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. The return to Kant's cosmopolitanism is at once a return to natural law, indeed to what was arguably the high point of the natural law tradition. His natural law theory was critical in that it sought to change the world. His cosmopolitanism was at its most radical when it pushed at the boundaries of natural law theory and advanced it not as a blueprint for an ideal legal and political order-to-come but as a reminder of what human freedom makes possible. The deduction of the institutional forms of right from postulates of practical reason can have conservative as well as critical appropriations. The risk is that an unmediated appropriation of Kant’s cosmopolitan thinking can turn his critical idealism into something more akin to an uncritical positivism.