Kant: War and Peace

Pauline Kleingeld argues that according to Kant it would be wrong to coerce a state into an international federation, due to the wrongness of paternalism. Although I agree that Kant opposes the waging of war as a means to peace, I disagree with Kleingeld's account of the reasons why he would oppose coercing a state into a federation. Since she does not address the broader question of the permissibility of interstate coercion, she does not properly address the narrower question of (...) whether coercion to compel a state to join a federation can be permissible. I revise and supplement her arguments. (shrink)

The idea that peace prevails in the relations among liberal democratic states, given its first expression in Kant’s essay “Toward Perpetual Peace,” has gathered a great deal of attention in the post-Cold War period as both a testable hypothesis and a proposal for expanding peace through democratization. This article examines the explanations for how a democratic peace is achieved and sustained. It argues that, despite tendencies within democratic state relations toward peaceful conflict resolution, such a peace is destabilized by continued (...) adherence to a set of assumptions and practices which we might call, following Jane Addams and John Dewey, ‘the war system.’ In the context of the ideological and institutional supports of militarism, democratic states remain subject to the dynamics of conflict escalation that produce occasions for war. This war system is the undoing of the democratic peace. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to consider Jewish philosophy in opposition to the anti-ocularcentrism that defined the German Jewish philosophical tradition after Kant, namely the idea that Judaism—or at least its philosophical expression in Maimonidean philosophy—is aniconic and cognitively abstract. I do so by attempting to rethink the epistemic-veridical place of the imagination and visual experience in the Guide of the Perplexed . Once the imagination has been disciplined by reason, is there any cognitive status to an image or sound (...) that the eye or the ear perceives, and to that mental faculty that combines and recombines such impressions? Is the sight or sound of revelation a hallucination or just a mere figure of speech? Does it bear any relation to a spiritual reality external to the human mind and finite physical existence? To address these questions I explore the visual images, both iconic and aniconic-abstract, that distinguish the Guide . There is no getting past the visual imagination, although I am not sure Maimonides would have recognized it as such. Even when he leaves behind figurative visual cues such as the false image-work of the undisciplined imagination or the appearance of angels and images of God found in lower grades of prophecy, he turns to another visual register, namely the “abstract art“ of pure, dazzling light. In regard to these questions, Maimonides was more Greek than German, ascribing, cautiously, penultimate cognitive status to the visual imagination. (shrink)

Charles Covell examines the jurisprudential aspects of Kant's international thought, with particular reference to the argument of the treatise Perpetual Peace (1795). The book begins with a general outline of Kant's moral and political philosophy. In the discussion of Perpetual Peace that follows, it is explained how Kant saw law as providing the basis for peace among men and states in the international sphere, and how, in his exposition of the elements of the law of peace, Kant broke with the (...) secular natural law tradition of Grotius, Hobbes, Wolff and Vattel in the view he took of the foundations of the law to make peace in the international sphere. In the conclusion to the book, Kant and his law of peace are considered in relation to the condition of contemporary international society. (shrink)

Antagonism in human relations has been recognised since the beginning of Western history and has beenacknowledged as its driving and progressive force. But how exactly do contest, competition, and warcontribute to the historical progress of humankind? Coming from the position that there are timeless truthsin human history and that there is a human nature, in this paper I examine Kant’s notion of unsocialsociability from his Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose and how this notion relatesto human progress. (...) I explain the Kantian notion of the dynamics of history, his ‘unsocial sociability’, andcritique its problematic relation to his telos of nature: the formation of a universal civil union in perpetualpeace. In order to address this problem of dynamic-telos disparity I go back to the beginnings of Westernhistory, the ancient Greeks, with Nietzsche as a guiding mind. Focusing on his essay Homer onCompetition and also his book, The Birth of Tragedy I examine his uncovering of Greek ‘truth’ in relationto the division of Being in a primordial strife into beings of two opposing forms, the Apollonian andDionysian. I consider how these dual impulses were channelled, according to Nietzsche, into constructivesocial competitions and characterised the development and flourishing of Greek culture. I argue thatNietzsche’s view of human development and progress, via a republic of geniuses, overcomes the Kantiandisparity between the dynamic of history and nature’s end. (shrink)

Beginning with an analysis of an early satire of Kant 's doctrine of marital law, this essay draws on Walter Benjamin's condensed exposition of this doctrine in order to ask whether Kant 's notoriously unsentimental representation of marriage is, in fact, from the perspective of his own idea of law, overly sentimental. Whereas Kant ridicules the idea of a "law of war" in his program for perpetual peace, he accepts the possibility of legally sanctioned intercourse, in which people use others (...) and themselves. Between marital law and martial law lies maritime law, which concerns a surface that can be used but not mastered. (shrink)

Kant is widely acknowledged for his critique of theoretical reason, his universalistic ethics, and his aesthetics. Scholars, however, often ignore his achievements in the philosophy of law and government. At least four innovations that are still relevant today can be attributed to Kant. He is the first thinker, and to date the only great thinker, to have elevated the concept of peace to the status of a foundational concept of philosophy. Kant links this concept to the political innovation of his (...) time, a republic devoted to human rights. He extends the concept by adding to it the right of nations and cosmopolitan law. Finally, Kant democratizes Plato's notion of philosopher kings with a concept of 'kingly people'. This book examines all aspects of this important, but neglected, body of Kant's writings. (shrink)

Summary A good deal of the late-twentieth-century commentary on Kant's ?Perpetual Peace? essay accepted its author's view that his conception of cosmopolitan justice had superseded the law of nations, some of whose leading exponents?Grotius, Pufendorf, and Vattel?Kant characterised as ?miserable comforters?. Focusing on the case of Vattel, in this paper I begin to subject Kant's claim to an historical investigation, asking whether his ?Perpetual Peace? did indeed supersede Vattel's Law of Nations in terms of the actual uses of the texts (...) in a variety of historical contexts. In pointing to an array of evidence against Kant's widely accepted claim, I develop a different and more historical way of assessing the relation between the two writers. Kant, I argue, should be approached as a political metaphysician whose conception of cosmopolitan justice formed part of a factional theological and philosophical attack on the law of nations tradition. Vattel, however, was a diplomatic official whose text operates within the horizon of the European state ensemble and functioned as a summative abstraction of a wide variety of post-Westphalian public-law treaties and diplomatic rules and conventions. This accounts for the wide distribution, use, and influence of Vattel's work in a variety of Anglophone contexts from the late eighteenth century through to the end of the nineteenth, where Kant's text was marginal to discussion. (shrink)

This article provides an historical account of Kant's political, legal, and religious thought in the context of the Prussian Enlightenment.

Whether this satirical inscription on a Dutch innkeeper's sign upon which a burial ground was painted had for its object mankind in general, or the rulers of states in particular, who are insatiable of war, or merely the philosophers who dream this sweet dream, it is not for us to decide. But one condition the author of this essay wishes to lay down. The practical politician assumes the attitude of looking down with great self-satisfaction on the political theorist as a (...) pedant whose empty ideas in no way threaten the security of the state, inasmuch as the state must proceed on empirical principles; so the theorist is allowed to play his game without interference from the worldly-wise statesman. Such being his attitude, the practical politician — and this is the condition I make — should at least act consistently in the case of a conflict and not suspect some danger to the state in the political theorist's opinions which are ventured and publicly expressed without any ulterior purpose. By this clausula salvatoria the author desires formally and emphatically to deprecate herewith any malevolent interpretation which might be placed on his words. (shrink)

In 1989, the age of power political realism ended. The conditions were set to replace the prevailing Hobbesian model of peace by deterrence with the considerably more challenging Kantian model of peace by right. If, however, Huntington's paradigm of fighting civilizations were right, we would have to forget Kant and remember Hobbes. Sober rationality, healthy distrust, striving for power accumulation and all the other instruments from the realist's toolbox of political prudence are very well suited to facilitate political self-assertion in (...) an age of violently clashing cultures. However, this helplessness is not well grounded. Considering that from the very beginning liberalism is a theory of religious and ethical pluralism and well-experienced in dealing with problems of multiculturalism, it is at least possible to argue for a weak liberal universalism which provides normative foundations for a global order of peacefully living together. Of course, conceptual and moral modesty is crucial. If the human rights doctrine wants to defend its universal claim in the face of cultural diversity , it has to restrict itself to the conditions of esse: the pre-cultural and sheer natural conditions of human being and human coexistence. However, the formulation of the conditions of bene esse has to be left to culture and its authorities and belief systems which buttress a cultural constitution of meaning, both theologically and metaphysically. Traditional natural rights theory knew that both have to go together, and that the esse-enabling duties necessarily enjoy priority. No cultural conception of thriving life and existential significance can be accepted which contradicts the fundamental imperatives and conditions of pure human existence and coexistence. (shrink)