In ‘Kant’s Changing Cosmopolitanism’ and Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship, Pauline Kleingeld argues that, in ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent,’ Kant meant for the Bund (usually translated as ‘federation’) of states to be a coercive federation. Kleingeld admits that there is a disparity between this earlier coercive idea of the Bund and Kant’s talk of a voluntary (i.e., non-coercive) congress in Toward Perpetual Peace and The Metaphysics of Morals. She explains this disparity by: (1) appealing to a semantic ambiguity in the term ‘Bund’; (2) making claims about with which contemporary 18th century works Kant was acquainted; and ultimately (3) attempting to draw a parallel between the unsocial sociability of individual people within a state and the unsocial sociability of individual states in a larger community of states. In this paper, I argue that while Kleingeld’s claims are superficially supported by the text, her claims depend on her apparent conflating of teleology and morality.

Key words: Kleingeld, Kant, teleology, Just State, Bund, Federation, Congress, Inter-Governmental Organization.

Julian Katz. 2018. Kant’s ‘Bund’: A Voluntary Reading. Public Reason 10 (1): 3-14.