Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay
to keep. We must seek after it where it may be found; but, having
done this and sought in vain, we have no alternative but to fall back
upon war. Reason requires “that every man ought to endeavour peace,”
(_Lev._ I. Ch. XIV.) “as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and
when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek, and use, all helps, and
advantages of war.”[51] This, says Hobbes elsewhere, (_On Liberty_,
Ch. I. 15) is the dictate of right reason, the first and fundamental
law of nature.
[51] We find the same rule laid down as early as the time of
Dante. Cf. _De Monarchia_, Bk. II. 9:—“When two nations quarrel
they are bound to try in every possible way to arrange the
quarrel by means of discussion: it is only when this is hopeless
that they may declare war.”
_Kant’s Idea of a Perpetual Peace._
With regard to the problems of international law, Kant is of course
a hundred and fifty years ahead of Hobbes. But he starts from the
same point: his theory of the beginning of society is practically
identical with that of the older philosopher. Men are by nature
imperfect creatures, unsociable and untrustworthy, cursed by a love
of glory, of possession, and of power, passions which make happiness
something for ever unattainable by them. Hobbes is content to leave
them here with their imperfections, and let a strong government
help them out as it may. But not so Kant. He looks beyond man
the individual, developing slowly by stages scarcely measurable,
progressing at one moment, and the next, as it seems, falling behind:
he looks beyond the individual, struggling and never attaining, to
the race. Here Kant is no pessimist. The capacities implanted in
man by nature are not all for evil: they are, he says, “destined to
unfold themselves completely in the course of time, and in accordance
with the end to which they are adapted.” (_Idea of a Universal
History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View_, 1784. Prop. 1.) This
end of humanity is the evolution of man from the stage of mere
self-satisfied animalism to a high state of civilisation. Through
his own reason man is to attain a perfect culture, intellectual and
moral. In this long period of struggle, the potential faculties
which nature or Providence has bestowed upon him reach their full
development. The process in which this evolution takes place is what
we call history.
To man nature has given none of the perfect animal equipments for
self-preservation and self-defence which she has bestowed on others
of her creatures. But she has given to him reason and freedom of
will, and has determined that through these faculties and without the
aid of instinct he shall win for himself a complete development of
his capacities and natural endowments. It is, says Kant, no happy
life that nature has marked out for man. He is filled with desires
which he can never satisfy. His life is one of endeavour and not of
attainment: not even the consciousness of the well-fought battle is
his, for the struggle is more or less an unconscious one, the end
unseen. Only in the race, and not in the individual, can the natural
capacities of the human species reach full development. Reason, says
Kant, (Prop. 2, _op. cit._) “does not itself work by instinct, but
requires experiments, exercise and instruction in order to advance
gradually from one stage of insight to another. Hence each individual
man would necessarily have to live an enormous length of time, in
order to learn by himself how to make a complete use of all his
natural endowments. Or, if nature should have given him but a short
lease of life, as is actually the case, reason would then require an
almost interminable series of generations, the one handing down its
enlightenment to the other, in order that the seeds she has sown in
our species may be brought at last to a stage of development which
is in perfect accordance with her design.” Man the individual shall
travel towards the land of promise and fight for its possession, but
not he, nor his children, nor his children’s children shall inherit
the land. “Only the latest comers can have the good fortune of
inhabiting the dwelling which the long series of their predecessors
have toiled—though,” adds Kant, “without any conscious intent—to
build up without even the possibility of participating in the
happiness which they were preparing.” (Proposition 3.)
The means which nature employs to bring about this development of
all the capacities implanted in men is their mutual antagonism in
society—what Kant calls the “unsocial sociableness of men, that is to
say, their inclination to enter into society, an inclination which
yet is bound up at every point with a resistance which threatens
continually to break up the society so formed.” (Proposition 4.) Man
hates society, and yet there alone he can develop his capacities; he
cannot live there peaceably, and yet cannot live without it. It is
the resistance which others offer to his inclinations and will—which
he, on his part, shows likewise to the desires of others—that awakens
all the latent powers of his nature and the determination to conquer
his natural propensity to indolence and love of material comfort
and to struggle for the first place among his fellow-creatures, to
satisfy, in outstripping them, his love of glory and possession and
power. “Without those, in themselves by no means lovely, qualities
which set man in social opposition to man, so that each finds his
selfish claims resisted by the selfishness of all the others, men
would have lived on in an Arcadian shepherd life, in perfect
harmony, contentment, and mutual love; but all their talents would
forever have remained hidden and undeveloped. Thus, kindly as the
sheep they tended, they would scarcely have given to their existence
a greater value than that of their cattle. And the place among the
ends of creation which was left for the development of rational
beings would not have been filled. Thanks be to nature for the
unsociableness, for the spiteful competition of vanity, for the
insatiate desires of gain and power! Without these, all the excellent
natural capacities of humanity would have slumbered undeveloped.
Man’s will is for harmony; but nature knows better what is good for
his species: her will is for dissension. He would like a life of
comfort and satisfaction, but nature wills that he should be dragged
out of idleness and inactive content and plunged into labour and
trouble, in order that he may be made to seek in his own prudence
for the means of again delivering himself from them. The natural
impulses which prompt this effort,—the causes of unsociableness and
mutual conflict, out of which so many evils spring,—are also in turn
the spurs which drive him to the development of his powers. Thus,
they really betray the providence of a wise Creator, and not the
interference of some evil spirit which has meddled with the world
which God has nobly planned, and enviously overturned its order.”
(Proposition 4: Caird’s translation in _The Critical Philosophy of
Kant_, Vol. II., pp. 550, 551.)
The problem now arises, How shall men live together, each free to
work out his own development, without at the same time interfering
with a like liberty on the part of his neighbour? The solution
of this problem is the state. Here the liberty of each member is
guaranteed and its limits strictly defined. A perfectly just civil
constitution, administered according to the principles of right,
would be that under which the greatest possible amount of liberty
was left to each citizen within these limits. This is the ideal
of Kant, and here lies the greatest practical problem which has
presented itself to humanity. An ideal of this kind is difficult of
realisation. But nature imposes no such duty upon us. “Out of such
crooked material as man is made,” says Kant, “nothing can be hammered
quite straight.” (Proposition 6.) We must make our constitution as
good as we can and, with that, rest content.
The direct cause of this transition from a state of nature and
conditions of unlimited freedom to civil society with its coercive
and restraining forces is found in the evils of that state of nature
as they are painted by Hobbes. A wild lawless freedom becomes
impossible for man: he is compelled to seek the protection of a
civil society. He lives in uncertainty and insecurity: his liberty
is so far worthless that he cannot peacefully enjoy it. For this
peace he voluntarily yields up some part of his independence. The
establishment of the state is in the interest of his development to
a higher civilisation. It is more—the guarantee of his existence
and self-preservation. This is the sense, says Professor Paulsen,
in which Kant like Hobbes regards the state as “resting on a
contract,”[52] that is to say, on the free will of all.[53] _Volenti
non fit injuria._ Only, adds Paulsen, we must remember that this
contract is not a historical fact, as it seemed to some writers of
the eighteenth century, but an “idea of reason”: we are speaking here
not of the history of the establishment of the state, but of the
reason of its existence. (Paulsen’s _Kant_, p. 354.)[54]
[52] Rousseau (_Contrat Social_: I. vi.) regards the social
contract as tacitly implied in every actual society: its articles
“are the same everywhere, and are everywhere tacitly admitted
and recognised, even though they may never have found formal
expression” in any constitution. In the same way he speaks of
a state of nature “which no longer exists, which perhaps never
has existed.” (Preface to the _Discourse on the Causes of
Inequality_.) But Rousseau’s interpretation of these terms is, on
the whole, literal in spite of these single passages. He speaks
throughout the _Contrat Social_, as if history could actually
record the signing and drawing up of such documents. Hobbes,
Hooker, (_Ecclesiastical Polity_, I. sect. 10—see also Ritchie:
_Darwin and Hegel_, p. 210 _seq._) Hume and Kant use more careful
language. “It cannot be denied,” writes Hume, (_Of the Original
Contract_) “that all government is, at first, founded on a
contract and that the most ancient rude combinations of mankind
were formed chiefly by that principle. In vain are we asked in
what records this charter of our liberties is registered. It was
not written on parchment, nor yet on leaves or barks of trees. It
preceded the use of writing and all the other civilised arts of
life. But we trace it plainly in the nature of man, and in the
equality, or something approaching equality, which we find in all
the individuals of that species.”
This fine passage expresses admirably the views of Kant on this
point. Cf. _Werke_, (Rosenkranz) IX. 160. The original contract
is merely an idea of reason, one of those ideas which we think
into things in order to explain them.
Hobbes does not professedly make the contract historical, but in
Locke’s _Civil Government_ (II. Ch. VIII. § 102) there is some
attempt made to give it a historical basis.—By consent all were
equal, “till by the same consent they set rulers over themselves.
So that their politic societies all began from a voluntary union,
and the mutual agreement of men freely acting in the choice of
their governors, and forms of government.”
Bluntschli points out (_Theory of the State_, IV. ix., p. 294
and _note_) that the same theory of contract on which Hobbes’
doctrine of an absolute government was based was made the
justification of violent resistance to the government at the time
of the French Revolution. The theory was differently applied by
Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. According to the first, men leave
the “state of nature” when they surrender their rights to a