The Right to Visit (I)

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter turns to Kant’s discussion of cosmopolitan right, where the argument from earth dwellership reappears. Starting with the ‘constraining’ dimension of the cosmopolitan right to visit, it makes sense of Kant’s anticolonialism against the background of his grounded cosmopolitanism. The primary systematic question is on which juridical basis Kant can radically curtail the comportment of Western emissaries abroad, denying them in particular a right to force non-state peoples to enter the civil condition, for instance by simply settling in their vicinity. The chapter argues that it is their shared earth dwellership which constrains travellers to cautious offers for interaction and exchange even in the absence of a shared property practice. Construing a regress from the property argument to the more fundamental domain of earth dwellership, I show how Kant is able to conceptualise a distinctly juridical critique of colonialism as wrongful comportment. The chapter thus highlights that Kant’s grounded cosmopolitanism is a cosmopolitanism of self-constraint vis-à-vis distant strangers or unfamiliar forms of collective life and political association.