Cosmopolitics: Law and Right

Abstract

Jürgen Habermas (1995) has attempted to address the question of how we should evaluate Kant’s notion of perpetual peace given the political history of the last two hundred years and their effect on jurisprudence. The nature and scope of Habermas’ corrections of Kant will be my theme and in the course of describing them I hope to evaluate the question of the extent to which Habermas enables a normative discussion that is more comprehensive than Kant’s. It is worth noting initially, however, the nature of Habermas’ description of how the notion of perpetual peace fits within the overall matrix of Kant’s practical philosophy. Habermas writes that with this notion Kant introduces a jurisprudential innovation as alongside the account of the laws of states and international law there has now been produced a third element: ‘the idea of a cosmopolitan law based on the rights of the world citizen’ (1995, 113). Habermas’ critical reconstruction of the thought of cosmopolitan law involves three stages. The first stage is where Habermas recasts the Kantian account by conceptually revisiting the manner in which Kant arrives at the goal of perpetual peace, the description of the project of it, and the solution to the problem that Kant posits to the problem posed by perpetual peace.