The Permanence of Particularist Politics in Kant’s Project of Perpetual Peace

• In Event: Politics and Particularity from Kant to Heidegger

Abstract

Certain questions and worries often occur to readers of Kant’s writings on “perpetual peace.” The political project governed by universalist morality seems to pose severe limits on the actions of statesmen, and Kant’s conception of history, as culminating in a cosmopolitan order of states that outlaws wars of aggression, suggests an ever-diminishing role for particular sovereign states and for the prudence required in governing them. Some readers propose that Kant even morally requires the vanishing of such states.

In relevant texts, especially Perpetual Peace (P), Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (R), and the Metaphysics of Morals (M), Kant presents a nuanced and complex account wherein particular states, as demanded by the enduring differences among peoples, remain a fact of the human condition. (My references are to the volumes in the Akademie-Ausgabe of Kant.) Every state (Staat) is inclined to seek expansive unification at the expense of others, but “nature wills otherwise,” and keeps peoples separate through language and religion, rather than allow a universal monarchy which would first exist as “soulless despotism” and then deteriorate into anarchy (P 8: 367-68; see also R 6: 123.) A permanent federation of peoples (Völker), rather than a state of peoples under one constitution (M 6: 350-51) will progress toward mutual accord while permitting peaceful competition (in commerce, arts, science, etc.) that is vital to the human free development of rational powers. “Unlike that peace that despotism (in the graveyard of freedom) brings about by vitiating all powers, this one is produced and secured by powers existing in an equilibrium of the liveliest competition (Gleichgewicht im lebhaftesten Weitteifer).” (P 8: 367.)

In sum, the accounts of perpetual peace do not propose or imply that human beings could at some point live without separate governments and states, and do not present a world without such states as a moral ideal. The topic in Kant of the role of language and religion, or certain subpolitical features of peoples as an enduring differentiating reality having lasting political implications, is relatively unexplored in the scholarship. (I think I espy the influence of Montesquieu in this, as in other topics in Kant’s political philosophy.) Also of interest is the characteristic concern of German Idealism with teleological development toward the play of diverse elements within a whole whose order is not strictly legislated. (Here one thinks of Kant’s account of reflective judging in the aesthetic and the organic, and of Arendt’s reading of the third Critique as a crucial text for Kant’s political philosophy.)

Author

• Richard L. Velkley, Tulane University