Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship

Description

This is the first comprehensive account of Kant's cosmopolitanism, highlighting its moral, political, legal, economic, cultural and psychological aspects. Contrasting Kant's views with those of his German contemporaries and relating them to current debates, Pauline Kleingeld sheds new light on texts that have been hitherto neglected or underestimated. In clear and carefully argued discussions, she shows that Kant's philosophical cosmopolitanism underwent a radical transformation in the mid 1790s and that the resulting theory is philosophically stronger than is usually thought. Using the work of figures such as Fichte, Cloots, Forster, Hegewisch, Wieland and Novalis, Kleingeld analyses Kant's arguments regarding the relationship between cosmopolitanism and patriotism, the importance of states, the ideal of an international federation, cultural pluralism, race, global economic justice and the psychological feasibility of the cosmopolitan ideal. In doing so, she reveals a broad spectrum of positions in cosmopolitan theory that are relevant to current discussions of cosmopolitanism.

Pauline Kleingeld is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. She is the author of Fortschritt und Vernunft: Zur Geschichtsphilosophie Kants (1995) and the editor of Immanuel Kant, 'Toward Perpetual Peace' and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History (2006).

'In this careful and insightful book, Pauline Kleingeld reconstructs Kant's cosmopolitanism, placing him in dialogue with historical contemporaries (including Christoph Wieland, Anacharsis Cloots, Georg Forster, Dietrich Hegewisch, and Novalis), and with several present-day thinkers (John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas, and Thomas Pogge). The result is an extremely clear and engaging work, one that manages to add something both to our understanding of Kant and to our understanding of what a 'cosmopolitan' political theory should look like today ... This book deserves a wide audience for its fine reconstruction of Kant's views on international justice.' Anna Stilz, Social Theory and Practice