How do we educate our children and ourselves to become enlightened world citizens? Georg Cavallar examines the roots and dimensions of Immanuel Kant's (1724-1804) approach to a cosmopolitan education. Why focus on Kant? We know so much more about his influence on contemporary debates on justice and world peace. But to ignore his pedagogy is to miss a crucial step through which he hoped to achieve such goals. The roots of Kant's pedagogy are in the Christian theology that pervades his philosophic system, as well as in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's philosophy, especially his book on education, Émile, and in the works of Johann Bernard Basedow, a “widely unknown” (93) eighteenth-century educational reformer. Having outlined these influences, Cavallar puts forward a challenging, historically informed interpretation of Kant's cosmopolitanism.

There are many branches and interpretations of cosmopolitanism. Even within Kant's texts, Cavallar surveys different grounds upon which human beings can identify with humanity rather than particular, rooted identities. There are legal, moral, cognitive, cultural/religious, economic, commercial, and—most important for this book—educational cosmopolitanisms. An ancient doctrine, dating back to the Greek and Roman Stoics, cosmopolitanism is almost impossible to decisively characterize. In recent years, however, a “new cosmopolitanism” has emerged around a set of concerns and problems: the weakness of global governance, the need to democratize international institutions and the lack of control that states have over globalization. Cavallar objects to the way Kant's philosophy has been misinterpreted and abused to fit the narrow and pragmatic agenda of the new cosmopolitanism. In particular, he argues that Kant had little interest in promoting global democratic institutions to govern people's lives. Rather, Kant was a “thin” cosmopolitan; he believed that people are first members of their own republics who, under ideal conditions, can learn to develop the right ethical dispositions for advancing the highest political end, a lawful condition of world peace. This goal can only be achieved over a long time, if at all.

Much of Kant's Embedded Cosmopolitanism outlines the content of Kant's cosmopolitan pedagogy. The key notion here is that of a vocation to become enlightened and enlarged thinkers, both as individuals and—collectively—as a species. Enlarged thinking means being a good person within one's own sphere but then extending outwards to have a positive, moral impact on the larger world. From Rousseau, Kant learns much, first, that education is not simply a matter of providing prefabricated content for young minds to absorb. Rather, to be educated is to be developed and cultivated in ways that create a capacity to align oneself with the larger whole: one's republic and then humanity writ large. Second, Kant adopts from Rousseau the idea that the deepest problem of education is in fact political. This problem is reconciling the attributes of a good, patriotic citizen with the aptitudes required for world citizenship.

Kant only knew Rousseau from books; he was personally acquainted with Basedow. Cavallar uncovers the extent to which latter's efforts to bring about a common, non-denominational (yet still religious) school system in Germany influenced Kant's thinking on world citizenship. From Basedow's efforts, Kant saw the possibility of a global project to instill in people the capacity for a lifelong vocation: being good citizens both at home and in the world.

As with Cavallar's earlier books on Kant and cosmopolitanism, this work fills a critical gap in the field. Substantively, new cosmopolitans are perhaps too reliant on the notion that simply building new, trans-world institutions and laws will resolve the planet's most pressing political problems. Cavallar's book on education shows how, for an earlier wave of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, positive reforms require not just good institutions but good people. Education is almost totally overlooked by new cosmopolitans who seem content to let existing technocratic and nationalistic pedagogies go unchallenged. Methodologically, rather than engage in sweeping claims about the development of cosmopolitan thought, Cavallar engages in a close reading of key texts in the history of the tradition. Moreover, he engages with important influences on Kant beyond the obvious such as Rousseau. Especially for English readers, this book reveals the continental European milieu in which Kant and Enlightenment cosmopolitans grappled with the politics of pedagogy.

Despite its strengths, Kant's Embedded Cosmopolitanism could have more strongly developed its critique of new cosmopolitans. Only in the introductory and concluding chapters does Cavallar outline the reasons why contemporary interpreters misuse Kant. Moreover, very little is said about how new cosmopolitans should view pedagogical issues. The intervening chapters on education, Rousseau, Basedow and the historical contexts that inform Kant's pedagogy make only brief, suggestive negative comments about the contemporary cosmopolitan project of democratizing global institutions. Overall, however, this book makes an excellent contribution to our knowledge of a neglected dimension in the history of ideas and the scholarship on Kant's political theory.