Goethe’s ‘Enhanced Praxis’ and the Emergence of a Cosmopolitical Future

Abstract

The recent interest generated by the topic of cosmopolitics is no doubt owing to it being pertinent to major contemporary issues such as globalisation, global citizenship, human rights and international (or transnational) democracy (see for instance Archibugi 2003; Breckenridge et al. 2002; Cheah and Robbins 1998; Held 2002; Stengers 1997). Critical attention has tended to focus on the works of Immanuel Kant, particularly on his Political Writings, as he seems most clearly to presage the advent of a ‘new world order’ which breaks away from the confines of the nation-state. Indeed, in his ‘Perpetual Peace’ essay of 1795/6, Kant famously wrote the following inspiring, and, one might add, optimistic, words:

The peoples of the earth have thus entered in varying degrees into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere. The idea of a cosmopolitan right is therefore not fantastic and overstrained; it is a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international right, transforming it into a right of humanity [zum öffentlichen Menschenrechte]. (Kant 1994, 107–8)