Kant’s Regional Cosmopolitanism

In his 1795 essay ‘Toward Perpetual Peace’ the East-Prussian university metaphysician Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) named ‘Hugo Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel’ as the ‘miserable comforters’ of the law of nations. This was a bon mot that became celebrated retrospectively, with the late-twentieth-century reception of Kant’s cosmopolitanism in political philosophy and international relations theory. In formulating it, Kant was accusing Grotius, Pufendorf and Vattel of using a concept of right (jus) in relation to war that not only lacked all legal force in restraining the belligerence of nations, but actually encouraged this belligerence. According to Kant, the concept of right employed in their jus gentium or law of nations was defective in that it only brought particular wars to an end in negotiated compromises or modi vivendi. It did not end war as such by eradicating the warlike disposition of mankind or nations, thereby bringing perpetual peace in the form of a world republican federation governed by global justice or ‘cosmopolitan right’. In this accusation and prophecy Kant invoked the existence of a dormant inner ‘moral disposition’ through which man would ‘eventually become master of the evil principle within him’. Apparently this was the moral disposition that Kant’s own moral philosophy had awakened, by recovering a metaphysical normative principle so pure and universal that it applies not just to human beings but to ‘rational beings’ as such. It was also a disposition that a ‘universal history with cosmopolitan intent’ would realise empirically, through the gradual synthesis of a world republic or a world federation of republics. We are not unaccustomed of course to seeing philosophers display contempt towards their predecessors. This is usually grounded — as it is here in Kant’s case — in hostility towards all philosophical cultures other than their own, and in studied