Kant e il carattere dei popoli

Kant deals with national characters in the second part of his Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view of 1798. Firmly rejecting the climatic theory, Kant advocates an anti-naturalistic stance. Yet Kant is also skeptical of Hume’s tenet that nations owe their characters to the form of their government. In Kant’s view, the most civilized nations are England and France: their character has to do with purely cultural factors. Complementing each other, the characters of those nations broadly correspond to the masculine and feminine element, as analyzed by Kant in another chapter of Anthropology. The remaining European and Extra-European peoples have a less defined – and in some case mixed – character, that owes something more to the natural dispositions. Yet Kant manages to avoids naturalistic explanations. Sometimes natural dispositions do prevail over cultural ones, but this simply means that less (and sometimes nothing) can be said about the character of those nations.