KANT AND WAR
KANT AND WAR

Summary/Abstract: Dwelling on Kant’s treatment of the enemy in the context of both civil war and inter-state war, this paper argues that the “cosmopolitan” perspective he inaugurated is not as radical a departure from traditional realist conceptions of politics as is commonly supposed. Kant’s rationalist approach does indeed put the question of war and peace on a novel footing, but as his overall argument implicitly hangs on the concept of sovereignty – albeit the sovereignty of reason – it can hardly serve as a basis for political judgement.

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