  Some cosmopolitans developed their view into a political theory about international relations. The most radical of eighteenth-century political cosmopolitans was no doubt Anacharsis Cloots (Jean-Baptiste du Val-de-Grace, baron de Cloots, 1755–1794). Cloots advocated the abolition of all existing states and the establishment of a single world state under which all human individuals would be directly subsumed. His arguments drew first of all on the general structure of social contract theory. If it is in the general interest for everyone to submit to the authority of a state that enforces laws that provide security, then this argument applies world-wide and justifies the establishment of a world-wide “republic of united individuals,” not a plurality of states that find themselves in the state of nature vis-à-vis each other. Second, he argues that sovereignty should reside with the people, and that the concept of sovereignty itself, because it involves indivisibility, implies that there can be but one sovereign body in the world, namely, the human race as a whole (La république universelle ou adresse aux tyrannicides, 1792; Bases constitutionelles de la république du genre humain, 1793).