Kant Against Territorial Rights

In this paper, I claim that territoriality is for Kant an inherently problematic aspect of modern statehood that confronts him with a genuine dilemma. On the one hand, as I show drawing on an analysis of Kant’s concept of ‘original acquisition of land’, it is the territorial nature of human existence (the fact that embodied reasoners need to be somewhere) that makes Kant’s political theorising irreducibly global: the community of individuals sharing the earth in common has normative priority over spatially bounded human-made communities like the modern state. On the other hand, as bearers of an artificially constituted (public) will, states have moral personality for Kant and thus cannot be forced to enter more inclusive political institutions. I show how Kant struggles with this tension throughout his political philosophy without ultimately being able to solve it.