Kant on Cosmopolitan Progress

There exists a longstanding puzzle over how to understand the relation between Kant’s progressive philosophy of history and his principles of political right. A key part of the confusion comes from the fact that Kant wrote about ‘cosmopolitanism’ in two different sorts of writings. The first was part of a long-running debate over key claims from Leibniz’s Theodicy, which Kant understood to have been challenged particularly by Rousseau and defended in a less-than fully convincing way most recently by Mendelssohn. In these writings, including the short, published pieces of the 1780s and the relevant passages in the third Critique, Kant was not arguing about politics at all, but about moral development and learning in such a way as to defend the coherence of a commitment to moral principle (while radically downgrading the presumption of actual divine providence from its foundational and explanatory role in the Leibnizian tradition). This debate was partly about holding off doctrinally skeptical conclusions, but even more about showing how one could do that and so preserve morality while clearly separating morality’s content from any specifically religious commitments to the immortality of the soul or the existence of God (which are downgraded to the status of postulates just to show that they depend on morality rather than morality depending on them). None of this has anything to do with political justice, and references to constitutions and cosmopolitanism in this context are best read on analogy to their place in Rousseau’s Emile, in contradistinction to the Social Contract, because in the former it is their status as ideals to orient the cultivation of moral faculties, rather than as specific doctrinal claims of right meant to guide concrete political decisions or reform proposals, that is at stake. Kant’s avowedly political works, by contrast, respond to the sorts of claims advanced instead in Achenwall’s Ius Naturae, which distinguish in a way the other texts do not between moral self-cultivation and coercive external obligations of justice, already in the earliest surviving lecture notes on natural right from 1784. In this different discussion, some of the shape of the arguments from the other texts are eventually repurposed in a strictly subordinate role within a fundamentally different sort of argument, once Kant began to think more deeply about specifically political questions in the early 1790s. But it is essential to see that the force of this move was, like the downgrading of immortality and God vis-à-vis Leibniz, exactly to show that principles of right must be established independently of any claims concerning progressive teleology, and that the latter can play only a secondary role to combat skepticism about the possibility of ever taking seriously principles of right in politics. The late Conflict of the Faculties, notably, is another essay of the earlier moralistic rather than political type. Distinguishing these arguments is key to seeing why Kant went out of his way to distinguish himself from what he saw as the naïve metaphysical optimism of Leibinizian natural law, without always entirely abandoning its language.