Kant's Toward Perpetual Peace envisions a normative ideal of world order, an ideal usually referred to as cosmopolitanism. Under the spell of this normative ideal, many scholars tend to approach the Kantian discourse itself in normative terms, as a yardstick for thinking about world order. This essay proposes a historical approach to Kantian cosmopolitanism. In its first step, it tracks the principal lines of thought in early modern Europe, which led from the ancient idea of world citizenship to Kantian cosmopolitanism. Whatever enthusiasm Kantian cosmopolitanism initially might have inspired in certain circles after the publication of the treatise on Perpetual Peace in 1795, other ways of thinking about world order soon drowned it out. In its second step, this essay sketches out the dominant model of world order in the nineteenth century, the so-called international law of civilized nations, which ran counter to Kantian cosmopolitanism in every way. In the twentieth century, there were some rare moments, especially in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when it seemed that the day for Kantian cosmopolitanism had finally arrived. But soon enough, it came up against multiple challenges. In the final step, the essay presents two alternative conceptions of cosmopolitanism for the multipolar world we inhabit today: Afropolitanism and Chinese cosmopolitanism.
