Hospitality, or Kant’s Critique of Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights
| Date | 01 August 2018 |
| Published date | 01 August 2018 |
| Author | Christopher Meckstroth |
| DOI | 10.1177/0090591717719546 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2017
Article
Political Theory
2018, Vol. 46(4) 537 –559
Hospitality, or
© The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permissions:
Kant’s Critique of
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591717719546
DOI: 10.1177/0090591717719546
journals.sagepub.com/home/ptx
Cosmopolitanism and
Human Rights
Christopher Meckstroth1
Abstract
Kant’s theory of international politics and his right of hospitality are
commonly associated with expansive projects of securing human rights
or cosmopolitan governance beyond state borders. This article shows
how this view misunderstands Kant’s criticism of the law of nations (ius
gentium) tradition as handed down into the eighteenth century as well
as the logic of his radical alternative, which was designed to explain the
conditions of possibility of global peace as a solution to the Hobbesian
problem of a war of all against all in the state of nature. I resolve
longstanding confusion over the meaning and justification of Kant’s
right of “hospitality” by showing how it functions not as a freestanding
positive claim demanding enforcement but as a way of ruling out specious
justifications for war against those the traditional law of nations permitted
one to label “enemies.” This poses important questions for contemporary
theories of global justice.
Keywords
Kant, hospitality, cosmopolitanism, human rights, Perpetual Peace
1University Lecturer in the History of Political Thought, Faculty of History, University of
Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Corresponding Author:
Christopher Meckstroth, University Lecturer in the History of Political Thought, Faculty of
History, University of Cambridge, West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9EF, United Kingdom.
Email: cm753@cam.ac.uk
538
Political Theory 46(4)
On one prominent view of global justice, all humankind is tied by moral bonds
to care for a cosmopolitan society spanning the entire globe. Duties of justice
to individuals do not end at borders but include positive obligations to secure
a potentially expansive list of human rights of persons everywhere, perhaps
including care for their material welfare, and this may require international
action or intervention when one cannot rely on local governments. On a sec-
ond, less sanguine view, most of this is nothing but a recipe for permanent war.
Because the sole legitimate aim of international politics is avoiding war when-
ever possible, the only valid casus belli is the violation or threatened violation
of one state’s sovereignty by another. Enforcement of human rights is an inter-
nal matter for states, and any peremptory rights of stateless persons or indi-
viduals across borders must be limited as narrowly as possible to ensure they
could never invite new conflicts by competing with state sovereignty. Above
all, any positive claims of justice grounded in membership in a world com-
munity, beyond the most minimal injunction against waging war at will on
foreigners, must be relegated to the dustbin of history as among the greatest
obstacles to lasting peace. In the world we inhabit, such claims can only pro-
vide pretexts for powers keen to rationalize self-interested belligerence by
dressing it up in the sanctimonious language of philanthropy.
Now Kant’s theory of what we may loosely call international politics is
often presented as a more or less distinctive version of the first view. But in
fact his view was the second, and the first that of thinkers he opposed. Too
often Kant is read on the presumption that the major choice in politics is
whether to stand on the side of principle, reason, and morality or instead with
realist critics such as Hobbes or Schmitt. But this obscures the originality of
Kant’s views: in fact he made a point of defending a third alternative, one
unshaken by Hobbes’s radical critique just because it took that critique
explicitly as its own point of departure, but which nevertheless went on to
defend a role for principles of justice also beyond state borders as a further
part of a solution to the problem of a war of all against all. The stakes in this
concern more than Kant interpretation, moreover, because if I am right, then
Kant advanced a powerful alternative to an all-too familiar forced choice
between moralism and immoralism in international politics.
This article considers one major piece of Kant’s solution—his novel cat-
egory of “cosmopolitan right” [Weltbürgerrecht], which he limited to the
single right of “hospitality” [Hospitalität, Wirthbarkeit]. There is no agree-
ment in the literature on what this right of hospitality entails or how Kant’s
brief discussions purport to justify it. The key, I will show, is to see that when
Kant formulated hospitality as a right “that it not be justified to be met as an
enemy” or “not to be treated as an enemy” simply for arriving on foreign
shores with offers of trade, he was joining a centuries-long argument in just
Meckstroth
539
war theory over who counts as an “enemy” who may rightly be repelled or
conquered.1 Contrary to what is almost universally supposed, the point of this
for Kant was not to secure a positive right to anything, but simply to rule out
familiar justifications for declaring others “enemies” and thereby overriding
their provisional rights—holding already in the state of nature—to defend
themselves and their possessions from attack. A contrary interpretation of the
“sacred right of hospitality” had been invoked, famously, by thinkers includ-
ing Vitoria and Grotius precisely to justify colonial wars in pursuit of com-
merce, and Kant’s reworking drew on Vattel’s criticisms of those predecessors
on just this point, while regrounding the right, in sharp contrast to Vattel, as a
solution to Hobbes’s problem of how to escape the state of nature.2
On this view, Kant’s theory of right may be summarized as follows. In the
state of nature, provisional, “private right” sanctions defense of one’s person
and posessions, but because interpretation and enforcement are left to indi-
viduals, a condition of controversy and general war ensues that must be left
behind. This is first solved at the domestic level through a sovereign state
(ideally with a certain constitution), then at the interstate level by means of a
pacific federation. But this still leaves a state of nature among states and non-
state peoples, which was a major concern in Kant’s eighteenth century, when
much of the world was widely held to live outside states and great power
politics was closely bound up with wars over extra-European colonies, nota-
bly in the French and Indian or Seven Years’ War of 1754-63, and again in the
American Revolution a few years later. This is what Kant’s cosmopolitan
right was meant to solve. Rather than resolving conflict through public
enforcement, as in the state, Kant opted here for no enforcement at all: his
right of hospitality was framed just so that it could never be invoked to start
a new war in the name of pursuing one’s rights. The rights to freedom and
property enjoyed by non-state peoples already in the state of nature will disal-
low colonial conquest and plunder unless it could be shown that locals had
injured foreign traders, thereby rendering themselves “enemies” open to just
retaliation. And this is just what Kant’s right of hospitality rules out (while
also ruling out wars against traders who remain peaceful). In this way, cos-
mopolitan right provides the third and final layer of a system of public right
designed as a comprehensive alternative to a global state of war.
Most interpreters of Kant’s cosmopolitan right see in it instead a source of
positive obligations independent of the logic of controversy that gives rise to
the need for sovereign states, and go on to associate Kant’s arguments with
expansive projects of institutionalizing cosmopolitan or human rights.3 Some
recent work has pushed back by emphasizing Kant’s debts to Hobbes or
Rousseau or his call for limiting cross-border rights more narrowly than prior
theorists, as part of a critique of colonialist war.4 But this has so far left a
540
Political Theory 46(4)
muddle over the meaning and justification of his right of hospitality. Tuck is
one of few to appreciate the full force of Kant’s famous criticism of Grotius,
Pufendorf, and Vattel as “only sorry comforters” (8:355), but he takes this to
imply, against the text, that Kant thought cosmopolitanism as hospitality
merely “desirable” rather than “necessary.”5 I argue, by contrast, that Kant’s
cosmopolitan right was meant precisely as the final piece of a solution to the
problem of right in controversy he took over from Hobbes—but it was none
the less for that a genuine principle of public right meant to show why
Hobbes’ state of nature beyond state borders was not, in fact, inescapable.
Perhaps one reason this has been so difficult for commentators to pin down
is that few are similarly comfortable with both Kant’s critical philosophical
logic and the centuries-long tradition of the law of nations with which he
engaged.6 The first section of this article thus situates Kant’s intervention
against the background of divergent eighteenth-century approaches to the law
of nations or ius gentium. The next deepens this background with a very con-
densed overview of a few of the most relevant controversies in the longer ius
gentium tradition reaching back to ancient Rome and through its radical refor-
mulation...
To continue reading
Request your trial