Abstract
Jakob Huber’s brilliant new reading of Kant’s Doctrine of Right begins with a simple Kantian observation: human beings sharing the surface of the earth cannot avoid interacting with one another. Using this observation to frame Kant’s mature political thought, Huber illuminates Kant’s ‘grounded cosmopolitanism’, distinguishing it from earlier readings and vindicating a ‘global standpoint’ that recognizes everyone’s ‘right to be somewhere’ while obliging us to seek ‘mutually justifiable terms of co-existence’. In this essay, I survey Huber’s account and suggest some extensions to it. Limits to the application of the idea of shared earth dwellership, especially across time and between different modes of political organization, are in tension with the revolutionary implications of the Kantian notion that we are always engaged with everyone across the surface of the planet. I argue that the distinction between state and non-state peoples is used here in a way that Kant’s own argument for the ideal of universal right relation pushes against, and I argue that this account of the ideal of universal right relation points towards something even more basic than concurrent earth dwellership: shared earth dwellership across time.