Kant, Gentz, and Arendt on Federation and Perpetual Peace

• In Event: Enmity, War, and Peace in the History of Political Thought

Abstract

Kant's famous 1795 essay 'Toward Perpetual Peace' is usually read as a paradigmatic brief for of liberal institutionalism against Hobbesian realism in international relations. This paper argues instead that the notion of a distinctively federal solution to the problem of re-establishing international order from the anarchy unleashed by failed attempts at universal monarchy (i.e. empire) represents a distinctive third way that is as far removed from present-day appeals to human rights and cosmopolitan international law as it is from Hobbes. Gentz, the Secretary General of the Congress of Vienna but also a former student of Kant's, is usually taken as a reactionary but I argue he offered an important, if partly flawed, further development of Kant's solution, which has been almost entirely overlooked in subsequent theoretical literature (although the importance of the Vienna Congress in the history of international relations is widely recognised). Arendt, who was well-read in the tradition linking Kant and Gentz, offered another version of this solution in the twentieth century – but to understand it one must consider her explicit comments on international order in light of her treatment of revolution and promising in the US constitution, where the characteristic dynamic of mutual recognition underlying the federal solution received a fuller treatment. This paper draws attention to a German tradition of thought on this federal solution which has been largely overlooked, and in doing so resituates both Kant's famous piece and Arendt's later reflections in a way that shows how they are much less vulnerable to familiar criticisms than commonly supposed. Indeed, it goes so far as to suggest that (at least according to this line of thought) the characteristic fact of modern international relations is not so much the emergence of an order of 'independent sovereign states' as one of a federal alternative to universal empire as an approach to global order and the necessary precondition of international justice.

Author

• Christopher Meckstroth, University of Cambridge