A Retrospective on Three U.S. Presidential Elections

Eight long years ago, the 2016 U.S. Presidential election resulted in the Electoral-College victory of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, despite Clinton’s winning of the national popular vote.  Trump won the popular vote in six of the seven so-called “swing states” (Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin), failing only to win Nevada.  (For a summary of these 2016 results, click here.)

In 2016, the Electoral College once again achieved its Constitutional goal: inducing the candidates to campaign in a broader swath of the country and not limiting themselves to the states of largest population (California, Texas, Florida, and New York).  Widespread campaigning avoids the appearance that the smallest states are merely colonial possessions of the largest states.  In winning most of the swing states by small popular-vote margins, Trump rolled to a robust 304-227 victory over Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College.

An aside: The 2016 U.S. Presidential race revealed seven so-called “faithless Electors,” who voted for persons other than those at the top of their party tickets.  These faithless seven have never been punished, thereby providing a precedent for future Electoral-College misbehavior; yet as far as the present writer knows, no one has ever expended any effort to remedy this situation via statute or Constitutional amendment.  It would be more accurate to say that the 2016 U.S. Electoral-College results were 304-227-7; indicating support for Republicans, Democrats, and what might be described as Insurrectionists, respectively.

A second aside: The Electoral College is based on a number of Electors for each state (plus three Electors for the District of Columbia).  Each of the state numbers is equal to the sum of that state’s number of Senators (two for each state, assuming states to be co-equal in sovereignty) and of that state’s number of U.S. Representatives (representation proportional to population).  The egregious Seventeenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution sabotages the original idea that the Senators represent the states themselves via appointment by their state legislatures to the federal legislature.  James Madison thought that this appointment process would convey a sense of each state’s authority and legitimacy in the federal system - - i.e., that no state was a colonial backwater in a federal system.  But what did James Madison know about the Constitution?

Joseph Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election in the midst of the COVID pandemic, the George-Floyd riots, outdated election-integrity laws, and an unprecedented flood of mail-in ballots.  Biden won six of the seven swing states by small popular-vote margins, losing only North Carolina.  (For a summary of these 2020 results, click here.)  Biden recorded a strong 306-232 victory in the Electoral College.

In the 2020 U.S. Presidential race, Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin (11+16+10 = 37 Electoral votes) were decided by approximately 11,000, 13,000, and 21,000 popular votes, respectively.  However, a few percent of the millions of mail-in ballots in those three states in 2020 seemed, to some analysts, to lack legitimacy - - or even to have been wholly fabricated - - based on the following line of thought: If a relatively low level of mail-in balloting in 2016 and previous years had resulted in an error rate of a few percent (rejection rate due to defective signature, dating, receipt-time, voter-ID, or any other problem), then a relatively high level (flood) of mail-in balloting in 2020 must have had at least the same error rate, not the much lower error rate alleged by some election precincts in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin.

In the case of the U.S. Presidential race in Wisconsin in 2020, a remarkable example of the aforesaid mail-in ballot conundrum has been documented: In 2016, only 4.8% of the total number of ballots were mail-in ballots; and of those mail-in ballots there was an error rate (rejection rate) of 1.4%.  In 2020, however, an unprecedented 41% of the total number of ballots were mail-in ballots (due to COVID and other causes peculiar to 2020); and of those mail-in ballots there was an error rate of only 0.2% - - a seven-fold decrease in error rate coinciding with a more than eight-fold increase in the fraction of mail-in ballots (41% / 4.8% = 8.54).  Ultimately, in the case of Wisconsin in 2020, it seemed plausible that tens of thousands of questionable votes were being injected into a Presidential tally in which the purported margin of victory was also on the order of tens of thousands of votes, vitiating Biden’s claim to victory in Wisconsin.  Analogous remarks pertain to Arizona and Georgia in 2020.

In this novel situation, however, the judicial system typically professed not to find anyone with a suitable legal standing to sue election officials over anomalies in the rejection rate for mail-in ballots.  In these potential court cases, there was the distinct appearance that the judges just wanted “to get out of Dodge City” in unseemly haste before any rioting broke out.  Additionally, the candidate challenging the vote count was left with the nearly impossible burden of proving a negative, viz., that the true rejection rate for mail-in ballots did not go down by an order of magnitude or so even while a much higher volume of mail-in ballots was being processed.  If indeed the 37 Electoral votes of Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin had gone to Trump in 2020, then Trump would have achieved a 306-37 = 232+37 = 269-269 tie in the Electoral College, sending the election to the House of Representatives and generating even more excitement!

Just prior to the 2020 election, a widely acclaimed, professional, scientific poll of Wisconsin voters gave Biden a projected 17% margin of victory in Wisconsin - - the supposed expectation of all those who “follow the science.”  (This was in the October 28, 2020 ABC News / Washington Post Poll.)  The 17% projected Biden victory contrasted sharply with the 0.6% actual Biden victory.  One wonders whether, heaven forfend, the 17% projected Biden advantage had been a polling fiction publicized precisely in order to discourage Trump voters from voting at all or to encourage them to switch sides in the contest.

Now compare the U.S. Presidential pre-election polling results from Wisconsin in 2020 to those from Iowa in 2024: The now infamous Des Moines Register pre-election poll by “legendary pollster” J. Ann Selzer purported to find, just days before the 2024 Presidential election, that Kamala Harris was ahead of Donald Trump by three percentage points in Iowa.  Regrettably for Selzer, Iowa went for Trump by thirteen percentage points in 2024.  Whoops, sixteen percentage points’ worth of error!  The day after Election Day, Selzer seemed to be shocked - - shocked! - - that such egregious error could have infiltrated the inner sanctums of scientific polling.  Selzer pledged to comb through her data in order to find the source or sources of this monumental error.  One wonders again whether, heaven forfend, the 16% over-estimate of projected Harris support had been a polling fiction publicized precisely in order to discourage Trump voters - - nationally! - - from voting at all or to encourage them to switch sides.

Without the confusion posed in 2020 by the COVID pandemic, the George-Floyd rioting, and the inadequate voter-ID laws in some states, etc., the 2024 U.S. Presidential election resulted in the Electoral-College victory of Donald Trump over Kamala Harris.  Trump won the national popular vote by 49.9% to 48.3%.  Trump won the popular vote in all seven swing states.  (For a summary of these 2024 results, click here.)  The Electoral College again worked as intended in forcing the candidates to campaign in a broader swath of the country than just in the states of largest population.  Trump stormed to an utterly dominating 312-226 victory over Harris in the Electoral College

In the opinion of Michael Barone, emeritus fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, “Mr. Trump’s ability to connect with the voters has ‘shaped and hastened’ two developments that could portend a political realignment,” which is to say, a fundamental change in the so-called rainbow coalition of political factions in the U.S.A.  First, immigrants are drifting toward the Republican Party, demanding border security as much as any other citizen of any background whatsoever.  Second, there is an “unraveling of black political unity.”  One has recently seen extreme dissatisfaction expressed by some black citizens of New York and Chicago regarding the billions of dollars diverted away from the support of those cities’ citizens and funneled towards immigrant groups.  Like any other citizens, those residing in the inner cities expect all levels of government in the U.S. to operate preferentially on the citizens’ behalf.

The Twelfth Man - - in Wisconsin?

Regarding the United States Presidential Election of 2020, consider the state of Wisconsin and assume that the ballot count reported to Congress by the usual state electoral machinery was a perfect numerical statement of all legal ballots, and only legal ballots, that were cast.  As of December 27, 2020, a reasonably reliable Internet website reported those results as 1,630,866 for Biden and 1,610,184 for Trump.  For the purposes of the present analysis, we will neglect the Libertarian and other candidates and will assume that the total number of ballots cast was 3,241,050.  Biden won by 20,682 votes (0.638%).  

It is desired to develop a theoretical model of how the Wisconsin results might have come about.  Suppose that prior to the election, the participating 3,241,050 Wisconsinites, being incredibly civic-minded, had decided to divide themselves into discussion groups of 12 voters each for political discussion and debate before casting their ballots.  There would have been 270,087 discussion groups, with 6 hapless Wisconsinites left group-less, assumed to have split evenly between the two candidates, and excluded from further analysis. 

If all 270,087 discussion groups had split their votes evenly, then the two candidates would have tied at 1,620,522 each in Wisconsin - - and you thought that the actual voting controversies were a headache!  But not to worry, 10,341 Wisconsinites “flipped their votes” in order to give Biden his 20,682-vote margin.  We assume that exactly one vote was flipped in each of 10,341 discussion groups (i.e., that 3.8% of all discussion groups broke for Biden by 7 to 5), while the remaining 270,087 – 10,341 = 259,746 discussion groups (96.2%) were dead even (6 Biden votes to 6 Trump votes).

Prior to the election, a widely acclaimed, professional, scientific poll gave Biden a projected 17% margin of victory - - and who are we to suggest any analysis that does not “follow the science”?  (See the footnote at the end of this blog post.  There were other polls; but the ABC / Washington Post poll will be used here in order to make a clean distinction.)  The 17% projected Biden victory would be consistent with all 270,087 discussion groups breaking 7 to 5 for Biden (58.3% to 41.7%, i.e., a 16.6% net preference for Biden).  In contrast, the 0.6% actual Biden victory is consistent with nearly all (259,746, or 96.2%) of the discussion groups being dead even (6 to 6).  

Who was this “Twelfth Man,” the defector from the projected 7 – 5 Biden poll advantage to the actual 6 – 6 electoral result in 96.2% of the hypothesized discussion groups?  (We’re dealing here with Wisconsin, so we assume that this Twelfth Man is not a certain student-athlete at Texas A&M University!)  The Wisconsinite Twelfth Man stated to pollsters a preference for Biden, nevertheless supported Trump at the ballot box, and almost gave Trump the victory.  This Twelfth Man is proposed to be a Wisconsinite who, being badgered by acquaintances and public media to support a scientifically projected or socially acceptable winner, is inclined to tell a pollster one thing and then to vote differently.  This Twelfth Man hopes merely to show the pollster the door and to get about the rest of his life in peace.  If this analysis is right for Wisconsin and generalizable to the rest of the nation, then the U.S. electorate is portrayed as split into two nearly equal factions that seem to be largely beyond the reach of rational persuasion: One-twelfth of the electorate will not even answer pollsters accurately, presumably due to fear of some manner of reprisal. 

Of course, this analysis has assumed scientific and accurate polling and voting procedures, and has focused on the hypothesized badgered voters who will not publicly state what they think or intend.  What would the analysis look like if, heaven forfend, the 17% projected Biden advantage had been a fiction publicized precisely in order to badger voters into flipping their votes or in order to suppress their turn-out?  We will not pursue that line of inquiry here.

The Twelfth Man analyzed here would seem to be a modern-day version of Solzhenitsyn’s Colonel Georgi Vorotyntsev.  (See the October 13, 2020 blog post in this series.)  When Vorotyntsev ventured the slightest deviation from the Kadet party line (that of the intelligentsia), the drawing room fell eerily silent.  As if hypnotized, Vorotyntsev said no more, “not because he felt he was wrong, but out of fear of saying something reactionary.”  Subsequently, he was privately advised that “in educated Russian society … by no means every view may be expressed … [and] the more ‘liberated’ the company, the more heavily this tacit prohibition weighs on it.”  Such ingrained self-censorship, or Vorotyntsev effect, severely limited public speech on important issues in late-Tsarist Russia.  Today, if a Twelfth Man would venture, during polite conversation, the slightest deviation from some aspect of, say, progressive identity politics, then the ensuing, eerie silence would quickly bid him to say no more, lest he say something reactionary.  Today, “in educated American society … by no means every view may be expressed … [and] the more ‘progressive’ the company, the more heavily this tacit prohibition weighs on it.”  The modern-day Vorotyntsev effect continues to limit and to distort public speech on important political issues, including those expressed in Presidential polling and voting. 

(Footnote: The October 28, 2020 ABC News / Washington Post Poll [rated A+ by those who supposedly know] gave Biden a 17% lead in Wisconsin.  See https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/wisconsin/, accessed 12-30-20.)

The Virtue of Independence Day

Granted that the writing of the American Declaration of Independence, the voting for colonial independence, the adopting of the Declaration, and its signing were spread out over time; nevertheless, as of the official date of July 4, 2019 it will have been twelve score and three years since the birth of the U.S.A.  According to the Declaration, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of a people’s unalienable rights, then it is the right of that people to alter or abolish that government, i.e., to practice national self-determination. 

      By August 14, 1941 the interests of the United States and the United Kingdom had converged to the point that an Atlantic Charter could be declared, in which Roosevelt and Churchill stipulated that their policies were to “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” (national self-determination).  After World War II, however, there was an increasing emphasis on international institutions such as the United Nations and the European Union.  Thus, the resurgent nationalism expressed by the British electorate in the Brexit vote of June 23, 2016, as well as by the American electorate in the Presidential vote of November 8, 2016, represented a break with post WW II internationalism and a return to the aspirations of the Atlantic Charter.

      Finding this change in the public acceptance of internationalism to be highly significant, Yoram Hazony wrote the excellent book The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) to proclaim the value of free national states.  Such independent nations stand in stark opposition to what Hazony calls the “liberal empire,” administered by the United Nations, the European Union, and the United States; and widely accepted as the best type of political state.  In contrast, however, Hazony supports free national states by distinguishing nationalism from the national socialism that led to the Holocaust; disputing the charge that nationalism creates more hate than does imperialism; focusing on liberal empire’s problematic promotion of peace and prosperity based on a sacrifice of collective self-determination; and pointing out that a national state encourages loyalties to natural or adopted family, tribe, nation, tradition, religion, and language. 

      Hazony finds that, just after the Reformation, there were two principles in European politics: First, a government had to be strong enough to defend itself from external threats, to adjudicate disputes among its citizens, to police itself, and officially to recognize one God.  Second, nations that were strong in the foregoing sense had the right of self-determination of their national and church governments.  (The reviewer notes parenthetically that these principles rendered it self-evident at that time that any newly discovered lands and peoples that did not have strong government in this sense were ipso facto ripe for colonial take-over.)  It would have been incomprehensible in that era to suggest that all nations could, would, or should become one. 

      Subsequently, John Locke offered his social contract theory of politics: There is only one underlying political principle, and it is individual freedom and consent to obligations.  Other, Burkean, loyalties to family, tribe, nation, tradition, religion, and language are extraneous and are to be jettisoned; and even the existence of national borders is said to be an unjustifiable artifact of primitive politics.  Hazony traces this stream of thought from Rousseau through Kant, Rand, and Rawls.  

      Here, the reviewer registers a minor disagreement with Hazony: It is true that Kant did sometimes write in favor of the idea of a cosmopolitan, utopian empire or, alternately, a world republic.  However, he also recognized the existence and strength of what he viewed as a “national identity politics” that would prevent the attainment of any of his ideal polities.  For that reason he insisted that a league of nations should be formed as a federation of free states.  (See the May 1, 2019 blog posting in this series.)  Thus, Kant did allow for national borders but could not foresee the future futility of such leagues.

      Hazony’s overall thesis remains unaffected: Today, the ongoing liberal reconstruction of Western politics unrealistically neglects Burkean loyalties and is a form of imperialism in the proud tradition of the Pharaohs, Babylonian kings, Roman emperors, Papal statesmen, Marxists, and any others who are “quick to express disgust, contempt, and anger when their vision of peace and prosperity meets with opposition” from the ostensible beneficiaries.  Moreover, any resistance to liberal doctrine is today “afflicted by public shaming campaigns and heresy hunts,” which are unwittingly modeled on medieval infallibility, inquisition, and index; and which are turning the Western democracies into one very large university campus.  For example, liberal imperialists view the consolidation of the European Union as the only political opinion that may be upheld by decent people in the face of opposition from Brexiteers.

      There never has been a Hobbesian or Lockean state of nature in which individuals were only loyal to themselves; instead, Hazony writes, there have been anarchical states of nature characterized by the lack of permanent, centralized governments.  Centralized governments come into being either as free states, in which individuals’ Burkean loyalties are transferred to the state, as when the loyalty to a father is transferred to the fatherland; or as despotic states, established by conquest.

      Hazony lists five virtues of the national state in his Chapter XIV.  First, the desire for collective freedom shifts from family units to the national state itself.  This shift strikes the reviewer as the attitude, “Why should individuals’ petty preferences interfere with the flourishing of the state?”  Comparing domestic slumber to martial vigor and national honor, Shakespeare has King Henry V say before the Battle of Agincourt that “Gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.” 

      The second virtue of the national state is a disinclination of contented national states to acquire empires.  Third, the freedom of the national state allows individuals to focus on material prosperity and cultural inheritance.  Fourth, nationalism is based on an empirical standpoint, a moderate skepticism regarding human reason, and a plurality of political paths.  Fifth, the national state offers the best environment for free institutions that evolve over long periods of time by trial and error and that support individual liberties. 

      Hazony proposes that the best political order is one of independent national states.  Yet although such independence is an evident good that should be established wherever feasible, political independence is not a right, because there are too many potential independent states and too few physical resources and moral rationales.  Even if India had a right of self-determination to assert against the British Empire in 1947, it does not follow that the speakers of each of India’s 1700 distinct languages should be awarded their own national states today.  Even if the thirteen British colonies in North America had a right of self-determination to assert against the British Empire in 1776, it does not follow that the Confederate states had a moral rationale for succession in 1861.   

      Beyond the attractive virtues of independent national states and the moral rationale for independence set forth in the Declaration’s listing of the “repeated injuries and usurpations” by the British king, the reviewer notes that the decisive factor in the American Revolutionary War may well have been the “geographical virtue” of a great physical separation between North America and the British Isles.  On July 4, 2019 it is time to celebrate not only the virtue of nationalism but also the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean and the slowness of sailing ships nearly a quarter millennium ago!

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.

Kant's Political Theory (2): Determinative Articles

The full subtitle for this posting is “Three Determinative Articles en route to the Guarantee of Perpetual Peace.”  This posting is the second of three installments reviewing Kant’s Toward Perpetual Peace, A Philosophical Sketch (1795).

In the subsection on his first determinative article (rational principle) for perpetual peace, Kant stated his taxonomy of political organization: A state can be classified according to its form of sovereignty (autocratic, aristocratic, or democratic) or according to its form of government (republican or despotic).  In a republic, the legislative assembly is representative and is separated from the executive power of the ruler, whereas a despot both makes and executes the laws.  Kant believed that, except possibly in some cases of violent revolution, democratic sovereignty leads to despotic government by founding an executive power of a small committee over a large community.  Democratic republics are, for Kant, an unlikely species.  In contrast, monarchical or aristocratic sovereignty offers the possibility of gradual legal reform culminating in republican government.  After all, the Prussian King Frederick II supposedly said that he was merely the highest-ranking servant of the state.

Kant’s first determinative article is: The civil constitution of every state, i.e., its form of government, is to be republican.  Kant thinks that only republican constitutions are consistent with the idea of the original contract (individuals giving up some natural rights to a ruler, who enforces peace) and its basic principles of freedom, equality, and dependence upon a single legislative source.  The republican constitution has favorable prospects for creating perpetual peace, because a republic’s citizens must vote to adopt the costs of warfare; whereas a despotism’s subjects have no voice in authorizing the dreadful tasks of financing, fighting, and dying in a war.

Each individual’s juridical equality is the right to be constrained only to the extent that others are so constrained.  Each individual’s juridical freedom is the authority or power to obey only those laws to which he either has consented or could have consented, either freely or under threat of “being thrown out of the neighborhood” (see the first blog post in this series).  Focusing now on the question of “has consented” versus “could have consented,” we see in Kant’s first footnote in his subsection on the first determinative article that “Rechtliche Freiheit … ist die Befugnis, keinen äuβeren Gesetzen zu gehorchen, als zu denen ich meine Beistimmung habe geben können.”  In the indicative mood, therefore, obedience is limited to laws “to which I have been able [in fact] to give my consent.”  In the subjunctive mood, however, obedience is limited to laws “to which I could have given my consent [even if I did not actually consent].”  Only Kant knew whether he meant to use the indicative or subjunctive mood when he wrote that sentence.  Either way, it seems clear that the original contract is not one occurrence in the past, but is rather the cumulative effect of a period of negotiation, force, and agreement.  

Kant’s second determinative article for perpetual peace is: International law is to be founded on a federation of free states.  Peoples (Völker), to the extent that they are civilized enough to form nation-states (Staaten), can be evaluated like individual human beings.  Each nation-state that can potentially be injured by other nation-states due to their mere proximity can and should demand from its neighbors that they all enter into a higher-order constitution analogous to that of the constitution for individuals within one nation-state.  Such a higher-order constitution must form a league of nations (Völkerbund) but not a higher-order state consisting of blended peoples (Völkerstaat).  (In his Universal History of 1784, Kant had written of a Staatsverbindung as that which is opposed to a league of nations.  See the March 1, 2019 blog posting.)

Each nation-state contains its own relationship between its lawgiving class and its Volk (be they citizens or subjects), which results in the nation-state’s persisting identity.  In effect, Kant adopted an early version of identity politics by saying that nation-states should not be melded or fused together in a higher-order nation-state (nicht in einem Staat zusammenschmelzen sollen).  Thus, Kant speaks of his league of nations as a federation of free states.

One should think, Kant writes, that civilized peoples, each of which has already united into a nation-state, would hurry to exit an international system of crudeness, boorishness, animal-like degradation, and warfare in favor of the constitutional order of a league of nations.  Until now, however, this has been prevented by each nation-state’s view that its own majesty consists precisely in its own independence, i.e., in the fact that there is no other nation-state that can subject it to external legal compulsion.  Live free or die.  European and American savages differ only in that the latter eat their enemies while the former exploit them more efficiently.

The idea of federation is practical, Kant thinks, because if fortune should direct one powerful and enlightened people to form a republic (the form of government best positioned to ensure perpetual peace), then this fact would act as a nucleating point that incentivizes other nation-states eventually to join it in a league of nations.

Reason, by itself, presents nation-states with no other way to exit the lawless condition that contains nothing but warfare: Give up wild, lawless freedom; get used to public legal compulsion; and join in a continuously growing, higher-order state consisting of blended peoples.  In its purest form, this would be a world republic (Weltrepublik).  But to the extent that the counsel of reason is rejected by existing nation-states with their precious notions of independence and majesty, only a surrogate remains, viz., a league of nations.

Kant’s third determinative article for perpetual peace is: The law of world citizenship shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality.  The limitation is that we are not dealing with a Gastrecht (guest law, which would serve as a basis for a foreigner [Fremdling] to claim the status of a temporary “housemate” (Hausgenosse, co-resident, or, presumably, legal resident]), but rather with a Besuchsrecht (visitation law, which is a basis for any foreigner to seek a temporary level of hospitality).  Hospitality is the right of an individual, upon his arrival in a country not his own, not to be treated in a hostile fashion during a temporary period of probation, after which he may be turned away if this would not result in his demise.  In this manner (by recognizing visitation law) remote parts of the world can come into mutually peaceful relationships that eventually become public law and so bring the human race ever closer to a cosmopolitan constitution.  

Compared to such peaceful, cosmopolitan relationships, Kant views the inhospitable behavior of the civilized, preeminently commercial European states in oppressing the indigenous peoples of America, sub-Saharan Africa, the Spice Islands, and Southern Africa as injustice approaching terror.  In this regard Kant speaks of “the litany of all evil” (die Litanei aller Übel).  At least the more developed societies of the Far East have shown more resistance to European “visitors.”

The idea of cosmopolitan law (Weltbürgerrecht) is not a fanciful or outrageous form of imaginary rights, but is rather a necessary completion (in the form of an unwritten code) pertaining both to civil law (Staatsrecht) and to international law (Völkerrecht) and culminating in public human law in general (öffentlichen Menschenrechte überhaupt or “human rights”), and hence, in perpetual peace.

In conclusion, Kant deferred to no one in harshly criticizing existing European empires; but with his pure, a priori principle in his Universal History that “the natural capacities of rational beings will eventually be developed,” he called for an abstract cosmopolitan utopia that amounted to an empire of sorts.  Likewise, with his purest form of political contract theory in his Perpetual Peace, he called for a single, continuously growing, transnational state consisting of blended peoples in a world republic. Thus, at different times Kant aspired to a utopian imperialism and then to a utopian, transnational world republic.  He seems ultimately to have realized that the utopian empire and the utopian world republic would forever remain nowhere in the real world.  Kant held out hope, however, that his backup plan, a league of nations, would eventually stop warfare.