Kant's popular sovereignty and cosmopolitanism

Abstract

In this article I present a reading of Kant's concept of sovereignty and of its relation to international and cosmopolitan ambits of law and rights. In section 2, I offer a reconstruction of Kant's justification of popular sovereignty as grounded in the idea of omnilaterality and critically different from state power assertion, as well as a new argument concerning the coactive character of right, with the aim of showing that there is no tension between sovereignty and the juridification of realms of interaction beyond borders. In section 3 I elaborate more on this latter point by sustaining that the three realms of right share the same normative grounding, i.e., the normative connection between the critical ideas of a possession in common of the earth and of the omnilateral will.