Abstract
With the end of the Cold War and following Doyle’s authoritative study, Kant’s Perpetual Peace experienced a surge in popularity during the first half of the 1990s. Beyond the proliferation of liberal peace advocates that reference Kant and the text in their various empirical studies during this period, there were a whole host of commentators who more substantively reviewed his text from 1990 to 1995. In fact, this brief five-year time span has the greatest concentration of thorough interpretations of Kant’s treatise in comparison with all other periods under consideration. In this chapter, I explore these interpretations in detail and continue the argument initially developed in chapter 5 that the practical reason for adopting a republican constitution outlined in the First Definitive Article becomes one of the most important parts of the text for this group of commentators in their search for what the work ultimately suggests to achieve peace. Considering the relative length of the chapter, I have chosen to divide it into two sections for the convenience of the reader. The principal interpretations discussed first offer the most detailed, comprehensive analyses of the text. The subsidiary interpretations that follow present more concise accounts of Kant’s work.
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Notes
Howard Williams and Ken Booth claim that the perceived “liberal triumphalism” at the end of the 1980s and the notion that “World politics … seemed to be moving in a ‘Kantian’ direction elevated the status of the great Prussian philosopher within International Relations circles.” 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), p. 73.
Andrew Hurrell, “Kant and the Kantian Paradigm in International Relations,” Review of International Studies, 16 (1990), p. 183.
Hurrell, Kant and the Kantian Paradigm, p. 189. Hurrell takes this quotation (along with all others in his article) from Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
Chris Brown, International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1992), p. 31 (emphasis in original).
Fernando R. Tesòn, “The Kantian Theory of International Law,” Columbia Law Review, 92 (January 1992), pp. 53–54. Tesón uses the following translation of Perpetual Peace throughout this article:
Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History and Morals, intro. and trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983).
Cecelia Lynch offers the following summary of Tesòns thesis in a 1994 interpretation of Perpetual Peace to be discussed more thoroughly later: “Fernando Tesòn, for example, has combined a liberal interpretation of Kant with the findings of the ‘democratic peace’ literature to argue in favor of founding international law on principles of respect for the sovereignty of liberal states only.” Cecelia Lynch, “Kant, the Republican Peace, and Moral Guidance in International Law,” Ethics and International Affairs, 8 (1994), p. 46.
Gabriel L. Negretto, “Kant and the Illusion of Collective Security,” Journal of International Affairs, 46 (Winter 1993), p. 506.
Negretto, “Kant and the Illusion of Collective Security,” p. 509. Negretto notes in Footnote 4 that Kant’s Perpetual Peace pamphlet is reprinted in Immanuel Kant, On History, ed. and trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963). Negretto, “Kant and the Illusion of Collective Security,” p. 503.
Georg Cavallar, “Kant’s Society of Nations: Free Federation or World Republic?” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 32 (July 1994), p. 476.
Jürg Martin Gabriel, Worldviews and Theories of International Relations (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 51.
Gabriel, Worldviews and Theories, p. 56. While Gabriel calls it “crucial” here, James Lee Ray, in a book about the liberal peace written during this same period, refers to the “consent of the citizens” selection from Perpetual Peace as “The essence of Kant’s argument that democracy is an important force for peace.” James Lee Ray, Democracy and International Conflict: An Evaluation of the Democratic Peace Proposition (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), p. 1.
Charles Covell, Kant, Liberalism and the Pursuit of Justice in the International Order, Studies in the History of International Relations, Band 1 (Munster, Hamburg: Lit, 1994), p. 23.
Daniele Archibugi, “Models of International Organization in Perpetual Peace Projects,” Review of International Studies, 18 (1992), p. 311.
Michael C. Williams, “Reason and Realpolitik: Kant’s Critique of International Politics,” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 25 (March 1992), p. 110.
Jens Bartleson, “The Trial of Judgment: A Note on Kant and the Paradoxes of Internationalism,” International Studies Quarterly, 39 (1995), p. 266.
Allen Wood, “Kant’s Project for Perpetual Peace” in Proceedings of the Eighth International Kant Congress, Memphis 1995, Volume One (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1995), p. 3.
In addition to the more relevant Eighth International Kant Congress, the following Kant congresses were considered in my research: L.W. Beck, ed., Proceedings of the Third International Kant Congress, Two Volumes (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1972);
Gerhard Funke and Thomas M. Seebohm, eds., Proceedings of the Sixth International Kant Congress, Two Volumes (Washington, D.C: University Press of America, 1989).
The following papers from the Eighth International Kant Congress that generally discuss Perpetual Peace can be found in Hoke Robinson, ed., Proceedings of the Eighth International Kant Congress, Two Volumes (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1995): Sharon Byrd, “Perpetual Peace: A 20th Century Project,” pp. 343–57; Sharon Byrd, “The State as a ‘Moral Person,’ ” pp. 171–89; Georg Geismann, “On the Philosophically Unique Realism of Kant’s Doctrine of Eternal Peace,” pp. 273–89; Paul Guyer, “Nature, Morality and the Possibility of Peace,” pp. 51–69; Ludwig Siep, “Kant and Hegel on Peace and International Law,” pp. 259–72; Harry Van der Linden, “Kant: the Duty to Promote International Peace and Political Intervention,” pp. 71–79; Allen Wood, “Kant’s Project for Perpetual Peace,” pp. 3–18.
Kenneth W Thompson, Fathers of International Thought, The Legacy of Political Theory (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), p. 108.
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© 2004 Eric S. Easley
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Easley, E.S. (2004). Pattern Two, Phase Two: State Sovereignty Preserved II. In: The War Over Perpetual Peace. The Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403978714_7
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