Simon Gros

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Roberta Picardi’s lecture advances a precise scholarly stake: it seeks to determine, within Kant’s Perpetual Peace and the juridical architecture presupposed by it, what cosmopolitan right is as a peace-promoting factor when its content is explicitly restricted to “universal hospitality.” The distinctive contribution consists in a methodical narrowing that refuses two familiar assimilations at once: the reduction of cosmopolitan right to a mere instrument of commercial pacification, and the inflation of cosmopolitan right into a surrogate for contemporary human-rights catalogues or world-constitutional blueprints. By reconstructing cosmopolitan right’s foundation in the concept of right and in the systematic gaps left by domestic and international right, Picardi proposes a qualified narrow reading that explains peace-promotion through the juridical management of border-crossing interaction and the disciplining of trade “within the limits of right.”

The lecture is framed, first, by an institutional and personal preface that matters for its philosophical posture. Introduced as an historian of philosophy working at the intersection of metaphysics, philosophy of history, political philosophy, and ethics, Picardi signals a dual competence that the talk will repeatedly activate: a sensitivity to the history of concepts (the early modern discourse of ius hospitii and its entanglement with doctrines of war) and an insistence on system (the functional differentiation of layers of public right in Kant’s doctrine of right). Her initial remarks—gratitude to the organizers, the confession of recent illness, the explicit decision to attend because the topic and research exchange matter—operate as more than courtesy: they prefigure a guiding constraint of the argument itself. The talk will treat cosmopolitan right neither as an abstract slogan to be maximized nor as a mere empirical regularity to be exploited, but as a normative instrument whose precision is part of its moral seriousness. The outer frame, in other words, already signals that the lecture’s ambition lies in conceptual exactitude under conditions of contemporary pressure, above all the pressure placed on Kant’s third definitive article by migration-centered political discourse since the late 1990s.

Picardi then announces, as the composition sequence of the paper, a tripartite movement: an overview of the debate by way of the narrow/broad distinction; a positioning through the contested relation between cosmopolitan right and human rights; and, finally, a “qualified narrow reading” meant to preserve cosmopolitan right’s peace function without distorting its juridical nature. This announced sequence is not merely organizational. It functions as an argument about method. The survey is presented as necessary because the contemporary literature displays agreement on cosmopolitan right’s status as a principal innovation of Kant’s public right, while lacking agreement on its content and its role in fostering perpetual peace. Picardi’s diagnosis is that Kant explains with relative clarity why republican constitutions and a federation of free states promote peace, while leaving the third ingredient underdetermined. The underdetermination is thereby treated as a genuine interpretive problem that calls for controlled distinctions rather than immediate moral supplementation.

The first phase, the “state of the debate,” is structured by a borrowed distinction that Picardi explicitly uses as a tool: narrow versus broad readings. The borrowing is itself philosophically significant because it shows her intent to avoid idiosyncratic typologies. She relies on a contemporary classificatory device while reserving the right to modify its outcome. Narrow readings, as she reconstructs them, interpret cosmopolitan right’s peace-promoting role through the channel of international commerce: cosmopolitan right, understood as a right to visit or first entry, facilitates trade; trade, producing economic interdependence, produces peace; cosmopolitan right thus becomes a means whose importance is derivative. Even as she acknowledges that such a narrow reading is not the dominant view among Kant specialists, she stresses its popularity among political scientists in the tradition of “Democratic Peace Theory.” The lecture’s conceptual pressure begins here: the empirical thesis that liberal-democratic states do not wage war against one another is made to lean on Kant’s three definitive articles as if they offered a ready-made explanatory model for liberal peace expansion. Picardi’s care is to mark that, within this research program, the third article is frequently translated into liberal economic theory’s assumptions about comparative advantage, cooperative division of labor, negotiation incentives, and alliance formation. Her point at this stage is not primarily to refute the political-science framework, though later discussion will intensify skepticism. The point is to isolate an interpretive displacement: cosmopolitan right becomes legible only as an enabling condition for commerce, while commerce becomes the real causal engine of peace.

Broad readings, by contrast, are presented as an ensemble with a shared core: cosmopolitan right expresses the acknowledgement of individuals’ legal international subjectivity as holders of human rights, because it concerns direct external relations of reciprocal influence between states and individuals, addressing persons as “citizens of a universal state” or of mankind beyond nationality. Picardi’s survey is not content to leave the broad camp undifferentiated; she introduces an internal bifurcation that will later allow her to critique broad readings without treating them as a monolith. On one side stand those broad approaches that tether cosmopolitan right to the ideal of a world republic or a global legal order that approximates world-state constitutionalism. Here she references influential trajectories that reinterpret cosmopolitan right as constitutional law of a world democracy and as the germ of a global constitution. She notes, with methodological restraint, that some such approaches famously concentrate on Kant’s second definitive article and criticize the federation model as historically inadequate in light of twentieth-century wars, humanitarian intervention dilemmas, and the absence of a world state. Picardi signals that she will not pursue that path at length, partly because the locus of her inquiry is the third article and the limited hospitality it prescribes. Yet she still extracts from these approaches an important motif: cosmopolitan right is made to bear the weight of enforcing global human-rights protections by supranational institutions, and thus its content tends to expand to match that burden.

On the other side of the broad spectrum, Picardi identifies interpretations that approve Kant’s preference for a loose league of nations and regard it as consistent with the systematic structure of the doctrine of right. In this federalist broad family, cosmopolitan right is commonly taken to include a subset of human rights: those of individuals against foreign states in contexts of voluntary and involuntary border crossing. Peace promotion is then routed through the civilizing effects of transnational interaction: mutual knowledge, intercultural communication, reduced defections into hostility. Within this subset she locates an additional moralizing tendency: cosmopolitan right is treated as a moral compensation for the absence of coercive supranational authority. It comes to rely on, and simultaneously to cultivate, a “global moral conscience” that condemns violations of natural rights worldwide. At this point in the lecture, an important tension is already visible, even before Picardi explicitly foregrounds it: the more cosmopolitan right is moralized, the more its juridical character as strict right seems to dissolve into ethical culture, sentiment, or historical maturation, and the less it can explain peace in the precise sense Kant requires, namely the transition from a condition of war to a condition governed by public law.

This tension becomes the hinge by which the survey stage is gradually displaced by the lecture’s own thesis. After the overview, Picardi states her position with a careful double alignment and separation. She aligns with those who deny that cosmopolitan right reduces to a play in favor of free international trade; she also aligns with arguments distinguishing Kant’s project of perpetual peace from the liberal-democratic peace thesis. Yet she separates herself from broad readings, including the moralizing variant she has just described, that “overburden” cosmopolitan right by linking it to current human-rights provisions. The concept of overburdening is doing heavy work. It designates an interpretive practice that assigns to a juridical category a function that exceeds its systematic place, and then retrofits the category’s content to meet that assigned function. The lecture’s method thereby shifts from mapping positions to diagnosing a recurrent category mistake: taking cosmopolitan right to be the name for whatever normative resources contemporary politics wishes Kant to supply, rather than asking what work cosmopolitan right performs given its stated limitation to hospitality.

At this juncture Picardi remarks that extensive discussion of world-republic interpretations is largely unnecessary because there is wide agreement that Kant does not conceive cosmopolitan right as world-constitutional law. The lecture’s more interesting labor, accordingly, is devoted to the “historical and systemic reasons” that render the cosmopolitan-right/human-rights nexus problematic. The argument now becomes deliberately genealogical. Kant’s restriction of cosmopolitan right to universal hospitality is situated within a centuries-long natural-law debate about ius hospitii, simultaneously a debate about who counts as an enemy, who may be justly conquered, and how war might be justified against those allegedly violating hospitality. The lecture’s conceptual tension sharpens: hospitality appears as a moral-legal threshold concept where the boundary between juridical protection and martial permission is historically porous. Picardi emphasizes that Kant’s narrowing is purposeful. By interpreting hospitality as a negative right—first entry or visit without hostile treatment—Kant aims to foreclose colonial conquest rationalized as punishment for supposed violations of expansive hospitality doctrines associated with earlier scholastic-natural-law positions. In this light, expansive readings that interpret cosmopolitan right as a source of positive obligations, or as the juridical lever for large-scale human-rights institutionalization, risk reinstating the very structure Kant sought to neutralize: the invocation of a “sacred” right as pretext for coercion and war. The peace function, on this reconstruction, is inseparable from restraint in the right’s content, because restraint blocks the conversion of right-claims into casus belli.

Yet Kant’s narrowing is paired, in Picardi’s account, with an equal refusal of a different historical drift: the reduction of hospitality duties to mere benevolence at the discretion of the state. Against the line that would treat hospitality as imperfect ethical duty, Kant insists, at the outset of the third definitive article, that the question concerns right, not philanthropy. Picardi uses this point to criticize moralizing broad readings from another direction. If cosmopolitan right is strict right, then it imposes perfect, enforceable duties, even when its content is negative duties of omission: the duty not to treat the foreigner with hostility and the reciprocal duty of the foreigner. The lecture thus produces a compact but potent conceptual constellation: narrow content, stringent form. The right’s scope is restricted, yet its juridical bindingness is intensified. The peace function emerges, correspondingly, from the legal determination of a border-zone of interaction, rather than from ethical largesse or from the cultural flowering of global moral sensibility.

From here Picardi transitions into the systematic reasons for skepticism about the cosmopolitan-right/human-rights linkage. The systematic critique unfolds as a sequence of clarifications about the subject and basis of cosmopolitan right. First, cosmopolitan right is presented as broader in bearers than many contemporary rights discourses assume. It includes states’ rights toward foreigners; it includes the rights of groups, even non-state peoples such as indigenous nations and nomadic tribes. This already destabilizes the tendency to equate cosmopolitan right with an individualistic human-rights paradigm. Second, the primary basis of cosmopolitan right is argued to lie in the concept of right itself rather than in an innate human right to external freedom. Picardi’s formulation is careful: the concept of right enjoys logical priority, and the innate right to freedom is defined in a way that presupposes the juridical form, because freedom is independence from constraint by another’s choice insofar as it can coexist with the freedom of everyone under universal law. The presupposition matters because it reverses a familiar justificatory order. Cosmopolitan right is not derived by extending a pre-juridical moral property of persons outward until it becomes global. It is derived from the relational structure of right as such, from the conditions of reciprocal coexistence of external freedom under law.

This reversal yields three consequences that Picardi explicitly draws and that collectively reconfigure the debate. The concept of right is inherently relational, and thus the innate right to freedom has an inherent relational dimension. The concept of right expresses, primarily, mutual obligations and limitations of freedom required for coexistence, rather than subjective entitlements conceived in isolation. The juridical standpoint abstracts from internal moral disposition and from the particular ends of action; it concerns external relations insofar as actions can influence one another. These consequences converge into a single methodological claim: Kant’s juridical philosophy is best understood, in this domain, as duty-oriented rather than right-oriented, with persons as points of departure insofar as they can assume obligations. In that duty-oriented frame, the temptation to conflate cosmopolitan right with liberal human-rights provisions becomes intelligible as a transposition from one normative grammar to another. Picardi’s critique is therefore not a denial of moral values. It is a denial that cosmopolitan right’s peace function is illuminated by translating it into a moral language of global conscience, sensitivity, or spiritual interdependence.

The lecture then tightens its focus by reading a crucial Kantian claim—“a violation of right in one place is felt in all”—through the lens of external freedom rather than moral sentiment. Picardi insists that Kant refers, here, to a growing material and physical interdependence of external freedoms, such that it becomes illusory to imagine that violations elsewhere can be contained. The argument’s pressure now shifts from abstract system to a quasi-structural diagnosis of globalization. Interdependence is not praised as moral progress; it is treated as an objective condition in which repercussions travel and security fantasies collapse. Under such conditions, cosmopolitan right acquires a peace-promoting necessity because it juridically regulates the border-crossing relations through which interdependence manifests. Even where cosmopolitan right’s content remains negative and limited, its systematic role becomes expansive: it stabilizes the other layers of public right by preventing the uncontrolled outbreak of hostility in the spaces those layers leave underdetermined.

At this point the lecture’s earlier survey has been decisively displaced. What initially appeared as a dispute between narrow commerce-based readings and broad human-rights readings is reconstituted as a question about the interdependence and functional differentiation of three layers of public right required to overcome the condition of war characteristic of the state of nature. Picardi articulates this condition with a precision that aligns Perpetual Peace and the Doctrine of Right: the state of nature is a condition of war because it contains the constant threat of hostilities and legitimates a presumption of hostility toward those who approach without common authority and law, even absent actual wrongdoing. Domestically, this is overcome through the sovereign state as a moral person representing a unilateral will that is inherently coercive. Internationally, the threat is mitigated through a federation of free states. Yet these two institutional moves leave a “double gap”: a state of nature between states and non-state peoples, and a state of nature between persons who are not members of the same civil state, particularly in contexts of border crossing. Here Picardi introduces a borderline ontology of legal status. Migrants and travelers are simultaneously within a civil condition as citizens of their home state and within a state of nature vis-à-vis the receiving community because they lack a legal relation with it. This mixed status is structurally unstable, and it threatens to undermine the whole framework by allowing hostility to erupt precisely where authority and law are absent.

Cosmopolitan right, on Picardi’s qualified narrow reading, fills this gap. It does so without becoming world-constitutional law and without dissolving into moral conscience. It supplies a determinate juridical rule governing the first point of contact: the foreigner’s right not to be treated with hostility upon arrival, coupled with reciprocal duties. Peace promotion follows because the legal vacuum at borders is a privileged site where warlike presumption can be activated. By legally limiting hostility there, cosmopolitan right prevents the collapse of domestic and international right into conflict. This is the core systematic claim: cosmopolitan right is necessary for peace because it secures the coherence of the layered public-right structure by regulating the transitional relations that would otherwise remain in a state of nature.

The lecture then addresses the residual truth in narrow commerce-centered readings by re-situating commerce within the doctrine of right’s concern with the “external mine and thine,” the domain of property in external things resting, in the first instance, on land acquisition. Picardi concedes that economic and commercial exchange comes to the forefront within cosmopolitan right’s horizon. Yet she refuses the liberal inference that free trade, as such, pacifies. The central concern in Kant’s reflection, as she reads it, is equally graspable from the standpoint of commerce’s capacity to accelerate and intensify war. Here Picardi cites a passage from Kant’s preface to Perpetual Peace that emphasizes how hospitality overstepping its bounds brought wars to Europe and how, with the awakening of commerce, hostilities threaten to become more frequent and to follow faster upon one another. The operative concept is concise: trade without right increases the tempo and frequency of war. Peace promotion therefore lies in juridical limitation, in bringing trade “within the limits of right,” rather than in celebrating interdependence. Cosmopolitan right’s peace function is thus reframed as a condition of regulated interaction: it restrains the pathways by which commerce, contact, and competition transmute into pretexts for violence.

The question-and-answer segment, though short, serves as an external test of Picardi’s internal distinctions and reveals further tensions that the lecture manages by maintaining strict separations of standpoint. A question is raised about the role of history in her argument, focusing on an apparent contradiction between commerce as a peace-promoting factor in Kant’s “spirit of trade” passages and commerce as a driver of war in the preface quotation. The question also proposes a duality between peace through law, conceived as a legal construction akin to perpetual peace, and a more contingent peace-as-absence-of-war emerging historically through self-interested commercial behavior, a “trick of reason” dynamic. Picardi’s reply is methodologically decisive: she distinguishes the perspective of the philosophy of right from that of the philosophy of history and declines to mingle them. She treats the preface quotation as revealing Kant’s concern with commerce-driven war, especially in a period of European powers fighting over commercial controversies, and she interprets the “spirit of trade” passages in a way consistent with her interdependence thesis: Europe’s commercial ties bind it to other peoples such that Europe will suffer the consequences of its own violations of right, thereby creating pressure to accept and implement cosmopolitan right in the governance of international trade.

This response reinforces the lecture’s central strategy: conceptual clarity through perspectival differentiation. It also shows how Picardi’s account can accommodate a limited historical mechanism without converting cosmopolitan right into a mere empirical byproduct. Interdependence can supply incentives to institutionalize right, yet right remains the normative and systematic condition for peace. In that sense, Picardi’s approach treats history as a domain where the costs of right-violation become globally distributed, thereby supporting the urgency of juridical limitation, while refusing to ground peace in historical cunning alone.

A subsequent intervention pushes the critique of Democratic Peace Theory further, doubting its empirical and conceptual foundations and suggesting that trade may be an instrument of imperialism, with wars fought for “free trade” and with hegemonic structures producing an absence of hostilities that should not be confused with peace. The intervention introduces concrete historical referents such as the Opium War and contemporary tensions between Europe and China, stressing that trade’s pacifying effects require specific conditions and can fail dramatically. Picardi agrees with the empirical thrust and notes how proponents of that theory would respond—by attributing trade-driven conflict to the non-democratic character of certain states—while reiterating that this is not Kant’s view. She then adds an interpretively consequential remark: Kant does not support international free trade as such, and he even justifies Chinese and Japanese protectionism. This supplementation, though brief, functions within the lecture’s architecture as an additional safeguard against liberal appropriation. It reinforces the thesis that Kant’s concern is juridical limitation rather than market maximalism. Picardi closes the exchange by linking the hegemonic-structure objection to earlier post-Kantian criticism, invoking the idea that power asymmetries within a league of nations could undermine the legalization of equal freedom.

When one reconstructs the lecture as a whole, its internal dynamics can be described as a disciplined dialectic of interpretive temptations. The talk begins in a field shaped by contemporary political salience—migration, globalization, the demand for cosmopolitan norms—and by a scholarly consensus that cosmopolitan right is an innovation whose precise role in peace is unclear. It then maps the two dominant temptations. One temptation reduces cosmopolitan right to a facilitator of commerce, thereby translating Kant’s juridical argument into an economistic causal story. The other temptation expands cosmopolitan right into human-rights moralism or world-constitutional aspiration, thereby translating Kant’s restricted juridical category into a modern normative programme. Picardi’s method consists in resisting both translations by treating cosmopolitan right as a strict right with limited content, embedded in a layered structure of public right whose completeness requires a third layer precisely because persons and peoples meet across borders without common authority.

This resistance is achieved by a sequence of displacements. The debate overview is displaced by a genealogical caution about the war-justifying misuse of expansive hospitality doctrines and by a systematic caution about conflating duty-oriented right with entitlement-oriented human-rights frameworks. That caution is then displaced by a constructive systematic proposal: cosmopolitan right fills the border-gap that domestic and international right cannot fill on their own. Finally, even commerce—initially the battleground of narrow readings—is displaced into a subordinate role as an arena requiring juridical limitation, because commerce accelerates war when unregulated by right. In the resulting picture, cosmopolitan right promotes peace neither by moral education alone nor by economic interdependence alone, but by legally constraining hostility and by stabilizing the entire architecture of public right against the centrifugal forces produced by global interaction.

The lecture’s conceptual tensions remain intentionally visible, and they constitute its philosophical productivity. Cosmopolitan right is at once minimal in content and maximal in systemic necessity. It is simultaneously addressed to individuals, states, and non-state peoples, thereby complicating modern individual-rights paradigms while still operating at the level of external relations. It is juridical rather than philanthropic, yet it concerns hospitality, a notion easily moralized and historically implicated in doctrines of war. It is connected to global interdependence, yet it refuses to treat interdependence as moral progress, and it refuses to treat free trade as peace’s engine. It stands adjacent to human rights in contemporary reception, yet it is grounded, in Picardi’s reconstruction, in the concept of right and the structure of mutual obligation rather than in the moral psychology of conscience. Each tension is managed by a consistent methodological commitment: to interpret Kant’s categories by their systematic function and historical stakes, and to treat peace as a juridical achievement, sustained by layered public right, rather than as a contingent equilibrium of interests.

In closing, Picardi’s qualified narrow reading clarifies a distinctive sense in which cosmopolitan right can be said to “promote peace.” Peace promotion does not name a teleological guarantee that contact, commerce, or moral sentiment will culminate in perpetual peace. It names a juridical stabilization of the most volatile interfaces of global coexistence: the points where persons and peoples encounter one another without shared civil membership, where presumptions of hostility find their easiest activation, and where economic competition can most rapidly become organized violence. Cosmopolitan right, limited to universal hospitality and understood as strict right, serves peace by depriving hostility of juridical legitimacy at the border and by preventing the structural incompleteness of domestic and international right from reopening the state of nature within a world otherwise aspiring to legal order. Within the lecture’s own terms, the concluding formula is accordingly exact: the aim is neither trade as such nor moralization as such, but international interaction, including trade, within the limits of right.

The apparent austerity of this conclusion conceals, however, a further layer of methodological ambition that becomes clearer once the lecture is read as a diagnostic of why the third definitive article has proven so hospitable to interpretive projection. Picardi’s procedure is to treat the interpretive field as itself a symptom of the concept’s position in Kant’s system: cosmopolitan right sits exactly at the seam where a doctrine of right, oriented to externally enforceable obligations, touches phenomena that contemporary discourse habitually processes in moralized, humanitarian, or identitarian registers. Migration, first entry, hospitality, colonial conquest, intercultural contact, global sensitivity to rights-violations, the world-market’s interdependence, and the recurrent temptation to build legal universality by moral universalism: these themes exert centrifugal force upon Kant’s strict-right vocabulary, drawing it either toward economic functionalism or toward ethical maximalism. The lecture’s density derives from a refusal to accept that centrifugal pull as interpretively innocent. Instead, it treats the pull as the very terrain upon which Kant’s juridical project must be re-established in its own terms.

A decisive element in this re-establishment lies in the way Picardi handles the “content” question. The familiar debate, as she presents it, oscillates between thin content (visit as trade facilitation) and thick content (a wide set of human rights, global constitutionalism, moral community). Her proposal reorganizes the axis. Content is thin in the sense that it remains limited to a negative claim against hostility at the point of arrival. Yet the thinness is itself internally articulated by the strictness of right: enforceable duties of omission, reciprocal constraints, and thereby a legal form that is sharply distinguished from beneficence. The concept thereby becomes intelligible as a kind of juridical hinge: it has minimal substantive demands and maximal structural function, precisely because it polices the condition of possibility for lawful interaction where membership is absent. The lecture implicitly suggests that this hinge-character is what invites inflationary readings. Wherever a category has hinge status, it appears to hold an entire structure together; interpretive impatience then attributes to it the entire normative content one wishes the structure to realize. Picardi counters that impatience with a kind of systematic asceticism: the hinge holds because it is correctly sized, since an oversized hinge would deform the door it is meant to sustain.

This asceticism is reinforced by the lecture’s consistent use of “peace” as a term of art rather than an honorific. The exchange at the end, where an interlocutor distinguishes peace-through-law from an empirical absence of war accompanied by prosperous trade, is revealing because it mirrors a pervasive equivocation in the wider reception. “Peace” can denote a juridical condition in which conflict is subsumed under public law, or it can denote a contingent equilibrium of power and interest where violence is suspended without being juridically overcome. Picardi’s insistence that the third definitive article concerns right rather than philanthropy belongs to the same conceptual purification: the peace that matters for Kant’s project is peace as a lawful condition, a condition that can be demanded as a postulate because the state of nature is structurally warlike even without actual aggression. In this light, Democratic Peace Theory appears as a paradigmatic case of equivocation: it treats a certain statistical pattern (absence of war among a subset of states under certain conditions) as if it instantiated the juridical overcoming of the state of nature. Picardi’s framework makes room for empirical considerations and historical mechanisms, yet it treats them as auxiliary to the juridical stake, since empirical pacification can coexist with legal insecurity, and legal insecurity can re-ignite hostility in precisely those border zones where presumptions of enmity are easiest to activate.

The lecture’s appeal to the state of nature as a condition of war is therefore not merely exegetical. It supplies the fundamental warrant for why a limited right to visit can bear peace-promoting significance without being transformed into a right to settle, a right to membership, or a comprehensive catalogue of human rights. If the state of nature is warlike because it legitimates a presumption of hostility toward those who approach without common authority, then the first point of approach becomes a privileged site where peace must be juridically instituted. Hospitality, re-described as a right of first entry, becomes the minimal legal antidote to the warlike presumption at the threshold of encounter. Picardi’s argument thereby furnishes a tight conceptual economy: a single negative prohibition, legally enforceable, can interrupt a logic of anticipatory hostility whose structural default would otherwise be conflict. The economy is delicate. It depends on the claim that hostility at the threshold is a structural temptation, not merely a moral failure. The talk consistently treats it as structural: the newcomer stands outside the receiving civil condition, even while remaining a citizen of a civil condition elsewhere; the receiving community sees an approaching agent not yet bound by its public law; the presumption of hostility becomes, under the state-of-nature logic, a rationally licensed posture. Cosmopolitan right, as a juridical rule, withdraws that license at the moment it would otherwise be most readily asserted.

In this respect the lecture’s historical genealogy performs a second function beyond guarding against colonial pretexts for war. It also clarifies why Kant can insist that hospitality is a matter of right and yet keep it negative. Early modern debates about ius hospitii tend to swing between sacralization and discretionary reduction: hospitality becomes either an expansive entitlement easily mobilized for coercive “punishment,” or a mere virtue subject to sovereign permission. Picardi reads Kant as seeking a third path that is juridically austere: enforceable duty without expansive claim. This third path is presented as strategically peace-oriented. Expansive sacralization creates war-pretexts. Discretionary reduction creates arbitrary exclusion and thereby cultivates hostility and retaliatory insecurity. A strict, negative right provides a determinate constraint that can be generalized without licensing conquest and without dissolving into charity. The peace function, under this analysis, lies in determinacy: determinacy reduces the interpretive and political space in which actors can cloak violence under right-talk or cloak exclusion under benevolence-talk. In a world of accelerating contact, the legal determinacy at the border becomes a stabilizer.

The systematic argument about the concept of right’s priority over the innate right to freedom further deepens this stabilizing role. If right is relational and defined through the coexistence of external freedoms under universal law, then cosmopolitan right is a specification of relational coexistence under conditions where the relevant “others” are not co-members of one civil condition. The right in question concerns relations that arise when actions can influence one another across the spatial distribution of peoples and territories. Picardi’s insistence that the concept of right abstracts from internal moral disposition and from the ends of action becomes crucial here. It blocks the temptation to ground cosmopolitan right in moral sympathy, global conscience, or cultural intermingling as such. Such phenomena can be welcomed as contingent supports, yet they do not supply the juridical form. The juridical form is supplied by the conditions of reciprocal influence and possible coercion at the point of encounter. This is why Picardi reads Kant’s remark about violations of right being felt everywhere as a statement about material interdependence of external freedoms. The point is not that conscience expands; the point is that the causal pathways by which rights-violations generate repercussions expand. The juridical demand then becomes more urgent because the costs of non-legal interaction become more widely distributed and more difficult to contain.

This shift from moral expansion to material interdependence also repositions the relation between cosmopolitan right and commerce. Picardi’s lecture yields a nuanced picture: commerce is neither incidental nor foundational. Commerce expresses one historically salient modality of transnational interaction involving external possessions, territorial access, and the movement of persons and goods. Because commerce increases contact and rivalry, it can also increase the frequency and speed of hostilities when unregulated by right. Consequently, the peace-promoting relevance of cosmopolitan right shows itself precisely where commerce intensifies conflict potential. A concept of right that is oriented to external relations is therefore structurally attuned to commerce’s ambivalence. The lecture implicitly treats this attunement as a reason to resist the economistic reduction. Economistic reduction presupposes that commerce supplies the peace mechanism, while law merely lubricates it. Picardi’s reconstruction treats law as the condition for commerce to avoid becoming a war accelerator. The key phrase with which she closes the prepared portion of the talk—international trade within the limits of right—condenses that reconstruction: commerce is brought under juridical constraints that block hostility, conquest, and the escalation of rivalry into violence.

The Q&A adds, in compressed form, a further dimension: the interplay between juridical structure and power asymmetry. The interlocutor’s suggestion that the absence of war among “democracies” could reflect hegemonic domination rather than genuine peace resonates with Picardi’s remark about early post-Kantian objections to leagues of nations whose members differ greatly in power. Even without elaboration, this exchange helps to specify what Picardi’s peace criterion must include. Peace, in Kant’s juridical sense, requires the legalization of equal external freedom. Power asymmetry threatens that legalization by enabling dominant members to shape the league’s norms and enforcement in their own favor, thereby reproducing a state-of-nature dynamic under the cover of institutional form. Picardi’s reference to this objection suggests that her emphasis on cosmopolitan right’s gap-filling role also belongs to a broader sensitivity: the layers of public right can collapse from within when their formal structures are infiltrated by unequal power that reintroduces unilateral will where common law is required. Cosmopolitan right, by constraining hostility at the border, cannot by itself solve power asymmetry among states. Yet it can reduce one pathway by which power asymmetry manifests violently: the treatment of foreigners, non-state peoples, and border-crossers as objects of unilateral decision rather than as subjects of enforceable duties.

The lecture’s refusal to conflate cosmopolitan right with contemporary human rights is therefore not a conservative narrowing meant to diminish migrants’ claims; it is presented as a systematic caution aimed at preserving the right’s peace function. Picardi’s thesis implies that when cosmopolitan right is inflated into a comprehensive human-rights regime, it risks losing its determinacy and its strictness. The inflation invites disputes about positive entitlements, institutional implementation, and moral ideals that, while significant, can obscure the minimal legal constraints that stabilize first contact. It can also reactivate the historical danger that expansive rights-claims serve as pretexts for coercion and war, especially under conditions of asymmetric power where “humanitarian” or “civilizing” missions can be mobilized to legitimate intervention. Picardi’s approach, by contrast, treats peace as served by a juridical floor that applies at the threshold regardless of broader institutional architecture. The floor is limited: do not treat with hostility; do not convert first entry into an occasion for violence; do not weaponize hospitality as an expansive right to conquest. Its limitation constitutes its universality, because it can be imposed as a strict duty without demanding the immediate construction of a world state or the global enforcement of a vast catalogue of rights.

At the same time, the lecture carefully avoids collapsing cosmopolitan right into mere sovereign discretion. The strictness of right means enforceability, at least in principle, and thus it also implies constraints on state agency that are “stringent” despite the right’s negative content. Here the lecture subtly reframes the usual evaluative intuition about negative rights. Negative rights are often interpreted as weak because they demand only non-interference. Picardi’s reconstruction treats the negative duty as stringent because it constrains the state precisely where it is tempted to treat outsiders as outside the realm of enforceable obligations. The right’s negative form becomes a legal check on the sovereign’s tendency to define the border as a zone of exception. In this sense, cosmopolitan right’s strictness interrupts a structural inclination of political power: the inclination to present border control as a domain of discretionary necessity immune to legal constraint. Peace promotion thus becomes inseparable from the juridical domestication of the border as a site of lawful interaction, even when the foreigner does not acquire membership.

One can see how each thematic strand is initially introduced as if it might carry explanatory weight and then is repositioned by a more exacting principle. The migration context introduces contemporary urgency and motivates attention. The debate overview introduces commerce and human rights as dominant explanatory candidates. The genealogy introduces hospitality and colonial war as the historical matrix of the right’s limitation. The systematic argument introduces the layered structure of public right and the priority of the concept of right. The interdependence argument introduces globalization’s material entanglement. The commerce discussion introduces trade’s war-accelerating capacity. The Q&A introduces historical “spirit of trade” passages and hegemonic critiques of democratic peace. Through these steps, commerce is displaced from foundation to regulated domain; moral conscience is displaced from basis to possible accompaniment; world-constitutionalism is displaced from content to a separate project; and even “human rights” are displaced from direct identification with cosmopolitan right to a broader normative landscape that must not be imposed upon a distinct juridical category. What remains constant is the concept of right and the structural incompleteness that cosmopolitan right remedies.

The lecture’s argumentative posture therefore yields a specific image of Kant’s peace architecture: a system that is simultaneously layered and fragile. Each layer addresses a different manifestation of the state of nature. Domestic right addresses conflict among individuals and the provisionality of unilateral claims by instituting a public authority. International right addresses conflict among states by forming a federation that reduces the war threat without dissolving sovereignty into a world state. Cosmopolitan right addresses the residual conflict potential generated by cross-border interaction between persons and peoples who lack common civil membership. The fragility lies in the fact that omissions at any layer allow the logic of the state of nature to reassert itself. The border zone is particularly dangerous because it constitutes a transitional space in which the warlike presumption is rationally licensed. Cosmopolitan right interrupts that license. The peace function thereby becomes intelligible without invoking moral progress narratives or economic determinism.

In the final accounting, Picardi’s qualified narrow reading proposes a disciplined way of using Kant for contemporary debates about migration and globalization: it recommends that cosmopolitan right be treated as a strict juridical constraint shaping first entry and transnational interaction, thereby limiting hostility and preventing war-pretexts, while leaving open, as separate questions, the moral and political debates about settlement, membership, distributive justice, humanitarian assistance, and global institutional design. The lecture does not deny the relevance of those debates; it argues that they should not be smuggled into cosmopolitan right by interpretive expansion, because such smuggling obscures the right’s peace-promoting function and risks reactivating the very violence that cosmopolitan right was designed to forestall.