Jakob Huber’s Kant’s Grounded Cosmopolitanism is an impressive work of interpretation of Kant’s global vision based on a systematic exegesis of Kant’s Doctrine of Right (DR) and Toward Perpetual Peace (TPP). Huber’s account of Kant makes the ‘right to be somewhere’ a central principle that foregrounds that ‘we are all earth dwellers’. Based on this reconstruction, Huber develops a global standpoint that orients Kant’s cosmopolitanism. This account centres possession rather than ownership of the globe and makes common ownership a permanent state (rather than a merely preparatory stage to appropriation and property rights) that shapes Kant’s system of Right and his cosmopolitanism. Based on this derivation, Huber revisits Kant’s anti-colonialism and the question of mobility.

Chapter 1 (The Right to be Somewhere) excavates Kant’s reflections on human beings’ relations to one another ‘merely in virtue of their concurrent existence on the spatially bounded earth’ (p. 11), an account that appears briefly in the section on cosmopolitanism in DR but, Huber notes, is introduced already in the section on Private Right. Given this location in Kant’s text, interpreters associate these claims with his duty-based argument about legitimate property and state entrance. Interpreters in what Huber calls the ‘standard reading’, in particular, see ‘common possession’ as a ‘disjunctive community of mutual exclusion’ according to which individuals unavoidably claim a space on earth, to which they are entitled only provisionally, until a public authority can legitimate that ownership in the name of the general will (pp. 18–19). In contrast to this reading, Huber extracts from the passage on earth dwellership normative principles derived from the concurrent existence on the earth’s spherical surface of a plurality of corporeal agents (p. 20). This is a ‘distinct kind of juridical relation … foundational for Kant’s grounded cosmopolitanism’ (ibid.). This entails a ‘particular kind [of] interdependen[t] relation of “possible physical interaction (DR 6:352)”’ that is not contained in the innate right but is instead ‘purely spatial and thus independent of any further ties constituted, for instanc[e], by economic or political interdependence, cultural affinity or shared interests’ (pp. 21, 30).

Chapter 2 argues further that earth dwellership cannot be reduced to ‘relations among propertied citizens’ but is rather a ‘distinct kind of interdependent relation among juridical equals who concurrently inhabit the globe’ (p. 38). The bulk of this chapter recovers the natural law tradition and argues that Kant departs from it by focusing on the relations of subjects to one another rather than to ‘land or the resources on it’ (ibid.). This means departing from contemporary (‘standard’) readings that posit that property relations leave the world of common possession behind, to instead argue that possession is a lasting condition that ‘encapsulates a formal, relational account of global connectedness that underlies Kant’s spatial cosmopolitanism’ (p. 54). This connectedness, importantly, is disjunctive, meaning that the simultaneous existence implies both their co-existence and their mutual exclusion (p. 53). Huber argues that this spatially located disjunctive community provides us with a ‘global standpoint’ to ‘reflexively relate to the whole of human beings with which we are in thoroughgoing interaction’ in order to find ‘shared solutions for shared problems’ (p. 56). Judging from the perspective of the commonly possessed earth entails acknowledging ‘the need and … shared ability to come to terms with the plurality of perspectives that humans bring to bear on each other on the earth’s spherical surface’ (p. 57). This does not undo relations and institutions like property, territory, or sovereignty; but allows us to critically reflect on them (p. 57). Humankind is thus depicted as a ‘more antagonistic kind of community of agents in “disjunctive interaction”’ (Longuenesse Reference Longuenesse2005: 206–7; Milstein Reference Milstein2013: 125, cited on p. 60) and as a community of subjects bound to ‘treat each other as justificatory equals [sharing] not only the predicament of co-inhabiting a finite space, but also the ability to [devise] mutually agreed terms of coexistence’ (pp. 60–1). In other words, rather than being concerned with ‘how to divide the world up’, and positing ‘passive recipients of goods’, Kant’s earth dwellers are ‘equal normative authorities [capable of creating] mutually justifiable relations across borders’ (p. 66).

Chapters 3 and 4 conceptualize ‘The Right to Visit’ that emerges from Huber’s derivation of Kant’s principle of earth dwellership. Chapter 3 reconstructs a ‘recursive argumentative move’ between Kant’s theorization of the possibility of property (and the associated duty to enter juridical relations under a state), and ‘spell[s] out the moral implications of embodied agency under spatial constraints’, which Huber calls a ‘regress to the global standpoint’ (p. 97). This strategy allows Huber to overcome the limits of existing approaches that cannot conceive of relations with non-state actors as juridical interactions because of their property, private-right, or non-reciprocal frameworks (Stilz Reference Stilz, Flikschuh and Ypi2014; Ripstein Reference Ripstein, Flikschuh and Ypi2014; Ajei and Flikschuh Reference Ajei, Flikschuh, Flikschuh and Ypi2014, cited on pp. 78, 82, 8). In contrast, the global standpoint extends the ‘scope of our obligations beyond those with whom we are in a property-mediated relation to all participants in a disjunctive community’ (p. 93). These obligations do not oblige us to particular entitlements or parts of the earth’s surface, but to ‘treat distant strangers as justificatory equals in coming to terms with the fact of our concurrent existence on the earth’s spherical surface’ (p. 93).

Huber opens Chapter 4 by wisely reminding us not to use ‘our own normative concerns’ regarding contemporary migration to read Kant on mobility given the ‘fundamentally different’ character of the mobility he was addressing (p. 102). Indeed, for Kant, global mobility contributes, as a transitional step, to the juridification of the interaction between states and non-state peoples. This is because by roaming the earth’s surface and establishing ‘cultural, intellectual, economic, or political exchange’, people also learn to relate to practices and institutions that are different from their own (p. 100). This right to mobility applies to both property and territory, implying a pass-through right that is also a recognition of their status as ‘earth dwellers’. In other words, earth dwellership, by allowing global mobility, restricts exclusive claims to land or territory and treats ‘noncitizen individuals as cosmopolitan agents on the move’ (pp. 100, 108, 110). This ‘act[ing] in a way that leaves open [the establishment of public institutions] in the future’ is proper to cosmopolitan right as inherently transitional rather than a self-standing claim subject to juridification (p. 120).

Chapter 5 works at several levels, first distinguishing between progress at the domestic and the international level and then considering the domestic realm itself as key for cosmopolitan progress. Regarding the former, Huber argues that the idea of progress as institutional perfection applies only domestically, while beyond the state the mere creation of institutions already amounts to progress. This is a slow and gradual process that depends on states becoming ‘radically reformed’ to act and guide their citizens to act in a cosmopolitan way of their own accord (pp. 129, 136, 147).Footnote ¹ Regarding the latter, the focus on the domestic sphere reveals that both the actions of the ‘cosmopolitan state’ and the epistemic attitude of hope that individuals adopt in their relations with strangers are key in bringing about cosmopolitanism. Citizens’ motivational ability to follow this path, in particular, requires that they harbour hope that peace can be attained (p. 129).

There is a lot to praise in this book. The focus on earth-dwellership joins other recent work that posits the inevitable interaction brought about by the finitude of the earth as grounding Kant’s juridical system (Marey Reference Marey2021). This opens a promising and necessary angle of research into Kant’s politics, given the contentious politics of space and the exhaustion of nature in our age of ecological catastrophe. Huber also offers a justification to mobility that counters statist accounts of Kant’s sovereignty, property, and territory. Yet, there is also space for critique regarding the coherence of the proposed interpretation vis-à-vis other aspects of Kant’s work, on the one hand, and the political project that emerges from Huber’s account, on the other hand. Interpretatively, I scrutinize the implications for the debate on Kant’s views on race and colonialism that Huber derives from his framework. Here, I argue that Huber dismisses too quickly the evidence of Kant’s persistent beliefs in racial and civilizational hierarchies. Politically, I consider the vision of politics that comes attached to the proposed account of earth dwellership and the global standpoint. Here, I am concerned with the limited ability of the resulting framework to illuminate questions of power and political economy globally.

On the first point, Huber is unpersuaded by the claim that Kant’s critique of colonialism, and thus his cosmopolitanism, is inward-looking and compatible with his belief on race and civilizational hierarchy, siding instead with Kleingeld’s hypothesis that Kant’s cosmopolitanism pivots from his earlier racist beliefs to ‘grant … nonwhites a status of full juridical equality’ in the 1790s (p. 76). In particular, Huber finds that Kant granting ‘full juridical equality’ to non-Europeans according to the description of cosmopolitanism as a realm of right is incompatible with my claims that neither the relation between colonizer and colonized nor the political agency of the colonized concern Kant.

While at first sight, and in the abstract, a juridical realm appears incompatible with hierarchy, we should consider, first, Kant’s sparse theorization of right within cosmopolitanism and exceptions to equality elsewhere in his system, and, second, Kant’s own earlier claims about the different groups that dwell upon the earth, which he never repudiated.

Important here is the question of ‘genre’, so to speak, meaning that Kant’s early racist writings about non-Europeans and his later anti-colonialism writings are not of the same kind. While the earlier writings dealt with the inability of non-Europeans to self-govern, their lack of work ethics in the absence of coercion, and their inferior intelligence (all of which made them fitting colonial subjects), none of these arguments are taken up or retracted in his 1790s writings on colonialism. In these later writings, Kant focuses instead on the cruelty effected on colonial natives and the destructive and vicious character of colonial conflict (Valdez Reference Valdez2017). That this cruelty is deemed morally wrong does not detract from the potential inequality between Europeans and natives in the colonies. Elsewhere in Kant’s system, we find respect coexisting with inequality in relation to women, to whom Kant accorded respect and whose wellbeing and membership in a juridical community coexisted with denying them an equal place in the public sphere (Bernasconi Reference Bernasconi, Elden and Mendieta2011; Kleingeld Reference Kleingeld1993). More generally, recent scholarship has noted the lack of conceptual space to theorize and counter relationships of inequality and dependence within the civil condition (Marey Reference Marey2021: 261–3; McKean Reference McKean2022).

Moreover, again in contrast to Kant’s earlier focus on natives’ capabilities to self-govern and work with discipline, his later critique of European cruelty is explicitly grounded on two European-centred reasons: the expansiveness of conflict that results from European rivalry over the colonies and the effects of these cruel acts on the character of Europeans. As I note elsewhere, every single one of the localities mentioned in TPP is the area of competition among European powers (Valdez Reference Valdez2017). The colonized, if they appear at all, do so as victims of unspeakable cruelties.

Thus the passivity that Huber critiques in other approaches to global justice (p. 162) is not undone by Kant’s framework, despite the many opportunities he had to do so. Kant praises the Chinese and the Japanese for their measures restricting Europeans’ entrance into their territory (TPP, 8: 359), but this makes all the more glaring the absence of any engagement with Haitian revolutionaries, who were fighting the French as Kant was writing TPP and the DR. Neither does Kant mention the many European accounts that engage with Indigenous Americans, including by Rousseau, whom Kant admired, who positively engages with the republicanism of the Tlaxcala people in current day Mexico (Chang and Williams Reference Chang and Lay Williams2025). In fact, the one mention of the actions/agency of the colonized is made in the much lengthier section on International Right of TPP, noting that American savages ‘eat their enemies’ rather than enlisting their manpower for further wars of expansion as the Europeans do (TPP, 8: 355).

This focus on cruelty toward colonial peoples remains in the Doctrine of Right, published two years later. This critique specifically targets the cruel and violent means of European conquest and while he denounces justifications of the ends of conquest as hypocritical, he does not substantially critique the differences in civilization that they refer to. Moreover, Kant even compares his critique of colonialism to his critique of revolutions, of which he famously condemned the means but agreed with the Republican ends (Valdez Reference Valdez2017: 831).

Finally, it is worth noting that the ‘union of all nations’ that Kant envisioned was not even homogeneously inclusive of European countries. In recent work analysing his anthropological writings on character alongside his cosmopolitanism I find that Kant thought that only the French, the British, and the Germans had characters that were properly civilized and cosmopolitan, in contrast with Spaniards and Turkish peoples, who did not travel or seek to establish community with others (Valdez Reference Valdez2022).

In sum, if Kant contributed to racist thinking through his anthropology and geography, his acknowledgment of global common possession and disjunctive community is not enough to derive cosmopolitan juridical equality of the kind male citizens enjoyed within a Kantian state. Because the juridical realm in cosmopolitanism is already unusual in not authorizing coercion, and domestic rights are also exclusionary of women and not clearly attuned to inequality, it would not be so far-fetched that inequality can be plausibly part of his cosmopolitanism as well. This means turning around Huber’s interpretative strategy. Rather than asserting juridical and justificatory equality in the cosmopolitan realm and deriving from it that Kant could not possibly have been a racist, we ought to take seriously the textual and contextual evidence that points to the persistence of Kant’s racist beliefs, and thus grapple with the fact that Kant may not have bequeathed us the universalist framework we want.

This does not detract from Huber’s accomplishments, in fact, a key contribution of the book is to put earth dwellership and possession (rather than property) at the centre of Kantianism. Huber identifies cosmopolitan right as a non-coercive right because it does not contain injunctions to enter common institutions or impose property-based state relations over non-state peoples (p. 90). Moreover, for Huber, possession is not merely a step toward acquired right and the state (p. 36). Instead, common possession remains as a ‘distinct … juridical relation among corporeal agents who coexist on the earth’s spherical surface’ (ibid.) even after states have been created. This is a ‘distinct kind of interdependence relation … conditioned by the concrete spatial circumstances’, which makes individuals ‘juridical equals who coexist on the spherical surface of the earth (p. 37). These conditions mean that these groups share a common world with a ‘plurality of perspectives in disjunctive interaction’, with ‘diverse and potentially incompatible sets of principles and forms of political organization’ (p. 94) that a ‘global standpoint’ helps us grapple with. To tackle this plurality of perspectives, Huber offers us a Kantian cosmopolitanism characterized by ‘reflexive self-constraint in the face of unfamiliar others’ given the ‘diversity of perspectives’ one encounters. This stance expresses ‘our openness towards the radically different and our willingness to accommodate it’ (p. 94).

While this move successfully overcomes the problem that rationalist and contextualist approaches have in grappling with difference, it makes global conflict about ‘a plurality of agents … that do not naturally or harmoniously converge on shared principles’ (p. 94). Thus, paradoxically, a focus on possession and earth-dwellership is highlighted only to be immediately sent to the background to focus on plural perspectives, openness toward difference, and clashing principles.

My worry is that this reduces cosmopolitanism to the encounter of diverse perspectives, construed as ‘radically different’, and ‘potentially incompatible’. Yet radical difference itself does not seem to be the problem of colonialism, or global injustice, which instead entails conflict about land, its use, and its articulation with human needs. Moreover, it entails conflict about labour and the instrumentalization of natives for the purpose of labouring the expropriated land for capital accumulation. My question here is how the global standpoint of perspective-taking, which emerges from common possession only to refocus on the relations of subjects to one another rather than ‘land or the resources on it’ (p. 38), helps us diagnose or critique this problem. To the extent that the proposed framework concerns just ‘perspective’ and ‘difference’, it does not, because it contains no critique of political economy and exploitation.Footnote ² Both Europeans and colonial natives took the land to be valuable, the former to expropriate it and commodify it and the latter to fulfil their needs through non-capitalist practices. Rather than a willingness to accommodate difference, Europeans lack a willingness to let go of expropriative relations with the non-western world, and to understand this orientation and actions, critiquing property and theorizing land are key. These are precisely the aspects of the natural law tradition that Huber explicitly eschews. While this might be exegetically correct, I wonder if it is politically productive for grounding a global critique.

For such a critique, we would need to move from Königsberg to Trier, where Karl Marx was born in 1818, and to Zamość, where Rosa Luxemburg followed suit in 1871 to further understand how property is not just different, but outright contrary to possession, in terms of the political economy it enables, and that property, once sanctioned domestically, is unlikely to stop at national borders (Luxemburg Reference Luxemburg, Hudis and Le Blanc2015 [1913]). While property entails ‘the right of the proprietors to exploit the earth’s surface, the bowels of the earth, the air and thereby the maintenance and development of life’, possession places societies as mere ‘beneficiaries’ of the land, who must ‘bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations’ (Marx Reference Marx and Fernbach1991 [1894] 908–9, 911). The latter account is aligned with Indigenous understandings of land as part of the reciprocal relations of political communities, communities forged not ‘on the land’ but ‘with the land’ as White Earth Ojibwe scholar Winona LaDuke puts it (Reference LaDuke and Churchill1983: iii). This incorporation of land into reciprocal communal interactions reveals that it is not necessary to choose between focusing on the interdependence between human beings and the interdependence between human beings and land, as Huber’s reading proposes. We must instead engage with both at once, to ensure that our politics are oriented toward enabling life.

In sum, I applaud the turn toward possession of the earth as a permanent feature of politics, but I urge that it be retained rather than abandoned for a focus on dematerialized human interdependence and cultural difference. Indeed, it is imperative to recognize land’s centrality for the provision of life and thus core to political relations of interdependence, and consequently in tension with the ownership of land for the purpose of gain. This is not a failing of Huber as much as of Kant, and it is our task to look elsewhere if we are to effectively orient our global relations in an era of climate disaster fuelled by capitalism.