dreamer; he began the essay with the self-deprecating confession that he took the title of his essay from the caption on an innkeeper’s sign with a picture of a burial ground. He then laid out six preliminary steps toward perpetual peace, followed by three sweeping principles. The preliminary steps were that peace treaties should not leave open the option of war; that states should not absorb other states; that standing armies should be abolished; that governments should not borrow to finance wars; that a state should not interfere in the internal governance of another state; and that in war, states should avoid tactics that would undermine confidence in a future peace, such as assassinations, poisonings, and incitements to treason.
More interesting were his “definitive articles.” Kant was a strong believer in human nature; elsewhere he had written that “from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made.” Thus he began from a Hobbesian premise:The state of peace among men living side by side is not the natural state; the natural state is one of war. This does not always mean open hostilities, but at least an unceasing threat of war. A state of peace, therefore, must be established, for in order to be secured against hostility it is not sufficient that hostilities simply be not committed; and, unless this security is pledged to each by his neighbor (a thing that can occur only in a civil state), each may treat his neighbor, from whom he demands this security, as an enemy.
He then outlined his three conditions for perpetual peace. The first is that states should be democratic. Kant himself preferred the term republican, because he associated the word democracy with mob rule; what he had in mind was a government dedicated to freedom, equality, and the rule of law. Democracies are unlikely to fight each other, Kant argued, for two reasons. One is that a democracy is a form of government that by design (“having sprung from the pure source of the concept of law”) is built around nonviolence. A democratic government wields its power only to safeguard the rights of its citizens. Democracies, Kant reasoned, are apt to externalize this principle to their dealings with other nations, who are no more deserving of domination by force than are their own citizens.
More important, democracies tend to avoid wars because the benefits of war go to a country’s leaders whereas the costs are paid by its citizens. In an autocracy “a declaration of war is the easiest thing in the world to decide upon, because war does not require of the ruler, who is the proprietor and not a member of the state, the least sacrifice of the pleasures of his table, the chase, his country houses, his court functions, and the like. He may, therefore, resolve on war as on a pleasure party for the most trivial reasons.” But if the citizens are in charge, they will think twice about wasting their own money and blood on a foolish foreign adventure.
Kant’s second condition for perpetual peace was that “the law of nations shall be founded on a Federation of Free States”—a “League of Nations,” as he also called it. This federation, a kind of international Leviathan, would provide objective, third-party adjudication of disputes, circumventing every nation’s tendency to believe that it is always in the right. Just as individuals accede to a social contract in which they surrender some of their freedom to the state to escape the nastiness of anarchy, so it should be with states: “For states in their relation to each other, there cannot be any reasonable way out of the lawless condition which entails only war except that they, like individual men, should give up their savage (lawless) freedom, adjust themselves to the constraints of public law, and thus establish a continuously growing state consisting of various nations which will ultimately include all the nations of the world.”
Kant didn’t have in mind a world government with a global army. He thought that international laws could be self-enforcing. “The homage which each state pays (at least in words) to the concept of law proves that there is slumbering in man an even greater moral disposition to become master of the evil principle in himself (which he cannot disclaim) and to hope for the same from others.” The author of “Perpetual Peace” was, after all, the same man who proposed the Categorical Imperative, which stated that people should act so that the maxim of their