Kantian Cosmopolitanism beyond ‘Perpetual Peace’: Commercium, Critique, and the Cosmopolitan Problematic

Abstract

Most contemporary attempts to draw inspiration from Kant's cosmopolitan project focus exclusively on the prescriptive recommendations he makes in his article, ‘On Perpetual Peace’. In this essay, I argue that there is more to his cosmopolitan point of view than his normative agenda. Kant has a unique and interesting way of problematizing the way individuals and peoples relate to one another on the stage of world history, based on a notion that human beings who share the earth in common ‘originally’ constitute a ‘commercium’ of thoroughgoing interaction. By unpacking this concept of ‘commercium’, we can uncover in Kant a more critical perspective on world history that sets up the cosmopolitan as a specific kind of historical‐political challenge. I will show that we can distinguish this level of problematization from the prescriptive level at which Kant formulates his familiar recommendations in ‘Perpetual Peace’. I will further show how his particular way of framing the cosmopolitan problematic can be expanded and expatiated upon to develop a more critical, reflexive, and open‐ended conception of cosmopolitan thinking.

Theorising from the Global Standpoint: Kant and Grotius on Original Common Possession of the Earth

“…The similarity between disjunctive community and the disjunctive judgment has also been explicated by Milstein (), whose work has been of great use to me.…”

“…‘Communio’ describes what Kant calls a ‘local community’ (CPR A213/B260), a set of items that belong together under some given criterion of commonality that demarcates those who belong from those who do not (cf. Milstein : 122). The category of community, instead, is defined as ‘commercium’, a community characterised by mere interaction and reciprocal influence.…”

“…Of course, he is not suggesting that we should do away with all kinds of particular relations, commitments and institutions . Rather, original common possession is normatively primordial in the sense that even under conditions where they are members of separate political communities, ‘participants still remain “originally” participants in “commercium” to the extent that they still retain the reflexive capacities to build upon, critique, or revise the terms on which they coexist and interact with one another’ (Milstein : 125). What motivates Kant's inversion of the sequence of Grotius's argument is precisely the latter's tendency to obliterate the global standpoint by essentially consolidating existing holdings and borders rather than questioning them.…”

Cosmopolitanism for Earth Dwellers: Kant on the Right to be Somewhere

“…Thus the right to be somewhere, as the notion upon which I have constructed this reading, does not contain a substantive set of entitlements, but speaks to the global nature of Kant’s theorizing more generally: it provides earth dwellers with something like a global standpoint from which to negotiate the terms of their coexistence (cf. Milstein 2013). To think of oneself as an earth dweller is to think of oneself as participant in a cosmopolitan community of individuals whose fates are, in an important sense, inevitably bound up with one another but who at the same time have the capacity to critically relate to one another and the contingent institutions, boundaries and loyalties that separate them.…”

Financial accounting for the common good – from a social economy perspective

“…Piaget (1955), applying Kantian thought to child development, demonstrates this by mapping the development of the child's emerging sense of self and the world. The individual agent emerges from the social setting through reflection and imagination (Milstein, 2013). The agent is knowledgeable within limits; there is always an individual perspective, an objective overview of reality is not possible; there is always a context which brings with it frameworks and inherited attitudes.…”