Assessing the Cosmopolitan

Defining and determining the meaning of “cosmopolitan” is no simple matter. As the volumes under review illustrate, confusion abounds about both the meaning of the term and how to read the philosophers most associated with its advocacy.

Part of this confusion stems from Rousseau, who thought that being cosmopolitan provided an excuse to boast that one loves everyone while in fact having a license to love no one. Of course, nineteenth-century nationalists—and their present-day heirs—think that the cosmopolitan means a repudiation of the nation-state. To make matters even more complicated, there is the well-intended conviction that everything in the Enlightenment and its origins, from Spinoza to Mozart’s operas, endorses or facilitates the arrival of the cosmopolitan.

In an effort to sort through the confusion, let us begin with one thinker who can be definitively linked to the cosmopolitan impulse, Immanuel Kant. There is dispute about the supposed contradictions in his almost utopian vision of cosmopolitanism, but by the 1790s, if not well before, Kant was incontrovertibly an advocate for the cosmopolitan. Pauline Kleingeld’s purpose in her short, dense book is to offer a new interpretation of Kant’s cosmopolitanism that diminishes, if not abolishes, the contradictory impulses that other interpreters have dwelt upon. This is a work by a philosopher, and while the intellectual historian sees in Kant the influence of Smith on the affective, of Hobbes on the state of nature, and longs to hear more about the sources of Kant’s republicanism, these are not Kleingeld’s interests. Rather, she seeks to show that “in its final form, Kant’s cosmopolitan moral and political theory includes an account of the fundamental importance of states, patriotism (of a specific kind), and cultural diversity” (8). She drives forward and confronts current debates about the compatibility of cosmopolitanism with patriotism, of global economic justice with the history of racism and colonialism.

Kleingeld’s account of the strengths and weaknesses of Kant’s vision deals directly with his racism as found in multiple texts and lectures from the 1770s and ‘80s. She bluntly concludes that Kant’s “moral cosmopolitanism is profoundly inconsistent with his defense of a white supremacist racial hierarchy” (107). In modern eyes, Kant’s redemption comes only in the 1790s, when for reasons not entirely clear he abandons racism (with its debt to Hume; see 111) and embraces a universalist vision of all humankind. Yet even here when we delve into Kant’s egalitarianism, we discover that half of humankind—namely, women—is excluded from full membership. How did a professor who never left his provincial university town come up with such appalling views on blacks, Amerindians, women, and to a less essentialist extent, Jews, Italians, etc., few if any of whom he had ever actually met? This is not the book in which an answer can be found; that remains as a research challenge for the next generation of Kant scholars.

An immense strength of Kleingeld’s volume lies in her treatment of the forms of cosmopolitanism found among Kant’s critics and contemporaries. There is a rich discussion of Dietrich Hermann Hegewisch (1746–1812), who may have been the first German thinker to engage directly with Smith’s Wealth of Nations and who then went beyond Smith in advocating a free-market cosmopolitanism that would include a common monetary standard for all of Europe. His views serve as a foil with which to characterize Kant’s understanding of free trade, and his caveat that before it can be free it must be just (125). Hegewisch appears to have been inspired by D’Armand, a French nobleman turned revolutionary, and this German cosmopolite argued for the abolition of mercantilism and the free migration of goods and people. Where Smith would allow the free market to settle the grim fate of those displaced or impoverished by free trade, Hegewisch argues that the state must step in to...