Kant is an important figure in this book, but not as important as those, who say that the Prussian philosopher invented cosmopolitanism, believe it is. Rather, he takes a place towards the end of developments in ideas about cosmopolitanism that began for our purposes with Francisco de Vitoria in the sixteenth century and passed through thinkers such as Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, Christian Wolff, Emer de Vattel and British Enlightenment figures such as David Hume and Adam Smith. A chapter towards the end that deals with early ideas about immigration rights does not have much to say about Kant, but does canvass the ideas of Pufendorf, Vattel, Johann Caspar Bluntschli and Alfred Verdross. One conclusion we can draw is that ideas about cosmopolitanism in the early modern period were much richer than many have thought.
In this field one must start with definitions. Cavallar begins with a definition of cosmopolitanism as the belief that all humans belong to one single, global community. He follows that with a nice (and necessary) set of distinctions among moral cosmopolitanism (normative individualism, universality, equality, and generality), natural law cosmopolitanism (the historical source of moral cosmopolitanism), political cosmopolitanism (requiring a global legal world order) and cultural cosmopolitanism (appreciation of the diversity of world cultures). Together, they mean rejecting nationalism, narrow communitarianism, statism, political realism, multiculturalism, postmodern relativism and more (except in their weakest, little more than symbolic, forms). There can be such things as Christian cosmopolitans and liberal cosmopolitans, if they meet certain standards.
Vitoria, Grotius, Pufendorf, Wolff and Vattel have recently suffered a lot of flak for allegedly endorsing European colonialism and exploitation. Cavallar is more subtle, noticing that Vitoria was shocked by the massacre of Atahualpa and that Grotius explicitly rejected some special rights for Europeans, even if the overall impact of his work was the justification of European aggression. Pufendorf was more critical of the rights of conquest, and defended the right of the Chinese to exclude Europeans. Wolff was the most sensitive to cultural difference. The result of his analysis is the warning that we should not replace the triumphalist narrative of European superiority with a mirror-image narrative of European perfidy; we should not construct false continuities from these thinkers to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; we should not overestimate the influence of theorists over actual state behaviour; and we should not ignore the ambiguity of many of these texts.
Cavallar also refutes long-standing notions of a uniform and optimistic Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. Voltaire, for example, was at best a thin moral cosmopolitan, certainly not a robust political one. Montesquieu gave us the theory of oriental despotism which did so much to delegitimize Asian governments in European eyes, but others such as Anquetil-Duperron showed that this was biased and unfounded. David Hume is a nationalist before he is a cosmopolitan, and relies too heavily on trade as an engine of cosmopolitanism. Adam Smith, on the other hand, may be more of a cosmopolitan although he is much more nuanced about the paradoxes and ambivalences of commercial society. It is interesting to read that Edmund Burke thought that he could be both a patriot and a cosmopolitan; this obviously implies distinctions of dimensions to which each could be applied. Things get very complicated when the Quaker John Bellers writes of the need for a European state during the War of the Spanish Succession (1710), and Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun outlines a republican cosmopolitanism. One conclusion that Cavallar comes to is that perhaps members of small and relatively powerless communities are more likely to come up with theories of cosmopolitanism than members of dominant nations.
Cavallar's chapter on Kant wants to debunk theories that Kant was a thorough-going cosmopolitan and at the same time defend him from the anti-cosmopolitan implications of his remarks about race. That is best done by arguing that Kant's racism was something he grew out of in the 1790s. By those years, he was an epistemological cosmopolitan (reason is the same everywhere), a moral cosmopolitan (all humans are members of a supersensible world) and a legal and political cosmopolitan. The latter is a result of the contract theory Kant took over and adapted from the natural lawyers. He also absorbed economic cosmopolitanism from Rousseau, Smith and the Scots.
One of the most interesting discussions is an analysis of what Kant meant by referring to the natural lawyers as ‘miserable comforters’. As Cavallar points out, the German leidige could also be translated as anything from troublesome to tiresome to unpleasant and inconvenient. The expression is found in the German version of the book of Job, where Job complains about the people who tell him that as a sinner he is to blame for his troubles. Kant could count on his eighteenth-century readers to pick up the biblical reference, but I daresay many contemporary readers miss it. By analogy, Kant could be complaining that the natural lawyers are offering sorry comfort, blaming the victims, in the face of tragedy. Kant liked Rousseau better for bringing out the horrors of death and mutilation in war rather than glossing it over as he might have thought the natural lawyers did. So we should admit that independent states cause wars, and that is one good reason for replacing them with a world-wide federation of states.
Another chapter brings out the variety of alternatives to Kant's view that were available in the period from the 1780s to the early 1800s. Freiherr von Martini, Jeremy Bentham and Georg Friedrich von Martens offered legal positivisms that tended to dismiss cosmopolitanism as a dream. Historians such as Johann Jacob Moser and Robert Ward abandoned theory for the actual practices of the age, justifying European superiority and the status quo. The French revolutionary Anacharsis Cloots developed a political cosmopolitanism which can also be understood as republicanism: a world republic with provinces but no independent states.
The chapter on the right to immigration is especially relevant today. Vitoria argued for open borders on the basis of a right to travel and trade, freedom of the seas, and a right to immigrate. Cavallar points out that restrictions on immigration were a product of the late nineteenth century. But they were built on thinkers like Pufendorf who maintained a very thin right of immigration, an imperfect right easily trumped by the perfect rights of states. Thinkers more open to immigration such as Bluntschli saw a moderate openness to foreigners as part of the rise of civilization. Twentieth-century thinker Alfred Verdross returned to natural law for a moderate openness to foreigners, based in part on concern for their suffering if denied immigration rights. But he also agreed with Michael Walzer on the right of communities to refuse entry, which in Walzer's case was designed to protect Israel from being flooded by non-Jewish immigrants.
On the one hand, the history of cosmopolitanism emerges from this careful study as much more nuanced and ambivalent than some histories would have it. Among other things, high-minded cosmopolitanism can empower the state and its bureaucracy to manage the lives and rights of citizens against their wills. Like so many other human ideas, the costs and benefits of cosmopolitanism surely depend very much on the exact how and why of their implementation at any particular location and at any particular time.
There are nice refutations of the analyses of well-known scholars from Carl Schmitt to Hedley Bull and Michael Walzer to Martha Nussbaum throughout the book. The footnotes are a gold-mine of the recent literature on cosmopolitanism. The most-cited book is Francis Cheneval's Philosophie in weltbürgerlicher Bedeutung (Reference Cheneval2002), and that is entirely appropriate because it is one of the best ever written on the topic. The loss to us that it is not available in English is mitigated by the use Cavallar makes of it here. Parts of this volume follow up on materials explored in Cavallar's ground-breaking The Rights of Strangers (Reference Cavallar2002), which also contained a substantial chapter on Kant and jus cosmopoliticum.
