Abstract
The final historical period within which Kant’s Perpetual Peace has been utilized, takes us, and pattern formation, up to the present day. The last interpretation within this period given consideration comes from Harold Kleinschmidt’s The Nemesis of Power, published in 2000. The first within this period is by Michael Doyle, a leading “liberal peace” theorist, in a well-known 1983 article entitled “Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs.” Like F.H. Hinsley’s 1963 interpretation, Doyle provides us with a pivotal textual analysis of Perpetual Peace, the influence of which is seen throughout this final historical phase. The articles originality, exclusive focus on Perpetual Peace, and the idea and empirical proof of an ever-expanding zone of peace among liberal, sovereign states that it sets forth, make it an interpretation crucial to the development of themes in this chapter and in chapters 6, 7, and 9 to follow.
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Notes
Dean Babst, “A Force for Peace,” Industrial Research (April 1972), pp. 55–58. Originally published as “Elective Governments—A Force for Peace,” The Wisconsin Sociologist, 3, No. 1 (1964), pp. 9–14. Other early studies include: R.J. Rummell, Understanding Conflict and War, Volumes 1–5 (Los Angeles: Sage, 1975–1981);
Bruce Russett and Harvey Starr, World Politics: The Menu for Choice (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1981);
Peter Wallensteen, Structure and War: On IR 1820–1968 (Stockholm: Raben and Sjogren, 1973).
Michael Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs, Parts 1 and 2,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 12, Nos. 3 and 4 (1983), pp. 205–35, 323–53. Howard Williams and Ken Booth note that this article, more than any other, “raised the profile of Kant’s work [on international relations].”
Howard Williams and Ken Booth, “Kant: Theorist Beyond Limits,” in Ian Clark and Iver B. Neumann, eds., Classical Theories of International Relations (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and London: MacMillan Press, 1996), pp. 72–73.
To demonstrate the overflow of liberal peace scholarship over the recent past, included below is a pared down list of post-Doyle articles from the References section of Wade L. Huntley’s, “Kant’s Third Image: Systemic Sources of the Liberal Peace,” International Studies Quarterly, 40 (1996), pp. 45–76;
B. Bueno de Mesquita, R. Siverson, and G. Woller, “War and the Fate of Regimes: A Comparative Analysis,” American Political Science Review, 86 (1992), pp. 638–46;
S. Chan, “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall … Are the Freer Countries More Pacific?” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 28 (1984), pp. 617–48;
N. Gleditsch, “Democracy and Peace,” Journal of Peace Research, 29 (1992), pp. 369–76;
J.D. Hagan, “Domestic Political Systems and War Proneness,” Mershon International Studies Review, 38 (1994), pp. 183–207;
D. Lake, “Powerful Pacifists: Democratic States and War,” American Political Science Review, 86 (1992), pp. 24–37;
C. Layne, “Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace,” International Security, 19 (1994), pp. 5–49;
J. Levy, “Domestic Politics and War,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 18 (1988), pp. 653–73;
Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, Principles for a Post-Cold War Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993);
D. Spiro, “The Insignificance of the Liberal Peace,” International Security, 19 (1994), pp. 50–86;
H. Starr, “Why Don’t Democracies Fight One Another?: Evaluating the Theory-Findings Feedback Loop,” Jerusalem Journal of International Relations, 14 (1992), pp. 41–59. With the proliferation of these studies over the past several years, several scholars have reached the conclusion that the existence of a liberal peace is “as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations.” Gleditsch, “Democracy and Peace,” p. 372 and Levy, “Domestic Politics and War,” pp. 661–62 in Huntley, “Kant’s Third Image,” p. 46.
Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 100.
Chris Brown, International Relations Theory (London: MacMillan Press, 1997), p. 36.
Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs, Part 1,” p. 229. As noted in note 1 from the Introduction, for purposes of uniformity throughout the book, any text quoted from Kant’s Perpetual Peace, excepting only that commentary by authors who may quote directly from other translations in their interpretation of the treatise, derives from the following translation: Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Reiss, trans. Nisbet. Here, as opposed to the Nisbet translation, Doyle chooses to use a translation of Perpetual Peace from Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace in The Enlightenment, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), pp. 790–92 Considering how central this passage is to Pattern Two, Phase Two interpretation, I believe it is helpful to my argument to demonstrate how similar the two translations are. Compare the above translation to the following translation by Nisbet of exactly the same passage: If, as is inevitably the case under this constitution, the consent of the citizens is required to decide whether or not war is to be declared, it is very natural that they will have great hesitation in embarking on so dangerous an enterprise. For this would mean calling down on themselves all the miseries of war, such as doing the fighting themselves, supplying the costs of the war from their own resources, painfully making good the ensuing devastation, and, as the crowning evil, having to takes upon themselves a burden of debt which will embitter peace itself and which can never be paid off on account of the constant threat of new wars. But under a constitution where the subject is not a citizen, and which is therefore not republican, it is the simplest thing in the world to go to war. For the head of state is not a fellow citizen, but the owner of the state, and a war will not force him to make the slightest sacrifice so far as his banquets, hunts, pleasure palaces and court festivals are concerned. He can thus decide on war, without any significant reason, as a kind of amusement, and unconcernedly leave it to the diplomatic corps (who are always ready for such purposes) to justify the war for the sake of propriety. (Kant, Perpetual Peace, ed. Reiss, trans. Nisbet, p. 100. A detailed comparison of both reveals little difference between the two)
Anthony Smith, “Kant’s Political Philosophy: Rechsstaat or Council Democracy?” Review of Politics, 47 (April 1985), p. 258.
Peter Calvocoresi, A Time for Peace: Pacifism, Internationalism and Protest Forces in the Reduction of War (London, Melbourne, Auckland, and Johannesburg: Hutchinson, 1987), p. 48.
Leslie A. Mulholland, “Kant on War and International Justice,” Kant-Studien, 78 (1987), p. 33.
Thomas L. Carson, “Perpetual Peace: What Kant Should Have Said,” Social Theory and Practice, 14, No. 2 (Summer 1988), p. 184.
Ian Clark, The Hierarchy of States: Reform and Resistance in the International Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 55.
Sissela Bok, A Strategy for Peace: Human Values and the Threat of War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), p. 32.
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© 2004 Eric S. Easley
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Easley, E.S. (2004). Pattern Two, Phase Two: State Sovereignty Preserved I. In: The War Over Perpetual Peace. The Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403978714_6
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