Jakob Huber’s new book delves deeply into the philosophical foundations of Kant’s cosmopolitanism, unearthing and defending an innovative reading that challenges a variety of assumptions within contemporary scholarship. Central to Huber’s interpretation is an early modern concept known as “original common possession,” which features prominently in Kant’s legal and political thought and informs how he understands the rights of states and citizens in a global community. Huber makes a strong case that scholars misunderstand how Kant uses the concept and, in so doing, misconceive key features of his cosmopolitan vision, rendering Kant unnecessarily vulnerable to criticism.
As Huber explains, a reader of Kant’s Doctrine of Right is liable to come away with a certain “standard reading.” In this account, Kant argues that all people “originally” have an “innate right” to external freedom, and as a corollary to this right, they have a right to exist on the Earth’s surface and make use of its contents “wherever nature or chance…has placed them” (Practical Philosophy, a 1997 volume of Kant’s works edited by Mary Gregor, 414). But the Earth’s surface is not naturally divided into plots ready for individual proprietorship; instead, everyone partakes in an “original common possession” of it, from which each individual “provisionally” acquires a right to claim a portion, pending the establishment of a “civil condition” that converts these provisional rights into positive rights (Kant 1997, 409–10).
This story would be Kant’s twist on a familiar narrative in classic social contract theory, Huber explains, where individuals are conceived as coexisting in a “state of nature”-like condition as “proto-owners” (19) with innate but not fully realized rights to property independent of formal governments. On this standard reading, much of Kant’s celebrated cosmopolitan philosophy—including his demand for a “federation of free states” and his idea of a “cosmopolitan right” to interaction across peoples—can be seen as deriving from the remnants of an originally global “common possession” that places limits on the rights of nations.
Common as this “proto-ownership” account is among Kant scholars, Huber argues that not only it is incorrect but that it also misconstrues what makes Kantian cosmopolitanism so revolutionary and powerful. In Huber’s view, Kant’s “original common possession” is not really about how people relate to land and resources; rather, it concerns “a particular way in which we relate to one another given that we find ourselves co-inhabiting a finite space” (38). Kant is breaking more radically than is usually appreciated from prior natural law accounts of common possession, such as those of Hugo Grotius and Samuel von Pufendorf. And, for Huber, it is precisely in the way that Kant breaks from these predecessors that the irreducibly global, pluralistic, and egalitarian character of his cosmopolitan vision fully comes into view.
Huber’s book is an impressive display of meticulous and systematic exegesis, though one should note it is not meant for those new to Kant. Even the well-versed reader may be daunted by parts of the first chapter, where Huber initially exposits the ins and outs of the “standard reading.” When following Huber into the inner circuitry of Kant’s discussion of private right, one would be advised to have an open copy of the Doctrine of Right handy. But the effort pays off. Over subsequent chapters, the gap Huber opens between the standard reading and his own grows increasingly wider, until what first appears to be an exercise in interpretive hairsplitting grows into an innovative framework for elaborating Kant’s cosmopolitanism and defending it from contemporary rivals and critics.
Huber’s revised reading of Kant aims to shift present-day conversations about global justice away from an often too narrow focus on territory, resources, and “distribution” and instead toward a philosophical basis on which human beings sharing the Earth in common are bound to recognize one another as “justificatory equals” (60). The significance of original common possession to Kant’s cosmopolitanism lies not so much in the limits it places on the territorial sovereignty of states but in the way it presses each of us, as “earth dwellers,” to confront the fact that we coexist together in a global community—albeit not one defined by common values or affinities per se but by unavoidable interaction with one another. Ultimately, it is this “grounded” experience of interaction that generates the obligation to recognize the embodied plurality of peoples and global perspectives.
In and of itself, one could ask whether there is anything terribly novel in such a view, which shares some features with, for example, the idea of “fundamental justice” that Rainer Forst outlined in The Right to Justification (2012) and with other discourse-ethical and contractualist theories. What gives Huber’s reading subversive force is precisely that “original common possession” both looks like and has been long treated as an idea native to a distributive paradigm for thinking about justice. By upending the concept in the way Huber does, he is able to level his revised Kantianism against a variety of accounts that lay claim to the concept’s historical lineage. Thus, he pits his account directly against Mathias Risse’s reconstructed Grotian approach in On Global Justice (2012), which Huber can now critique for relying on a conception of “original common possession” that is unsatisfactorily narrow (58–99). Huber shows how the Kantian conception obligates us to take up a “global standpoint” that recognizes and accommodates the diverse but equal agency of all peoples who share the Earth in common—and in a way that precedes the implications this may have for our distributive holdings.
Huber further uses this reading to push back on recent “colonialist” readings of Kant, which accuse even Kant’s ostensibly anticolonial positions of an implicit Eurocentrism. He argues that adherents to the “standard reading” leave themselves exposed to this criticism by centering Kant’s system of right around property and territory, a move that misrecognizes the status of peoples not organized into European-style territorial states (90–91). In contrast, a reading of Kant’s cosmopolitan right that centers justificatory equality is better equipped to uphold the equal standing of all peoples, European or not.
Huber makes a compelling case when it comes to how we should think about the foundations of Kant’s cosmopolitan thinking. But questions are raised when he shifts his focus to the institutional principles of Kant’s system. Although Huber’s claim for equal standing to state and nonstate peoples works at the level of cosmopolitan right, Kant is still clear that it is peoples organized as states that create the pillars of international law. This makes it harder to deny a certain privileged status to territorial states, and Huber does not quite address this tension.
Huber also demurs from any extensive relitigation of Kant’s more contested positions, such as his rejection of revolution or foreign intervention in favor of gradual “reform,” or his apparent dismissal of the idea of a world republic. Accepting Kant’s reformist position, Huber instead places the impetus for political progress in a regulative ideal of moral hope that is pursued largely at the domestic level. Although philosophically interesting, Huber’s comparative inattention to the constitution and politics of Kant’s global vision may leave readers mildly frustrated as to how this revitalized understanding can help clarify present-day challenges in the realms of human rights, self-determination, and global governance.
A new reading of Kant’s cosmopolitanism should aim to improve our understanding of Kant’s philosophy on its own terms in a way that helps resolve philosophical ambiguities and conflicts in Kant scholarship. But it might also show how this new reading helps make sense of contemporary political challenges, possibly opening new paths for understanding and action. Although a little more attention to the latter would have been welcome, Huber’s book excels at the former to a degree that it more than earns its place within contemporary Kant scholarship.
