"Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose" embroiled Kant in controversy due to the political implications of its critique of his contemporary Johann Gottfried Herder.
[3] The essay proceeds by way of nine propositions through which Kant seeks to prove his claim that rational and moral autonomy will inevitably defeat the compulsions of self-interested individualism.
[4] Kant seeks to achieve this by advancing a hierarchical account of development of human history.
[5] In writing from the perspective of a universal history, Kant valorizes an unrealized future state (though he is aware of the problem of theorizing without empirical basis, recognizing the appearance of irrationality that such an enterprise exhibits and criticizing Herder for extracting conclusions from speculative psychologizing).
[5] Kant proposes that the European nations were tending towards statehood in a federation characterized by a universalist and cosmopolitan moral culture—a historical end-state also approached (albeit at a slower pace) by those inferior non-European societies, defined as they still were by the embrace of faith.