Public lecture with Prof. Ian Hunter

Cosmopolitan Metaphysics and Territorial Diplomacy: Kant and Vattel on International Justice

Owing to its roots in universalist (ultimately theological) conceptions of reason, European philosophy has proved ill-suited for understanding the territorialisation of political and juridical thought that followed the Reformation and the rise of sovereign states. Kant’s conception of cosmopolitan justice is exemplary in this regard, for the only spatial construct suited to his conception of universal reason and a universe of rational beings is the entire globe. Since at least the seventeenth century, however, there have been forms of political thought — Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf — that grounded justice not in the agreement of a universe of rational beings but in the agreement of territorial communities of fearful beings to appoint a sovereign whose laws ended at the borders of the state. As Vattel argued, beyond the state there was no law or justice as such, although there were the treaties and conventions of European jus gentium and the institutions of diplomacy that had emerged to regulate war- and peace-making among the ensemble of states. Even in the late twentieth century this disconnect between the philosophy of universal justice and the history of territorial law and diplomacy was viewed through a Kantian lens, as if it were a symptom of the gap between theory and practice, reason and interest, or norm and fact. In this lecture I explore a different way of approaching this disconnection. Through a discussion of Kant and Vattel I argue that the philosophy of cosmopolitan justice and the history of territorial law and diplomacy belong to different cultural regions of the European intellectual world, being embedded in different cultural contexts, and serving divergent cultural and political purposes.                   

Ian Hunter was an Australian Professorial Fellow at University of Queensland Australia. Since the mid 1990s he has been working on the history of early modern political, religious and philosophical thought.

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