Abstract. Immanuel Kant and Samuel Pufendorf were both exercised by the relationship between politics, morality and lawful authority; a relationship that goes to the heart of the sovereign state's existence and legitimacy. However, while Kant defended the authority of the moral law, believing morality provides higher authoritative norms than the sovereign state, Pufendorf defends the political morality of authority, believing the sovereign state should submit to no higher moral norms. The rivalry between these two positions is reprised in current debate between cosmopolitanism and statism over humanitarian intervention. Arguing against statism, this article defends a Habermasian-style critical international theory which affords a ‘cosmopolitanism without imperialism’.

Introduction

Born in 1632 in the Saxon town of Dorfchemnitz, Samuel Pufendorf grew up having experienced the horrible brutality and senseless violence of the Thirty Years War. He held university appointments at Heidelberg and Lund before eventually working as historian and counsellor to the Swedish and then Brandenburg courts. Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in the Prussian port city of Konigsberg and lectured at its local university. He apparently never left his home town, but on his daily walks the urbane philosopher of enlightenment must have travelled the world in his mind, conjuring ideas of a cosmopolitan system of rights for all peoples across the globe. No such cosmopolitan thoughts occurred to the well-travelled Pufendorf. His political thought remained scaled at the level of the sovereign territorial state that was taking shape across Europe. But for all the differences of personal biography and political outlook, both Kant and Pufendorf were exercised by the relationship between politics, morality and lawful authority: a relationship that goes to the heart of the sovereign state's existence and legitimacy.