Abstract
Kant’s reputation in world philosophy is secure; in the study of world politics it is still being made. For decades Kant’s work was marginal and marginalised in academic international relations, though he has a justifiable claim to be the first comprehensive theorist of world politics. Kant has something to say, inter alia, about justice, international government, domestic politics and interstate relations, war and peace — and other priority issues on the international relations agenda. He also makes a fundamental contribution to our thinking about ontology and epistemology. If for nothing else he is a key figure because he was the first political philosopher of significance to emphasise the primacy of the international in understanding politics.
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Notes
Martin Wight, International Theory. The Three Traditions, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1991), passim.
For a general discussion, see Timothy Dunne, ‘Mythology or methodology? Traditions in international relations’, Review of International Studies Vol. 19 (3), July 1993, pp. 305–18.
Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana, 1976), p. 227.
E. H. Carr, The 20 Years’ Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1946).
F. H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp. 62–80.
W. B. Gallie, Philosophers of Peace and War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 8–36.
Michael Doyle, ‘Kant, liberal legacies and foreign affairs’, parts 1 and 2, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 12 (3 and 4), 1983.
Steve Smith, ‘The Forty Years’ Detour: The Resurgence of Normative Theory in International Relations’, Millennium, Vol. 12 (3), Winter 1992, pp. 489–506.
Timothy Garton Ash, ‘Kant in one hand, deterrence in the other’, The Independent, 10 May 1990.
See, inter alia, Evan Luard, Basic Texts in International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1992).
Ed. L. W. Beck, Perpetual Peace, in Kant Selections (New York: Macmillan, 1988), p. 445;
Gesammelte Schriften, VIII (Berlin, 1902), p. 368 (hereafter GS).
Respectively, Michael Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in Paul Rainbow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 32–51 and Gallie, op. cit., pp. 14–15.
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980).
Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959).
Hans Reiss, (ed.), Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 54 (‘An Answer to the Question “What is Enlightenment”?’).
Isaiah Berlin used this phrase as the basis for the title of his book about the glories of pluralism against the pulls of fundamentalism: The Crooked Timber of Humanity (London: Fontana Press, 1991).
For what this can mean in the empirical world, see Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope. A Memoir (London: Collins Harvill, 1989), trans. Max Hayward.
T. W. Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 240.
M. Gregor (ed. and trans.), Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 55; G. S., VI, p. 230.
Cf. H. Williams, International Relations in Political Theory (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1992), p. 42.
A. P. D’Entreves (ed.), Aquinas: Selected Political Writings (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959), p. 123.
H. Williams, M. Wright & A. Evans (eds), A Reader in International Relations and Political Theory (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1993), p. 87.
Daniele Archibugi, ‘Models of international organization in perpetual peace projects’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 18, 1992, pp. 295–317;
Hidemi Suganami, The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 40–61.
Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
This is well argued in Andrew Hurrell, ‘Kant and the Kantian paradigm in international relations’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 16 (3), July 1990, pp. 183–206.
Karl Deutsch, et al., Political Community in the North Atlantic Area (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).
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Williams, H., Booth, K. (1996). Kant: Theorist beyond Limits. In: Clark, I., Neumann, I.B. (eds) Classical Theories of International Relations. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27509-0_4
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