The focus of this book is Royce's imaginative proposal to preserve world peace by virtue of international insurance and his reasons for choice of insurance as an instrument of peace. He attempted to combine the art of statistics with the precepts of insurance as a means to craft a scheme for international peace.

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 this short essay, Kant completes his political theory and philosophy of history, considering the prospects for peace among nations and addressing questions that remain central to our thoughts about nationalism, war, and peace. Ted Humphrey provides an eminently readable translation, along with a brief introduction that sketches Kant's argument.

Presents a collection of essays detailing Kant's views on politics, history, and ethics.

Scholars have long debated the relationship between Kant’s doctrine of right and his doctrine of virtue (including his moral religion or ethico-theology), which are the two branches of his moral philosophy. This article will examine the intimate connection in his practical philosophy between perpetual peace and the highest good, between political and ethico-religious communities, and between the types of transparency peculiar to each. It will show how domestic and international right provides a framework for the development of ethical (...) communities, including a kingdom of ends and even the noumenal ethical community of an afterlife, and how the transparency and trust achieved in these communities is anticipated in rightful political society by publicity and the mutual confidence among citizens that it engenders. Finally, it will explore the implications of this synthesis of Kant’s political and religious philosophies for contemporary Kantian political theories, especially those of Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls. (shrink)

This article examines some arguments in favor of taking peace as a political obligation that can be found in one of the most important founders of the pacifist movement, Jane Addams. The main focus is on her 1907 book Newer Ideals of Peace, which has often been read as idealistic and outdated, and above all, as more of an activist’s manifesto than a serious contribution to either political philosophy or political theory. I point out that this owes much (...) to an ambiguity of Addams’ criticisms of the traditional and Kantian cosmopolitan defense of peace as a political ideal, the ambiguity between practical-political and conceptual problems. However, Addam’s succeeds in identifying one profound problem for traditional, even enlightended institution-centered ideals of peace, the collapse of the very ideal in cases of breaches of explicit peace-agreements among nations, because breaches of agreements are tantamount to the loss of all commitment to the other nation’s rights. It reveals that the conditions imposed by such ideals are at most necessary, but not sufficient for peace, and hence that the concept based on them is not a complete concept of lasting peaceful conditions among humans. Once it is seen as dedicated to resolving the problems entailed by this fundamental problem, Addams’ work, and in particular her focus on resources of solidarity and right-granting practices beyond and outside explicit agreements between governments can be understood as the development of a more adequate, coherent and comprehensive, while also a more actionable conception of peace. In the course of this development, Addams can also be observed to make use of crucial epistemological and more technical philosophical tools that are most closely associated with classical pragmatism, but which partly appear (albeit largely obliquely in the course of their application to a particular case) for the first time Addams’ treatise. Addams’ work is therefore of more than merely political activist interest for philosophers. Nonetheless, the article also explains her status as an important contributor to proper conceptions of world peace and the understanding of certain phenomena in the organization of public will formation precisely by pointing out that without some of her future-oriented proposals, like the inseparability of peace-policies and development, or the need to institutionally protect and foster spontaneous solidary action, the best contemporary work on peace would not have been possible. (shrink)

This is the first English translation of all of Kant's writings on moral and political philosophy collected in a single volume. No other collection competes with the comprehensiveness of this one. As well as Kant's most famous moral and political writings, the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, the Critique of Practical Reason, the Metaphysics of Morals, and Toward Perpetual Peace, the volume includes shorter essays and reviews, some of which have never been translated before. The (...) volume has been furnished with a substantial editorial apparatus including translator's introductions and explanatory notes to each text by Mary Gregor, and a general introduction to Kant's moral and political philosophy by Allen Wood. There is also an English-German and German-English glossary of key terms. (shrink)

Unholy human beings and holy humanity in Kant's critical and practical philosophy -- Independence from nature : preparing the ground for perpetual peace in the third critique -- The problem of international politics : human beings within the mechanism of nature -- The instruction of suffering : Kant's theological anthropology for a prodigal species -- An "all-unifying church triumphant!" -- Conclusion : believing in the possibility of salvation -- Epilogue : Kant and contemporary cosmopolitanism.

What is enlightenment?--Idea for a universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view.--Reviews of Herder's Ideas for a philosophy of the history and mankind.--Conjectural beginning of human history.--The end of all things.--Perpetual peace.--An old question raised again: Is the human race constantly progressing?

Based on the theoretical reconstruction of neglected post-WWI writings and political action of W. E. B. Du Bois, this volume offers a normative account of transnational cosmopolitanism. Pointing out the limitations of Kant's cosmopolitanism through a novel contextual account of Perpetual Peace, Transnational Cosmopolitanism shows how these limits remain in neo-Kantian scholarship. Inés Valdez's framework overcomes these limitations in a methodologically unique way, taking Du Bois's writings and his coalitional political action both as text that should inform (...) our theorization and normative insights. The cosmopolitanism proposed in this work is an original contribution that questions the contemporary currency of Kant's canonical approach and enlists overlooked resources to radicalize, democratize, and transnationalize cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

In 1795 Immanuel Kant published an essay entitled "Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch." The immediate occasion for the essay was the March 1795 signing of the Treaty of Basel by Prussia and revolutionary France, which Kant condemned as only "the suspension of hostilities, not a peace." In the essay, Kant argues that it is humankind's immediate duty to solve the problem of violence and enter into the cosmopolitan ideal of a universal community of all peoples governed (...) by the rule of law.The essay's two-hundredth anniversary, 1995, also marked the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II and of the establishment of the Charter of the United Nations. The essays in this volume were written for a conference held in Frankfurt in May 1995 to commemorate these three anniversaries. Together, the authors argue for the continued theoretical and practical relevance of the cosmopolitan ideals of Kant's essay. They also show that history has both confirmed and outstripped Kant's prognoses. As recent events have shown, we certainly have not emerged from the violence of the state of nature. Accelerating globalization also gives these reconstructions and reappraisals of Kant's cosmopolitan ideal a new urgency.Contributors : Karl-Otto Apel, Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, Jürgen Habermas, David Held, Axel Honneth, Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, Thomas McCarthy, Martha Nussbaum. (shrink)

There exists a standard view of Kant’s position on global order and this view informs much of current Kantian political theory. This standard view is that Kant advocates a voluntary league of states and rejects the ideal of a federative state of states as dangerous, unrealistic, and conceptually incoherent. This standard interpretation is usually thought to fall victim to three equally standard objections. In this essay, I argue that the standard interpretation is mistaken and that the three standard objections miss (...) their target. Kant does advocate the establishment of a non-coercive league of states, at least in his mature political writings (such as Perpetual Peace and the Metaphysics of Morals), but he does so for different reasons than is usually thought and without rejecting the ideal that a world federation of states eventually be realized. I end by indicating how Kant’s revised view can be made productive for present-day philosophical purposes. (shrink)

The starting point of my study is Kant’s remark to the effect that Garve in his treatise on the connection between morality and politics presents arguments in defence of unjust principles. Recognition of these principles is, according to Kant, an inadvisable concession to those who are inclined to abuse it. I interpret this judgement by making a detailed comparison of the texts of the two treatises. I demonstrate that Garve’s work is an eclectic attempt to combine in one concept the (...) lessons of historical experience with the ideas drawn from British empiricism and German rationalism. These ideas were criticised by Kant in his “critical” period. There is a consensus among researchers that Garve condoned the expansionist policy of Frederick II of Prussia, totally denied that legality in international relations was possible and in general deserved the reputation of an conservative. From that point of view the key values for Garve were the security and well-being of the state. I offer an alternative interpretation of Garve’s position because I believe that the value of political stability plays an important role in it. Such an interpretation makes it possible to treat Garve’s narrative as it was assessed by Kant, i.e. as a concession to the common principles of political practice as a result of a failure to find the guiding theory. My study has established that the role of Garve’s work in the writing of Kant’s treatise Toward Perpetual Peace was more significant than Kant’s own words suggest. Besides, I show that it was under Garve’s influence that Kant turned to the problem of excessive complexity of the principles involved in the search for concrete political decisions. Garve obviously laments this complexity and yet makes these principles still more complex. Kant offers a simpler solution of the problem on the basis of his theory of morals and right. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s views on politics, peace, and history have lost none of their relevance since their publication more than two centuries ago. This volume contains a comprehensive collection of Kant’s writings on international relations theory and political philosophy, superbly translated and accompanied by stimulating essays. Pauline Kleingeld provides a lucid introduction to the main themes of the volume, and three essays by distinguished contributors follow: Jeremy Waldron on Kant’s theory of the state; Michael W. Doyle on the implications of (...) Kant’s political theory for his theory of international relations; and Allen W. Wood on Kant’s philosophical approach to history and its current relevance. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant, in his political project, “Perpetual Peace” has attempted to show a moral hope for the scourge of humanity, i.e. war. For Kant, man’s intrinsic selfish nature is a cause of constant collision that can be controlled by universal laws of reason to ensure an enduring peace among the warring nations. But is this idealistic approach towards war equally applicable to concrete particular situations of humankind? What if there are conditions under which war becomes inevitable or (...) even a desirable alternative? Can the choice of war be a morally justified alternative? And again, with the choice of war, can we ever hope for perpetual peace? It seems not! There are certain conditions when humanity is put at stake and war turns out to be the ultimate way to find peace Kant hinted but has not explored at length. In this paper, I want to explore and expound on these human conditions by bringing the situational examples of Mahābhārata and its idea of Dharma Yudha (righteous war). Mahābhārata serves as illuminating justifications for irremediable difficulties and dilemmas behind the inescapability of war in certain human circumstances. I will try to understand how far this “realistic” effort is ethically warranted in the way of seeking peace. I argue that although the Kantian universal model of rejection of war is a valuable ideal, and Mahābhārata’s realistic solution in terms of recognition of righteous war is relevant on the practical ground, both these positions of morality and corporality do not seem to provide a sufficient means of achieving perpetual peace in a contingent world, and therefore, it requires to look at some other alternatives. In doing so, an attempt will be made to critically analyse the incessant struggle between universal and particular, or idealism and realism by highlighting the existential contingencies and ambiguities of human finitude in the light of Kant and Mahābhārata in relation with perpetual peace and war. (shrink)

There are two main questions which it is possible to ask about war. The first is, whether it is inevitable; the second, whether it is desirable. The former question is one of fact, the latter one of value. In the discussions of ordinary conversation the two are frequently-confused and obscured; arguments to prove war desirable may be heard based upon the supposed fact of its inevitability, and conversely. It is worth while considering how the two are related.

Kant’s 1795 essay on perpetual peace has been lauded as one of his most important and influential political texts as well as one of the most important texts on peace. Kant’s text was largely forgotten until the 1980s and 1990s, with numerous commentaries appearing around the time of its 200 years existence. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s interest in Kant’s text appears to have arisen around the same time, and his analyses of this text continued after the (...) turn of the century. The references to Kant’s essay in Derrida’s texts appear mostly in the context of a discussion of the concept of hospitality. The latter concept is understood by Derrida as including both a demand for absolute hospitality, that is, hospitality without the imposition of any limitations, as well as a demand, in the interests of survival, for such limitations or conditions. A negotiation between these dimensions of hospitality is ultimately required. The aim of this article is to elucidate Derrida’s analysis of Kant’s essay, specifically his recasting of the concept of peace as absolute hospitality, as well as to briefly outline its implications for international and cosmopolitan law. (shrink)

There are two main questions which it is possible to ask about war. The first is, whether it is inevitable; the second, whether it is desirable. The former question is one of fact, the latter one of value. In the discussions of ordinary conversation the two are frequently-confused and obscured; arguments to prove war desirable may be heard based upon the supposed fact of its inevitability, and conversely. It is worth while considering how the two are related.

Immanuel Kant’s essay on Perpetual Peace contains a rejection of the idea of a world government. In connexion with a substantial argument for cosmopolitan rights based on the human body and its need for a space on the surface of the Earth, Kant presents the most rigorous philosophical formulation ever given of the limitations of the cosmopolitan law. In this contribution, Kant’s essay is analysed and the reasons he gives for these restrictions discussed in relation to his main (...) focus: to project a realistic path to perpetual peace. (shrink)

Kant described the state as a ‘moral person’, and did so when dealing with international relations. For all the interest in his contribution to the theory of global politics, the locution according to which Kant characterized the state has received very little attention. When notice has been taken of it, the moral personality of the state has moved arguments in opposing directions. On one recent reading, when Kant called the state a moral person he intended to indicate that it possessed (...) certain duties to itself and to others, for the sake of which it could be coerced to leave the international state of nature. On another, the juridical compulsion of states to join a state of nations or world republic is categorically ruled out because this would impair their moral personality. Both cannot be right. In this article, I analyse Kant’s notion of moral personhood, contextualizing it within his wider philosophical concerns. On the basis of this groundwork I put forward an argument about Kant’s theory of the moral person of the state which allows me to show how he in fact was able coherently to incorporate two seemingly contradictory arguments about the state as an international actor in a single argument, and present this as my solution to what I call the Perpetual Peace Puzzle. (shrink)

There has been a persistent misunderstanding of the nature of cosmopolitanism in Immanuel Kant’s 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace,” viewing it as a qualitative break from the bellicose natural law tradition preceding it. This misunderstanding is in part due to Kant’s explicitly critical comments about colonialism as well as his attempt to rhetorically distance his cosmopolitanism from traditional natural law theory. In this paper, I argue that the necessary foundation for Kant’s cosmopolitan subjectivity and right was forged in the (...) experience of European colonialism and the (pre-Kantian) theory it engendered. It is in this context that we witness the universalization of subjectivity and the subjectivization of right, emerging from the justificatory needs of extra-national jurisdiction and resource appropriation. This form of cosmopolitanism, whose emergence necessarily tracks the rise of global capitalism, continues to exert great and often uncritical influence on theories and practices of peace today. (shrink)

It is hardly surprising that the two greatest Kantian philosophers of the twentieth century's second half would, at some point of time, reflect and comment on one of the most famous writings of the Königsberg sage, namely on Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. Of course, in recent decades, and especially around the celebration of the 200th anniversary of its publication, many commentary articles and books have been published on Kant's little essay, but it makes a difference when (...) Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls make an effort to get to an appropriate understanding of Kant's text in the present-day world. Here I will describe some of the main features of their understanding of Kant's peace proposal. I will first briefly recall the main scheme of Kant's essay, anticipating the writings of Habermas and Rawls by employing their new vocabularies and schemes in describing Kant's position. The main purpose of my outline of Kant's essay is to investigate how much of Kant's proposal has remained alive in Habermas and Rawls. (shrink)

This collection of essays by eminent scholars on the reconstruction and critique of Kant's transcendental philosophy in the Indian context specifically discusses his ideas on perpetual peace, universal history, and critical philosophy.

This chapter contains sections titled: I. Kant's Practical Political Teleology II. Demands of Practical Reason and Nature's Will III. Perpetual Peace as the End of Right.

Today the idea of cosmopolitanism has become widely accepted as an appropriate answer to what we now call globalization. A key reference is Kant who argues for a Recht of the world citizen, and this is normally understood as a cosmopolitan law. Apparently Kant lets the law of the world citizen be limited to a right to visit, but somehow his peace project must imply something more than just this very modest claim. Following a hint from Kant himself I (...) take a closer look at the material aspect of cosmopolitanism, i.e. the economy of travelling, and it appears that cosmopolitanism can function as an ideology for letting possible investors look for business cases, that is, for promising places for capitalist exploitation. As an answer to such strong material processes cosmopolitanism is insufficient, both as a moral imperative and as a stipulated right. What we need is a more comprehensive political and legal perspective and the solutions this indicates. To get inspiration for this, however, we can turn to Kant again, since it turns out that he does not argue for cosmopolitanism at all, neither as a programme nor as an ideology. For Kant the overall goal is perpetual peace, and the law of the world citizen represents only one subordinate element. As an answer to globalization we should thus drop the limited ideal of cosmopolitanism and follow Kant in his ambition of a threefold political constitution comprising state law, law of the people and law of the world citizen. (shrink)

This dissertation examines philosophical and literary configurations of "violence" in discourses of human freedom and imperial subjugation in Germany and Japan. The concept of "violence" marks the ethical limit of normative claims. Without a definition in itself, "violence" serves the critical function of disclosing norms orienting social and political life. Each of the authors studied in this dissertation turned toward a conception of human freedom founded in the confrontation of social norms disclosed by rhetorical violence. Chapter one examines the rhetoric (...) of Immanuel Kant's Zum ewigen Frieden in the historical context of its writing. Kant engages in a performative argument for publicity in his critique of Prussian imperialism and the censorship of revolutionary views. Through rhetorical gestures such as the title of his essay as an invocation of death and the clausula salvatoria as a hedge against his critics, Kant encodes the political upheavals of the historical exterior in the rhetorical movement of his essay. He argues for peace by performing violence in language. Whereas Kant's essay has been conventionally read apart from its historical context, Heinrich von Kleist's Die Herrmannsschlacht has been interpreted strictly in terms of the historical moment of its writing. Chapter two argues instead for a rhetorical reading of Kleist's play in which language emerges as both the central theme of the text and an agent of anti-imperial violence. Kleist concretizes metaphors of the body such that they perform the politics of absolute opposition. Freedom for Kleist means opposition to the other. Chapter three turns to an alternative conception of human freedom grounded in opposition. In his Phanomenologie des Geistes, Hegel produces a performative narrative of the development of subjectivity in relations of violence. As an "unhappy consciousness," the subject no longer opposes an external other but itself as an internal "enemy." The freedom that it attains is constituted in self-subjection. Chapter four examines the appropriation of Kant and Hegel by the Japanese wartime philosophers Miki Kiyoshi and Tanabe Hajime. Both defend the project of Japanese imperialism by arguing for a form of freedom in which the subject negates its attachment to the imperial state. This negation inverts into a performance of subjectivity as the movement of self-subjection. (shrink)

This is a comparative study of the concept of nature in Kant and Fichte’s proposals for perpetual peace. I will argue that Kant and Fichte’s ideas of perpetual peace present two very different ways of dealing with nature: whereas Kant’s proposal consists of administrating the natural unsociable inclinations of human beings, departing from the assumption that the unsociable sociability of men is not only inherent to human nature but also the motor of the historical progress of (...) humanity, Fichte, on the contrary, advocates for a total repression of these inclinations, departing from the postulate that the historical progress of humanity concerns exclusively the spiritual or intelligible dimension of human existence. (shrink)

Introducing articles on Kant’s Toward Perpetual Peace, various interpretative questions are discussed. Externally, alleged senility is contrasted with political maturity, just as irony and rhetorics are discussed in relation to (self-)censorship and the French Revolution. Internally, Kant scholars have discussed, e.g. the use of ‘eternal’ vs. ‘perpetual’, the question of preventive war, and, more in general, the relation between Kant’s political writings. In relation to the three definitive articles on state law, law of people and world citizen (...) law, issues are, e.g., Kant’s conception of constitution, democracy and their relation to peace, peace federation vs. world republic, thesis vs. hypothesis, and various ideas of sovereignty, as well as cosmopolitanism vs. world citizen right. Finally, questions concerning morality vs. politics and concerning transcendental publicity are presented. (shrink)

World peace was a common theoretical consideration among philosophers during Europe’s Enlightenment period. The first robust essay on peace was written by Charles Irénée Castel de Saint- Pierre, which sparked an intellectual debate among prominent philosophers like Jean- Jacques Rousseau and Jeremy Bentham, who offered their own treatises on the concept of peace. Perhaps the most influential of all such writings comes from Immanuel Kant, who argues that world peace is no “high- flown or exaggerated notion” (...) but rather a natural result of the rational progression of the human species. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, the mastermind behind the formation of the League of Nations in 1920 that provided the scaffolding to today’s United Nations, read Kant’s philosophy while he was a student at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). Some have argued that it is no coincidence that the per-son responsible for embarking upon the first serious political pursuit of world peace on a global scale was familiar with Kant. Indeed, William Galston claims that “Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points [for world peace] were a faithful transcription of both the letter and spirit of Kant’s Perpetual Peace.”3 Historical connections aside, the question remains as to whether Kant’s philosophy is a viable conception of peace in a contemporary context. Using the conceptual distinction of positive and negative peace provided by Johan Galtung, I argue that Kant’s philosophy does provide the scaffolding for a viable conception of peace. In particular, I provide particular examples as to what social rights must be included in a Kantian model of peace. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall try to elucidate the relationship between nature and providence with regard to the function of guaranteeing perpetual peace in Kant's 1795 essay, an issue which, presumably for the very reason of providence being granted some role in the first place, has led to noticeable unease in Kant scholarship. Providence simply does not seem to fit in well into Kant’s philosophical account of history given the emphasis he puts on the notion of human (...) freedom. The main idea grounding my approach is that the notion of providence is not only not a threat to human freedom, but perhaps the most important ingredient in Kant’s solution of the compatibility problem with regard to human freedom and natural causal determinism. This solution of the compatibility problem, as I have argued elsewhere, must be understood along the lines of a so-called “altered law-compatibilism” which makes the special laws of nature dependent on human freedom. The role of providence then is to elucidate or explicate how such a dependency is possible. Moreover, Kant’s own definition of “providence”, which he develops as an alternative to Baumgarten’s, provides the resources of identifying it – in a sense to be qualified below – with nature and hence provides the means for solving a long-standing riddle in Kant’s account. Of course, the compatibility problem does not take centre stage in the guarantor section in any way. Rather, what Kant is doing there can best be understood as presupposing and being closely related to his compatibility argument: He can be read as spelling out the dependency of laws on nature with regard to the course of history. (shrink)

This article analyses the teleological argument justifying historical progress in Kant's Guarantee of Perpetual Peace. It starts by examining the controversies produced by Kant's claim that the teleology of nature supports the idea of a providential development of humanity towards moral progress and the possibility of achieving a cosmopolitan political constitution. It further illustrates how Kant's teleological argument in Perpetual Peace needs to be assessed with reference to two systematically relevant issues: first, the (...) problem of coordination linked to the necessity of realizing the ‘highest good’ as a historical end of practical reason, and secondly the problem of continuity posed by the temporal limitation of all individual efforts to cultivate moral dispositions. To illustrate the implications of both issues for the teleological argument in Perpetual Peace, the article draws attention to some important developments in Kant's analysis of teleology following the Critique of Judgment. (shrink)