Pauline Kleingeld, Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 215 pages, $ 90.00, hardback. ISBN 978-0-521-76418-6.

See Eduardo Mendieta's most recent Society & Space contributions: Being-with as Making Worlds: The ‘Second Coming’ of Peter Sloterdijk

Immanuel Kant lived to the ripe age of 82. He retired from teaching when he was 72, in 1796, but one could hardly say that Kant eased into a life of leisure and quiet contemplation. The last two decades of his life were surely the most productive and original.  In particular, to his last decade we owe some of the most important work on political philosophy, the philosophy of law, philosophy of the state, ethics and the development of a new category of right that has become the foundation for a new global legal regime, namely cosmopolitan right. We are just beginning to realize how ahead of his time Kant was, and how contemporary he remains to our challenges and needs.

Pauline Kleingeld’s book on Kant and cosmopolitanism is a superlative piece of scholarship, one that will set a new gold standard in the interpretation and analysis of Kant’s work. This is surely one of the most comprehensive and carefully elaborated and argued reconstructions of Kant’s mature political philosophy— a contribution to Kant scholarship of the first order.

Kleingeld’s book, however, accomplishes more than this. It is also a contribution to the intellectual history of the eighteenth century. Kleingeld offers us unsuspecting retrievals and reconstructions of the then influential ideas of key German, and European, cosmopolitan and Enlightenment intellectuals. Thus we have intellectual profiles of thinkers such as Anacharsis Cloots, Georg Forster, Dietrich Hermann Hegewisch, Novalis, and Christoph Martin Wieland. Some of these names will be new to many. The book is also more than an intellectual history. Given the systematic reconstruction of the different debates in which Kant was involved regarding the nature, meaning, feasibility of a cosmopolitan order, Kleingeld’s book also contributes to contemporary debates on cosmopolitanism. We are exposed to an analysis of moral, political, legal, economic, market, and even what I would call “affective or emotive” cosmopolitanism. Let me briefly survey some of the key debates Kleingeld reconstructs, before I move to the relationship between Kant’s views on race and his moral and political cosmopolitanism, a key issue this book confronts unabashedly and frontally.

The first chapter juxtaposes Kant and Wieland in order to discuss the relationship between moral cosmopolitanism and patriotism. As in the eighteenth century, today we debate whether moral cosmopolitanism is anathema to patriotism, for both terms refer to two different inimical loyalties. To be a moral cosmopolitan means to spouse and advocate for the equal respect of all human beings without regard to race, class, gender, and nationality. To be patriotic is to be loyal to one’s motherland, to one’s nation. If one is rootless, the other is rooted. If one loves every human being without loving anyone in particular, the other loves only those who are closest and singular without having any love of humanity as such. Kleingeld shows how in fact moral cosmopolitanism and patriotism can be compatible, and how the former depends on the latter, if it is not to be either vacuous or to project a utopia without a path to it. Kleingeld demonstrates how Kant’s republicanism allowed him to defend what is now called ‘constitutional’ patriotism, or what she names ‘civic cosmopolitanism’, which is love of one’s nation as a love of its constitution and legal justice. In fact, according to her, “Kant even goes so far as to say that patriotism is a cosmopolitan duty” (page 19). Commitment to moral cosmopolitanism, which is commitment to the critique and abolition of all conditions that diminish and undermine the moral integrity of humanity, commits us to a variety of activities that can and should be characterized as ‘political’. Indeed, moral cosmopolitanism is vacuous without political cosmopolitanism, but political cosmopolitanism is ineffective without the political efficacy that is granted by citizenship rights.

In the second chapter we are offered a reconstruction of the debate on the relationship between political cosmopolitanism and the alleged need for a global state. The basic question here is that implied in Kant’s essay “Zur ewigen Frieden [Toward Perpetual Peace]”, namely: how can we achieve global peace? We know that Kant did not endorse the development of a world state as a necessary condition for the attainment of global peace. In fact, he thought the opposite. Kant’s federation of constitutional nation states is inimical to a world state that could coerce peoples into its legal and political framework. This aspect of Kant’s work is well known. This chapter, however, offers an interesting reconstruction of the appropriation of the Hobbesian argument of the establishment of governments of law as a departure from the state of nature by Anacharsis Cloots. The argument is that just as individuals have the authority to coerce each other into a state, forcing each other to leave the lawless, violent, and brutish state of nature, so nations ought to have a similar authority to coerce other states into a global state, thus forcing them to leave the global state of nature. Kleingeld, however, demonstrates that there is an important “disanalogy between the state of nature among individuals and that among states”(page 53). The creation of a state by individuals, which is the creation of a juridical entity, is undertaken so that the freedom of an individual may not be infringed by the freedom of others. Legal coercion is authorized for the very preservation of individual freedom, in accordance with the freedom of all. The self-legislation that is embodied in a state is an exercise of political freedom or political autonomy. Innate freedom finds its efficacy in a juridical entity, the state of law. At the global level, however, the coercion of one state by another is different in that those states already exist as juridical and political entities, and thus, they are no longer in the state of nature. One could say that once there is at least one state, a post-state-of-nature condition has already been established, one in which the attainment of global peace is possible through the development of a global legal order, one that could be characterized as a “cosmopolitan condition” (page 71).

The next chapter is a detailed reconstruction of Kant’s conception of “cosmopolitan right” and one could say that this is the pivot of Kleingeld’s book, as it is the development of “cosmopolitan right” in the ‘90s that allows Kant to overcome some of his personal biases and to fix inconsistencies and paradoxes in his political work from the ‘80s. Cosmopolitan right is the third branch of public right. The first branch regulates relations within states and among citizens (i.e. citizen rights), the second among states (i.e. international law), and cosmopolitan right between persons and foreign states. At the heart of cosmopolitan right is the right to hospitality, which is  the right to present oneself before another state, but also the right not to be turned away violently or when one’s subsistence is at stake.

Using Hannah Arendt’s language, we may say that cosmopolitan right is the right to have rights, as it entails that under no condition can one be rendered without right to the degree that one cannot present oneself before another state. What is interesting in Kleingeld’s reconstruction is that she demonstrates how Kant ‘grounds’ or ‘derives’ cosmopolitan right from two basic presuppositions. One presupposition, or axiom, is that humans have an innate right to freedom. The foundation of human dignity is precisely this inalienable freedom, which is the condition for the possibility of moral autonomy. The other presupposition is that all humans have a joint right to the earth. Humans, according to Kant, form part of an “original community of the land” (page 81). Thus, Kleingeld explains, “humans have a right to freedom, freedom requires existence, and human existence requires a place on the globe; therefore, one has right to be where one cannot help being and not to be send away if this would lead to one’s ‘demise’”(page 84). This means, in short, that “the innate right to freedom and the idea of the original community of the land together provide a grounding for cosmopolitan right” (page 85).

Since I intend to address separately the issue of Kant’s changing views on race, let me for the moment skip chapter four, and move on to discuss jointly chapters five, six, and seven. In chapter five Kleingeld juxtaposes Kant to Hegewisch on free markets and their relationship to global justice and international relations. Hegewisch, basing himself on Adam Smith, but going beyond him, advocated completely free international trade. He thought that unfettered and unconstrained trade among nations would be to the benefit of all—as it would provide those without certain commodities access to them, but above all, because the preservation of free trade requires a peaceful global order. Trade would also expose nations to other nations, leading to a kind of cosmopolitan education and mutual respect or recognition. Additionally, and in contrast to Smith, Hegewisch argued that states had the duty to offset the adverse consequences of market liberalism. Thus, one could say that Hegewisch advocated free global trade with the development of a global safety net to make sure that no partner in the global trade would be adversely or deleteriously affected. In short, Hegewisch was sanguine about leaving everything to the perspicacity of the ‘invisible hand’ of the markets. It is for this reason that Kleingeld argues that Hegewisch’s views on global free trade can be characterized as a form of “market cosmopolitanism” (page 131).

In contrast, we discover that Kant changed his view on the effects of markets. For instance, in the Critique of Judgment, Kant views war as “sublime”, while long peace tends to make the spirit of the trade prevail thus having a “debasing” effect (page 135). In Toward Perpetual Peace, he argues that the “spirit of trade”—an expression taken up from Montesquieu—has beneficial effects, as it tends to promote interaction among nations and peace across the globe. But, the path to global peace requires the establishment of conditions for economic justice. Unregulated global trade can result in both national and international inequities. For Kant, then, trade has to be regulated by the principles of justice, in which the freedom of some is not infringed by the freedom of others. In Kleingeld’s analysis, Kant’s views on trade are intricately related to his conception of cosmopolitan right. Global free trade is one way in which this can be promoted and actualized. Thus, Kant also espouses a form of market cosmopolitanism within the bounds of global justice and a means to promote the cosmopolitan condition.

Like all the other chapters in this book, chapter six is filled with unsuspecting readings. Here we approach the question of the realization of the cosmopolitan as the realization of a ‘moral world’ through a reading of the early German Romantics, in particular Novalis. At the center of this discussion is the Romantic conception of Bildung, which means as much education as self-realization. Like the Greek conception of paideía, Bildung meant the education of the whole person, that is of one’s cognitive capacities, as well as one’s aesthetic abilities through the edification of feelings, senses, and imagination. This pedagogical ideal presupposes that reason and feeling, judgment and imagination were not subordinate but complementary. Moral excellence was coupled with aesthetic sensibility. Kant, evidently, would not have accepted any kind of view that would subordinate reason to feeling, or judgment to imagination. This does not mean that he did not see the importance of the aesthetic education of the moral sensibility of individuals. In his work from the ‘90s, Kant considers the education of affect as a necessary condition for the realization of the cosmopolitan moral community. In fact, we have an “indirect duty to cultivate our compassionate feelings”(page 167, emphasis in the original text). In the Metaphysics of Morals (1797) Kant argues not only that beneficence is a duty, but also that we have a duty to have “active” empathy towards those who suffer, and thus have an “indirect duty to cultivate the compassionate natural (aesthetic) feelings in us” (quoted on page 167). From this, Kant argues that we have a duty not to “avoid the places where the poor who lack the most basic needs are to be found, but rather to seek them out” (quoted on page167). We thus have an indirect duty to expose ourselves to the suffering of others precisely in order to educate our moral sensibilities by activating our natural sentiments. As Kleingeld beautifully puts it, “thus, the duty to expose oneself to suffering is a reflexive moral duty: it is a duty aimed at the promotion of moral action itself” (page 167).

While nature has endowed humans with natural feelings that may lead to moral action, the attainment of the moral community is the result of our deliberate moral action. Our natural feelings in themselves are not a guarantee that we will become moral exemplars. Acting morally, in accordance with the moral law, will guide our natural feelings of beneficence and empathy. The question “what is the end result of my moral conduct?” should be translated into the question:

“what kind of world would be created by complete and universal obedience to the moral imperative, for that world is the implicit telos of moral agency[?]” (page 171; Kleingeld is here is paraphrasing the Kingdom of Ends version of the categorical imperative).

The telos of our moral behavior is a moral world. Thus, “the moral community is both means and end” (page 171).

Acting in accordance with the moral law, commits us to promoting the development and preservation of a moral community. It is part of moral duty to promote the establishment of the moral community. In fact, Kleingeld argues persuasively that in Kant’s work we have the duty to act in accordance with the moral law and the duty to promote the moral community:

“Therefore, Kant argues, joining the ethical community is a distinct duty over and above acting on the moral law…With some interpretative charity, one could read this line of argument already into Kant’s defense of the duty to promote the highest good” (page 171).

Joining, promoting, and preserving this moral community, however, requires that we continue to aesthetically educate our natural feelings of empathy. The key insight here is that acting in accordance with the moral law and establishing the cosmopolitan moral community requires affective solicitude, that is exposure to the suffering and privation of those least well off. The moral law requires the eyes of feeling to be guided to the moral community.

Chapter seven is a wonderful overview of the contemporary and very recent engagements and appropriations of Kant’s work, especially by John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. Experts will surely balk at the one-sidedness or briefness of the discussion, but neophytes will appreciate the care with which Kleingeld defends and corrects Kant’s innovative readings and evident misreadings. This chapter cannot be missed for the additional reason that it contains the best summary of the key arguments in the book and a superlative succinct overview of the changes in Kant’s cosmopolitanism from the ‘70s through the late ‘90s (see pages 178-81). It is in these pages, too, where we get an explicit elaboration of the hermeneutical principles that have guided Kleingeld. We know that towards the end of his life, and in particular, in the ‘90s, Kant “kept charting new philosophical ground” (page 180). This required that he develop new arguments, new categories, and new concepts. Hence, while we should always aim to determine whether Kant was consistent, we should also entertain the possibility that he changed his mind, even when he did not explicitly avowed that he had done so. “Showing that Kant changed his mind requires not just clear and substantial textual evidence that there is indeed a difference between earlier and later views. It also requires a broader analysis that shows that the earlier and later statements are not different aspects of one stable theory or a simple contradiction, but that they do indeed represent different stages in the development of Kant’s views” (page 180). Kant changed his views, because commitment to philosophical consistency required that he develop new arguments. Kant’s thinking underwent stages of development, and Kleingeld has beautifully reconstructed those stages and how they are consistent and coherent within a certain philosophical horizon.

I left chapter four to the end because it is the one that is most likely to be read polemically by all kinds of philosophers, social scientists, geographers and critical thinkers in general. It is in this chapter that Kleingeld addresses issues related to Kant’s views on race, and in particular Kant’s debate with Forster and Herder on the inherent value of cultural diversity. Kleingeld identifies three different positions on Kant’s racism and so-called “second thoughts” on race. One position claims that Kant was a “consistent inegalitarian”, or what we could call a white race supremacist. This view holds that Kant did not believe or argue for the equality of all races and that his moral universalism was contradictorily restricted to white males. Additionally, this view argues that Kant remains an inveterate white race supremacist to the end of his days. This is the view held by thinkers like Charles Mills, Robert Bernasconi, and Emmanuel Eze. Another position claims that Kant was an “inconsistent inegalitarian”, or what we could call an inconsistent moral universalist, whose personal racism was anathema to his own philosophical outlook and commitments. This is the view espoused by thinkers like Robert Louden, Thomas McCarthy, Thomas Hill, and Bernard Boxill. The third view holds that Kant abandoned his racist views around the time of the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason, between 1781 and 1787. To these three views, Kleingeld adds her own view, which is that Kant was committed until the early nineties to racial hierarchy but that he had “second thoughts” about race, racial hierarchies, and the cultural diversity before the publication of Toward Perpetual Peace in 1795.

The least defensible of these position is the third, which is that propounded by Sankar Muthu, since there is plenty of work published by Kant between 1787 and 1795 where he expresses racist views. The most defensible position, but perhaps also the easiest to defend, would be to claim that Kant was an inconsistent universalist; that his racism was personal but not philosophical. The most polemical and also the hardest to defend, as it goes against the grain of everything we associate with Kant and Kantianism, is that he was a consistent inegalitarian who to the end of his life remained personally and philosophically committed to a white male and race supremacist view of morality and history. This view would entail that Kant’s cosmopolitanism is a racial cosmopolitanism, or a cosmopolitanism of the Herrenvolk, to use Charles Mills’ language. Kleingeld’s position is forcefully argued on the basis of careful textual readings and reconstruction of texts from the ‘90s, but it is also based on conjecture, extrapolation, and reading between the lines. As she put it,

“Kant changed his views on race during the same period that his political theory and philosophy of right underwent significant transformations. Examples of other important developments in Kant’s political theory around this time are his notion of citizenship, his republicanism, and the concept of cosmopolitan right. Kant was never generous in explaining the genesis or transformation of his views, and we may never know the precise circumstances of his change of mind. Yet it is likely that he started to reconsider his early acquiescence in the European practice of colonialism and slavery while he was developing new philosophical commitments in his legal and political theory. This work took place while important political changes occurred in France, and perhaps these events and the intellectual debates surrounding them, including the 1794 French abolition of slavery in the wake of the revolt of Saint-Domingue, prompted him to rethink his earlier concept of the characteristics of the races. Perhaps, too, there was a delayed effect of the criticism voiced by Herder, Metzger, Forster, and others” (page 116).

The recent anthology Reading Kant’s Geography (2011), which I co-edited with Stuart Elden, brought scholars from many different disciplines to consider not only Kant’s lecture on Physical Geography, but also the overall role of geography, anthropology, space, race, and gender in his thought. Like Kleingeld, we relied on Werner Stark’s exacting and painstaking philological, detective, reconstructive work on the extant manuscripts of the physical geography lectures. It is unfortunate that our work seems to have been a passing ship in the vast of ocean of scholarly publication, for Bernasconi’s contribution to our volume, titled “Kant’s Third Thoughts on Race” I think has offered substantive and equally persuasive rebuttals of Kleingeld’s position on Kant’s so-called “second thoughts” on race. Bernasconi’s position is strong and perhaps—for the time being—unassailable because it relies on the absence of explicit evidence from Kant’s writings that he had explicitly repudiated earlier views. Above all, it relies on the fact that Kant allowed work that relied on early notes, lectures, formulations contaminated by racism to go to press, including the Anthropology and the authorized Rink edition of the Physical Geography.

Kleingeld’s position relies on too many conjectures, as the passage I just quoted makes explicit. This is no small change when we are trying to resolve what a thinker did or did not write. On the other hand, Kleingeld’s position has the merit of performing an admirable work of hermeneutical generosity by demonstrating how Kant’s mature political work requires the explicit repudiation of white racist supremacy and invidious racial hierarchies. Had I read her book before I wrote my own contribution to Reading Kant’s Geography and other critical work on Kant’s version of cosmopolitanism, I would have been more cautious and less likely to focus on Kant’s work before the ‘90s. I am thus personally thankful to Kleingeld for her call to hermeneutical accountability (Mendieta, 2009).

Kant may have harbored racist views himself, to the end of his life, but his mature work—as Kleingeld so eloquently demonstrates—makes all forms of racism not only untenable but also reprehensible and contrary to the moral law and the development of the cosmopolitan moral community. By demonstrating how Kant changed his views on citizenship, on federalism, republicanism, by developing the conception of cosmopolitan right, by arguing for the positive role of educating our affect towards empathy, and by urging us to expose ourselves to the suffering of the poor, Kleingeld has given us a more humane and humble Kant, but also a more admirable one because he exhibited in his maturing work the power of allowing oneself to be educated by reason guided by solicitous empathy. It may be redundant to endorse this book any further, but I cannot not close by saying that it is truly a gift of philosophy to our cosmopolitan hopes.

Immanuel Kant lived to the ripe age of 82. He retired from teaching when he was 72, in 1796, but one could hardly say that Kant eased into a life of leisure and quiet contemplation. The last two decades of his life were surely the most productive and original.  In particular, to his last decade we owe some of the most important work on political philosophy, the philosophy of law, philosophy of the state, ethics and the development of a new category of right that has become the foundation for a new global legal regime, namely cosmopolitan right. We are just beginning to realize how ahead of his time Kant was, and how contemporary he remains to our challenges and needs.

Pauline Kleingeld’s book on Kant and cosmopolitanism is a superlative piece of scholarship, one that will set a new gold standard in the interpretation and analysis of Kant’s work. This is surely one of the most comprehensive and carefully elaborated and argued reconstructions of Kant’s mature political philosophy— a contribution to Kant scholarship of the first order.

Kleingeld’s book, however, accomplishes more than this. It is also a contribution to the intellectual history of the eighteenth century. Kleingeld offers us unsuspecting retrievals and reconstructions of the then influential ideas of key German, and European, cosmopolitan and Enlightenment intellectuals. Thus we have intellectual profiles of thinkers such as Anacharsis Cloots, Georg Forster, Dietrich Hermann Hegewisch, Novalis, and Christoph Martin Wieland. Some of these names will be new to many. The book is also more than an intellectual history. Given the systematic reconstruction of the different debates in which Kant was involved regarding the nature, meaning, feasibility of a cosmopolitan order, Kleingeld’s book also contributes to contemporary debates on cosmopolitanism. We are exposed to an analysis of moral, political, legal, economic, market, and even what I would call “affective or emotive” cosmopolitanism. Let me briefly survey some of the key debates Kleingeld reconstructs, before I move to the relationship between Kant’s views on race and his moral and political cosmopolitanism, a key issue this book confronts unabashedly and frontally.

The first chapter juxtaposes Kant and Wieland in order to discuss the relationship between moral cosmopolitanism and patriotism. As in the eighteenth century, today we debate whether moral cosmopolitanism is anathema to patriotism, for both terms refer to two different inimical loyalties. To be a moral cosmopolitan means to spouse and advocate for the equal respect of all human beings without regard to race, class, gender, and nationality. To be patriotic is to be loyal to one’s motherland, to one’s nation. If one is rootless, the other is rooted. If one loves every human being without loving anyone in particular, the other loves only those who are closest and singular without having any love of humanity as such. Kleingeld shows how in fact moral cosmopolitanism and patriotism can be compatible, and how the former depends on the latter, if it is not to be either vacuous or to project a utopia without a path to it. Kleingeld demonstrates how Kant’s republicanism allowed him to defend what is now called ‘constitutional’ patriotism, or what she names ‘civic cosmopolitanism’, which is love of one’s nation as a love of its constitution and legal justice. In fact, according to her, “Kant even goes so far as to say that patriotism is a cosmopolitan duty” (page 19). Commitment to moral cosmopolitanism, which is commitment to the critique and abolition of all conditions that diminish and undermine the moral integrity of humanity, commits us to a variety of activities that can and should be characterized as ‘political’. Indeed, moral cosmopolitanism is vacuous without political cosmopolitanism, but political cosmopolitanism is ineffective without the political efficacy that is granted by citizenship rights.

In the second chapter we are offered a reconstruction of the debate on the relationship between political cosmopolitanism and the alleged need for a global state. The basic question here is that implied in Kant’s essay “Zur ewigen Frieden [Toward Perpetual Peace]”, namely: how can we achieve global peace? We know that Kant did not endorse the development of a world state as a necessary condition for the attainment of global peace. In fact, he thought the opposite. Kant’s federation of constitutional nation states is inimical to a world state that could coerce peoples into its legal and political framework. This aspect of Kant’s work is well known. This chapter, however, offers an interesting reconstruction of the appropriation of the Hobbesian argument of the establishment of governments of law as a departure from the state of nature by Anacharsis Cloots. The argument is that just as individuals have the authority to coerce each other into a state, forcing each other to leave the lawless, violent, and brutish state of nature, so nations ought to have a similar authority to coerce other states into a global state, thus forcing them to leave the global state of nature. Kleingeld, however, demonstrates that there is an important “disanalogy between the state of nature among individuals and that among states”(page 53). The creation of a state by individuals, which is the creation of a juridical entity, is undertaken so that the freedom of an individual may not be infringed by the freedom of others. Legal coercion is authorized for the very preservation of individual freedom, in accordance with the freedom of all. The self-legislation that is embodied in a state is an exercise of political freedom or political autonomy. Innate freedom finds its efficacy in a juridical entity, the state of law. At the global level, however, the coercion of one state by another is different in that those states already exist as juridical and political entities, and thus, they are no longer in the state of nature. One could say that once there is at least one state, a post-state-of-nature condition has already been established, one in which the attainment of global peace is possible through the development of a global legal order, one that could be characterized as a “cosmopolitan condition” (page 71).

The next chapter is a detailed reconstruction of Kant’s conception of “cosmopolitan right” and one could say that this is the pivot of Kleingeld’s book, as it is the development of “cosmopolitan right” in the ‘90s that allows Kant to overcome some of his personal biases and to fix inconsistencies and paradoxes in his political work from the ‘80s. Cosmopolitan right is the third branch of public right. The first branch regulates relations within states and among citizens (i.e. citizen rights), the second among states (i.e. international law), and cosmopolitan right between persons and foreign states. At the heart of cosmopolitan right is the right to hospitality, which is  the right to present oneself before another state, but also the right not to be turned away violently or when one’s subsistence is at stake.

Using Hannah Arendt’s language, we may say that cosmopolitan right is the right to have rights, as it entails that under no condition can one be rendered without right to the degree that one cannot present oneself before another state. What is interesting in Kleingeld’s reconstruction is that she demonstrates how Kant ‘grounds’ or ‘derives’ cosmopolitan right from two basic presuppositions. One presupposition, or axiom, is that humans have an innate right to freedom. The foundation of human dignity is precisely this inalienable freedom, which is the condition for the possibility of moral autonomy. The other presupposition is that all humans have a joint right to the earth. Humans, according to Kant, form part of an “original community of the land” (page 81). Thus, Kleingeld explains, “humans have a right to freedom, freedom requires existence, and human existence requires a place on the globe; therefore, one has right to be where one cannot help being and not to be send away if this would lead to one’s ‘demise’”(page 84). This means, in short, that “the innate right to freedom and the idea of the original community of the land together provide a grounding for cosmopolitan right” (page 85).

Since I intend to address separately the issue of Kant’s changing views on race, let me for the moment skip chapter four, and move on to discuss jointly chapters five, six, and seven. In chapter five Kleingeld juxtaposes Kant to Hegewisch on free markets and their relationship to global justice and international relations. Hegewisch, basing himself on Adam Smith, but going beyond him, advocated completely free international trade. He thought that unfettered and unconstrained trade among nations would be to the benefit of all—as it would provide those without certain commodities access to them, but above all, because the preservation of free trade requires a peaceful global order. Trade would also expose nations to other nations, leading to a kind of cosmopolitan education and mutual respect or recognition. Additionally, and in contrast to Smith, Hegewisch argued that states had the duty to offset the adverse consequences of market liberalism. Thus, one could say that Hegewisch advocated free global trade with the development of a global safety net to make sure that no partner in the global trade would be adversely or deleteriously affected. In short, Hegewisch was sanguine about leaving everything to the perspicacity of the ‘invisible hand’ of the markets. It is for this reason that Kleingeld argues that Hegewisch’s views on global free trade can be characterized as a form of “market cosmopolitanism” (page 131).

In contrast, we discover that Kant changed his view on the effects of markets. For instance, in the Critique of Judgment, Kant views war as “sublime”, while long peace tends to make the spirit of the trade prevail thus having a “debasing” effect (page 135). In Toward Perpetual Peace, he argues that the “spirit of trade”—an expression taken up from Montesquieu—has beneficial effects, as it tends to promote interaction among nations and peace across the globe. But, the path to global peace requires the establishment of conditions for economic justice. Unregulated global trade can result in both national and international inequities. For Kant, then, trade has to be regulated by the principles of justice, in which the freedom of some is not infringed by the freedom of others. In Kleingeld’s analysis, Kant’s views on trade are intricately related to his conception of cosmopolitan right. Global free trade is one way in which this can be promoted and actualized. Thus, Kant also espouses a form of market cosmopolitanism within the bounds of global justice and a means to promote the cosmopolitan condition.

Like all the other chapters in this book, chapter six is filled with unsuspecting readings. Here we approach the question of the realization of the cosmopolitan as the realization of a ‘moral world’ through a reading of the early German Romantics, in particular Novalis. At the center of this discussion is the Romantic conception of Bildung, which means as much education as self-realization. Like the Greek conception of paideía, Bildung meant the education of the whole person, that is of one’s cognitive capacities, as well as one’s aesthetic abilities through the edification of feelings, senses, and imagination. This pedagogical ideal presupposes that reason and feeling, judgment and imagination were not subordinate but complementary. Moral excellence was coupled with aesthetic sensibility. Kant, evidently, would not have accepted any kind of view that would subordinate reason to feeling, or judgment to imagination. This does not mean that he did not see the importance of the aesthetic education of the moral sensibility of individuals. In his work from the ‘90s, Kant considers the education of affect as a necessary condition for the realization of the cosmopolitan moral community. In fact, we have an “indirect duty to cultivate our compassionate feelings”(page 167, emphasis in the original text). In the Metaphysics of Morals (1797) Kant argues not only that beneficence is a duty, but also that we have a duty to have “active” empathy towards those who suffer, and thus have an “indirect duty to cultivate the compassionate natural (aesthetic) feelings in us” (quoted on page 167). From this, Kant argues that we have a duty not to “avoid the places where the poor who lack the most basic needs are to be found, but rather to seek them out” (quoted on page167). We thus have an indirect duty to expose ourselves to the suffering of others precisely in order to educate our moral sensibilities by activating our natural sentiments. As Kleingeld beautifully puts it, “thus, the duty to expose oneself to suffering is a reflexive moral duty: it is a duty aimed at the promotion of moral action itself” (page 167).

While nature has endowed humans with natural feelings that may lead to moral action, the attainment of the moral community is the result of our deliberate moral action. Our natural feelings in themselves are not a guarantee that we will become moral exemplars. Acting morally, in accordance with the moral law, will guide our natural feelings of beneficence and empathy. The question “what is the end result of my moral conduct?” should be translated into the question:

“what kind of world would be created by complete and universal obedience to the moral imperative, for that world is the implicit telos of moral agency[?]” (page 171; Kleingeld is here is paraphrasing the Kingdom of Ends version of the categorical imperative). The telos of our moral behavior is a moral world. Thus, “the moral community is both means and end” (page 171).

Acting in accordance with the moral law, commits us to promoting the development and preservation of a moral community. It is part of moral duty to promote the establishment of the moral community. In fact, Kleingeld argues persuasively that in Kant’s work we have the duty to act in accordance with the moral law and the duty to promote the moral community:

“Therefore, Kant argues, joining the ethical community is a distinct duty over and above acting on the moral law…With some interpretative charity, one could read this line of argument already into Kant’s defense of the duty to promote the highest good” (page 171).

Joining, promoting, and preserving this moral community, however, requires that we continue to aesthetically educate our natural feelings of empathy. The key insight here is that acting in accordance with the moral law and establishing the cosmopolitan moral community requires affective solicitude, that is exposure to the suffering and privation of those least well off. The moral law requires the eyes of feeling to be guided to the moral community.Chapter seven is a wonderful overview of the contemporary and very recent engagements and appropriations of Kant’s work, especially by John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. Experts will surely balk at the one-sidedness or briefness of the discussion, but neophytes will appreciate the care with which Kleingeld defends and corrects Kant’s innovative readings and evident misreadings. This chapter cannot be missed for the additional reason that it contains the best summary of the key arguments in the book and a superlative succinct overview of the changes in Kant’s cosmopolitanism from the ‘70s through the late ‘90s (see pages 178-81). It is in these pages, too, where we get an explicit elaboration of the hermeneutical principles that have guided Kleingeld. We know that towards the end of his life, and in particular, in the ‘90s, Kant “kept charting new philosophical ground” (page 180). This required that he develop new arguments, new categories, and new concepts. Hence, while we should always aim to determine whether Kant was consistent, we should also entertain the possibility that he changed his mind, even when he did not explicitly avowed that he had done so. “Showing that Kant changed his mind requires not just clear and substantial textual evidence that there is indeed a difference between earlier and later views. It also requires a broader analysis that shows that the earlier and later statements are not different aspects of one stable theory or a simple contradiction, but that they do indeed represent different stages in the development of Kant’s views” (page 180). Kant changed his views, because commitment to philosophical consistency required that he develop new arguments. Kant’s thinking underwent stages of development, and Kleingeld has beautifully reconstructed those stages and how they are consistent and coherent within a certain philosophical horizon.

I left chapter four to the end because it is the one that is most likely to be read polemically by all kinds of philosophers, social scientists, geographers and critical thinkers in general. It is in this chapter that Kleingeld addresses issues related to Kant’s views on race, and in particular Kant’s debate with Forster and Herder on the inherent value of cultural diversity. Kleingeld identifies three different positions on Kant’s racism and so-called “second thoughts” on race. One position claims that Kant was a “consistent inegalitarian”, or what we could call a white race supremacist. This view holds that Kant did not believe or argue for the equality of all races and that his moral universalism was contradictorily restricted to white males. Additionally, this view argues that Kant remains an inveterate white race supremacist to the end of his days. This is the view held by thinkers like Charles Mills, Robert Bernasconi, and Emmanuel Eze. Another position claims that Kant was an “inconsistent inegalitarian”, or what we could call an inconsistent moral universalist, whose personal racism was anathema to his own philosophical outlook and commitments. This is the view espoused by thinkers like Robert Louden, Thomas McCarthy, Thomas Hill, and Bernard Boxill. The third view holds that Kant abandoned his racist views around the time of the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason, between 1781 and 1787. To these three views, Kleingeld adds her own view, which is that Kant was committed until the early nineties to racial hierarchy but that he had “second thoughts” about race, racial hierarchies, and the cultural diversity before the publication of Toward Perpetual Peace in 1795.

The least defensible of these position is the third, which is that propounded by Sankar Muthu, since there is plenty of work published by Kant between 1787 and 1795 where he expresses racist views. The most defensible position, but perhaps also the easiest to defend, would be to claim that Kant was an inconsistent universalist; that his racism was personal but not philosophical. The most polemical and also the hardest to defend, as it goes against the grain of everything we associate with Kant and Kantianism, is that he was a consistent inegalitarian who to the end of his life remained personally and philosophically committed to a white male and race supremacist view of morality and history. This view would entail that Kant’s cosmopolitanism is a racial cosmopolitanism, or a cosmopolitanism of the Herrenvolk, to use Charles Mills’ language. Kleingeld’s position is forcefully argued on the basis of careful textual readings and reconstruction of texts from the ‘90s, but it is also based on conjecture, extrapolation, and reading between the lines. As she put it,

“Kant changed his views on race during the same period that his political theory and philosophy of right underwent significant transformations. Examples of other important developments in Kant’s political theory around this time are his notion of citizenship, his republicanism, and the concept of cosmopolitan right. Kant was never generous in explaining the genesis or transformation of his views, and we may never know the precise circumstances of his change of mind. Yet it is likely that he started to reconsider his early acquiescence in the European practice of colonialism and slavery while he was developing new philosophical commitments in his legal and political theory. This work took place while important political changes occurred in France, and perhaps these events and the intellectual debates surrounding them, including the 1794 French abolition of slavery in the wake of the revolt of Saint-Domingue, prompted him to rethink his earlier concept of the characteristics of the races. Perhaps, too, there was a delayed effect of the criticism voiced by Herder, Metzger, Forster, and others” (page 116).

The recent anthology Reading Kant’s Geography (2011), which I co-edited with Stuart Elden, brought scholars from many different disciplines to consider not only Kant’s lecture on Physical Geography, but also the overall role of geography, anthropology, space, race, and gender in his thought. Like Kleingeld, we relied on Werner Stark’s exacting and painstaking philological, detective, reconstructive work on the extant manuscripts of the physical geography lectures. It is unfortunate that our work seems to have been a passing ship in the vast of ocean of scholarly publication, for Bernasconi’s contribution to our volume, titled “Kant’s Third Thoughts on Race” I think has offered substantive and equally persuasive rebuttals of Kleingeld’s position on Kant’s so-called “second thoughts” on race. Bernasconi’s position is strong and perhaps—for the time being—unassailable because it relies on the absence of explicit evidence from Kant’s writings that he had explicitly repudiated earlier views. Above all, it relies on the fact that Kant allowed work that relied on early notes, lectures, formulations contaminated by racism to go to press, including the Anthropology and the authorized Rink edition of the Physical Geography.

Kleingeld’s position relies on too many conjectures, as the passage I just quoted makes explicit. This is no small change when we are trying to resolve what a thinker did or did not write. On the other hand, Kleingeld’s position has the merit of performing an admirable work of hermeneutical generosity by demonstrating how Kant’s mature political work requires the explicit repudiation of white racist supremacy and invidious racial hierarchies. Had I read her book before I wrote my own contribution to Reading Kant’s Geography and other critical work on Kant’s version of cosmopolitanism, I would have been more cautious and less likely to focus on Kant’s work before the ‘90s. I am thus personally thankful to Kleingeld for her call to hermeneutical accountability [1].

Kant may have harbored racist views himself, to the end of his life, but his mature work—as Kleingeld so eloquently demonstrates—makes all forms of racism not only untenable but also reprehensible and contrary to the moral law and the development of the cosmopolitan moral community. By demonstrating how Kant changed his views on citizenship, on federalism, republicanism, by developing the conception of cosmopolitan right, by arguing for the positive role of educating our affect towards empathy, and by urging us to expose ourselves to the suffering of the poor, Kleingeld has given us a more humane and humble Kant, but also a more admirable one because he exhibited in his maturing work the power of allowing oneself to be educated by reason guided by solicitous empathy. It may be redundant to endorse this book any further, but I cannot not close by saying that it is truly a gift of philosophy to our cosmopolitan hopes. 

References

Elden S and E Mendieta (2011) Reading Kant’s Geography. Albany: SUNY Press.

Mendieta E (2009) From imperial to dialogical cosmopolitanism. Ethics and Global Politics 3 241-58.