ABSTRACT
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen proclaimed during the French Revolution, tracing the semantic slippage from universal rights to embodied rights whose exercise is made possible and guaranteed by a particular polis imposing its own rules of membership and belonging. Crucially, the fact that Kant's principle of hospitality grants the right to visit, but not necessarily to settle, has given rise to vehement disagreements on the moral corollary of his peace project. On the one hand, one has to recognize the anti-imperial charge of the idea of universal hospitality without unconditional right to settle. On the other hand, his principle of hospitality has met with implicit scepticism regarding its powers to address the problems of people's globalized societies. Twentieth-century responses to Kant's project display, similarly, a concern with nationalism, the sovereign rights of the nation state, and the momentous recalibration of the polis in the wake of significant historical events.
