Abstract
A Dutch innkeeper once put this satirical inscription on his signboard, along with the picture of a graveyard. We shall not trouble to ask whether it applies to men in general, or particularly to heads of state (who can never have enough of war), or only to the philosophers who blissfully dream of perpetual peace. The author of the present essay does, however, make one reservation in advance. The practical politician tends to look down with great complacency upon the political theorist as a mere academic. The theorists abstract ideas, the practitioner believes, cannot endanger the state, since the state must be founded upon principles of experience; it thus seems safe to let him fire off his whole broadside, and the worldly-wise statesman need not turn a hair. It thus follows that if the practical politician is to be consistent, he must not claim, in the event of a dispute with the theorist, to scent any danger to the state in the opinions which the theorist has randomly uttered in public. By this saving clause, the author of this essay will consider himself expressly safeguarded, in correct and proper style, against all malicious interpretation.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. by Hans Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 93 (emphasis added). The majority of text quoted from Kant’s Perpetual Peace throughout the book derives from this translation. When commentators use alternative translations in their interpretation of the treatise, these are generally noted and any relevant distinctions in language are indicated.
Apparently, Kant’s Prelude was not clever enough. The publication of Perpetual Peace immediately “won him the reproach of being a Jacobin (1795).” A.CF. Beales, The History of Peace: A Short Account of the Organized Movements for International Peace (New York: The Dial Press, 1931), p. 36.
Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954; first published in England, 1936), p. 237 and p. 238, respectively.
In a short essay discussing Mannheim’s thought, E.H. Carr once wrote the following: The proposition that thought is influenced and conditioned by the situation of the thinker in time and place had been repeated so often as to become trite and boring. Yet in practice the history of philosophical or political or economic ideas could still be discussed and taught as a self-sufficient entity in which one “school” succeeded another without regard to the social background whose changing character determined the changing patterns of thought. Mannheim labored to show that the history of ideas, like other kinds of history, could not be studied in isolation from the society in which the ideas were born and flourished. (E.H. Carr, From Napoleon to Stalin and Other Essays (London: MacMillan Press, 1980), pp. 179–80)
Edwin Mead, “Immanuel Kant’s Internationalism,” Contemporary Review, CVII (February 1915), p. 228.
W.B. Gallie, Philosophers of Peace and War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 9.
Chris Brown notes, “the discipline of International Relations remains to this day largely a product of the English-speaking world, although, happily, this may not be the case for much longer.” Chris Brown, Understanding International Relations (London: MacMillan Press, 1997), p. 22.
Hannah Arendt and Ronald Beiner, eds., Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy — Delivered at the New School for Social Research, Fall 1970 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), p. 7.
Andrew Hurrell, “Kant and the Kantian Paradigm in International Relations,” Review of International Studies, 16 (1990), p. 183.
Howard Williams and Ken Booth, “Kant: Theorist beyond Limits,” in Ian Clark and Iver B. Neuman, eds., Classical Theories of International Relations (Houndsmills, Basingstoke and London: MacMillan Press, 1996), p. 71. While both authors applaud Wight for encouraging scholarly interest in Kant’s writings on international relations, they note that Wight “did not serve Kant well” by anointing him “intellectual figurehead of the ‘Revolutionist’ tradition.” Williams and Booth, “Kant: Theorist beyond Limits,” p. 71.
Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions, ed. Gabriele Wright and Brian Porter with an introductory essay by Hedley Bull (Leicester: Leicester University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1991), p. 4.
Georg Cavallar, “Kant’s Society of Nations: Free Federation or World Republic?” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 32 (July 1994), pp. 462–63.
Copyright information
© 2004 Eric S. Easley
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Easley, E.S. (2004). Introduction: The Perpetual Peace. In: The War Over Perpetual Peace. The Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403978714_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403978714_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-52959-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-7871-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)