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Perpetual Peace, and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals (HPC Classics Series)

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It is very useful to have a Kant's shorter essays on political philosophy and the philosophy of history collected in a single volume. While a larger, more comprehensive collection, edited by Hans Reiss, is published by Cambridge Univ. Press under the title *Kant: Political Writings*, this smaller Hackett version is nicely translated and much more affordable. Hackett Publ. Co. in general has been very kind to philosophy. They deserve your patronage.

A nice, inexpensive edition of some of Kant's notable essays including his famous short essay An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? and To Perpetual Peace. The latter and the Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent are some of Kant's notable political writings. Generally more accessible than Kant's major critical works and sometimes written vividly, not a quality associated generally with Kant. The political writings feature Kant's emphasis on grounding in his moral philosophy and a contractual approach. To Perpetual Peace includes Kant's famous and to this point vindicated prediction that properly constituted Republics (though not direct democracies, which he sees as tending to despotism) are likely to form peaceful federal relationships with each other. All well worth reading, and also an interesting comparison with the work of John Rawls, much influenced by Kant's general approach. To Perpetual Peace is clearly the direct inspiration and model for Rawls' last book, The Law of Peoples.

Also included are the essays Speculative Beginning of Human History and The End of All Things, which are interesting and sometimes obscure combinations of philosophical speculation and scriptural exegesis.

Good footnotes and introductory essay.

This is an unusual text, as it was written by a renowned philosopher over two hundred years ago. He expressed his thoughts during the age of the Enlightenment and Benevolent Absolutism punctuated by the brutal French Revolution. It seems a long time ago for someone to have pondered about, not just peace, but perpetual peace on the face of this earth. His principles were quite modern: There should be the abolishment of standing armies, a federation of nations should be established, the constitution of every nation should be republican and he required the conduct among nations to be civilized, hospitable and devoid of hostility. Republicanism is to be understood as meaning the separation of the legislative from the executive branches in contrast to his age where authoritarian rulers combined the two, a system he called despotism. He may have also been stimulated by the brand-new phenomena of the French and American constitutions.
Yes, the modernity of his thoughts is astonishing, but even more so is the fact that two centuries later the establishment of a world federation and the permanent abolition of warfare are still being discussed only by isolated, out-of-the-way theoreticians. Two world wars and an entire century of unheard of violence across the globe have made no difference on the mind of humanity. We are still playing the ancient game of one-upmanship and international power-play. The world is clogged with armed forces and weapons of mass destruction, while the cure from all that violence has been known for ages. Reading about his thoughts makes one realize that man has not become any wiser during the past 200 years.

Find out how we will achieve peace through war and continual conflict. This is an important, though troubling work of political philosophy by the great thinker, though it is mediocre when compared to the historical dialectics of Hegel. For evidence of Kant's racism/ethnocentrism, read the section on Cosmopolitanism, in which Kant effectively excludes all humans outside of the Ancient Greece and the West from the human project. Well, one can't assume a great transcendental thinker will also be enlightened in politics; sad considering the "Enlightenment" is one of Kant's primary concerns in the book.