Book on "Kant and Cosmopolitanism"

Kant and Cosmopolitanism
The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship

by Pauline Kleingeld

(Cambridge University Press, December 2011)

232 pages


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.

Content [preview]

Introduction
1. World citizens in their own country: Wieland and Kant on moral cosmopolitanism and patriotism
2. Universal republic of world citizens or international federation?: Cloots and Kant on global peace
3. Global hospitality: Kant's concept of cosmopolitan right
4. Hierarchy or diversity?: Forster and Kant on race, culture, and cosmopolitanism
5. International trade and justice: Hegewisch and Kant on cosmopolitanism and globalization
6. Cosmopolitanism and feeling: Novalis and Kant on the development of a universal human community
7. Kant's cosmopolitanism and current philosophical debates.

Pauline Kleingeld is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. She is the editor of "Immanuel Kant, ‘Toward Perpetual Peace’ and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History" (Yale University Press, 2006) and co-author (with Eric Brown) of the entry on "Cosmopolitanism" (2006) in "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy".

See also her papers on
- "Kant's Cosmopolitan Law" (pdf, 1998)
- "Kant's Cosmopolitan Patriotism" (pdf, 2003).