Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship by Pauline Kleingeld (review)

Moral and political philosophers typically take the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ to mark accounts of global justice that emphasize the needs and interests of individuals. Proponents understand fellow human beings first and foremost as citizens of the world who deserve concern as such, not as members of particular states. Pauline Kleingeld challenges this understanding as narrow and misleading, offering a careful analysis of eighteenth-century German cosmopolitanism, and of Immanuel Kant’s work in particular, to demonstrate and elucidate the rich variety and contemporary relevance of cosmopolitanism more broadly conceived. The results are a catholic understanding that is likely to promote productive discussion and an enlightening and nuanced picture of Kant’s moral and political theory. The latter not only puts Kant’s work in historical context, but challenges popular readings and thoughtfully and candidly addresses more and less admirable aspects of his thought.

Divided into seven chapters and organized thematically, the book takes up the compatibility of moral cosmopolitanism with special obligations, patriotic obligations in particular (chapter 1) and the consistency of political cosmopolitanism with the existence of a plethora of independent states (chapter 2). Chapters 3 and 4 consider the breadth of what Kant terms “cosmopolitan right,” which determines the nature of just relations between states and foreign individuals. Chapter 4, in particular, originally and convincingly argues that Kant made a significant shift, during the 1790s, from a hierarchical account of race to a view at once more egalitarian and more mindful and supportive of cultural diversity. The relationship of free trade (chapter 5) and of affect or feeling (chapter 6) to Kant’s cosmopolitan ideal, and a closing consideration (chapter 7) of the relevance of the discussion as a whole to recent philosophical debates, make up the remaining three chapters. In all but the third and seventh, where it is absent, extended comparison of Kant’s views with those of German contemporaries helps to demonstrate the range and variety of cosmopolitan approaches and, especially, to enrich and clarify understanding of Kant’s views. A closer look at one of these discussions provides a sense of Kleingeld’s own interpretive approach and reassurance that, at least as she reads him, Kant is worthy of attention as a contributor to an enriched understanding of cosmopolitanism and as a catalyst for fruitful debate.

Kant’s unwillingness to embrace an international political body with authority coercively to enforce the dictates of cosmopolitan right has been a source of puzzlement and a foundation for criticism. For Kant not only endorses individuals’ use of force where necessary to insure that others become members of a state governed by coercive laws, but acknowledges that, like individuals, states are at risk both of suffering and inflicting rights violations in the absence of shared political institutions. Seeking to resolve puzzlement and blunt criticism, Kleingeld argues that we best understand Kant’s later work not to reject an international political body with coercive powers over its members, as many suppose. Rather, we should read this work to urge that just realization of such a body demands an intermediate step. Thus largely as a consequence of his evolving conception of republicanism in the 1790s, Kleingeld argues, Kant supplements his 1780s advocacy of a coercive international body with a voluntary and non-coercive league of states. This league is best seen not as the realization of just relations between states but as an intermediate step on the road to perpetual peace, or its near approximation. As a voluntary and non-coercive association, it respects the political autonomy of individuals, achievable on Kant’s view only by means of the just state. As an aid in avoiding wars, it encourages the kind of development within states that will move them toward republicanism and facilitate the willing formation of the kind of “federative world republic” with coercive authority that is the key to international justice.

Typical of the interrelated lines of argument she advances throughout the book, Kleingeld here offers...