ABSTRACT
For the contemporary student of cosmopolitanism, Kant’s vision of a cosmopolitan condition-to-come provides a rich and ever re-readable resource. Kant’s political writings have become ‘classic’ texts of contemporary cosmopolitanism.1 The critically minded cosmopolitan understands we cannot simply repeat Kant’s eighteenth-century vision – that it is necessary to iron out inconsistencies in his thinking, radicalize it where its break from the old order of nation states is incomplete, draw out latent connections between peace and social justice, and modernize in terms of differences in historical context and conceptual framework – but a core cosmopolitan intuition is that Kant’s cosmopolitanism remains as relevant to our times as it was to his own (Bohman and Lutz-Bachman 1997). To my mind, the return to Kant is fully justified by the richness of what we find in the texts but I do wish question the narrative within which the return to Kant is typically framed. In this narrative we are reminded of the strong cosmopolitan currents running through eighteenth-century enlightenment thought; then we are warned that in the long nineteenth century these cosmopolitan currents succumbed to nationalism, imperialism, racism, anti-Semitism and technology; finally we are reassured we are now in a position to remember the dead and recover enlightenment’s cosmopolitan insight (Schlereth 1997). This narrative offers a consoling story of birth, death and rebirth. The widely held view that eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism left little
or no legacy for the long century that followed may be represented by Theodor Adorno’s remark in Negative Dialectics that Hegel’s alleged deification of the nation state was reactionary in comparison with Kant’s cosmopolitan point of view (Adorno 1990) or by Jürgen Habermas’ remark in The Inclusion of the Other that what Kant understood is that the idea of right is best suited to the identity of world citizens, not to that of citizens of a particular nation state, but that this insight was lost when the universalistic elements of right were swamped by the particularistic self-assertion of one nation against another (Habermas 1998). Sankar Muthu concludes his fine book on Enlightenment against Empire with a statement (outside the area of his expertise) that the cosmopolitanism characteristic of the enlightenment was unable to endure into the nineteenth century because of a sea change that occurred in philosophical assumptions, argument and temperaments (Muthu 2003: 259).2
