widthWhat is barbarism? Emanuel Kant Define it as “violence without freedom and law.” This is abstract, and it is aimed at the country’s internal constitution. Therefore, Kant is one of many political philosophers who hold similar views. To this day, the word still strongly indicates illegal behavior. Oliver Eberl’s research shows cleverly and powerfully that we should say goodbye to such rhetoric because its basic ideas are morally contaminated.
Eberl argued from the source. His book is impressive with clear thinking and transparency in dealing with the history of thought. When it comes to the profound impact of his historical discoveries on the present, the author is not stingy. Because Ebel showed how the defense and criticism of the national order is based on a barbaric idea shaped by colonialism and continues to this day.
Foreign companies are almost always depreciating
The easiest way to prove this is the classics of early modern political thought. They designed a so-called “state of nature” with high-sounding words and vivid pictures. One should not just imagine Hobbes’s natural state as a lawless chaos full of violence and fear. This is often described and analyzed, and its overcoming: “Building a civilized country” is the universal solution. It frees people from need and suffering, civil wars and scarce economies.
But Hobbes is not without intuition in writing this article. Ebel proved that the abstraction of the state of nature and the state of barbarism is based on what we previously ignored and suppressed: the cross-cultural experience of discovering other continents, lifestyles and concepts of order. The image of the “other” is constructed based on travel reports in order to legitimize one’s own political model. In this process, other organizational forms of society have been depreciating almost all the time. They were given a natural state of life, and they were completely killed on the desk of a political philosopher.
Poor life, ugly social relations, primitive manners
Cross-cultural tolerance like Montaigne’s is still the exception. The latter judged very carefully, and the travel notes about strangers were full of exaggerations. If these illustrations are omitted as a reader, it is obvious that “the indigenous people in their world do not have any barbarism or wildness towards them, or at least in what everyone calls barbarism, which is unusual in their country” . Rousseau also avoided evaluating non-European people from the perspective of colonialism; instead, he discovered their freedom.
“Wrong”, most political philosophers shouted: non-European foreigners are undoubtedly barbarians, their lives are poor, social relations are ugly, and their behavior is primitive. Their thinking is that they lack any national status that Europe has created for themselves. In the distant past, it probably existed in the state of nature, and had to fear this state again and again in the form of wars and civil wars, because it would Relapse into a barbaric state. .
The idea of colonization is a deliberate distortion
However, most importantly, in the sense of “America, your situation is worse”, the state of nature allegedly encountered Europeans on their journey of discovery and conquest. In fact, the opposite view has gradually faded, replaced by the addition of inventions (such as cannibalism and castrated women). “The colonial concept is not a misunderstanding, but a deliberate distortion,” Eber wrote.
