[Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity by Omri Boehm (New York Review of Books, 2025; 192 pp.)]
The philosopher Omri Boehm is well-regarded as an authority on Kant, and in Radical Universalism he offers a brilliant interpretation of Kant’s aims in The Critique of Pure Reason. Kant famously promised to limit reason in order to make room for faith, and Boehm gives the best explanation I have seen, at least in a very short space, of what Kant meant. Unfortunately, he applies his understanding of Kant to the War Between the States, viewing the war as a revolutionary crusade to destroy the South. He argues that Abraham Lincoln, though he had publicly justified John Brown’s execution for treason, in the Gettysburg Address enlisted under the banner of that murderer and incendiary by calling for the Confederacy’s destruction.
To grasp Boehm’s account of Kant, we have first to take a detour. Spinoza argued that, in contrast to the teleological view of natural law found, though in different forms, in Aristotelian philosophy and the natural law of the Christian Middle Ages, nature operated through blindly mechanical laws:
According to Spinoza’s Ethics, it is a self-evident truth, known with the certainty of a geometrical demonstration, that everything in nature proceeds by blind logical necessity.
(Boehm contends that Spinoza and not Hume is Kant’s principal target in The Critique of Pure Reason, a position he defends with great ingenuity in Kant’s Criticism of Spinoza (Oxford University Press, 2014). Kant seldom cited Spinoza directly, because the governments of Europe rightly regarded his philosophy as subversive of religion and the state, and thus its publication was banned, but it was widely read in manuscript by all the major enlightened intellectuals, as the historian Jonathan Israel has documented in multiple volumes.
Kant rightly saw that if nature operated by blind necessity, then the authority of reason to assess arguments, including arguments for Spinoza’s own position, was undermined. In other words, you have to be able to be free to think in order to conclude that your thinking is determined; but if that is true, then you aren’t determined. (It’s ironic that Objectivists, who think that Kant is, in Ayn Rand’s memorable phrase, “the machine-gunner of the mind,” adopt this Kantian argument).
If Kant’s argument is correct, it has implications for ethics. As Kant puts it:
Men’s humanity consists in the fact that, in contrast to natural species, who they are cannot be reduced to what they are. It depends not on what they do or how they live but on their being open to the call of what they ought to be doing. . . Humans are free to set moral ends. Therefore, they themselves ought to be categorically treated as ends, never as mere means. They don’t just have value—things can acquire value by being used. Rather, they have a dignity that’s exalted above all value, that is, absolute.
(Mises had little use for Kant’s categorical imperative, as you can see from his discussion of Hermann Cohen in Socialism).
Readers impatient with philosophical abstractions should not worry. I will soon get to John Brown. But, before doing so, we must remain in the empyrean, because this will enable us to connect Kant’s argument with slavery. I said earlier that Kant proposed to deny knowledge and make room for faith. It wasn’t conventional religious faith that Kant meant but rather the authority of thinking about what we ought to do. “We do not accept the authority of justice because God commands it; rather we have faith because, facing the demand of justice, we recognize an authority that could not have been man-made.”
Now at last we turn to slavery. Because human beings have absolute value, slavery is unconditionally forbidden. “Slavery is the paradigmatic violation of this absolute principle because it is premised on the systematic reduction of humans to mere means.” It is always and everywhere unconditionally wrong.
Here is where John Brown enters the scene. He is a hero, Boehm thinks, because he didn’t limit opposition to slavery to non-violent protest. On the contrary, he and his followers raided the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia, planning to distribute its 100,000 muskets to Southern slaves in order to incite rebellion. Some years before, Brown and some of his followers had executed five men in Pottawatomie, Kansas, because they were pro-slavery, although not slaveowners themselves. This set off a wave of massacre and counter-massacre in the struggle for “bleeding Kansas.”
This wasn’t enough violence for Brown, and he then proceeded to the raid described above. Before the raid on the arsenal, most abolitionists supported non-violent protests against slavery, but this changed after the raid, and they now were willing to countenance violence. Abraham Lincoln was not among them; he said after Brown’s execution for treason against Virginia that it was justified because Brown had acted illegally. Violence to end secession was, of course, another matter, as Lincoln was to show in the horrendous War Between the States.
I was heartened by the fact that Boehm’s adulation for Brown is shared by a target of mine, Susan Neiman, who he says offered the first philosophical account of Brown as a moral hero. Neiman has also praised the East German Communists.
Boehm’s defense of Kantian reason falls victim to the emotional contagion he is so quick to condemn in others. This is strikingly apparent in his interpretation of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. As everybody but Boehm knows, Lincoln wanted to force the South back into the union. But for Boehm, the message of Gettysburg was that,
Union soldiers were fighting to emancipate blacks and include all men in the people, not to keep Southern citizens as members of the Union. The country that gave itself “a new birth of freedom” at Gettysburg by dedicating itself to the truth cannot dedicate Gettysburg to soldiers who fought to deny it—the truth that all men belong to the people is upheld by the Confederate soldiers’ exclusion.
That is truly Orwellian.
Boehm is a gifted philosopher, but he has fallen victim to what his philosophical hero Kant called “schwarmerei” (enthusiasm or fanaticism). We should give him the Boehm’s rush.
