Kant’s World-State Ideal and its Provisional Surrogates
Kant’s World-State Ideal and its Provisional Surrogates

Summary/Abstract: The paper discusses the place and meaning of Kant’s cosmopolitanism, more specifically, of his theory of cosmopolitan right and of a world state, while maintaining a dialogue with modern interpretations concerning these, ones that aim at developing their own theories of cosmopolitanism in a Kantian spirit. The world state is seen as an unattainable ideal, whereas provisionality, an idea borrowed from the Doctrine of Right, is reconstructed as the best model of the status of transnational institutions as seen by Kant. Furthermore, an alternative to permanent provisionality (i.e.,a chance for progress) is suggested in the idea of an ultra-minimal world-state as a place of public legal discourse that grounds a sanctioned legal order, thus approximating an ontologically strict idea of (cosmopolitan) politics.

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