The Journal of Political Philosophy: Volume 8, Number 2, 2000, pp.

227±243

What is Cosmopolitan?*
JEREMY WALDRON
Columbia Law School

I. INTRODUCTION

T HE syntax of my title sounds weird. Surely the title should be `What is

Cosmopolitanism?' Or if I wanted to stick with the adjective, I should have
chosen a title like `What is it for a Person, or an Institution, or a Set of Ideas to be
Cosmopolitan?' or maybe, `What is Cosmopolitan about Liberalism?' These last
versions get pretty close to the topics I want to address. But I want to begin by
asking: `What sort of adjective is ``cosmopolitan''? What is its use, or what
should its use be, in political theory? What sort of things is it predicated of?'
We talk, in the ®rst instance, of cosmopolitan attitudes and cosmopolitan
lifestyles, where the adjective is supposed to indicate a way of being in the world,
a way of constructing an identity for oneself that is different from, and arguably
opposed to, the idea of belonging to or devotion to or immersion in a particular
culture. In his Dictionary of Political Thought, the English conservative Roger
Scruton gave the following de®nition of `cosmopolitanism':
The belief in, and pursuit of, a style of life which . . . [shows] acquaintance with, and
an ability to incorporate, the manners, habits, languages, and social customs of cities
throughout the world . . . In this sense, the cosmopolitan is often seen as a kind of
parasite, who depends upon the quotidian lives of others to create the various local
¯avors and identities in which he dabbles.1

Personally, I feel the sting in the tail of this de®nition quite acutelyÐthe
cosmopolitan as parasiteÐbecause the charge of dabbling rootlessly in a plurality
of cultures, each of which has taken generations or millennia to develop as a
single living organism, seems to apply exactly to the idealized self-description I
used in an article published a few years ago in The Michigan Journal of Law
Reform, an article entitled `Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan
Alternative.'2 There I characterized the cosmopolitan lifestyle, or rather the

*An earlier version of this article was presented as a Moffett Lecture at Princeton University in
March 1996. I am grateful to Amy Gutmann, George Kateb and Maurizio Viroli for their comments
on that occasion, and to Chaim Gans, Bonnie Honig, Will Kymlicka, Glyn Morgan and Carol Sanger
for many conversations on these issues.
1
Roger Scruton, A Dictionary of Political Thought (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 100.
2
Jeremy Waldron, `Minority cultures and the cosmopolitan alternative', University of Michigan
Journal of Law Reform, 25 (1992), 751±92; reprinted in The Rights of Minority Cultures, ed. Will
Kymlicka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 93±119.

#Blackwell Publishers, 2000, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street,
Malden, MA 02148, USA.
228 JEREMY WALDRON

cosmopolitan approach to lifestyle, in terms of a person who lives in California,

but came there from Oxford via Edinburgh, and came in turn to Oxford from the
other side of the world, the southwestern corner of the Paci®c Ocean, whither his
English and Irish ancestors emigrated in the mid-nineteenth century. I spoke of
someone who did not associate his identity with any secure sense of place,
someone who did not take his cultural identity to be de®ned by any bounded
subset of the cultural resources available in the world. He did not take his
identity as anything de®nitive, as anything homogenous that might be muddied
or compromised when he studied Greek, ate Chinese, wore clothes made in
Korea, worshipped with the Book of Common Prayer, listened to arias by Verdi
sung by a Maori diva on Japanese equipment, gave lectures in Buenos Aires,
followed Israeli politics, or practised Buddhist meditation techniques. I spoke of
this person as a creature of modernity, conscious, even proud, of living in a
mixed-up world and having a mixed-up self.3 And I said that as long as a person
can live like that, it is evident that people do not need what the proponents of
cultural identity politics claim they do need, claim in fact that they are entitled to
as a matter of right, namely, immersion in the secure framework of a single
culture to which, in some deep sense, they belong.4
The characterization I gave in `Minority Cultures' has elicited a number of
responses. I am exercised particularly by a question that Will Kymlicka posed in
his recent book Multicultural Citizenship, when he asked in effect, `What exactly
is cosmopolitan about this style of life that Waldron describes?' It is not, said
Kymlicka, a genuine mixing of cultures; it is simply a case of someone `enjoying
the opportunities provided by the diverse societal culture which characterizes the
Anglophone society of the United States.'5 One of the things I want to do in this
paper is answer that question. And I want also to correct what I think now is the
rather unfortunate impression I gave in `Minority Cultures' that there can be
nothing cosmopolitan about the life or lifestyle of someone who stays where he
is, immersed in the traditions, language and practices of a particular culture.
That is one topic. I would also like to discuss the use of the term
`cosmopolitan' in political philosophy and in the philosophy of law. There we
®nd that the adjective is used in various ways, some of them differing quite
signi®cantly in their logic from the use we have just been discussing. On the one
hand, there is what we might call the cosmopolitan political idealÐthat is, the
substantive utopian ideal of a polis or polity constructed on a world scale, rather
than on the basis of regional, territorially limited states. This is the idea which
Alfred, Lord Tennyson evoked in 1842 in the following delirious lines from
Locksley Hall:6

3
Ibid., p. 754 (p. 95 of the Kymlicka collection).
4
See, e.g., Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
5
Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 85.
6
Poems of Tennyson, ed. J. H. Buckley (Boston: Houghton, Mif¯in, 1958), p. 108.
 WHAT IS COSMOPOLITAN? 229

I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
. . . Heard the heavens ®ll with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;
. . . Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-¯ags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

That is cosmopolitanism as a particular utopian vision. On the other hand, the

term cosmopolitan is used sometimes in legal and political philosophy not so
much to pick out a particular ideal as to denote an area or department of juridical
concern.
Here I have in mind the use of the term in the political writings of Immanuel
Kant. Kant did not use `cosmopolitan' to designate any particular view about
how the world should be organized. This is not to deny that he held such a view.
Like Lord Tennyson, Kant thought that `the distress produced by the constant
wars in which states try to subjugate or engulf each other must ®nally lead them,
even against their will, to enter into a cosmopolitan constitution.'7 He was of
course well aware that this view was regarded as a non-starterÐ `ridiculed by
great statesmen, and even more by heads of state, as pedantic, childish and
academic ideas'8Ðwhich is perhaps why he discussed it, among other places, in
an essay with the laborious title, `On the Common Saying: ``This May be True in
Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice.'' ' But apart from that substantive ideal
of world government or a permanent and paci®c League of Nations, Kant used
the term `cosmopolitan' as a label for a topic or a department of law and legal
philosophy. He used the phrase `cosmopolitan right' rather in the way we use the
phrase `international law,' not so much as a substantive thesis about what the law
ought to be, but as a way of designating an area of human life and interaction
with which law, right and justice ought to be concerned.9 His own belief in some
sort of grand federation of states is thus a thesis in cosmopolitan right (as his
republicanism is a thesis in constitutional jurisprudence), rather than being, so to
speak, the essence of the cosmopolitan.
7
Immanuel Kant, `On the common saying: this may be true in theory, but it does not apply in
practice', Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, enlarged edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 61±92, at p. 90 (cited hereinafter as Kant, `Theory and practice'). However, no sooner
did Kant announce this aspiration for world government than he backed away from it, saying
apprehensively: `Or if such a state . . . is in turn even more dangerous to freedom, for it may lead to the
most fearful despotism (as has indeed occurred more than once with states which have grown too
large), distress must force men to form a state which is not a cosmopolitan commonwealth under a
single ruler, but a lawful federation under a commonly accepted international right' (idem).
8
Ibid., p. 92.
9
Thus the term `right' in `cosmopolitan right' is a translation of `Recht.' It is not necessarily an
indication that there are cosmopolitan rights, e.g., alongside civil rights, cultural rights, or socio-
economic rights. Whether cosmopolitan right yields a distinctive theory of rights (whether individual
rights or group rights) must be regarded as an open question. (I am grateful to George Fletcher for
some conversations on this point.)
230 JEREMY WALDRON

We have to be careful here. I do not want to pretend that using a term like
`cosmopolitan' as a name for a department of legal inquiry is unrelated to its use
as the name of a substantive thesis. The terms we use for departments of legal
study are never entirely neutral from a substantive point of view. If I say that I am
going to talk about the law of torts, I imply not merely that I am going to talk
about the way society handles or ought to handle mishaps, accidents, injury and
carelessness; I also imply that I am going to talk about a particular kind of
approach to mishaps, accidents, injury and carelessnessÐnamely, an approach
that proceeds in terms of causation, fault, individual liability, and compensation
expressed as damages. In 1973, when New Zealand abolished individual liability
for personal injury and replaced it with a state-administered Accident
Compensation Scheme, it did not simply adopt a different approach to tort
law; it abandoned tort law in this area, and approached accidents and injury on a
different basis altogether.10 Similarly, I think Kant's phrase `cosmopolitan right'
does not merely pick out a form, a topic or a level of legal analysis; it does also
connote a kind of substantive view or attitude about the basis on which he thinks
we ought to proceed when we are considering law and rights at a global level.
One would not talk about cosmopolitan right if one believed the peoples of the
world were entitled to prey upon one another in a manner largely unregulated by
law; and on the other hand, one also would not talk about cosmopolitan right if
one believed that, for the sake of cultural purity or cultural integrity, the peoples
of the world should have as little as possible to do with one another.
Cosmopolitan right, for Kant, is the department of jurisprudence concerned
with people and peoples' sharing the world with others, given the circumstance
that this sharing is more or less inevitable, and likely to go drastically wrong, if
not governed by juridical principles.
Thus Kant's use of `cosmopolitan' in this context is more subtle and
challenging than the one that was at issue in my article on `Minority Cultures.'
It is challenging not least because it draws our attention to aspects of human
relations, aspects of the human condition, that legal, political and constitutional
theorists have to come to terms with, or ought to come to terms with, whether
they like it or not, whether they are cultural cosmopolitans or not, and whether
or not their political ideologies commit them to world government as an
aspiration.
So there we have two topics to discuss: cosmopolitanism in culture, and the
Kantian idea of cosmopolitan right. The two are connected of course. They are
connected by way of our thinking about the relation between culture and
identityÐwhere `identity' has something to do with the way we sometimes think
we are entitled to present ourselves to others, the sort of non-negotiable side of
our cultural preferences. At the end of this paper, I want to draw some
implications from the Kantian discussion for the politics of cultural identity. I

10
See Ernest J. Weinrib, 'Understanding tort law', Valparaiso Law Review, 23 (1989), 485±521.
 WHAT IS COSMOPOLITAN? 231

want to suggest that cosmopolitan right, in Kant's sense, makes demands on the
way we behave and comport ourselves in domestic politics. In particular, I shall
argue, it calls into question the virtue of what we call `identity-politics'Ðwhich I
understand as a way of presenting oneself and one's cultural preferences non-
negotiably to others in the present circumstances of the world.

II. COSMOPOLITAN CULTURE

Let us begin with the cosmopolitan in culture. In `Minority Cultures,' I made the
misleading suggestion that a cosmopolitan lifestyle differs necessarily in its
content and format from the lifestyle of one who is immersed in the practices of a
particular culture. I implied that someone immersed in the life of a particular
culture swallows his culture whole, so to speak, so that his identity is as secure as
the identity of the culture, uncontaminated by the intrusion of alien practices or
ideas; whereas someone who lives the cosmopolitan experience wears a coat of
many colors, `a bit of this and a bit of that,'11 an identity composed of many
fragments, or perhaps more accurately just many fragments of culture coexisting
in the life of a single person, with the question of identity sidelined or rejected as
distracting, redundant or irrelevant.
I think now that this contrast is mistaken. It is certainly wrong to imply that
immersion in the particular culture of the society in which one has been brought
up is incompatible with what Kant would call a cosmopolitan attitude towards
sharing the world with others. It is wrong for a number of reasons.
FirstÐand this is the truth in Kymlicka's critique of the original picture I
paintedÐmany cultures in the world have already something of a cosmopolitan
aspect. A person who grows up in Manhattan, for example, cannot but be aware
of a diversity of cultures, a diversity of human practices and experiences, indeed a
diversity of languages clamoring for his attention. They are there on the streets, in
Greenwich Village or on the Upper West Side. It is another matter whether we
call this a single cultureÐ`New York culture'Ða culture of diversity, or whether
we say (as I think) that it is just many fragments that happen to be available at a
given place and time and that that does not amount to the existence of a single
culture in any socially or philosophically interesting sense of `singularity.'
11
The phrase is taken from Salman Rushdie's defense of The Satanic Verses in a collection of his
essays entitled Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981±1991 (London: Granta Books,
1991), p. 394: `Those who oppose the novel most vociferously today are of the opinion that
intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own. I am of the opposite
opinion. The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that
comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs.
It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this
and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives
the world, and I have tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-
conjoining. It is a love-song to our mongrel selves'. I took this passage as a sort of motto at the
beginning of `Minority cultures and the cosmopolitan alternative', pp. 751±2 (p. 93 of the Kymlicka
collection).
232 JEREMY WALDRON

However we describe it, the fact is that someone who makes a life in this milieu is
already making a life in the world, whether he has particular affection for one of
the available cultures or not. Even if he spends his whole life in Manhattan, he is
by virtue of his location necessarily open to new practices and new experiences in
a cosmopolitan sort of way.
A second point follows from this, and I think it is more important.12 Cities like
New York, Paris, London and Bombay are the urban centers of world culture;
they are great centers of trade, tourism and migration, where peoples and their
traditions mingle and interact. They pay tribute to a central fact about human
nature which the cosmopolitan, above all, ought to be in the business of
emphasizing and extolling. Humans are curious and adventurous animals: they
travel, they migrate, they trade, they ®ght, and they plunder. And they report
back what they have found out about the ways in which others live (and trade
and ®ght etc.). They bring back tales of exotic customs as well as the exotic goods
they have purchased or stolen. One result of this is that custom, practice,
language, and social and military organization seldom stay local. The pure
culture, uncontaminated in its singularity, is for this reason an anomaly; it is an
exception usually explained by historical contingency and extraordinary
geographical isolation.13 For human cultures, it is the rule, not the exception,
that ideas and ways of doing things are propagated and transmitted, noticed and
adapted. No doubtÐfrom a purist's point of viewÐthey are violated and
distorted in the process; but my point is that there is nothing normative about the
purist's point of view.
Thus we should certainly expect that neighboring communitiesÐcommunities
within regular trading or shooting distance from one anotherÐwill have many
similarities in their respective cultures. One sometimes hears it said that what is
important about each culture is its distinctiveness, and that respecting another
culture is a matter of cherishing diversity, celebrating difference, focusing
attention on those aspects that clearly distinguish it from one's own. That may be
a useful educational strategy in, say, elementary schools. When children in the
United States have Guatemala Day at school, we do not want them all to make a
special ceremony of wearing Levi jeans and drinking Coca-Cola, even if that is
what Guatemalans in fact like to wear and drink. In that context, we have reason
to highlight the differences between culture in Guatemala and Norteamericano
culture. But the general view that it is distinctiveness that counts may be seriously
mistaken if it is intended as a description of the consciousness of those who live in

12
Much of what follows is taken from my discussion of multiculturalism in Jeremy Waldron,
`Multiculturalism and melange', Public Education in a Multicultural Society: Policy, Theory, Critique,
ed. Robert K. Fullinwider (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 90±118, at pp. 99±
100.
13
The case of the New Zealand Maori is an excellent example of this, and much damage has been
done to clear thinking about culture by regarding its utter isolation in the thousand years preceding
European settlement as a paradigm of cultural singularity rather than as a geographical and historical
accident.
 WHAT IS COSMOPOLITAN? 233

the communities in question or as a prescription about what respect for another

culture ought essentially to involve.
Consider the example I just mentioned, Guatemala; and compare it to a
culture on the other side of the world, say, the culture of Eire (or Ireland). To the
extent that a Guatemalan or an Irish person actually thinks self-consciously
about her culture (a problematic notion to which I want to return in a page or
two), is it the distinctiveness of the culture that will be important to herÐthat is,
the respects in which her culture differs from others, as opposed to the respects in
which it is similar? I doubt that we can assume this. It seems perfectly possible,
for example, that an inhabitant of Guatemala would regard the teachings and
sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church as among the most important aspects
of her culture. If so, it may be both implicit in and essential to that thought that
her Church be regarded as catholic with a small `c',14 in the sense of universalÐ
that is, catholic in precisely the sense of being something shared by many other
communities. That feature of her lifeÐthat as a Guatemalan she shares a faith
and a church with the Irish, and also with Italians, Poles, Brazilians, Japanese
Catholics and FilipinasÐmay be much more important to her identity than
anything which (say) a Tourist Board or an elementary school teacher would use
to highlight the cultural distinctiveness of Guatemala. Thus, participation in this
particular culture already has a cosmopolitan dimension. The humble, local and
earthy practice of worshiping God and taking the sacraments may be
unintelligible except as an implicit faith in and attachment to an institution
because it exists on a world scale and because it claims potentially to unite all
mankind.
It follows, I think, that the `essence' of a culture (if indeed that idea makes
sense) need not consist in its distinctiveness. One culture does not need to be
clearly and importantly different from another, either in its appearance to an
outsider or in the consciousness of its practitioners, in order to be the culture that
it is. A cultural taxonomist may be interested in qualitative differentiation, and
we as multiculturalists may want there to be lots of colorful differences in
costume, language and ritual so that we can display our commitment to
multiculturalism to even the most super®cial glance. But all that may be beside
the point so far as the culture itself is concerned. A culture just is what it is, and
its practices and rituals are constitutive of it in virtue of their place in a shared
way of life, not in virtue of their perceived peculiarity.
The point can be taken a step further. In general, we should not assume that
thoughts about one's cultureÐwhether they are thoughts about its distinctiveness
or anything elseÐloom very large in one's own involvement in the cultural life of
one's community. What one does in a community is simply speak or marry or

14
I am using the second meaning of `catholic' given in Webster's Dictionary: `2 a: of, relating to, or
forming the church universal b: of, relating to, or forming the ancient undivided Christian church or a
church claiming historical continuity from it'; Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary
(Spring®eld, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1991), p. 216.
234 JEREMY WALDRON

dance or worship. One participates in a form of life. Advertising or announcing

that this is what one is doing is participation in another form of lifeÐa different
form of lifeÐa form of life only problematically related to the ®rst. When one
speaks or marries or dances or worships, one does not say anything about the
distinctive features of, say, the Irish heritage, or the peculiarities of Guatemalan
wedding festivities. One keeps faith with the mores of one's community by just
following them, not by announcing self-consciously that it is the mores of one's
community that one is following.
This point has a broader importance, beyond the scope of cultural
participation. It calls in question some of the self-conscious posturing often
associated with nationhood. In a famous essay on `Nationalism,' Isaiah Berlin
suggested that nationalism
entails the notion that one of the most compelling reasons, perhaps the most
compelling, for holding a particular belief, pursuing a particular policy, serving a
particular end, living a particular life, is that these ends, beliefs, policies, lives are
ours. This is tantamount to saying that these rules or doctrines or principles should
be followed not because they lead to virtue or happiness or justice or liberty . . . or
are good and right in themselves . . . rather they are to be followed because these
values are those of my groupÐfor the nationalist, of my nation . . .15

I am sure Berlin was right to see this as an aspect of explicit nationalist

consciousness. (I do not think this was his own view, although discerning that is
often quite dif®cult.) It seems to me that this self-consciousness is characteristic,
too, of a great deal of modern cultural identity politics. People say: `I dress this
way or I speak this language or I follow these marriage customs because they are
the ways of my people.' But if you pause and think about it, this is a very peculiar
attitude to takeÐto insert the cultural provenance of a norm or value into what
H.L.A. Hart would call its `internal aspect.'16 It seems very odd to regard the fact
that something is `our' normÐthat is, that this is what we Irishmen or we Maori
or we Americans doÐas part of the reason, if not the central reason, for having
the norm, and for sustaining and following it. For consider: social norms and
practices do not exist in order to make up a colorful distinctive culture for us to
display and immerse ourselves in. They exist in a context of reasons and
reasoning. There is always a story to be told, a story internal to the normÐpart,
as I said, of its internal aspectÐas to why doing things this way is better or
appropriate or obligatory or required. If, for example, I ask an elder of the group
to which I belong why we have and follow a norm of monogamy, he may tell me
a story about the need for reciprocity and equality between lovers and explain
why this is dif®cult or impossible in polygamous relationships, or he may tell me
a story about the sun and the moon and about there being only one of each.
Either way, that is the sort of thing that counts, in the group, as a reason for
15
Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1981), pp. 342±3.
16
See H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 88 ff.
 WHAT IS COSMOPOLITAN? 235

having and following the monogamy custom. True, I may not accept the
reasoning that the group associates with the norm; or I may ®nd the sun-and-
moon story bewildering or unsatisfying. But if I do, that is all there is to say about
the matter: I no longer understand or respect the norm on the basis on which it
claims my respect and understanding. I certainly do not show any respect for itÐ
rather I show a vain and self-preoccupied contempt for the norm itselfÐby
gutting it of its reasons, and replacing them as reasons with my own need to keep
faith with my own cultural roots. That is not the point of the monogamy
requirement, and to think of it as the point, or part of the point, or even as one
reason among others, may be to give a quite misleading impression of how
important the norm is supposed to be in this culture and what that importance is
based upon.
In other words: if there are norms and practices that constitute `our' way of life
and that matter to us, then the thing to do is embrace them wholeheartedly, not
in a way that leaves it open for us to comment to others in the sort of stage
whisper that characterizes modern identity-politics: `I am following the practices
of my community,' or `What I am doing here is revisiting my roots.' It is not and
has not been the nature of our moral practices to go around saying that sort of
thing about them (`I am telling my wife the truth because that is what we do
around here'); and I doubt that it is the practice of very many other groups either.
On the contrary, to congratulate oneself on following `the norms of my
community' is already to take a point of view somewhat external to those norms,
rather than to subscribe wholeheartedly to the substantive commitments that
they embody.17
The same point can be taken one step further. If you accept what I have said so
far, then it is no longer evident that the abstract idea of moral universalism is the
sort of gigantic affront to cultural particularity that practitioners of identity
politics take it to be. Humans and human groups take their norms seriously, and
to take them seriously is to think of them as embedded in a structure of reasons
and reasoning. Whatever we think of them from the outside, from the inside they
are not like the rules of games or the norms of fancy dressÐthat is, things one can
cast off as soon as it seems no longer important to display oneself as a member of
a particular group. They make deep claims, powerful claims about what is
important and what sort of things are at stake in the areas of life that they
govern. Those claims are usually held to be true (by those who make them),
which means that they claim to offer to give a better account of what really
matters than the reasoning associated with the different norms and practices of
the society next door or across the sea. Now, that reasoning may bewilder and
disconcert us; it is no part of my argument that it should be familiar or congenial
or just like our reasoning over here. But it is like ours at least in this: that it
17
See also Jeremy Waldron, `Particular values and critical morality', California Law Review, 77
(1989), 561±89, at p. 589; reprinted in Jeremy Waldron, Liberal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 168±202, at p. 202.
236 JEREMY WALDRON

represents or claims to represent some repository of human wisdom as to the best

way of doing things. As such it necessarily makes its reasoning availableÐ
though, as I have said now several times, not always easily or comfortably
availableÐto understanding and assessment on the basis of what else there is in
the world in the way of human wisdom and experience on questions such as
those that the norm purports to address. And that, I think, is what is
cosmopolitanÐor what has the potential to be universal and cosmopolitanÐ
about the character of genuine as opposed to fake or patronizing participation in
the life and practice of one's particular community.

III. COSMOPOLITAN RIGHT

The second thing I said I wanted to discus in this paper was Immanuel Kant's use
of the term `cosmopolitan right,' understood in the ®rst instance as the
designation of a topic of inquiry in the philosophy of law, an area of legal
concern whichÐas much as crime and punishment, or contract, or marriageÐa
decent jurisprudence ought to be in the business of saying something about.
How are we to de®ne this topic or understand this area of concern? We may
proceed by analogy with other departments of law. Criminal law responds to the
potential for violence and depredation in human affairs. Its presuppositionsÐor,
to adapt a phrase from John Rawls, the `circumstances' of criminal law18Ðare
our mutual vulnerability, our limited strength of will, and the hundred and one
reasons there may be for one individual to attack, or to fear attack from,
another.19 Or to take another example: family law responds to the need for
structure and constraint in the intense human experience of sex, love,
procreation, and the sharing of homes, lives, responsibilities and careers. Its
presupposition again is the potential for things to go badly wrong as well as
ecstatically well in these regards, and the exquisite vulnerability of children (not
to mention adults!) when they do go badly wrong.20 These are familiar
explications of the point of familiar bodies of law. What are the corresponding
presuppositions or circumstances of cosmopolitan right?
The starting point of Immanuel Kant's analysis of circumstances of
cosmopolitan right is an entertaining mixture of the abstract, the bizarre and
the almost amateurishly concrete. Nature, Kant says, has given us as a world a
sphere to live on, not an in®nite plain so that those whose actions, beliefs,
customs and attitudes offend each other could disperse over the horizon beyond
each others' apprehensions. We live on the surface of a sphere so that if I go far
enough away from you in one direction, I will sooner or later ®nd myself
18
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 126±30 (on `the
circumstances of justice'). See also Jeremy Waldron, `The circumstances of integrity', Legal Theory, 3
(1997), 1±22, at pp. 2±5.
19
See also Hart, Concept of Law, pp. 193±200 (`the minimum content of natural law').
20
See also Jeremy Waldron, `When justice replaces affection: the need for rights,' Harvard Journal
of Law and Public Policy, 11 (1988), 625±47; reprinted in Waldron, Liberal Rights, pp. 370±91.
 WHAT IS COSMOPOLITAN? 237

approaching you from the other direction. The world of course is very large, and
different regions are separated from one another by uninhabitable stretches of
desert or ocean. But even then, Kant says, `the ship or the camel (the ship of the
desert) make it possible for [men] to approach their fellows over these ownerless
tracts, and to utilize as a means of social intercourse that right to the earth's
surface which the human race shares in common.'21 Indeed, and rather curiously,
Kant thinks of the existence of camels, along with marine mammals and
driftwood, as evidence of nature's purpose that we should spread out over the
whole globe, not just the forested regions.

[E]vidence of design in nature emerges even more clearly [i.e. even more clearly than
in the case of the camel] when we realize that the shores of the Arctic Ocean are
inhabited not only by fur-bearing animals, but also by seals, walruses and whales,
whose ¯esh provides food and whose fat provides warmth for the native inhabitants.
Nature's care arouses most admiration, however, by carrying driftwood to these
treeless regions, without anyone knowing exactly where it comes from. For if they
did not have this material, the natives would not be able to construct either boats, or
weapons, or dwellings in which to live.22

I do not know whether Kant took driftwood as a prototype for `the crooked
timber of humanity,'23 but at any rate the spherical shape of the earth, together
with seals, camels and driftwood, are for Kant what David Hume would call the
`outward circumstances' of cosmopolitan right.24
There are also circumstances of `natural temper,'25 that is, circumstances
relating to human motivation and attitude. Humans seem disposed to wander,
travel, explore, and settle new regions. Or, if this is not an innate disposition, it is
at the very least a disposition to respond to certain other vicissitudes of lifeÐsuch
as famine, climate change, overpopulation or attack by other groupsÐby
wandering, traveling, exploring and settling. At the same time, there are familiar
temptations accompanying this movement, exploration and settlement: the
temptation to plunder and conquer, and exploit, enslave, or even exterminate
others when one ®nds that the lands to which one travels are already inhabited.
And there is ®nally the exasperating fact of what Kant called man's `unsocial
sociability,'26 which in the present context combines man's cosmopolitan
curiosity about how others live, and about practices and traditions other than
his own, with an extraordinary human reluctance to take others' practices
21
Immanuel Kant, `Perpetual peace: a philosophical sketch,' Kant's Political Writings, pp. 93±130,
at p. 106.
22
Ibid., p. 110.
23
Cf. Immanuel Kant, `Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose,' Kant: Political
Writings, at p. 46: `Nothing straight can be made from such warped wood as that which man is made
of.' Compare the title of Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapter in the History of
Ideas (New York: Knopf, 1990).
24
Cf. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1888), Bk. III, Part II, sect. ii, pp. 486 ff.
25
Idem.
26
Kant, `Idea for a universal history', p. 44.
238 JEREMY WALDRON

seriously, as competitors or alternatives to his own views about what he

actually owes to others in the way of forbearance and respect. Kant thinks of
man, even in the blood-soaked context of migration, conquest and settlement,
as sociable in a certain (no doubt limited) willingness to restrain his own
inclinations for the sake of others. Indeed, man is even potentially moral, in this
sphere. But he is at the same time unsociable in the sense (and this is Kant's
phrase) `of wanting to direct everything in accordance with his own ideas,'27
not others' ideas, of what he owes to others in the way of forbearance and
respect. It is not that his own sociability is just a cover for self-interest and that
is why he is reluctant to accept others' accounts of what sociability requires. It
is rather that each of usÐeach individual or each societyÐtakes his own moral
thinking very seriously, and ®nds some terrible affront, some sort of obstacle of
self-righteousness, in taking seriously the different moral thinking of others,
especially when it leads to different conclusions. This is the key to Kant's
political philosophy of courseÐthe famous paragraph 44 of the Rechtslehre28Ð
but it is also, I believe, a crucial presupposition, a crucial part of the
problematic, of cosmopolitan right. So, to summarize: we share the earth with
those who may have ways of doing things that are different from our own,
perhaps ways of doing things that we can barely understand, and who may
make demands on us, for cooperation or forbearance, that are quite different
from the demands with which we are prepared to comply. And we have an
inclination to move across and around the surface of a bounded sphere. As a
result there is no telling who in particular, or what groups, one is likely to
discover as one's neighbors. There is no telling on what terms one will have to
cooperate, or to what practices one will have to adapt.
As Kant himself developed it, towards the end of the Doctrine of Right,
cosmopolitan right was understood primarily in terms of a set of constraints
governing what a people was entitled to do in the course of this process as they
came alongside strangers, or what they were entitled to do as strangers moved
closer to them.29 (Much of this is a vehicle for Kant's indignation at some of the
bloodthirsty abuses associated with contemporary imperialism and the European
colonization of Africa and America.)30
Each person, he said, and each group has the right to approach others with a
view to engaging in commerce. Though this right is often terribly abused, still
`such abuse cannot annul the right of citizens of the world to try to establish
community with all [others] and, to this end, to visit all regions of the earth.'31
This is not, Kant insists, the same as a right of settlement in lands which are
already inhabited; for that a genuine agreement is required, an agreement that
27
Idem.
28
See Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals in Kant: Political Writings, p. 137. See note 36
below.
29
Ibid., pp. 172±5.
30
See, e.g., ibid., p. 173.
31
Ibid., p. 172.
 WHAT IS COSMOPOLITAN? 239

does not allow one or other party unscrupulously to take advantage of the other
so far as the acquisition of land is concerned.32
It is less clear what Kant thinks should happen once violations of this principle
have become established, that is, once settlement and intermingling have taken
place, and become ®xed and more or less permanent, perhaps without the
agreement of the original inhabitants. All he says in the Doctrine of Right is that the
stain of injustice cannot be erased from such settlement;33 but that does not help us
very much in ®guring out what now is to be done about the resulting situation.
My hunch, howeverÐand this is where my argument becomes constructive,
not just interpretiveÐis that Kant held the view of commonsense here. If a new
settlementÐoriginally wrong and unlawful under principles of cosmopolitan
rightÐbecomes established over several generations, then the descendants of the
original settlers are likely to have nowhere to return to. They and the descendants
of those whom their ancestors invaded and expropriated now have nothing to do
but come to terms with one anotherÐas people who, whatever the history, now
happen to be `unavoidably side by side'Ðand establish a fair basis for sharing the
lands and resources that surround them.34 Certainly, this is what is suggested by
the general tenor of Kant's observation that people and peoples move out across
a surface that is not in®nite. Apart from the illegitimate possibilities we have just
been considering, there are a hundred and one legitimate ways in which people
might ®nd themselves living side by side with others of different cultures. In
general, in a mobile, migratory world, there is no telling who we will end up
living alongside of, no telling who our neighbors may turn out to be. This means
that cosmopolitan right is bound to have some interesting implications for the
social and political organization of particular territorial states, quite apart from
the more glamorous business of international law, federations of states or
cosmopolitan commonwealths.

IV. COSMOPOLITAN RIGHT AND CIVIC RESPONSIBILITY

In the last part of this paper, I shall explore some of these implications. I shall
attempt to map some of what Kant said about cosmopolitan right onto other
parts of his work that address more familiar topics in legal and political
philosophy, namely, the basis on which we are required to live together with our
fellow citizens in an ordinary middle-sized republic.
The heart of Kant's political philosophy isÐas I said earlier35Ðparagraph 44
of the Rechtslehre. There he maintains that, apart from positive law, the natural
situation of human beings is con¯ict. It is not necessarily con¯ict for Hobbesian
32
Ibid., p. 173. `[A]nd even then,' Kant adds, `there must be no attempt to exploit the ignorance of
the natives in persuading them to give up their territories' (idem).
33
Idem.
34
Cf. Jeremy Waldron, `Superseding historic injustice', Ethics 103 (1992), 4±28.
35
See text accompanying note 28 above.
240 JEREMY WALDRON

reasons, that is, a struggle of the self-interest or the survival interest of each
against the self-interest or survival interest of all others. For Kant, the idea of
con¯ict in the state of nature is the idea of a war raised under competing and
hostile banners of justice and right. He says that people `can never be secure
against acts of violence from one another, since each will have his own right to do
what seems right and good to him, independently of the opinion of others.'36
Now the fact that you and I have different views about rights and justice is not a
matter of concern if our interests do not converge on the same space for action, or
the same objects or land or resources. But if we are, in Kant's words,
`unavoidably side by side' with one another (whatever the historical reasons
for our current proximity), then we have no choice but to attempt to come to
terms with one another in some sort of common framework of law. Without that
(I mean, without that coming to terms), no determinate principles of freedom and
no relations of property are going to be possibleÐwhich means of course that
there will be no shared basis, no mutually recognized basis, and thus no
commonly assured basis, on which people around here can act and live their lives
and make use of the material resources that are useful to and necessary for their
subsistence.37
In both liberalÐparticularly RawlsianÐand also in recent communitarian and
Walzerian political philosophy, there has been a tendency to insist that a well-
ordered society should be thought of as something constructed among those who
share certain fundamental understandings which are constitutive of justice.38 The
idea seems to be that whatever else citizens disagree about, either they share
understandings that are constitutive of justice in the abstract, or they share
understandings that are constitutive of what justice in various forms is for them.
By contrast, the great virtue of Kant's work, it seems to me, and the reason why
all this bears the sort of weight I am trying to put on it, is that he begins from the
opposite assumption. He assumes that we are always likely to ®nd ourselves

36
Immanuel Kant, from section 44 of the Rechtslehre, i.e. the ®rst part of The Metaphysics of
Morals, in Kant: Political Writings, p. 137. The whole passage is worth quoting: `Experience teaches
us the maxim that human beings act in a violent and malevolent manner, and that they tend to ®ght
among themselves until an external coercive legislation supervenes. But it is not experience or any
kind of factual knowledge which makes public legal coercion necessary. On the contrary, even if we
imagine men to be as benevolent and law-abiding as we please, the a priori rational idea of a non-
lawful state will still tell us that before a public and legal state is established, individual men, peoples,
and states can never be secure against acts of violence from one another, since each will have his own
right to do what seems right and good to him, independently of the opinion of others. Thus the ®rst
decision the individual is obliged to make, if he does not wish to renounce all concepts of right, will be
to adopt the principle that one must abandon the state of nature in which everyone follows his own
desires, and unite with everyone else (with whom he cannot avoid having intercourse) in order to
submit to external, public and lawful coercion. He must accordingly enter into a state wherein that
which is to be recognized as belonging to each person is allotted to him by law and guaranteed to him
by an external power (which is not his own, but external to him). In other words, he should at all costs
enter into a state of civil society.'
37
I have developed this argument at length in Jeremy Waldron, `Kant's legal positivism', Harvard
Law Review, 109 (1996), 1535±66.
38
See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 35; see
also Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), pp. 8±10 and 312 ff.
 WHAT IS COSMOPOLITAN? 241

alongside others who disagree with us about justice; and he argues that if there is
to be community or a common law, a common framework for living, it has to be
created in the form of positive law, constructed by good-hearted citizens out of
an array of individual and cultural understandings that are initially disparate and
opposed.
The need for a common body of positive law is, as I said, relative to this
geographical relation of being unavoidably side by side with others. Cultural
relativists and participants in identity politics positÐat least as an idealÐthat
people begin in proximity to those with whom they share a common morality: we
start off in tidily homogenous communities and these are only disrupted by
imperialism, attempted genocide, etc. The point of Kant's cosmopolitan right,
however, is that this geographical relationÐbeing unavoidably side by side with
othersÐis no guarantee whatever that common moral views and shared
understandings can be taken for granted, not even ideally, let alone as initially
given. We cannot pick and choose the people with whom we are required to
come to terms, in Kant's theory. Of those who surround us, competing for the use
and control of the same action-space and the same resources, we cannot say, `We
will enter into civil society with A and B, who share our understandings, but not
with C because C is not a person who shares our traditions.' The discipline of
politics is that there is no alternative to our coming to terms with C. Humans live
side by side, clustered together in circumstances where they simply have to deal
with one another, whatever the initial disparity between their views of justice,
morality and right.
All this is true of individuals holding different views. And it is true, I think, in
spades of whole peoplesÐand of disparate culturesÐwho ®nd themselves
unavoidably side by side. If humans have fanned out over the face of the earth (as
they have), then a way has to be found, when they cluster together in particular
fertile or hospitable territories, to bring into relation with one another the views
of each group and individual concerning justice and right with the views of all of
the other groups and individuals in that locality. Or to put the matter a little
more carefully, since groups may not helpfully label their views as `views about
justice and rights': if we live alongside another group, a way has to be found to
bring our views about justice and right into relation with whatever views of the
other groupÐtraditional, political, metaphysical, theologicalÐserve the function
of views of justice and right. By `serve the function of views about justice and
right,' I mean simply that, for practical purposes, they are (actually or
potentially) at odds with, and compete with, our views about justice and right
with regard to the resources and territory that we somehow need to share.39
This brings me ®nally to the points I wanted to make about civic virtue and the
politics of cultural identity.
39
Thus, for example, a view about the sacredness of a mountain may con¯ict with a mundane
proposition about property, even though it may not be appropriate to designate the former as a view
about justice.
242 JEREMY WALDRON

Cosmopolitan rightÐone's willingness to do what is required by the general

principle of sharing this limited world with othersÐis rightly regarded by Kant as
not just one ethical idea among others. However dusty and quaint it sounds,
cosmopolitan right is not, he says, a mere `philanthropic principle of ethics, but a
principle of right'.40 It imposes a certain juridically-based discipline in politics, a
discipline rooted in our diversity, our potential disagreements, and our need
nevertheless for law. Because we hold disparate views about justice and follow
different traditions but still live unavoidably side by side with one another, we
have to come to terms with one another. Our need to come to terms has an
impact, then, on the way in which we are entitled to present ourselves as
partisans of different views or participants in disparate traditions.
In Part II of this paper, I attempted to distinguish a mode of allegiance to the
traditions of a particular culture that was not in principle incompatible with this
discipline of cosmopolitan right. If one participates straightforwardly in a way of
life, without the self-consciousness that multiculturalism often involves, then
paradoxically one is often more open to outsiders than one is if cultural
participation is always presented as `revisiting my roots' or `following the
traditions of my people' or `here's what's distinctive about us.' If one acts directly
in response responding to the reasons that internally support a given way of life,
then, however peculiar one's practices, they are at least amenable to reasoned
challenge or inquisitive reasoning from the outside. If someone says, `Why do you
people insist on monogamy,' we can give him a substantive answer (which is not
simply `This is how we do things round here'); and in principle our answer can be
brought into dialectical relation with his reasonsÐthe outsider's reasonsÐfor
thinking that polygamy is a superior structure. On the other hand, I want to
suggest that what is incompatible with cosmopolitan right is the presentation of
one's engagement with a particular set of cultural norms and practices as though
they were brute aspects of one's identity, like one's sex or one's color, and
therefore non-negotiable by anyone who takes seriously and respects one's
identity, one's self. This mode of engagementÐcultural engagement as identityÐ
treats the norms and practices of one's community or culture as though they were
costumes or attributes rather than intelligent and intelligible structures of
reasoning. To repeat then: if we take a tradition or practice of our culture
seriously, then we should treat it not simply as a costume for display or as an
attribute of our identity, but as a standard which does some normative work in
the life of one's community. Moreover, to take it seriously is to treat it as a
standard with a pointÐa standard which does work in the society which might
(in principle or at least as a matter of logical possibility) have been performed by
other norms, alternative standards, and which therefore cannot be understood
except in terms of its association with an array of reasons that explain why in fact
it is this norm rather than thatÐmonogamy, for example, rather than

40
Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, p. 172.
 WHAT IS COSMOPOLITAN? 243

polygamyÐwhich is the standard we happen to uphold. Only if one's initial

allegiance to the practices of one's culture is held and presented in this sort of
spirit can it be presented to others of different cultures (others who hold different
norms) as a ®rst move in the complicated businessÐinvolving bargaining,
deliberation, compromise, voting, authorityÐof coming to terms with those who
with whom we need to come to terms (rather than simply those with whom we
would like to come to terms).
Thus, the discipline of cosmopolitan right in domestic politics is not that I
must give up my intense and particularistic allegiances and become the sort of
shallow gad¯y or parasite that Roger Scruton excoriated in the de®nition we
considered at the beginning of this paper.41 It is rather that I should take the
norms of my culture for what they really areÐnot aspects of my `identity' (or my
cultural vanity), but solutions or purported solutions, which have been developed
in one group over time and funded deeply by the distinctive experience of the
members of this group, to problems and con¯icts which we may possibly ®nd
ourselves sharing with others who have developed different (and rival)
approaches funded by different experiences.
That is the discipline; and it seems to me that what is cosmopolitan about it is,
accordingly, much more complicated than the raf®sh airs of an insecure young
man, thousands of miles from home, and grasping at whatever cultural straws he
can reach to concoct an identity for himself. I fear that this paper has been more
autobiography than moral philosophy; but one speaks of what one knows, and I
hope that these remarks help to mark out some common ground between those
who are engaged wholeheartedly in the life of some particular culture and those
who believeÐwith Immanuel KantÐthat it is important also simply to live in the
world and to regard nothing human as alien.

41
See text accompanying note 1, above.