By John von Heyking, Jul 20, 2009 in Pedagogy and Teaching
Kant directly confronts political realism in To Perpetual Peace. The preface confronts the pragmatic politician who dismisses the theoretical speculations of the political theorist who offers his wisdom concerning international affairs. The pragmatic politician cannot defend what counts as his pragmatism or utility, and his Realpolitik threatens the dignity of human beings as free and rational beings. The "law of the jungle" that constitutes contemporary international affairs makes us all beasts.
Kant's project, from beginning to end, is to consider the conditions that make it possible for ethical wisdom to guide political life and international affairs. It is no surprise, then, that the Second Supplement of To Perpetual Peace includes a secret article requiring states to consult the views of philosophers. In a pamphlet arguing state actions must abide by the principle of publicity (don't do anything you think should be done secretly), Kant whispers the federation of republics must consult the wisdom of philosophers to perpetuate peace. One wishes to ask why Kant breaks his own ethical rule. Moreover, how does the wisdom of the philosophers overcome ambition, advantage, and fear, the three "irrational" causes of war according to Thucydides? More fundamentally, how does reason win the historic battle over the passions?
I point out to the students that this pamphlet is written like a peace treaty. If Kantian ethics has a formalistic side, this political treatise suggests the international arena will be managed primarily with laws, binding, it seems, in all cases (though except one, the secret protocol concerning consulting philosophers).
The first preliminary article states there can be no peace unless the underlying causes of war are eliminated. On one level, this is the problem of defining the beginning of war, as we covered with Thucydides. I use the example of the twentieth century as well to illustrate this. World War Two came about because the underlying causes of conflict stemming from World War One endured. Some, like Philip Bobbitt, argue the entire twentieth-century should be understood as having endured the "Long War," from WW1 to the end of the Cold War in 1989, because the "underlying cause" was a conflict over state legitimacy. 1989 marks the victory, not of liberal democracy as Fukuyama describes it, but of representative democracy. The two World Wars and the Cold War were over which was the best way to legitimate government.
Even so, Kant's point in the first preliminary article runs deeper than the question of war's beginning. The "underlying cause" of war is the fact that nations find themselves in a lawless state vis-à-vis each other. He defines the lawless state as the state of nature where there lacks a common authority. So long as states are in this situation, they will be in the law of the jungle as Thucydides described. This also means that humanity in all of its history has been at war, that is, until now, or at least until Kant shows how to get out of the spiral in which man historically has found himself.
