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Human beings, he says: Cannot be without peaceful coexistence, and yet they cannot avoid continuous disagreement with one another. Consequently, they feel destined by nature to develop, through mutual compulsion and laws written by them, into a cosmopolitan society which is constantly threatened by dissension but generally progressing toward a coalition. The cosmopolitan society is in itself an unreachable idea, but it is not a constitutive principle … It is only a regulative principle demanding that we yield generously to the cosmopolitan society as the destiny of the human race; and this not without reasonable grounds for supposition that there is a natural inclination in this direction … (W)e tend to present the human species not as evil, but as a species of rational beings, striving among obstacles to advance constantly from the evil to the good.

Human beings have made themselves differently in different places. What Kant seems to have done here, is to move from one side to the other of what we in geography have long known as a divide between ‘environmental determinism’ on the one hand and ‘possibilism’ on the other (Tatham 1957). Kant’s relative neglect of the geography later on then makes sense, for it is indeed racked with environmental determinism, racism and prejudicial commentary. But there are deeper reasons for Kant’s difficulties with respect to the geography.

Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, David (forthcoming) Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom. New York: Columbia University Press. Kant, Immanuel (1964) Anthropologie. Translated by Michel Foucault. Paris: Vrin. Kant, Immanuel (1974) Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Translated by V. Dowell. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Lefebvre, Henri (2003) The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. May, J. A. (1970) Kant’s Concept of Geography and Its Relation to Recent Geographical Thought.