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Kant was the greatest of modern philosophers. He held that we have knowledge of the phenomenal world alone; of the realm of the noumenal we have only moral experience. But he had moral passion in his notion of the categorical imperative, or goodwill dedicated to duty. Kant’s revolutionism is seen in the idea of the homogeneity of states—a federation of ‘republics’; or alternatively in cosmopolitanism— a world of individuals and peoples rather than of governments and states. Kant’s belief in the harmony of interests underlies his doctrine of progress. There are categories of Kantians, although Kant himself was both comprehensive and universal as a philosopher.

This chapter shows how Fichte's response to Kant's essay Perpetual Peace culminated in The Closed Commercial State. Kant's essay defined the legal character of a peaceful international community. It also identified the historical processes favoring the emergence of an increasingly legalized and demilitarized European states system. The Closed Commercial State elaborated Kant's historical model into an account of the rise of global trade and its impact on state formation. Fichte concluded that the pacification of Europe envisioned by Kant was predicated on a resolution to the conflicts unleashed by heightened economic competition, both between and within states. In making this argument, Fichte developed an account of commerce and international relations that was closely aligned with contemporary pro-French and anti-English views of global trade and the European states system. Like Kant's Perpetual Peace, Fichte's Closed Commercial State was a highly abstracted theoretical investigation occasioned by a French diplomatic initiative championed by Sieyès. However, Fichte was much more willing than Kant to work out the details of a reform strategy predicated on Sieyès's efforts to engineer a French-led restructuring of the European balance of power.

Chapter 8 examines the qualities of Europeanism as they relate to perceptions about relations between Europe and the rest of the world. After centuries of assertion—expressed most obviously by colonialism and imperialism—post‐war Europe has fundamentally altered the way it sees itself in the world. Europeans have emphasized Kantian peace and cooperation in their dealings with each other, while on the global stage they have switched away from reliance on military power towards civilian power. They have also adopted a combination of hard and soft power tools, now increasingly described as smart power, or an adept use of a balance of coercion and encouragement. Europeanism champions internationalism, engagement, diplomacy, and multilateralism, not—as some would have us believe—because they no longer can afford large militaries, but because their history has suggested to them the futility of a reliance on militarism, and instead encouraged them to seek the achievement of perpetual and positive peace.

This essay examines the relation between Kant's Toward Perpetual Peace and the nature–freedom problem posed in the third Critique. The problem concerns the “immense gulf,” which separates the supersensible from appearances and which seems to stand in the way of their influencing one another (KU 5: 175). According to Kant, this gulf arises because the ends set by the “laws of freedom” (various aspects of the highest good) ought to be realized in the sensible world, even though this world is governed by mechanistic laws that are indifferent to these ends. After spelling out Kant's approach to the problem and its connection with his conception of the reflective power of judgment, this analysis is applied to Kant's account of how human nature may, apart from any moral considerations, be thought to lead to the institution of republican forms of government and perpetual peace.

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's focus, namely Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), whose investigation of the idea of perpetual peace culminated in his Der geschlossene Handelsstaat, or The Closed Commercial State (1800). Fichte was a sometime disciple and self-appointed successor of Kant, and is widely regarded as a major philosopher in his own right, but much of his political thought has yet to receive the sustained attention it deserves. His Closed Commercial State was a pivotal development of Kant's model of perpetual peace. This book shows how Fichte redefined the political economy of the Kantian ideal and extended it into a strategic analysis of the prospects for pacifying modern Europe. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter examines the role of states in Kant's cosmopolitan federation and attempts to clarify the relationship between the rights of states and the concept of cosmopolitan law. It explores Kant's move away from the traditional natural law concept of jus gentium to the idea of a pacific federation and its corresponding feature of cosmopolitan law. It outlines and examines the three definitive articles of Perpetual Peace and their primary significance in creating a cosmopolitan order. Through this exegetical examination, the chapter seeks to resolve the debate between Kantian scholars as to whether Kant's cosmopolitanism must be understood as advocating a federation of free states or a world republic. The chapter concludes by comparing Kant's cosmopolitanism to contemporary theories.

This chapter examines the opposition between productive war and purposeless violence through Immanuel Kant’s and Sayyid Quṭb’s writings on peace. Kant criticizes colonialism, but he passively sanctions its historical structures, and his ambiguities about intervention and statehood open to imperial action. Kant’s discussions of Arabian Bedouins, political economy, and hospitality, and his construction of the globe through imagery drawn from Orientalism, reframe how his peace plan produces an unjust enemy. Meanwhile, Quṭb’s theorizations of empire and postcolonialism diagnose Euro-American empires as unjust enemies. In his neglected peace plan, he proposes reforming the legal order of states in the “Islamic world,” creating a federation, and policing the globe against imperial aggression. The shared sequence of state, law, and federation provides a grammar for determining who polices the globe and for diagnosing whose political form and legal order are wrong. The idea of universal peace anticipates a lawless enemy of peace.

At the center of much of this chapter's disagreement with Jeremy Waldron is interpreting Immanuel Kant's doctrine of jus cosmopoliticum, which can be rendered into English as “cosmopolitan right” or “cosmopolitan law.” Kant's doctrine of universal hospitality opens up a space of discourse. The discourse of hospitality moves from the language of morals to that of juridical right. No matter how limited in scope the right of hospitality may be, Kant's three articles of “Perpetual Peace,” taken together, articulate principles of legal cosmopolitanism, according to which the individual is not only a moral being who is a member of a universal moral community but is also a person entitled to a certain status in a global civil society. Referring to “hospitality” as signifying all human rights claims that are cross-border in scope, may be more intelligible when viewed against the intentions of Kant's essay as a whole.

The Introduction considers the steadily rising attention given to the challenge of peacemaking across the long eighteenth century, paying special attention to the Enlightenment discourse of perpetual peace. This discourse illuminates in a concentrated way many of the key ideas that Romantic-era writers would come to explore, such as how best to define peace, how to identify the forces that tend to stand in its way, and how to understand the actions by which it is achieved and preserved. In this Introduction I offer an example of how these concerns thread through what was a virtual genre during the Romantic period, “arrival-of-peace” poems that explore a basic epistemological challenge: after so much war, how can this new thing called peace be known? My main exhibit here is Amelia Opie’s “Lines Written at Norwich on the First News of Peace” (1802), which evinces the cross-energy embodied in the discourse of the treaty—a literary mode I refer to as “treaty poetics”—in which new beginnings must coexist with past wrongs, and compensation can only partly satisfy the demands of what has been lost.

Modernity has created an age of globalization. Immanuel Kant was the first writer to connect the Enlightenment’s belief in an age of reason and criticism with the emergence of a new international order after the French Revolution. Kant was the architect of the human rights revolution that would later find expression in institutions like the United Nations and in charters like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Kant offered a road map to “perpetual peace” with his argument that when seen from a “cosmopolitan” perspective, humanity has been evolving, by fits and starts to be sure, to a condition of global governance overseen by international law. The chapter argues that Kant represents the high point of Enlightenment, yet he also dangerously underestimated the forces of nationalism and tribalism that would govern later modernity.

The essay examines Kant's thesis that “All natural predispositions of a creature are determined sometime to develop themselves completely and purposively” which is the initial proposition of “The Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim.” It explores the connection between this teleological principle, which Kant applies in the remaining propositions of his essay to the history of humankind, and the central ideas of the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment; and, in light of this connection, it argues for the controversial thesis that Kant's philosophy of history is fully “critical.” Special attention is given to what has been called the “cunning of nature,” which refers to the way in which humankind is seen as directed against its collective will to the political ends specified in Toward Perpetual Peace. It further notes, however, that Kant alludes in his essay to a trans‐political goal of history, namely, the collective realization of the highest good.

This chapter contains extended discussion on matters relating to war and peace and the relevance of Gandhi’s ideas to perpetual peace; it reveals how Gandhi’s ideas complement and go beyond those espoused by thinkers like the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. For example, both Kant and Gandhi agree that egoistic tendencies need to be checked and controlled for peace to prevail. Kant hoped that reason would accomplish this because the prohibitive costs of war and destructive potentialities posed by it make war repugnant to reason. Gandhi goes beyond reason to cultivate peace of mind in the place of ‘armed peace’ to get as close as possible to perpetual peace. The state, according to Gandhi, subsists on the power of force and, therefore, it cannot ensure peace. More significantly, Gandhi emphasized non-violence as the right means to achieve peace within the individual as well as between individuals, groups, and states.

“Perpetual peace” proposes a number of confusing arguments about the disappearance of frontiers in cosmopolitanism and their necessary maintenance in internationalism. Given pervasive images of death in the text, it transpires that the chance of perpetual peace depends on its not being perpetual (which would be death), and thus always involving a hesitation or interruption that involves an element of radical evil. This also affects our understanding of the relation between critique and doctrine in Kant’s thinking more generally.

This chapter centers around political cosmopolitanism, which seeks to convert the principles of moral-ethical universalism into practical-political terms. In this sense, politics is understood in the context of government, the state, and the organization of public affairs, with emphasis on how common assumptions about political theory are challenged by cosmopolitanism. Contemporary political cosmopolitanism takes after Immanuel Kant's conception, particularly the tension between the ends it seeks and the means for achieving them. The chapter begins by tracing Kant's proposal for perpetual peace and the difficulties of his vision of cosmopolitanism. The latter part illustrates how Kant's model has been reinforced as a form of “cosmopolitan democracy,” and how the work of contemporary cosmopolitan democrats contains hints of a cosmopolitics that could pursue cosmopolitanism's universalistic aspirations.

At the center of nonviolence as the nexus of history lies a paradox: the reality of a nonviolent revolution and the impossibility of the nonviolent state. The Chapter starts with a brief argument on why we should read the system established at Utrecht (1713), and not Westphalia (1648), to be at the origins of the nation-state and the international order within which world peace is sought. In a close reading of the “Perpetual Peace” genre in the eighteenth-century works of Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Rousseau, and Kant behind the enduring democratic peace theories, against the inherent violence of the state as expressed in the works of Robert Cover on the nature of judging, it shows the persistent relevance of the paradox, and seeks to solve it temporally and substantively.

The rise of the nation-state along with the revolution in military technique prompted peace thinkers of the Enlightenment to take the first steps towards serious consideration of an international approach towards the prevention of war. This chapter pursues the argument which developed among intellectual circles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which reached its fullest expression with Immanuel Kant's essay Perpetual Peace. Although often dismissed as an idealist, Kant addressed in realistic terms many issues which are now regarded as of global concern, including the universality of human rights and the need for international agreement to prevent war. The peace societies which began to emerge after the Napoleonic Wars for the first time were the concern of millions rather than thousands. Although they suffered drastic reversals and were easily silenced by the shrill sound of patriotism whenever a new war broke out, they quickly came back to life when the costs of such a war were reckoned up. It is easy to dismiss the nineteenth-century peace movement for placing too much faith in the power of persuasion and for underestimating the strength of militarism. Yet the First Hague Peace Conference of 1899 did achieve practical results in the fields of arbitration and the regulation of rules of war, while peace and disarmament were placed on the international agenda, where they have remained ever since.

This chapter offers a reading of Kant’s essay Perpetual Peace. Echoing his earlier essays on enlightenment, Kant argues that a cosmopolitan future is implicit in Nature’s purposes for humanity, and that these purposes unfold in human history. The chapter focuses especially on his version of cosmopolitanism, his idea of a limited ‘right to hospitality’, and his attitude to war. It also discusses his approach to ‘cosmopolitan right’ in relation to Hannah Arendt’s reconstruction of a Kantian political philosophy, centred on judgement and imagination. Special attention is given to the relevance of Kant’s approach to hospitality for contemporary issues associated with refugees.