I. Introduction
Much commentary on Immanuel Kant’s essay Perpetual Peace focuses on the First and
Second Definitive Articles for Perpetual Peace (“The civil constitution in every state shall be
republican” and “The right of nations shall be based on a federalism of free states”).
Much less
has been written on Kant’s Third Definitive Article for Perpetual Peace: “Cosmopolitan right
shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality.”
A few contemporary philosophers have noted this gap and have tried to take seriously
Kant's category of cosmopolitan right.
However, many of these writers tend to go beyond Kant’s
own minimal specification of cosmopolitan right. In this paper, I focus specifically on how
Jeremy Waldron conceives of the category of cosmopolitan right and its implications for issues of
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For these two Definitive Articles of Perpetual Peace, see Immanuel Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace,” in Practical
Philosophy, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 322, 325.
Hereafter, citations to Perpetual Peace will reference the volume and page of the Academy Edition of Kant’s works,
followed by “PP”. I will sometimes follow this with the page number of the Gregor translation in Practical Philosophy.
For example: ‘8:349 PP (Gregor, p. 322)’ or ‘8:354 PP’. Other times, I will use the translation in a volume edited by
Hans Reiss: Kant: Political Works, 2
nd
ed., Hans Reiss, ed., H. B. Nisbet, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991).
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8:357 PP (Gregor, p. 328). ‘Right’ has a broader meaning than ‘a right’ or ‘rights’ (as in ‘the right to vote’ or ‘civil
rights’). ‘Right’ is a translation of Recht, roughly a mixture of ‘law’ and ‘justice.’ See section III below.
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See, in particular, Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
Katrin Flikschuh, Kant and Modern Political Philosophy (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp.
chs. 5-6; and A John Simmons, “Human Rights and World Citizenship: The Universality of Human Rights in Kant and
Locke,” in Justification and Legitimacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). I focus in this paper on the
works by Jeremy Waldron (citations to his work are in later footnote).
For useful historical discussions of Kant and cosmopolitan right see Sankar Muthu, "Justice and Foreigners: Kant's
Cosmopolitan Right," Constellations 7 (March 2000): 23-45; Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton, Princeton
University Press, 2003); Georg Cavallar, The Rights of Strangers: Theories of International Hospitality, the Global
Community, and Political Justice since Vitoria (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); and Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and
Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 207-
255. Hannah Arendt mentioned cosmopolitan right in Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, Ronald Beiner, ed.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), but Arendt largely shied away from discussion of Kant's specifically
political works, which I focus on here. Jacques Derrida has also contrasted Kant’s limited notion of hospitality with an
unconditional hospitality; see for example: "Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility. A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,"
in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley, eds. (London:
Routledge, 1999), pp. 65-83. Among many others, Pavlos Eleftheriadis argues that Kant’s category of ‘cosmopolitan
law’ can be expanded beyond the limited right of hospitality to the institutionalization of human rights (European Law
Journal, Vol. 9, No. 2 [April 2003], pp. 241-263). For more on Kant and human rights, see the essays in James
Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, eds., Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge,
Mass: The MIT Press, 1997); in my opinion, this volume generally does not adequately capture what is special about
Kant’s category of cosmopolitan right.
For other (brief) mentions of the cosmopolitan right to hospitality, see Allen Wood's Kant (Malden, MA; Blackwell
Publishing, 2004), pp. 178-179; Elisabeth Ellis, Kant’s Politics: Provisional Theory for an Uncertain World (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 94-96; Howard Williams, Kant’s Political Philosophy (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1983), p. 260; Charles Covell, Kant and the Law of Peace: A Study in the Philosophy of International
Law and International Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), pp. 141-8; Anthony Pagden, “The Christian
Tradition,” in States, Nations, and Borders: The Ethics of Making Boundaries, Allen Buchanan and Margaret Moore,
eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 103-126, pp. 109-110; Lords of All the World (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1995), pp. 61-62. Cf. the references in George Cavallar, Kant and the Theory and Practice of
International Right (Cardiff, Unversity of Wales Press, 1999), p. 199 fn. 44.
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Convention