Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal

by James Bohman (Editor), Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (Editor)

In 1795 Immanuel Kant published an essay entitled "Toward Perpetual A Philosophical Sketch." The immediate occasion for the essay was the March 1795 signing of the Treaty of Basel by Prussia and revolutionary France, which Kant condemned as only "the suspension of hostilities, not a peace." In the essay, Kant argues that it is humankind's immediate duty to solve the problem of violence and enter into the cosmopolitan ideal of a universal community of all peoples governed by the rule of law.The essay's two-hundredth anniversary, 1995, also marked the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II and of the establishment of the Charter of the United Nations. The essays in this volume were written for a conference held in Frankfurt in May 1995 to commemorate these three anniversaries. Together, the authors argue for the continued theoretical and practical relevance of the cosmopolitan ideals of Kant's essay. They also show that history has both confirmed and outstripped Kant's prognoses. As recent events have shown, we certainly have not emerged from the violence of the state of nature. Accelerating globalization also gives these reconstructions and reappraisals of Kant's cosmopolitan ideal a new urgency. Contributors
Karl-Otto Apel, Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, Jürgen Habermas, David Held, Axel Honneth, Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, Thomas McCarthy, Martha Nussbaum

Genres: Philosophy

266 pages, Paperback

First published June 6, 1997

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

While looking for Kant's "Perpetual Peace", I accidentally borrowed this book of the same name. It is a collection of academic essays contributed to a conference celebrating the bicentennial of Kant's 1795 book. To some surprise, most of these essays, despite their oft-turgid prose and their dating to 1995, are relevant today. None of the essays, not even one by Habermas, especially stands out; they are uniform in their message that Kant foretold a future liberal international order but incompletely. The essay authors are also uniformly somewhat dark in mood, defying and even refuting the liberal optimism of the time, between the end of the Cold War and before the 9/11 attacks. By 1995 the world had already witnessed the horrors of Somalia and Bosnia and Rwanda and other what were (and in some cases still are) essentially civil wars. The essayists react to this by praising (or perhaps merely assuming) Kant's forward-thinking vision, while also pointing out the weaknesses revealed by the seeming outbreak of communal conflicts along ethnic, linguistic, and religious lines after the fall of the Berlin Wall. (I would dispute this narrative; instead I see that internecine warfare continued nonstop from the World Wars to the present day, Cold War or no Cold War, but that is another matter). The essayists' critiques are nicely summarized by the editor in 3 categories: 1) there is not inevitability in progress toward an international order, liberal or otherwise. 2) it would be necessary for an international order's member states to cede some national sovereignty, leading to something inbetween a federation of states and a single world government. 3) it is possible and probably inevitable that individual people have both local communitarian and global cosmopolitan identities, but the latter identities necessitate a concept of universal human rights. This last point segues into the issue of illiberal societies, governments that are not the republics envisioned by Kant, but which are nevertheless stable and legitimate in the eyes of most of their inhabitants. Some of those essayists anticipate the sort of communal conflict represented by such actors as Al-Qaeda (something which Kant did not anticipate), but those same essayists would probably be shocked by the degree their concern for illiberal states is matched by the surge in repeatedly re-elected autocrats (and wannabe autocrats) today.