Kant’s Political Theory (3): Perpetual Peace

The full subtitle for this posting is “Recapitulation, Commentary, and the Guarantee of Perpetual Peace.”  This posting is the third of three installments reviewing Kant’s Toward Perpetual Peace, A Philosophical Sketch (1795).

By way of background: Natural objects, like rocks, may serve extrinsic, utilitarian purposes, such as keeping doors open.  Other natural objects, known as natural ends, have intrinsic purposes and characteristic cause-effect relationships, in which the effect is part of the cause.  [See § 62 - 68 in Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), as well as Sections I.II.3 and I.II.6.3 in my book An Initial View of Final Causes (2017), described elsewhere on this website.]  Biological organisms are natural ends. For example, an acorn grows by mechanistic means (efficient causes, today known to include DNA processes) into an instance of the form of an oak.  The form is the final cause (Naturzweck) of the growth.  At a higher level of abstraction, the kingdom of nature itself might be said to have an ultimate, providential cause (Endzweck der Schöpfung).

By way of recapitulation and commentary: Kant should have recognized that peoples and nations are natural objects of a sort, produced by the efficient mechanisms of language-formation, common history, cultural achievement, religious experience, and political events.  In addition, the vision of speakers, actors, cultural innovators, and religious leaders; and the leadership of influential monarchs, aristocrats, and populists have served as final causes for peoples and nations.  However, Kant’s political contract theory downplays history and focuses entirely on the idea that the natural state of neighbors (individuals or nation-states) is either actual or threatened warfare.  Kantian neighbors either must agree upon some common constitutional system or else be forcibly ejected from each other’s neighborhood. Kantian neighbors do reciprocally renounce some natural rights for the sake of mutual peace.  This leaves open the question whether any neighbors might reciprocally renounce other natural rights for the sake of culture, language, or religion; leading to great differences among nation-states; and culminating in grave difficulties in forming the league of nations favored by Kant (see the second posting in this series).  

By way of exposition on the guarantee of perpetual peace: According to the “Addition” section of Kant’s 1795 essay, that which guarantees perpetual peace is nothing less than the great artist, nature, from whose merely mechanical operations shines forth the purposiveness (design) required to generate political concord from discordant individual wills.  Nature’s purposiveness can be considered to be a necessitation of natural law according to an unknown cause (destiny, fate, or Schicksal); or to be a deep wisdom of a higher, predetermining cause directed to the objective final end of the human race (providence or Vorsehung).

As a technical matter, Kant believed that providence must be “thought into” nature by reflective judgment during the conceptualization of purposes immediately prescribed by reason; and not recognized, inferred, or known from experience in any strict sense.  Any claim that providence is knowable, Kant thought, would imply, presumptuously, that one could put on the wings of Icarus in order to come closer to the secret of nature’s inscrutable design.  

Now we come to the question of what nature has done, or at least of what our reflective judgment leads us to believe that nature has done, to enforce perpetual peace in case mankind does not respond to its moral duty to renounce some rights for the sake of peace.  How does nature aid the establishment of constitutions appropriate for civil, international, and cosmopolitan law? Kant offers three numbered sections paralleling his three determinative articles for perpetual peace mentioned in the second posting in this tripartite series.

1.  Even if a recognizable group of people does not choose to submit to civil law (Staatsbürgerrecht) because of discord among its individuals, nature, in the form of actual or threatened warfare from outsiders, will eventually require that people’s submission to civil law.  If that civil law establishes a republican form of government with its separation of powers, then there is the best chance for political concord to arise from the cancellation of selfish, opposing, and ruinous individual inclinations.  Individuals are forced to be good citizens even if not morally good persons. Nature inexorably wills that the right will prevail.

2.  The idea of international law (Völkerrecht) presupposes the existence of independent nation-states, because the amalgamation of nation-states under one superior power, Kant believed, leads to soulless despotism.  National “identity politics” implies the futility of attempting to fuse nation-states into a higher-order state. Even though reason may prescribe the existence of exactly one all-encompassing Weltrepublic, the reality of nation-states jealous of their identity implies that only a league of nations is achievable.  Nature enforces the separation of states by differences in language, religion, and culture. Nature, in the form of actual or threatened warfare between nation-states, will eventually force those nation-states to submit to international law.

3.  The idea of cosmopolitan law (Weltbürgerrecht) is the necessary completion, albeit in an unwritten code, of civil law and of international law.  Moreover, nature unites some peoples, for whom the concept of cosmopolitan law might not have secured peace, by offering a principle of reciprocal self-interest (wechselseitgen Eigennutz) or spirit of commerce (Handelsgeist), which will ultimately empower every people.  The power of money (Geldmacht) may be nature’s most reliable means to promote a noble peace.

In this manner, Kant concludes, nature guarantees perpetual peace by the mechanism of human inclinations, away from actual or threatened military conflict, and toward what can serve as their substitutes, economic competition and the power of money.  Military and economic conflict ensures the development of a league of nations to limit that conflict. This guarantee does not come with a security sufficient to predict the future; but it suffices for the practical purpose, which is also a duty, of working towards the end of perpetual peace, which is anything but chimerical.

Today, of course, one may note that the economic development of late 19th century Europe made the prospect of European warfare unthinkable, until World War I occurred.  Thereafter, the combined effects of the League of Nations, disarmament treaties, and general appeasement were incapable of preventing World War II.  For promoting peace, it is not clear that trans-national institutions fare better than a balance of power between nation-states.