The laws of hospitality

Hospitality is a fashionable topic in political and international thought. The most obvious reason for this development is the movement of people across national frontiers to escape persecution or privation in their own countries. The unplanned-for arrival of needy or enterprising strangers is hardly a new phenomenon. Nor is their disposition to make themselves at home. Yet in recent years immigration and its restriction have come to be seen as a social problem on a global scale— one that raises troubling questions about the duties we, as individuals or societies, have when faced with strangers.

Scholars have discovered that their predecessors have had little to say about the treatment of strangers. Thus they have seized on Immanuel Kant's brief and ambiguous remarks on ‘universal hospitality’ in Perpetual Peace. This should be no surprise. With the recent resuscitation of liberalism in a cosmopolitan guise, Kantian ethics have been much in fashion and Kant and Perpetual Peace much discussed. Yet recent efforts to reach more deeply into early modern thought have, in my opinion, confirmed the paucity of relevant conceptual and ethical resources for help in thinking about hospitality in today's world of strictly bounded, presumptively sovereign nation-states.

Among contemporary thinkers, Jacques Derrida is not just fashionable. His extensive work on hospitality is at the centre of the discussion of a cosmopolitan ethics not predicated on liberal premises. As Gideon Baker has remarked, Derrida's ethical stance is ‘a significant departure from Kantian hospitality and from Kantian ethics generally’. Derrida based his stance on a distinction that I believe most people would find entirely plausible. Hospitality is, or should be, utterly unconditional; it is to be extended to the stranger at the door, no questions asked. At the same time, hospitality is, in practice, always conditional; it is subject to rules in practice.

Derrida formulated this apparent contradiction in striking terms, with Kant very much on his mind.