Contact: Yasuyuki Funaba

Project at the Centre:

Human Rights in the Age of Globalization

Jürgen Habermas attaches great importance to the discussion that Kant, in relation to perpetual peace, introduces the law of world citizenship and gives substance to the state of world citizenship (The Inclusion of the Other, Suhrkamp, 1996, p. 192). Legal pacifism, for which Kant paves the way with his treatise on peace, brings about a cosmopolitan state and the abolition of war, according to Habermas’s interpretation (ibid.). According to this interpretation, the realization of a cosmopolitan state means the realization of peace through law, and therefore—as Habermas writes—the idea of the cosmopolitan state is endowed with “attraction and vivid power” (ibid.). However, in both the Peace Treatise and his legal philosophy, Kant himself discusses cosmopolitan law very little indeed. It is difficult to address the human rights of world citizens at all—as Habermas does—or to respond to Arendt’s discussion of the “aporias of human rights” (The Origins of Totalitarianism, Piper Verlag, 2023 [1986], p. 629ff.) based solely on the discussion of the right of visitation. It must therefore be a laborious task, requiring many supplementary arguments, to discuss the establishment of the cosmopolitan constitution, starting from “offering oneself to society” (VIII 358) or “offering oneself to mutual interaction” (VI 352).

Research interests:

・The right to have rights

・Legal pacifism

・Perpetual Peace

・Principle of publication

・Discourse theory