Historical Duties. Kant’s Path from Nature to Freedom, Cosmopolitanism and Peace

In this paper I reconstruct Kant’s account of history as the moral space where the full development of human being’s dispositions takes place by moving from nature to the idea of a cosmopolitan rightful condition. By highlighting the key concepts of Kant’s writings on history1, I aim to show that both perpetual peace and a cosmopolitan order are historical duties, namely achievements that human species ought to work for in order to substantiate the moral vocation of human nature. I address three main issues. First, Kant’s puzzling account of (human) nature requires us to clarify that we can conceive of a “natural” predisposition to morality only in terms of an analogy. Second, I take the notion of right to be the organ of freedom throughout history, as the means to let 1) morality permeate the world of human practices; 2) culture emerge. Third, the continuity between morality and right leads to both perpetual peace and cosmopolitanism as the achievements of human species’ moral development