Chapter 4 addresses the idea of “cosmopolitan law” in Kantian thought. This idea was conceived as a way to progressively move beyond the power politics of the sovereign states of the eighteenth century and as a criticism of Western colonialism, taking a historical perspective that, in the matter of international relations, laid the groundwork for asserting human rights against the states – a conception that did not come to full fruition until the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Kantian thinking on international law has been interpreted in this book not as utopian but rather as stoutly realistic, this because, as much as Kant may have envisioned an unachievable ideal of peace, he also laid out a necessary path on the way to that ideal.