Immanuel Kant: Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. In H. M. Reis, editor: Kant: The Political Writings. H. B. Nisbet translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
While cheerfully admitting that the only really perpetual peace is the peace of the grave, Kant nevertheless soldiers on, proposing an institutional structure for achieving perpetual peace among states. To what degree, if any, does his proposal require the doctrine of natural-evolutionary progress enunciated in his writings on history to make it plausible?
Kant propounds six “preliminary articles” to any such international agreement. First, “no conclusion of peace shall be considered valid as such if it was made with a secret reservation of the material for a future war.” Peace is not a mere truce. A genuine peace treaty “nullifies all existing reasons for a future war,” doing so with no “mental reservation.” This distinction may be seen in Islamic thought, which distinguishes the dar-es-Islam, the realm of peace, not only from the dar-es-harb, the realm of war, but from the dar-es-sulh, the realm of truce. “If, in accordance with ‘enlightened’ notions of political expediency”—prominently advocated by Machiavelli and his followers—we “believe that the true glory of a state consists of the constant increase of its power by any means whatsoever, the above judgment will certainly appear academic and pedantic.” Be that as it may, it is indispensable to the perpetuation of peace.
Second, “no independently existing state, whether it be large or small, may be acquired by another state by inheritance, exchange, purchase or gift.” This was common practice in Europe, where monarchs and aristocrats acquired or shed territories without the consent of those they ruled. Kant demurs. A state is “not a possession,” a patrimony, but “a society of men, which no one other than itself can command or dispose of.” In other words, it is not a commodity but “a moral personality,” established by an “original contract” among its members; without that contract, “the rights of a people are unthinkable,” in real-world practice if not in theory. The same goes for the use of mercenaries, “troops of one state” hired by another “to fight an enemy who is not common to both.” Such mercenaries are being “used and misused as objects to be manipulated at will,” not as persons. Machiavelli deprecated the use of mercenaries as injurious to civic virtù. Kant deprecates their use for the injury it does to virtue, to life conducted in accordance with the categorical imperative.
Third, “standing armies (miles perpetuus) will gradually abolished altogether.” The existence of standing armies “spur on the states to outdo one another in arming unlimited numbers of soldiers. “Such armies must be paid; although they are not mercenaries hired by a foreign state, they are mercenaries hired by their own state to be used as “mere machines and instruments in the hands of someone else (the state),” in obvious violation of Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ always to treat men as ends, not as means. Kant does not deny the need for militias, whereby “citizens undertake voluntary military training from time to time in order to secure themselves and their fatherland against attacks from outsiders.” But mercenaries fight for money, and money changes everything, since “the power of money” is “probably the most reliable instrument of war.”
Regarding money, “no national debt shall be contracted in connection with the eternal affairs of the state.” Not only is debt itself bad for debtor and creditor alike, but “a credit system, if used by the powers as an instrument of aggression against one another, shows the power of money in its most dangerous form,” making it easy to wage war. “Coupled with the warlike inclination of those in power (which seems to be an integral feature of human nature),” war debt presents “a great obstacle in the way of perpetual peace.” Indeed, “other states are thus justified in allying themselves against such a state and its pretensions.” Writing in 1795, Kant has Great Britain specifically in mind. With its well-organized banking system, its centerpiece being financial credit, Great Britain poses a threat to the peace of continental Europe.
Fifth, “no state shall forcibly interfere in the constitution and government of another state,” “for what could justify such interference?” “A bad example is no injury.” This article integrates the principle of the Peace of Westphalia, by then a century and a half old, into Kant’s proposal. He stipulates an exception to this principle: an alliance with one faction in a foreign state after a civil war that has resulted in the dissolution of that state into two or more sovereign states. Such an alliance during the civil war itself is forbidden, however. This article follows from the principle that states should be independent, ‘autonomous’—giving laws to themselves and to themselves only. This again comports with Kant’s categorical imperative, amounting to a political application of that moral law.
Finally, “no state at war with another shall permit such acts of hostility as would make mutual confidence impossible during a future time of peace.” Examples include assassination, breach of agreements, and “the instigation of treason within the enemy state.” War is war, but without some modicum of trust between the warring parties their war will become “a war of extermination.” Such a war would indeed result in the peace of the grave, a “perpetual peace only on the vast graveyard of the human race.” As a ” regrettable expedient for asserting one’s rights within a state of nature, where no court of justice is available to judge with legal authority” the merits of the grievances on either side, a declaration of war cannot be a matter of punishment, since “no relationship of superior to inferior,” of judge to accused, pertains among them. Acts of hostility that might well be “carried over into peacetime” contradict peace itself, make any treaty into a truce.
Kant distinguishes the preliminary articles that must be followed immediately from those that can be acknowledged as eventual. The article prohibiting interference in a foreign regime and the two articles that maintain the distinction between peace and truce must be observed strictly and immediately. The article denying the right to exchange territories ‘above the heads’ of the people can be fulfilled more gradually, as can the prohibition of standing armies and war debts. Although these “are not exceptions to the rule of justice,” they do “allow some subjective latitude according to the circumstances in which they are applied.” Categorical imperative or not, Kant does admit the need for prudence in politics.
Kant concurs with Hobbes’s claim that “a state of peace of men living together is not the same as the state of nature, which is rather a state of war.” As with men in the state of nature coming together to form a social contract with one another, which eliminates the state of war insofar as they conform to that contract in the future, so with states in the state of nature that now exists among them. A “state of peace must be formally instituted” amongst them, too. In both cases, “a mere state of nature robs me of any such security” that I seek for my person or property, “injur[ing] me by virtue of this very state in which [another person] coexists with me.” This being so, “I can require him either to enter into a common lawful state with me or to move away from my vicinity” as a moral duty respecting my natural rights. Legal constitutions come in three types: civil constitutions, “based on the civil right of individuals within a nation”; international constitutions, “based on the international right of states in their relationships with one another”—the ius gentium of writers on the law of nations; and “a constitution based on cosmopolitan right, in so far as individuals and states, coexisting in an external relationship of mutual influences, may be regarded as citizens of a universal state of mankind.” This latter constitution, which Kant calls the ius cosmopoliticum, would entail a ‘global’ system of institutions and laws—that is, a real system, not simply the agglomeration of international treaties and practices which compose the ius gentium. The cosmopolitan constitution would more nearly resemble the social-contract regimes established in civil societies.
Such a constitution will require three “definitive” (as distinguished from “preliminary”) articles. The first stipulates that “the civil constitution of every State shall be republican, guaranteeing freedom for all members as men, that is, as human beings, dependence of every member upon one set of laws, as subjects, and legal equality for all, as citizens. “Rightful” or “external” freedom “cannot, as is usually thought, be defined as a warrant to do whatever one wishes unless it means doing injustice to others,” a definition Kant considers tautological—perhaps more precisely, the definition leaves justice and injustice undefined. Rightful freedom rightly understood is “a warrant to obey no external laws except those to which I have been able to give my own consent.” Similarly, rightful legal equality means that “no one can put anyone else under a legal obligation without submitting simultaneously to a law which requires that he can himself be put under the same kind of obligation by the other persons.” Both of these are “innate and inalienable rights, the necessary property of mankind.” As such, they exist regardless of what may be said about divine laws. “I am not under any obligation even to divine laws (which I can recognize by reason alone), except in so far as I have been able to give my own consent to them; for I can form a conception of the divine will only in terms of the law of freedom of my own reason.” That law can only be, for Kant, his categorical imperative. This stricture does not apply to the principle of equality, however since the relationship of man to God is radically unequal: “God is the only being for whom the concept of duty ceases to be valid,” having no superior to which He needs to report. Politically, the republican regime follows from these principles of right. Kant regards republicanism as the only constitution which can flow from an original social contract, the only one that “springs from the pure concept of right.”
Here as everywhere in his writings, Kant redefines natural right, which in the modern philosophers included equality as much as freedom, strictly in terms of reason, which (he claims) issues in the categorical imperative. The problem is that the categorical imperative itself is self-contradictory, not rational, as Hegel was soon to demonstrate. The categorical imperative claims that no moral choice can be valid unless the principle or maxim animating it can be universalizable. ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ for example, is a universalizable maxim. Unfortunately, ‘Thou shalt steal’ is also a universalizable maxim—one instantiated, for example, by cadets at West Point who act under an imperative to steal one another’s caps. Two contradictory maxims are equally universalizable, unless one smuggles in a prior right to property. The same goes for ‘Thou shalt not kill’ and all similar moral laws; their universalizability depends upon the divine law or right, the natural law or right, or a historical law or right—the latter being Hegel’s choice and the choice of ‘historicists’ generally. The categorical imperative is an unstable halfway house between natural and historical right. Perhaps for rhetorical purposes, Kant often maintains the term, ‘natural rights,’ even as he has altered its meaning.
Kant argues that republican regimes are likely to be peaceful because few among the sovereign people will call down upon themselves the miseries of war. He knows that ancient democracies were decidedly warlike, but republicanism isn’t democracy. Although republics are democratic with respect to sovereignty, with the many or all ruling, not the one or the few, republics separate executive from legislative power. In despotisms, the executive and legislative powers combine, “reflect[ing] the will of the people only in so far as the ruler treats the will of the people as his own private will.” In democracies, the people are the despots because they both vote for the laws and policies of the state and then carry them out. But “one and the same person cannot at the same time be both the legislator and the executor of his own will.” Therefore, “if the mode of government is to accord with the concept of right, it must be based on the representative system,” without which “despotism and violence will result, no matter what kind of constitution is in force.” That is why the ancient democracies “inevitably ended in despotism.”
In this, Kant departs from Montesquieu, the philosopher who originated the claim that republics do not make war upon each other, although they may very well make war against other regimes, which are often inclined to attack them. Montesquieu made this argument concerning not republics simply but commercial republics, which add the incentive to avoid disruptions in trade to the popular aversion to risking one’s own life. This is in keeping with Kant’s preference for pure motives in morals and consequently in politics. While recognizing that impure motives usually prevail, he will not admit them in principle. Montesquieu, less firmly opposed to a sort of tamed Machiavellianism, does not go so far. [1]
Kant’s second definitive article states that “the right of nations shall be based on the federation of free States.” Given the dangerous state of nature in which all sovereign states now live in relation to one another, a condition of “standing offense to one another by the very fact that they are neighbors,” “each nation, for the sake of its own security, can and ought to demand of the others that they should enter along with it into a constitution, similar to the civil one, within which the rights of each could be secured,” a “federation of peoples.” Kant hastens to write that this “would not be the same thing as an international state.” An international state contradicts the right of nations because “every state involves a relationship between a superior (the legislator) and an inferior (the people obeying the laws), whereas a number of nations forming one state would constitute a single nation.”
Today, Kant declares, the European states are worse than the barbarians of America who practice cannibalism. Modern European states use the peoples they defeat in war, violating the categorical imperative to treat all human beings as ends, not means, and “thereby augmenting their stock of instruments for conducting even more extensive wars” instead of merely eating their victims. This notwithstanding, European states do give verbal homage to international right, indicating that such right does exist, even if “dormant.” Natural right cannot extend the right of civil peace from individuals to states because states already have “a lawful internal constitution” whereas no such constitution prevails among states, which are not natural entities, in their external relations. Reason, however, “as the highest legislative moral,” as distinguished from natural, “power, absolutely condemns war as a test of rights and sets up peace as an immediate duty.” The federation Kant envisions “would seek to end all wars for good.”
It can do so because it aims not to acquire statelike power, instead aiming “to preserve the freedom of each state in itself, along with that of the other confederated states.” This is the Peace of Westphalia plus a republican regime within each federation member. A worldwide federation of republican states “is practicable and has objective reality” because “if by good fortune one powerful and enlightened nation can form a republic (which is by its nature inclined to seek perpetual peace), this will provide a focal point for federal association among other states.” This “free federation” of states would thus serve as a “substitute for the union of civil society.” In 1795, the United States was lacked the power needed to function this way, but a century later, Woodrow Wilson would be attending. [2]
Kant again rejects the notion of world government as utopian, at least now. He has no objection to one in principle. Indeed, “the only rational way in which states coexisting with other states can emerge from the lawless condition of pure warfare” is to act like “individual men” in the state of nature, “renounce their savage and lawless freedom, adapt themselves to public coercive laws, and thus form an international state which would necessarily continue to grow until it embraced all the peoples of the earth.” But “this is not the will of the nations, according to their present conception of international right,” and so the worldwide federation will remain the only practicable solution to the problem of war.
Turning to the third and final definitive principle based upon “cosmopolitan” right,” this right “shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality,” that is, the right of a foreigner “not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory.” “No one originally has any greater right than anyone else to occupy any particular portion of the earth,” a condition of equality that changes only with the institution of civil society. European states now claim the right to invade one another while denying the right of foreign citizens merely to visit; they further claim the right to imperial conquest of “America, the negro countries, the Spice Islands, the Cape,” places “looked upon at the time of their discovery as ownerless territories “because Europeans “counted as nothing” their “native inhabitants.” “This led to oppression of the natives, incitement of the various Indian states to widespread wars, famine, insurrection, treachery and the whole litany of evils which can afflict the human race, “the work pf powers who make endless ado about their piety.”
Kant foresees a better condition. The very acts of violence seen in imperial conquest shows that “the peoples of the earth” have “entered in varying degrees into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere.” Thus the idea of cosmopolitan right proves “a necessary complement to the unwritten and international right, transforming it into a universal right of humanity.” If so, this would confirm Kant’s claim that nature in its evolution brings human beings to morality without their intending any such thing. ‘Historicized’ nature replaces divine providence.
Thus “perpetual peace is guaranteed by no less an authority than the great artist Nature herself,” its “mechanical process” exhibiting “the purposive plan of producing concord among men, even against their will and indeed by their very discord.” Call it fate, call it providence, this plan, “far-fetched in theory,” nonetheless “possess[es] dogmatic validity and has a very real foundation in practice”—perhaps the Enlightenment equivalent of Socrates’ ‘noble lie,’ but with a sounder foundation in fact. Better to call it nature, out of “modesty.”
Nature has proceeded toward peace by a series of steps: humans are able to live in many regions of the earth; nature drove them into those regions by means of war; nature then compelled them to “enter into more or less legal relationships” to secure property (agriculture being more civilized than hunting); with property secure, trading became possible, establishing peaceful relations, often, between the nations. Thus Kant brings in Montesquieu’s commercial relations, not so much in civil societies as in international politics. More, the war that drives nations apart, initially, teaches them to love honor; risking one’s life transcends “selfish motives,” at least insofar as these are material. Since “wars are often started merely to display this quality…war itself is invested with an inherent dignity.”
War “help[s] to promote” man’s “moral purpose” in his political, international, and cosmopolitan rights. Politically, war forces nations to organize themselves internally, so that they can become battle-ready. The “universal and rational human will,” “admirable in itself but so impotent in practice,” thereby begins to instantiate itself. This is where Kant delivers his famous remark, “As hard as it may sound, the problem of setting up a state may be solved even by a nation of devils (so long as they possess understanding).” The institutional aspects of republican regimes can be designed by discovering “how the mechanism of nature can be applied to men in such a manner that the antagonism of their hostile attitudes will make them compel one another to submit to coercive laws, thereby producing a condition of peace within which the laws can be enforced.”
Internationally, Kant continues to prefer a federation of republics to the other candidate for perpetual peace, a universal monarchy which amalgamates the nations “under a single power.” Universal monarchy—he may be thinking of the pretensions of the Holy Roman Empire—overbears consent and laws freely consented to, “as the government increases its range, and a soulless despotism, after crushing the seeds of goodness, will, finally lapse into anarchy.” “Nature wills it otherwise,” having separated the nations into linguistic and religious groups initially hostile to one another. “But as culture grows and men gradually move towards greater agreement over their principles, they lead to mutual understanding and peace,” a peace guaranteed precisely by “an equilibrium of forces and a most vigorous rivalry” among the nations.
Cosmopolitan right, finally, sees nature unite with commerce. Commerce “cannot exist side by side with war,” which the bankers upon which commerce depends will seek to prevent it. Although this might lead to the notion of a cabal of international bankers, so familiar to this day, Kant has another thing in mind. There will be a “secret article of a perpetual peace”: “The maxims of the philosophers on the conditions under which public peace is possible shall be consulted by states which are armed for war.” Kant concedes that “it is not to be expected that kings will philosophize or that philosophers will become kings,” as per the well-known suggestion of Plato’s Socrates. “Nor is it to be desired, however, since the possession of power inevitably corrupts the free judgment of reason.” “Kings or sovereign peoples (i. e. those governing themselves by egalitarian laws) should not, however, force the class of philosophers to disappear or to remain silent, but should allow them to speak publicly,” so that “light may be thrown on their affairs.” Enlightenment, indeed: Kant differs in this respect from Socrates, who does not so much suppose that politics will corrupt philosophers as take up too much of their time. For Kant, morality consists essentially of rules, rules based upon the master-rule, the categorical imperative. For Socrates, the ‘transcendental’ realm of the Ideas causes philosophers to become disoriented, not corrupted, when they return to ‘the Cave’ of political life. The remedy for this disorientation is not withdrawal from politics because the Ideas are not rules. They are guides, at best to be approximated by the prudential judgment of citizens. A political philosopher does not ‘enlighten’ his fellow citizens so much as he engages them in dialogue, with due caution and a certain irony. In his role as prophetic lawgiver, Kant’s philosophers are “by nature incapable of forming seditious factions or clubs,” and “cannot incur suspicion of disseminating propaganda.” To which one can only reply, ‘Ahem,’ a term not to be confused with ‘Amen.’ Perhaps Kant himself is indulging in a bit of Socratic irony?
To his credit, Kant addresses the need for prudential reasoning in his Appendices, “On the Disagreement Between Morals and Politics in Relation to Perpetual Peace” and “On the Agreement Between Politics and Morality According to the Transcendental Concept of Public Right.” Be wise as serpents, the political man says, to which the moralist adds, be as harmless as doves. Jesus evidently sees no necessary contradiction between these (as Kant would put it) maxims, likely because He regards prudence to be as much a virtue as harmlessness. Kant, too, wants to reconcile them, on somewhat different grounds. Since prudential reasoning “is not sufficiently enlightened to discover the whole series of predetermining causes which would allow it to predict accurately the happy or unhappy consequence of human activities as dictated by the mechanism of nature,” at best it can “tell us what our duty is.” That is, it can lay down the law of conduct for ourselves. To this, “the man of practice” will oppose a theoretical judgment, that “human nature” ensures that “man will never want to do what is necessary in order to attain the goal of eternal peace.” Kant has already supplied his answer, that a sound constitution, backed by force, can rule a race of devils whom the state can overpower. Civil laws give the rule of force “a veneer of morality but in a salutary way, by making it “much easier for the moral capacities of men to develop into an immediate respect for the right” once each person “believes of himself that he would by all means maintain the sanctity of the concept of right and obey it faithfully, if only he could be certain that all the others would do likewise.” A rightly ordered government, a republic, “guarantees this for him,” taking “a great step towards morality,” that is, towards “a state in where the concept of duty is recognized for its own sake, irrespective of any possible gain in return.”
Despite all this, there can be such a person as a “moral politician,” as distinguished from a “political moralist”—one who “fashions his morality to suit his own advantage as a statesman.” The moral politician “make[s] it a principle that, if any faults which could not have been prevented are discovered in the political constitution or in the relation between states, it is a duty, especially for heads of state, to see to it that they are corrected as soon as possible,” that “political institutions are made to conform to natural right, which stands before us as a model in the idea of practical reason”—rule-based, however, as Kant has insisted. Having seen the results of the French Revolution, Kant distances himself from any suggestion that morality entitles us “to destroy any of the existing bonds of political or cosmopolitan union before a better constitution has been prepared to take their place.” He is rather concerned with the ‘Machiavellian’ politicians “who do not know man and his potentialities,” a convenient ignorance that enables them to worship “the god of success,” to deflect blame for failure on others, and to pursue the policy of divide and rule. “Such theories are particularly damaging, because they may themselves produce the very evil they predict” by “put[ting man into the same class as other living machines,” denying human freedom.
Kant in no way abandons the categorical imperative, demanding that “act[ing] in such a way that you can wish your maxim to become a universal law,” regardless of “what the end in view may be” remains an “absolute necessity.” Following his own model of the philosophic enlightener, Kant offers a revised Biblical maxim: “Seek ye first the kingdom of pure practical reason,” not the Kingdom of God, “and its righteousness, and your object (the blessing of perpetual peace) will be added unto you.” While he’s at it, he proposes a novel translation of the maxim, fiat iusticia, pereat mundus” as “let justice reign, even if all the rogues in the world must perish.” There’s a hint of Jacobinism in our Immanuel, after all. It is possible that he believes that the world will not perish if justice is done because the world cannot perish; as we’ve seen, he claims that nature is ‘providential,’ if by accident. He wisely adds that “the true courage of virtue…does not consist, in the present case, in resolutely standing up to the evils and sacrifices which must be encountered, as in facing the evil principle within ourselves and overcoming its wiles.” The self-righteousness of a Robespierre really is best avoided. In the end, he denies that peoples have the right to revolution, the right to overthrow “a so-called tyrant.” That is because irresistible supreme power is necessary in order to be a true head of state and any sudden collapse of state power would lead (France-like) to anarchy followed by worse tyranny, Jacobin guillotines followed by Napoleon.
With regard to international right, Kant supposes that if one member refused his obligations, others would desert him, thus defeating his own purpose. It suffices to remark that Hitler and others have disproved this claim to the extent that they can overbear the other federation members. Nor may weaker states strike pre-emptively and remain faithful to the categorical imperative; “if a state were to let it be known that it affirmed this maxim” of pre-emption, “it would merely bring about more surely and more quickly the very evil it feared,” given a greater power’s capacity to play divide-and-conquer against weaker rivals. That is, the maxim of pre-emption is neither universalizable nor practicable. However, it has proved practicable under certain circumstances, notably the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
More generally, while it is not true that “all maxims which can be made public are therefore also just,” since a great power could announce an evil intention without worry of serious reprisal, it is true that “all maxims which require publicity if they are not to fail in their purpose can be reconciled both with right and with politics.” Such maxims require consent, conformity “to the universal aim of the public,” happiness; further, because only within [public right] is it possible to unite the ends of everyone.” The second consideration assures that the maxim conforms to the categorical imperative.
At the end of his book, Kant acknowledges that for perpetual peace not to be “just an empty idea” there will need to be “an infinite process of gradual approximation” to it. That is, the ‘historicized’ nature he propounds must take its course.
Note
- See Harvey C. Mansfield: Taming the Prince. New York: The Free Press, 1989.
- See William Galston: Kant and the Problem of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975, pp. 26-27.
Recent Comments