Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches

Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay

* Italics are denoted by underscores as in _italics_. * Bold text is denoted by equals as in =bold=. * Small caps are represented in upper case as in SMALL CAPS. * Original spelling was kept, but variant spellings were made consistent when a predominant usage was found. * Obvi...

Chapters

11. Part 11

This guarantee is given by no less a power than the great artist nature (_natura dædala rerum_) in whose mechanical course is clearly exhibited a predetermined design to make ha...

12. Part 12

In this way nature guarantees the coming of perpetual peace, through the natural course of human propensities: not indeed with sufficient certainty to enable us to prophesy the...

7. Part 7

But, indeed, looking away from questions so vital and on which there can be little difference of opinion, we are apt to forget, when we allow ourselves to talk extravagantly of...

6. Part 6

We come now to the central idea of the treatise: (_c_) the law of nations must be based upon a federation of free states. (Art. 2.)[74] This must be regarded as the end to which...

5. Part 5

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...

8. Part 8

It was only of this political peace between civilised nations that Kant thought.[103] In this form it is bound to come. The federation of Europe will follow the federation of Ge...

4. Part 4

Rousseau took St. Pierre’s project[45] much more seriously than either Leibniz or Voltaire. But sovereigns, he thought, are deaf to the voice of justice; the absolutism of princ...

3. Part 3

In the Middle Ages the development of these ideas received little encouragement. All laws are silent in the time of war,[25] and this was a period of war, both bloody and consta...

13. Part 13

[C] This depravity of human nature is denied by Rousseau, who held that the mind of man was naturally inclined to virtue, and that good civil and social institutions are all tha...

2. Part 2

Aristotle strongly condemns the Lacedæmonians and Cretans for regarding war and conquest as the sole ends to which all law and education should be directed. Also in non-Greek tr...

9. Part 9

[115] It has been hitherto doubted, not without reason, whether there can be laws of permission (_leges permissivæ_) of pure reason as well as commands (_leges præceptivæ_) and...

1. Part 1

* Italics are denoted by underscores as in _italics_. * Bold text is denoted by equals as in =bold=. * Small caps are represented in upper case as in SMALL CAPS. * Original spel...

10. Part 10

[125] But see p. 136, where Kant seems to speak of a State of nations as the ideal. Kant expresses himself, on this point, more clearly in the _Rechtslehre_, Part. II. § 61:—“Th...

14. Part 14

_a._ “When either of these states has promised something to another, (as, for instance, assistance, or a relinquishment of certain territory, or subsidies and such like), the qu...