Kant, Global Politics and Cosmopolitan Law

The World Republic as a Regulative Idea of Reason

Claudio Corradetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429670725
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Law

Why is there so much attention on Kant's global politics in present day law and philosophy? This book highlights the potential fruitfulness of Kant's cosmopolitan thought for understanding the complexities of the contemporary political world. It adopts a double methodological strategy by reconstructing a genealogical conceptual journey showing the development of international law, as well as introducing an interpretation of cosmopolitanism centred on Kant's theory of a metaphysics of freedom. The result is a novel focus on Kant's notion of the world republic. The hypothesis here defended is that the world republic stands as a way of thinking about international politics where the possibility of progression towards peace results from its use as a regulative idea.

Part 1
Kant and the legacy of modernity

§ 1
From universal monarchy to global authority

Global authority as a concept is a prismatic notion reflecting at times different historical, contextual, and political-ideological conceptions of power and the world. It is a notion which can be dated back to Alexander the Great and to his historical enterprise. Aristotle in his letter to Alexander speaks of a “day when men will agree to constitute one rule and kingdom. [A day when] They will cease from wars and strife […]”.¹ No matter whether the writing is apocryphal or not, the idea there expressed is compatible both with the unique capacity of the Greeks to rule the world and with the maintenance of the autonomy of the city states under one ruler. Furthermore, the idea of the unity of the human being was not unknown at the time of Aristotle. Indeed, it was certainly expressed by Sophocles,² but, perhaps even more significantly, it arose as a notion only as a result of the awareness of uniformity – even if not yet of unity – of human mankind already according to the Homeric tradition.³

1 The long version of the letter is reproduced and discussed in S.M. Stern, Aristotle on the World State, Cassirer, Oxford, 1968, pp.7 ff.

2 See Stern, Aristotle on the World State, p.40.

3 H.C. Baldry, The Unity of Mankind in Greek Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1965, p.8.

In the following sections I propose a research hypothesis considering how the notion of world authority underwent across time different transformations shaping the definition of the legitimacy conditions of natural law as well as of the idea of a modern ius gentium. To anticipate the most relevant steps: if, in the classical age, the Greek man of the polis arose out of the universal measure of authority reaching an apex with the first cosmopolitan leader – Alexander the Great – it was with the Roman Emperors that the logos of the Stoics turned into a proper universal political authority, then shifting into the spiritual urbis et orbis authority of the Popes.

Modernity began, on the one hand, from the intersection between the eschatological personification of Christ on Earth leads and the recognition of a metaphysical equality of humankind (where men are seen as sons of the same God). Right after Columbus’ discovery of America, as soon as the Second Scholastics attempted to answer to the crisis of conscience of the Spanish crown and of Europe at large, the most important outcome consisted in moving beyond a conception of human equality (understood in merely metaphysical terms) and framing such a concept along a moral and political dimension. Francisco de Vito-ria’s idea of the dignity of the Indios as equal human beings resisted the prejudice that they lacked the knowledge of the word of Christ. The totality of all the visitable world became apparent.⁴ Yet, if the world became smaller, the conceptual realm, including the moral one, became universal.⁵ It does not come as a surprise, then, that with Kant the recognition of a full equal standing for all human beings was understood on moral and juridical terms. In Kant, indeed, the unity of humankind was with no exceptions based on substantive and unmodifiable prerequisites going beyond the individual moral will.

4 As Schmitt defines the link between law and the earth: “the earth is bound to law in three ways. She contains law within herself, as a reward of labor; she manifests law upon herself, as fixed boundaries; and she sustains law above herself, as a public sign of order. Law is bound to the earth and related to the earth”, C. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 2006, p.42.

5 On this crucial point and more in general on the encounter with the other see T. Todorov, The Conquest of America. The Encounter with the Other, Harper & Row, New York, 1984.

Yet, in the archaic times of Greece, the unity of mankind was still conceived in epic narratives, only in terms of an allegiance to one standard of human sameness. Deviating from such a standard was to be a non-human, as the Cyclops were considered.⁶ This “biological approach”⁷ for the definition of humanity as a homogeneous whole was followed quickly by Heraclitus’ idea of a common logos as a principle of rationality in virtue of which human beings were considered as part of one and the same family.⁸ This concept unfolded further along the fifth and fourth century BC until it became, with Protagoras, the idea of shared norms and then, in Socrates, the idea of a “good life”.⁹ It followed with Plato and Aristotle that a separation between the Greeks and the barbarians was matched to a territorial division between the inner and the outer polis. It followed that slavery was considered an institution in accord with nature, so that no contrary position was expressed against it.¹⁰

6 Baldry, The Unity of Mankind in Greek Thought, p.10.

7 Ibid., p.25.

8 Ibid., p.26.

9 See, respectively, Baldry, The Unity of Mankind in Greek Thought, p.43 ff. and p.53.

10 Ibid., p.85 and particularly p.87 ff.

It was only with the Cynics that an idea of cosmopolitanism as universal citizenship appeared. The kosmopolitēs was not yet the contemporary cosmopolitan citizen linked to humankind in virtue of brotherhood or world state membership. He was, instead, someone enjoying a status of membership of the universe.¹¹ Whereas the Cynics did not look for any political and social transformation in the direction of a cosmopolitan political entity, limiting their principles only to individuals, Peripatetics such as Theophrastus conceived of a natural resemblance of humankind in ways that are different from the hyper-individualism of the Epicureans for whom there was no society.¹² It was only with the Stoics that the idea of a unity among fellow human beings gained significant momentum as with the idea of universal rationality/logos inscribed in each human being.¹³ The whole of humankind became inscribed into one single rational order commonly shared.

11 Ibid., p.108.

12 Ibid., p.147.

13 For a detailed analysis if this phase, see Baldry, The Unity of Mankind in Greek Thought, p.151.

A division between a ‘civilized inside’ and an ‘unregulated outside’ reappeared with the decline of the Roman imperium and the resurgence of a limes, a physically excluding political boundary. The juridical space of the romanitas was thus about to be transformed into an empire with no limits.¹⁴ The imperium was radically opposed to something totally external and inimical to itself, namely, to barbarianism. If within the ancient Greek polis the foreigner could also be seen as a subject internal to the city walls (xenos), for Rome only the barbaroi were the non-recognizable alien subjects.¹⁵ In the Roman empire, thus, the political order was interiorized within a form which aimed to be universal and all-inclusive. Since the empire contained nothing outside itself threatening its own identity, all it could admit externally was only the idea of an ordo barbaricum, a ‘disorderly arranged order’ with no real power or sovereignty.

14 An “imperium sine fine”, in L. Scuccimarra, I confini del mondo. Storia del Cosmopolitismo dall’Antichità al Settecento, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2006, p.83.

15 On these points see D. Heater, World Citizenship and Government. Cosmopolitan Ideas in the History of Western Political Thought, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1996, pp.1–26 and Baldry, The Unity of Mankind in Greek Thought.

The imperium was the only political ideal capable of assuring an international peaceful condition, the so-called pax romana. From the merely contemplative views of the Stoics there followed a political instantiation of the cosmopolitan ideals.

Epictetus and the emperor Marcus Aurelius were the last Stoics to testify to an hyperrationalist contemplative vision. For Marcus Aurelius there was only one single law keeping together the cosmos: the law of reason.¹⁶ In such law was inscribed the metaphor of the cosmos and the city.¹⁷ Marcus Aurelius incorporated a non-mediated union between his identity as emperor and as a Roman citizen.¹⁸ Yet, such immediate unity was considered to be realizable only within the boundaries of the romanitas, that is, only within the geographical and political limits of the empire and according to the scheme of a rationality conceived in accordance with nature. Thus, it was not a case of administering the empire according to a stoic cosmopolitan ideal, but contrariwise, it was the case of living the inspirational drives of the civitas in accordance with a cosmopolitan order becoming history and power. From such a political conception it appeared already clear that the spinning force of the empire had lost its momentum, transforming itself into an individual action compliant to a standard of rationality.

16 “There is one substance, one law, and one reason common to all intelligent beings, and one truth; as there must be one sort of perfection to all beings, who are of the same nature, and partake of the same rational power”, Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, M. Silverthorne and J. Moore (eds.), F. Hutcheson and J. Moor (trans.), VII, 9, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, 2008 [II AC], p.84.

17 “The intellectual part is the same to all rationals and therefore that reason also, whence we are called rational, is common to all. If so, then, that commanding power, which shews what should be done or not done, is common. If so, we have all a common law. If so, we are all fellow-citizens: and if so, we have a common city. The universe, then, must be that city; for of what other common city are all men citizens? Hence, therefore, even from this common city, we derive our intellectual power, our reason, our law; as my earthly part is derived to me from some common earth, my ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Method of citation of Kant’s works
• Introduction
• PART 1 Kant and the legacy of modernity
• PART 2 ant’s critique of just war theory and colonialism
• PART 3 Theory and practice: the world (state) republic as a regulative idea of reason
• PART 4 Juridical constructivism and the cosmopolitan constitution
• Conclusion
• References
• Analytic index