Philosophy Today

published on October 7, 2023

Every Man Has His Price
Money and Slavery in Immanuel Kant’s Doctrine of Right

Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy is organized around an exclusive disjunction of dignity or price, equality or equivalence. In his 1797 Doctrine of Right, however, Kant places enslaved black people on the wrong side of this disjunction when he speculates that their status as currency may offer insight into the origins of money. Recent work in black studies has begun to speculate on the link between blackness and money in modernity, and this paper draws attention to Kant’s role as an unlikely and unwitting precursor for monetary theories of blackness. Precisely in his attempt to secure the priceless and unconditional character of freedom and dignity, it argues, Kant ends up demonstrating the positional value of both.