Kant’s Condition of Hospitality

Abstract

This paper reinterprets Kant’s cosmopolitan right of hospitality as a minimal juridical status whose primary function is peacetime prevention – it civilises the first contact in ordinary cross-border encounters such as work, study, trade, and cultural exchange. It asks how Kant’s legal notion of hospitality can regulate non-emergency interactions so as to help prevent conflict, and advances two claims: hospitality is a right of visit, not a charitable duty nor a right to settlement and its principal force is preventive, operating in peacetime by structuring non-hostile encounters. Using conceptual analysis and a hermeneutic reconstruction of Perpetual Peace (AA 8) in dialogue with recent scholarship, the article shows that this reading clarifies the reciprocal duties of host and guest, illuminates the connection to commerce and cosmopolitan education, and steers a course between moral maximalism and realist minimalism.