Description

The promise of Kant's critical philosophy is sublimely invoked at the conclusion of his 1802 Lectures on Pedagogy.1 Kant exhorts teachers that students "must learn to] rejoice at the best for the world, even if it is not to the advantage of their fatherland or to their own gain" (AA IX 499, 485).2 Embedding the production of cosmopolitan subjectivity within a pedagogical project, these elegant last words of Kant, the last words published in his lifetime, figure a lifelong aim: teaching students to work in the interests of reason, rather than the interests of nation or self.3 Following Nadia Urbinati's claim that Kant's cosmopolitan project is precisely one of "making the cosmos into a unified political space,"4 this study investigates the constituting political frame within which a cosmopolitan subjectivity is possible. To some extent, my dissertation worries the question of the political conditions of possibility necessary to thinking cosmopolitanism.