Religion within the boundaries of mere reason as the key for a comprehension of Kant's cosmopolitanism

Abstract

This article advances the thesis that Kant's cosmopolitanism is to be interpreted as a view that contains at its core the idea of a world state as the final destination of humanity's historical progress. Evidence for this is to be found in Kant's Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, in particular on the basis of an interpretation of the notion of the 'ethical commonwealth'. A phase in this progress of humanity toward a world state is a federation of states that Kant advances in Toward Perpetual Peace. Before elucidating this core idea of my article, a review of contemporary interpretations of Kant's cosmopolitanism will be offered. The primary division of these interpretations will be based on the distinction between the 'democratic peace paradigm' and the 'cosmopolitan democracy paradigm'. It will be asserted that the proponents of both paradigms generally claim to have Kantian underpinnings, but by and large suffer from a failure to devote the necessary attention to Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. This failure is above all detrimental to the argumentation of the proponents of the cosmopolitan democracy paradigm.