Toward Perpetual Peace
A Philosophical Sketch
Immanuel Kant

Copyright © Jonathan Bennett 2017. All rights reserved[Brackets] enclose editorial explanations. Small ·dots· enclose material that has been added, but can be read as
though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations,

are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis . . . . indicates theomission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth. Longer omissions are reported
between brackets in normal-sized type.
First launched: October 2010

Perpetual Peace

Immanuel Kant

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1Section I: Preliminary articles for perpetual peace among states
1. ‘No peace treaty is valid if it was made with mental reservations that could lead to a future war.’ . . . . . . . . . . . .
2: ‘No independent states, large or small, are to come under the dominion of another state by inheritance, exchange,purchase, or gift.’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3: ‘Standing armies are eventually to be abolished.’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4: ‘National debts are not to be incurred as an aid to the conduct of foreign policy.’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5: ‘No state is to interfere by force with the constitution or government of another state.’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6: ‘No state during a war is to permit acts of hostility that would make mutual confidence impossible after the war isover—e.g. the use of assassins and poisoners, breach of capitulation, incitement to treason in the opposing state.’

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2
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3
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4

Section 2: Definitive articles for perpetual peace among states
5First article: ’The civil constitution of every state is to be republican.’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6Second Article: ‘The law of nations is to be founded on a federation of free states.’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
9Third article: ‘The law of world citizenship is to be united to conditions of universal hospitality.’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Two additions
1: Nature as a guarantor of perpetual peace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2: The secret article . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Two appendices
1: The friction between morality and politics with regarding perpetual peace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2: How the transcendental concept of public law harmonizes morality with politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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I: Preliminary articles

Introduction
A Dutch innkeeper’s sign had a burial ground painted onit, with the mocking inscription ‘Eternal Peace’. This could
have been aimed•generally at mankind, or•specifically at the war-hungry rulers of states, or•merely at the philosophers who dream this sweet
dream ·of eternal peace·.
The author of the present essay wants to set one condition·regarding relations between rulers and philosophers·. The
attitude of practical politicians to political theorists is atonce condescending and offensive, complacently regarding
them as pedants whose empty ideas pose no threat to theState. The State has to proceed on empirical principles;so the theorists are allowed to play their games without
attracting the attention of statesmen, who know how theworld works! My condition is this: the practical politician
must maintain this attitude in times of trouble, and mustn’t
suspect some danger to the state in things that the politicaltheorist says openly and with no hidden purpose. With thissaving clause the author regards himself as expressly andrigorously protected from any malicious interpretation of
his words. [‘saving clause’ translates Kant’s Latin clausula salvatoria.
Though mainly a technical term in music theory, this has other meanings
too; ‘saving clause ’ is not one of them, but one suspects that Kant
thought it was. Anyway, whatever he meant by it, he clearly intended
the phrase as pompous or mock-solemn, like the rest of the sentence.]

Section I: Preliminary articles for perpetual peace among states
1. ‘No peace treaty is valid if it was made withmental reservations that could lead to a future
war.’

these are all, all, annihilated by the peace treaty. When one
or both parties •sign a peace treaty only because they are
too exhausted to continue the war, and in bad faith •enter
into the treaty with a ·silent· mental reservation concerning
issues that are to be confronted later on, that’s a bit ofJesuit casuistry. [In that sentence, ‘that’ refers not to the treaty but

Otherwise this would be only a truce, a suspension of hostilities, not peace, which means the end of all hostilities—sothat it’s really redundant to qualify ‘peace’ with the adjective‘perpetual’. There may be existing states of affairs that could
be causes of future wars—ones that the parties to the peace
treaty don’t know about, and perhaps couldn’t know except
through clever forensic digging in dusty documents—butto the mental reservation. Kant aims to head off any such plea as: ‘I’m
not morally bound by the treaty that I signed, because I signed it with amental reservation that excluded clauses x and y from what I intended.”Some Jesuit casuists—i.e. theoreticians of practical morality—have attributed that kind of moral force to ‘mental reservations’.]

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3: ‘Standing armies are eventually to be abolished.’

It’s beneath the dignity of a sovereign to make such a ‘mental
reservation’, and it’s beneath the dignity of a sovereign’s
ministers to act upon it.
But if ‘enlightened’ concepts of statecraft lead to the viewthat glory of a state consists in its growing power, however itis achieved, then what I’m saying here will strike people as
merely academic and pedantic.

That’s because their constant appearance of war-readinessis a continuing threat to other states, encouraging a neverending ·arms-race, a· competition for which state can mobilize the largest army. This makes •peace eventually more ofa burden than •a short war, so that a standing army is itself
a cause of offensive war undertaken in order to relieve thestate of this burden ·of peace·! And there’s another point:
Paying men to kill or to be killed seems to be using them asmere machines—as tools in the hand of someone else (thestate)—which doesn’t sit well with individual human rights.
(As for periodic voluntary military exercises of citizens, tosecure themselves and their country against foreign aggression, that is entirely different.) The accumulation of treasure
also has the effect that other states see it as preparation forwar, because of these three—
the power of armies,
the power of alliances, andthe power of money—the third may well be the most dependable weapon. The
other states may ·think they are· compelled to make a
pre-emptive attack against the wealthy state; though ·thiswhole danger is lessened by the fact that· it’s hard to discover
how wealthy a given state is.

2: ‘No independent states, large or small, areto come under the dominion of another state byinheritance, exchange, purchase, or gift.’
Unlike the ground that it occupies, a state isn’t a piece ofproperty—·it isn’t owned ·. It’s a society of men that can’t
rightly be commanded or disposed of by anyone, except·of course·, by itself. A state is a tree with its own roots;
to incorporate it into another state—treating it ·as a mere
branch· that can be grafted—is to destroy its existence
as a moral •person. It’s to reduce it to a mere •thing,thus contradicting the idea of the original contract without
which no right over a people is conceivable.1 It is common
knowledge what dangerous situations have arisen, even very
recently, from this kind of thing. It is a European practicethat is unknown in the rest of the world, namely:
It is thought that states can marry one another, thisbeing a new kind of industry for gaining power andterritory by means of family alliances, with no expenditure of resources.
This principle also covers any state’s fighting an enemy using
soldiers hired from another state that has no quarrel withthat enemy; because this practice uses and uses up subjects
as though they were merely convenient commodities.
1

I: Preliminary articles

A hereditary monarchy isn’t a state that another state can inherit; though another physical person can inherit the right to govern it. If the ruler of x
becomes through inheritance the ruler also of y, y acquires a ruler but x doesn’t acquire a state!

2

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4: ‘National debts are not to be incurred as an aid
to the conduct of foreign policy.’

I: Preliminary articles

5: ‘No state is to interfere by force with the constitution or government of another state.’

There’s nothing wrong with this way of seeking aid, within thestate or from outside it, in support of the domestic economy—
the improvement of roads, new settlements, creating reserve
stores of commodities as insurance against unfruitful years,
etc. But as a tool for use in the struggle of ·national·
powers against each other, this credit system—the ingenious
invention of a commercial people in the present century—isa dangerous kind of money-power. The debt it involves keeps
growing, unnoticed, and the debtor state isn’t pulled up
short by demands for repayment, because the creditors don’t
all require payment at one time. ·And in time it grows to
be· a war-chest bigger than those of all the other states
combined. The only way it can get used up is through a lossof tax income [to pay the interest?]; that certainly will eventually
happen, but it can be kept at bay for a long time becauseof the stimulus the credit system gives to industry andcommerce ·and thus to tax revenues·. This ease in making
war, together with rulers’ lust for power—something that
seems inborn in human nature—is thus a great hindrance
to perpetual peace. All the more reason why there should
be a preliminary article of perpetual peace forbidding thiscredit system; and states that don’t use it are justified in
combining against any state that does, because they will
be harmed by their entanglement in that state’s inevitablebankruptcy.

For what is there to authorize it to do so? [In the rest of
this paragraph, ‘scandal’ (German Skandal) is being used in something
like its theological sense (quoting the Shorter Oxford) of ‘moral perplexity
caused by the conduct of a person looked up to as an example’. The Latin

You
might think that state x is authorized to interfere with statey if y’s subjects behave in ways that create a scandal for x’s
subjects—·for example, the authorities in x see that y allows
its subjects to engage in polygamy and polyandry, and think‘We ought to do something about this or the infection will
spread·.’ But that’s not right. A better response to that kindof thing is to exhibit y ·not as a temptation but· as a warningof what can happen if a state lets its people behave lawlessly.
In such a scandalum acceptum—·i.e. letting that behaviour
happen rather than stepping in and putting a stop to it·—theleaders of x are perhaps setting a bad example to others, butthey aren’t doing harm.
scandalum acceptum is a technical term from Thomist theology.]

If a state undergoes internal dissension that splits it into
two parts, each claiming to be a separate state and laying
claim to the whole, it may be all right for another state tohelp one of the sides; this ·isn’t an infringement of article
5 because doing this· doesn’t count as interfering with theconstitution of another state—it’s not a state, it’s an anarchy.
But until the internal dissension reaches this critical point,
such interference by foreign powers would infringe on therights of an independent people struggling with its internal
ills. It would itself be a scandal, and would render theautonomy of all states insecure.
3

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6: ‘No state during a war is to permit acts of hostility that would make mutual confidence impossible
after the war is over—e.g. the use of assassins andpoisoners, breach of capitulation, incitement totreason in the opposing state.’

I: Preliminary articles****[The following paragraph and its long footnote are larded with Latin legal
terms, which seem not to be needed for the main thrusts of what Kant issaying.] Although the laws—·my six ‘articles’·—are all statedas outright prohibitions, they differ in how strict ·or strictly
immediate· they are. Articles 1, 5, and 6 are of the strictkind that hold regardless of circumstances, demanding to beacted on right away. On the other hand, Articles 2, 3, and 4,
though also laws that are to be obeyed, allow some latitude
regarding when they are to be obeyed; with each of them,delay is permissible. But it’s not permissible to lose sight ofthe purpose of the article in question. Article 2, for instance:state x has been deprived of its freedom, which could berestored by state y; if immediate restoration might actuallyharm x’s situation, then it is permissible for y to delay it—but
not until hell freezes over! [Kant uses a different but equivalentcolloquialism.] Postponement is allowed so that the restorationof freedom isn’t rushed into, thus thwarting the very purposeof the legal rule. [In the remainder of this paragraph, Kant
says: The rule forbids an action, the •creation of a certain
state of affairs; it doesn’t forbid the •existence of the state ofaffairs. The action through which this state lost its freedom
may have been universally regarded as lawful at the time it
happened; it wasn’t in fact lawful, and isn’t so now; but thisdoesn’t mean that any state has an immediate duty to movein and fix the situation by restoring the state’s freedom to it.]

These are dishonourable stratagems. Even in war there must
be some confidence in the enemy’s character; otherwise
no peace could be concluded, and the hostilities would
degenerate into a war of extermination. What is war? In thestate of nature ·that obtains between states·, where there isno higher court to settle disputes through law, war is thesad recourse by which each state uses violence to assert
its right and in which neither party can be condemned as
wrong, because that would presuppose a juridical decision.
In the absence of such a decision, the question of which side
is right is answered by the outcome of the conflict (as though
this were a so-called ‘judgment of God’). There can be noquestion of one state’s going to war to punish another state,because no state has authority over any other state.
It follows that a war of extermination, which can wipe out•both parties and •all justice, can lead to ‘perpetual peace’
only in the vast burial ground of the human race. Such awar, therefore, must be absolutely forbidden, as must any
activities that lead to such a war. The examples that I cited·in my statement of article 6 come under this ban, because
they· do inevitably lead to a war of extermination. Once thesevile practices are employed, they’ll soon spread beyond theconfines of the war. The use of spies, for instance—·though
it may seem morally innocent because it· only makes useof the infamy of others (something that can’t be entirely
exterminated ·even in a war of extermination·!)—will carry
this over into the state of peace and thereby cancel the spiritof peace.

·T HE REST OF THIS SECTION WAS A LARGE FOOTNOTE·
The question has been raised, not unreasonably, as towhether pure reason can be a source not only of laws saying‘Do x’ and ‘Don’t do y’ but also of permissions i.e. laws
saying ‘It is all right for you to do z’. [Kant’s account of why
this is questionable is condensed and hard to follow. The
core of it seems to be that ‘laws as such’ involve ’practical4

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necessity’—they say ‘You must do x’ or ‘you mustn’t doy’—while a permission is essentially a statement of nonnecessity, saying ‘You don’t have to do x’. Kant sorts this out
by saying that there can be a ‘permissive law’ that says ineffect ‘You must do x, but you don’t have to do x yet’, or—thisbeing his present concern—one that says in effect ‘You must
not permanently have relation R to another state, but you
may have it for a while under certain circumstances’. Heapplies this also to the case discussed above, of a state thatlost its freedom through some state action that can now beseen to be illegal. There is a prohibition against one state’s
acquiring another in certain ways, and a permission to allow
a wrongly acquired state to stay acquired at least for a while.
Kant is at pains to say, again, that the permission holds only
if the wrong acquisition •occurred ‘in the transition from thestate of nature to a civil state’ and •was universally regarded

2: Definitive articles

as legal at that time. He continues:] If the acquisition of
the state had occurred in the civil state, it would be an
infringement that would have to cease as soon as its illegality
was discovered.
[Kant adds a further paragraph explaining why he has
wanted to linger on this matter. It is to replace
permissions that are seen as exceptions to some law
bypermissions that are built into a law,because only the latter of these leaves intact the notionof a law as something absolutely strict and in some way
necessary. As Kant puts it:] Otherwise we shall have merely
general laws (which apply to a great number of cases), but
no universal laws (which apply to all cases) as the concept oflaw seems to require.

Section 2: Definitive articles for perpetual peace among states·S TAR T OF A FOOTNOTE·

The natural state of men is not •peaceful co-existence but•war—not always open hostilities, but at least an unceasing
threat of war. So a state in which there is no danger ofhostilities needs to be established, and this will have to
involve more than merely the absence of hostilities. Realsecurity against outbreaks of war is something that has tobe pledged to each person by his neighbour (a thing that canoccur only in a civil state); without that pledge, each person
may treat his neighbour as an enemy.

We ordinarily assume that no-one may act in a hostile way
toward someone who hasn’t actively harmed him. And thatis quite correct if both men are under civil law, because byentering into a civil state they have given each other therequired security through the government that has powerover both of them. A man. . . .in the state of nature deprives
me of this security; and if he is in my vicinity he harms
me—even if he doesn’t do anything to me—by the merefact that he isn’t subject to any law and is therefore a5Perpetual Peace

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2: Definitive articles·S TAR T OF A FOOTNOTE·

constant threat to me. So I can compel him either •to enterwith me into a state of civil law or •to get right out of myneighbourhood. So the underlying postulate of all ·three of·the following articles is: All men who can affect each othermust stand under some civil constitution.

[Kant starts the footnote by stating and then trashing one
suggested definition of ‘juridical [rechtliche] freedom’. He
continues with a definition that he does accept:] My juridical
freedom is my ·right or· privilege of not having to obey any
laws except those that I could have consented to. My juridical[rechtliche ] equality with you in a state is the relationshipbetween us such that if I am to constrain you by any law, it
must be one by which I am also bound (and vice versa). . . .
The validity of these inborn rights [Rechte], which are
inalienable and belong necessarily to humanity, is raised toan even higher level by the principle of the juridical [rechtliche]
relation of man to higher beings (if he believes in them),
because he regards himself by those principles as a citizenof a supersensuous [= ‘supernatural’] world. [The switch from‘principle’ to ‘principles’ is Kant’s.] The situation about my freedom
is this: Divine laws that I know only through reason don’t
put any obligation on me except to the extent that I could
have given my consent to them; because the very concept ofGod’s will is one that I have only through the law of freedomof my own reason. Take the most sublime being in the worldthat I can think of (apart from God): when I do my duty
in my post as he does in his, there’s no reason under thelaw of equality why obedience to duty should fall only to me
and the right to command only to him. The reason why thisprinciple of equality doesn’t apply to our relation to God (asthe principle of freedom does) is that God is the only beingat which the concept of duty stops.
Regarding the right of equality of all citizens as subjects,
the question arises: ‘Can a hereditary nobility be tolerated?’
The answer depends on how rank relates to merit:
Is the pre-eminent rank granted by the state to citizen
x over citizen y (1) a consequence of x’s having moremerit than y, or is it (2) the other way around?

[In this next sentence, Kant uses Personen = ‘persons’ to cover Franceand Germany as well as you and me; we’ll see in a moment that hecounts nation-states as ‘citizens’ of the world-order and thus presumablyas ‘persons’.] Such constitutions are of three types, which differ

in what range of persons falls under their laws:(1) Constitutions that embody the civil law governinginter-relations amongst men in a nation-state;(2) The constitution that embodies international law
governing the inter-relations amongst the nationstates of the world;(3) The constitution that embodies the law of world
citizenship, governing the relations amongst men andnation-states considered as citizens of a universal
state of mankind.
This isn’t an arbitrary classification; it goes to the heart ofthe idea of perpetual peace. For if even one pair of these
items—·two men, two nation-states, or one man and one
nation-state·—were in a position to affect one another andyet were in a state of nature, war would necessarily follow,
and freedom from war is the object of the present exercise.
·E ND OF THE FOOTNOTE·First article: ’The civil constitution of every stateis to be republican.’The only constitution which derives from the idea of theoriginal compact, and on which all juridical legislation of apeople must be based, is the republican.

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Not (2): if rank is decided by birth then obviously there is
no guarantee that merit (political skill and integrity) willaccompany it; a nobleman is not necessarily a noble man!
Assigning rank on this basis would be on a par with giving
the command to a meritless favourite; and the general willof the people would never agree to this in ·drawing up· theoriginal contract that is the source of all law. ·So the answer
to the original question is: No, hereditary nobility is not
to be tolerated.· But (1) there’s a kind of nobility that ·isallowable because it· follows from merit: this is the rank ofthose who are high in the government, a position that has tobe earned by merit. This rank doesn’t belong to the person
as his property; it belongs to his governmental position, andit doesn’t infringe equality because when a man leaves his
governmental position he •gives up the rank it confers and•returns to the level of ordinary citizen.
·E ND OF FOOTNOTE·

2: Definitive articles•fight,•pay the costs of the war out of their own pockets,•painfully repair the devastation war leaves behind,and,•load themselves with a heavy national debt that would

embitter peace itself and could never be amortised
because of constant further wars.
Faced with all that, it is utterly natural for them to be very
cautious about getting into such a dangerous game.
On the other hand, in a non-republican political system
in which the subjects are not citizens, it’s the easiest thing in
the world to decide to declare war. The ruler isn’t a memberof the state—he’s its owner—and a war won’t cost him theleast sacrifice of the pleasures of his table, his hunting, hiscountry houses, his court functions, and the like. So he
can decide on war for the most trivial reasons, as though it
were a pleasure party, casually leaving it to his ever-readydiplomatic corps to come up with ‘reasons’ that will makethe war seem respectable.

This constitution—·the republican one that I introduced
before embarking on that long footnote·— is establishedfirstly (a) by principles of the freedom of the members ofa society (as human beings); secondly, (b) by principles ofeveryone’s dependence on a single common system of law(as subjects); and thirdly (c) by the law of their equality (ascitizens). On its legal side, then, the republican constitution
is the one that is the original basis of every form of civil
constitution. But that leaves open the question of how the
republican constitution relates to the prospects for perpetual
peace.
I answer that its prospects for creating perpetual peace
are favourable. Here is why. In a republican system it must
be the citizens, who are all legally on a par, who decide ‘Waror no war?’, and in answering that they have to contemplate
all calamities of war, in which they would have to****
People usually confuse the •republican constitution with the•democratic constitution; let us now separate them. The
forms that a state can have can be classified either(1) according to who has sovereign power in the state; or(2) according to how the sovereign power is used, by
whoever has it, to administer the affairs of the state.
(1) The first classification is properly called ·a classificationof· forms of sovereignty, and there are only three of these:•autocracy, in which only one person, the monarch,
has sovereign power;•aristocracy, in which an associated group, the nobility, has sovereign power;
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2: Definitive articles•democracy, in which all those who constitute society,or any of its cognates occurs, except for one occurrence on page 24. Kant

the people, have sovereign power.
(2) The second classification is ·a classification of· formsof government, i.e. in terms of how states use their power(this being based on the constitution, which is the act of thegeneral will through which the many persons become one
nation). In this classification ·there are only two items·: agovernment can be either•republican or•despotic
Republicanism is the political principle of the separation of
the executive from the legislative power; despotism is theprinciple of the state’s making the laws and administering
them. In a despotic system, the public will is administeredby the ruler (or rulers) as his (or their) own private will.
Of the three forms of the state, democracy—in the proper
sense of that word—is necessarily despotism; because it
establishes an executive power in which ‘all’ settle thingsfor each individual, and may settle some things against an
individual who doesn’t agree ·with the policy in question·;
decisions are made by an ‘all’ that doesn’t include everyone!
In this the general will contradicts •itself and •freedom. [Youdoesn’t explain it, but his view seems to be that a strictly representative
form of government is one in which no citizen of the state is ever thwarted
by the law.] Every form of government that isn’t representativeis really a shapeless monster, because a legislator (whochooses what laws there will be) can’t possibly also be an
executive (who implements those choices); any more than ina syllogism such as:(i) All men are mortal, and (ii) Hannibal is a man,
therefore (iii) Hannibal is mortal
the work done by premise (ii) can be done by premise (i).
Autocracy and aristocracy are always defective in leavingroom for this to the extent that they do leave room forthis mode of administration, but it is at least possible forthem to govern in a way that conforms to the spirit of arepresentative system (as when Frederick II at least said he
was merely the first servant of the State).2 On the other hand,the democratic mode of government makes this impossible,
because everyone wants to be in charge. So we can say:the smaller the personnel of the government (thesmaller the number of rulers), the greater is their representation and the closer •their constitution comes tothe possibility of republicanism; so that there’s roomfor hope that •it will through gradual reform finally torise to the level of outright republicanism.
For these reasons it is harder for an aristocracy than for amonarchy to achieve the one perfectly legitimate constitution,and it is impossible for a democracy to do so except throughviolent revolution.

may have noticed an oddity here. To show why democracy must be
despotic, Kant should have contended that in democracy the legislativeand executive powers are in the same hands. Perhaps that is buriedin what he does say; but it is hidden from view by his emphasis on
the matter of ‘all’ versus ’all but one’ and the supposed threat of this topeace.][This paragraph and the next are the only ones where repräsentativ
2

High-flying epithets such as ‘the Lord’s anointed,’ ‘the executor of the divine will on earth’ and ‘the vicar of God’, which have been lavished onsovereigns, are often condemned as crude flattery. I think this is wrong. Far from filling a monarch with pride, they should rather make him
humble. . . . They should make him reflect •that he has taken on a job that is too great for any man, a job that is the holiest God has ordained onearth, namely to be the trustee of the rights of men, and •that he must always stand in dread of having in some way harmed ·these rights·, thisapple of God’s eye.

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How the governing is done, however, matters much moreto the people than does the form of sovereignty (though a lot
depends on how suitable the form of sovereignty is to the
purpose of ·good· government).3 To conform to the conceptof law, however, government must have a representative
form, which is the only one in which a republican modeof government is possible; without a representative form,
government is despotic and arbitrary, no matter what its
constitution is. None of the ancient so-called ‘republics’
knew this, and they all finally and inevitably degenerated
into despotism under the sovereignty of one, which is themost bearable of all forms of despotism.

When we see how devoted savages are to their lawless freedom, in which they prefer •being constantly at one anothers’
throats to •having the ·peaceful· rational freedom that they
could have if they submitted to a lawful constraint underlaws established by themselves, we regard this with profoundcontempt as crudeness, barbarity, and a brutish degradationof humanity. So you’d think that civilized peoples (eachunited in a state) would be eager to escape—the sooner the
better—from such a depraved condition. But, instead, eachstate places its majesty. . . .in being subject to no external
lawful restraint; and the glory of its sovereign consists in thefact that while he isn’t in the least danger many thousandsof people are ready at his bidding to sacrifice themselves forsomething that really isn’t any of their business. European
savages differ from American ones mainly in knowing how
to make better use of their conquered enemies than to eat
them! They use them to increase their subject populationand thus the quantity of cannon-fodder for ever bigger wars.
The depravity of human nature appears nakedly in theunrestrained relations of nations to each other (it is pretty
well hidden within law-governed civil states by the constraintof government). So it’s astonishing that the word ’law’ [German
recht, which can also mean ‘right’] hasn’t yet been entirely banished from the politics of war as an academic irrelevance. . . .
·But it certainly hasn’t. Such 17th and 18th century legal
theorists as· Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf and Emerich
Vattel are sincerely quoted to justify wars, although

Second Article: ‘The law of nations is to be founded
on a federation of free states.’
Peoples, as states, can be judged to harm one anothermerely by their coexistence in the state of nature (i.e. while
independent of external laws), just as individuals can. Eachpeople can—and for its own security should—encourage theother peoples to enter with it into a constitution like a civil
one; for under such a constitution each can be secure in its
right. This would be a league of nations, but it couldn’t be aninternational state, a state consisting of nations. [Kant gives
an obscure reason why it couldn’t be, and then says thatanyway that isn’t the point:] Our concern is with weighing
the rights of nations against each other, regarding them as
distinct states and not amalgamated into one.
3

2: Definitive articles[Kant begins this note with a fierce put-down of a writer who seems to have thought] that the best-administered state also has the best modeof government, i.e. the best constitution. That is thoroughly wrong: examples of good governments prove nothing about the form of government.
Who ever reigned better than Titus and Marcus Aurelius? Yet Titus was succeeded by Domitian and Marcus Aurelius by Commodus, though theirunworthiness to be emperor was known early enough for them to have been excluded, and in each case the ruler had the power to make the exclusion.
This could never have happened under a good constitution.

9Perpetual Peace

Immanuel Kant

2: Definitive articles

is something that states have outgrown. This is true despite
the fact that reason from its throne of supreme morally
legislating authority absolutely condemns war as a legal
recourse and makes a state of peace a direct duty, althoughpeace can’t be established or secured except by a compact
among nations. So there must be a special sort of league
that can be called a league of peace, aiming to make an
end to all wars forever, to be distinguished from a treaty ofpeace which only ends one war. [In this work as Kant wrote it, thisparagraph down to here is a single sentence.] This league doesn’t
encroach on the power of the state; its aim is just to maintainand secure the freedom of the state itself and of other statesin league with it, with no need for them to be constrained bycivil laws as men in a state of nature must be.
This idea of federation that is gradually to spread to allstates and thus lead to perpetual peace—is it practicable?
Yes, and this can be shown. If it so happens that a powerfuland enlightened people can make a republic for itself, whichby its nature must be inclined to perpetual peace, thisprovides a centre from which other states can be drawn
into the federal union, thus securing freedom in accordancewith the law of nations. By more and more such associations,the federation can be gradually extended.
We can understand a people’s saying:‘There is to be no war among us, for we plan to makeourselves into a state; i.e. to establish a supreme
legislative, executive, and judicial power that willreconcile our differences peaceably.’
But when this state says:‘There is to be no war between myself and other states,
although I don’t acknowledge any supreme legislative
power by which our rights are mutually guaranteed’,
we don’t at all understand what basis the state can have for
confidence in its own rights unless it is the free federation

their legal codes—whether in their philosophical or
their diplomatic versions—can’t have the slightest
legal force, because states as such are not under
any common external authority;and ·states presumably see this, because·
there is no instance of a state having ever been moved
to hold back from starting a war by an argument
based on the views of such great men.
This lip-service that every state pays to the idea of law [recht ]shows that there is to be found in man—asleep in him!—ahigher natural moral capacity that he can’t disown and thatwill eventually enable him to get the mastery over the sourceof evil in his nature, and to hope that others will do the same.
If that were not there in human nature, states wanting towage war would never use the word ‘law’ except perhaps tosneer at it like the Gallic Prince who said that law is ‘theprivilege that nature gives the strong to force the weak toobey them’.
States don’t plead their cause in a law-court; their only
way of bringing a suit is by war. It may be clear who won thewar, but no question of law or right is settled; there’s no rightor wrong here, because on the international scene each stateis the judge of its own case. A peace-treaty may bring to anend •this particular war, but it doesn’t end the •state of war,
i.e. the state in which new ‘reasons’ for hostilities can always
be found. Individuals in a lawless condition are subject toa natural law that says ‘You should extract yourself fromthis condition’; but states aren’t subject to a law of nations
telling them the same thing. That is because as states they
have their own internal juridical constitution, so that
constraint by others, according to their ideas of right,
based on some juridical constitution that is broader·than that of any individual state·10Perpetual Peace

Immanuel Kant

that reason necessarily ties to the concept of the law ofnations if that has any real meaning left. [Kant builds intothat sentence a clause calling this federation ‘a substitutefor civil social order’; he means that the federation of nations
would keep them at peace in a manner analogous to that inwhich ordinary civil government keeps individual people atpeace.]
The concept of a law of nations as a law about the making
of war really doesn’t mean anything, because:such a war-law would be a law for deciding what isright •by unilateral maxims through force, not •byuniversally valid public laws that put limits on thefreedom of each one.
The only conceivable meaning for a law like that would be: Itis right that men who choose to destroy each other shouldfind perpetual peace in the vast grave that swallows boththe atrocities and their perpetrators. For relations amongstates the only reasonable way out of the lawless condition
that promises only war is for them to behave like individual
men, that isgive up their savage (lawless) freedom, get used to theconstraints of public law, and in this way establish acontinuously growing superstate to which, eventually,
all the nations of the world will belong.
But their conception of the law of nations won’t let them dothis; they reject in practice what is correct in theory; so ifanything is to be rescued from all this, and we can’t apply
the positive idea of a world-republic, we’ll have to settle forthe negative idea of an alliance that averts war: while that
4

2: Definitive articles

lasts and spreads it will hold back the torrent of hostility
and lawlessness, but it will always be in danger of a new
bursting of the banks. [Kant decorates that thought with abrief quotation from Virgil].4

Third article: ‘The law of world citizenship is to beunited to conditions of universal hospitality.’This article like the preceding ones is not about •philanthropy
but about •right. Hospitality means the right of a visiting
foreigner not to be treated as an enemy.
[In what follows, Kant distinguishes (1) what the foreigner has a rightto from (2) what he doesn’t have a right to, and he isn’t utterly clear
about what line he is drawing. The best guess seems to be that he isdistinguishing(1) being peacefully allowed to •set foot on the territory and to •ask
to be accepted into that societyfrom(2) being accepted into the society.
The present version will track the German as closely as possible, occasionally using those numerals to help sort things out.]

It is all right to refuse him (2) this ·acceptance into thesociety· if the refusal doesn’t have fatal consequences for him;
but as long as he conducts himself peacefully and doesn’t
push forward, he is (1) not to be treated with hostility. It’s notthat he has a right to be (2) received as a guest (he couldn’t
have that right unless a special friendship convention werein play), but just that he has a right to (1) visit, a right that
all men have to offer themselves as potential members of any
society. All men have this right by virtue of their common
possession of the surface of the earth, where (because it is a

A people that has just ended a war would do well to follow its day of •thanksgiving with a day of •repentance, in order to ask. . . .for heaven’s
forgiveness for the constant wicked pride that leads the nations to •refuse to bring their relations with one another under the constraint of a systemof laws and instead to •resort to the barbarity of war even though that never really settles anything. The war-time thanks for victories in battle, thehymns sung to the •God of Hosts. . . ., contrast sharply with the moral idea of the •Father of Men. For they not only show indifference to how nations
seek their rights but also express joy at how many men’s lives they have taken or at least ruined.

11Perpetual Peace

Immanuel Kant

2: Definitive articles·finite· sphere) they can’t spread out for ever, and so must•spread famine, rebellion, treachery, and the whole litany ofeventually tolerate each other’s presence.
Originally no-one had more right than anyone else to any
particular part of the earth. This community ·of all men·is divided up by seas and deserts—uninhabitable parts ofthe earth—but ships and camels (ships of the desert) enablepeople to •approach each other across these ungoverned
regions and, using mankind’s common right to the face ofthe earth, to •create a possibility of ·peaceful· interaction.
The inhospitality of coastal people (e.g. those on the Barbarycoast) in robbing ships that come near or making slaves of
stranded travelers, and the inhospitality of desert people (e.g.
the Bedouin Arabs) who see the approach of nomadic tribes
as conferring the right to plunder them, is thus opposedto the natural law. ·You get a measure of how bad thisconduct is from seeing how weak, how unstrenuous, thatnatural law is·: all it does is to lay it down that people
arriving from foreign parts have (1) the right to try to interact
with the locals. In this way distant parts of the world cancome to relate peaceably with one another, in ways that will
eventually be covered by laws, moving the human race evercloser to a constitution establishing world citizenship.
Compare that ideal with the inhospitable conduct of the‘civilised’ countries of Europe, especially the ones driven bycommerce. Their wrong treatment of the lands and peoples
they visit (here ‘visit’ = ‘conquer’!) is terrifying in its extremes.
When ·these Europeans·, these ‘civilised’ intruders, firstcame upon America, the Negro lands, the Spice Islands, theCape etc., they regarded them as lands without owners, forthey counted the inhabitants as nothing. In India, under
the pretence of intending to establish trading posts, they•brought in foreign soldiers to oppress the natives, •started
up widespread wars among the various Indian states, andevils that afflict mankind.
[Kant attaches to the first word of this paragraph a very long discussion of what name it is best for a European to use for ‘that wonderfulcountry’.] China and Japan, who have had experience withsuch ‘guests’, have wisely refused them entry:•China lets them come up to the border but not tocross it;
•Japan allows only the Dutch to land on its shores,
but it treats them like prisoners, not allowing them tointeract in any way with the native Chinese.
The worst of this (or from the moral point of view, thebest!) is that nothing was gained from all these outrages,
because all these trading companies are on the verge ofcollapse. The Sugar Islands [in the Caribbean], that place ofthe most refined and cruel slavery [where purchasers of slaves
paid for them with sugar], have produced no real revenue except
indirectly and nastily by providing sailors for warships, thus
contributing to the conduct of war in Europe. And theseatrocities are the work of powers that •make a great showof their piety, and—drinking injustice like water—•regard
themselves as being, in the matter of correct religious belief,the chosen people!
The peoples of the earth have now gone a good distancein forming themselves into smaller or larger communities;
this has gone so far that a violation of rights in one place isnow felt throughout the world. So the idea of a law of world
citizenship is not a legal flight of fancy; rather, it is necessary
to complete •the unwritten code of civil and internationallaw and also •mankind’s written laws; and so it is needed
for perpetual peace. Until we can establish a law of world
citizenship, we mustn’t congratulate ourselves on how close
we are coming to that.

12Perpetual Peace

Immanuel Kant

Two additions

Two additions
1: Nature as a guarantor of perpetual peace

but from now on the reading of nature as a person will be dropped, except

What guarantees perpetual peace is nothing less than that
great artist Nature, who runs her mechanical course in a waythat shows that she aims to produce a harmony among men,whether or not they want it. [In that sentence, ‘artist’ translates

Considering nature as anecessary course of events governed by laws that we don’tknow, we call it fate. But when we consider its design in how
the world goes, seeing in it the wisdom of a higher cause that
predetermines nature’s course and directs it to mankind’s
ultimate goal, we call it providence.5 [’Providence’ translates
in one place where it insists on itself.]

Künstlerin, in which the -in makes it female, like the ending of ‘heroine’;5

In the mechanism of nature, to which man as an empirically detectable object belongs, a basic form is exhibited which we can’t get our minds aroundexcept by thinking of it as depending on what the Author of the world aimed to achieve when he set this thing going. We have different names forthis fact of being settled in advance. Thinking of it•generally, we call it divine providence;•as exercised at the beginning of the world, founding providence;•as maintaining nature in its course by universal laws of design, ruling providence;•as directing nature to ends that we don’t foresee and can only conjecture from the actual result, guiding providence.
With respect to single events as divine ends, it is no longer called ‘providence’ but dispensation [Kant adds Latin equivalents for all these names except
the first]. But ‘divine dispensation’ indicates miracles. . . .and it is stupid and pretentious on our part to describe any event in that way—claiming toknow what the event is for—because it’s always possible that it’s a mechanical corollary of some other end that is wholly unknown to us. . . . [Kantgoes on to sketch and condemn, as logically incoherent, a classification of instances of providence into general providence and particular providence;
we can excuse ourselves from the details of this. He continues:] When people talk like that, presumably what they are trying to do is ·something
respectable, namely· to distinguish•ordinary providence, e.g. the annual dying-out and rebirth of nature with the changes of the season; from•special providence, e.g. the way ocean currents carry wood to arctic lands where it can’t grow but where the people couldn’t survive unlessthey had it ·as fuel·.
We can explain the plain physical causes of these ‘special’ cases (rivers in temperate lands have trees growing on their banks, trees fall into therivers, and when they reach the sea they are carried along by the Gulf Stream); but we mustn’t overlook the teleological cause—the ‘what-it-is-forcause’—which indicates the foresight of a wisdom that has nature under its command.
The scholastics use the concept of God’s being involved in empirical events by •going along with them, •concurring in or •agreeing to their occurrence.
This must be given up. It’s a self-contradictory attempt to pair two things that can’t go together: (a) God is the perfect cause of events in the world,and (b) God concurs in or goes along with the occurrence of events in the world—as though his initial causation wasn’t adequate and has to besupplemented later on! We fall into this self-contradiction, for example, when we say that ‘Second only to God, it was the physician who cured theillness’, as if he had been God’s helper. God is the sole creator of the physician and all his medicines. Although it isn’t intellectually available to
us in our theorising about the world, we can float up to the level of the first cause, and at that level the effect must be ascribed to God alone. If wedescend to the level of causally explaining events that happen in the course of nature, the effect is produced by the physician alone. Either way, it’sa single unaided cause, not one that needs help! [Continued on the next page]13

Perpetual Peace

Immanuel Kant

Two additions

Vorsehung. That is the standard German word for ‘(divine) providence’,·Preliminaries: nature and homo sapiens ·but it carries more strongly than the English does the idea of looking

We can’t pin down nature’s guarantee in detail until we haveexamined the situation in which she has placed the actors
on her vast stage—the situation that will eventually assure
peace among them. Then, but only then, we can see how shebrings this off. Her preparatory arrangements are:(1) In every region of the world she has made it possible
for men to live.
(2) By war she has driven them even into the mostinhospitable regions in order to populate them.
(3) By the same means, she has forced men into more orless lawful relations with each other.
There are some wonderful facts about nature’s arrangements. For example:(1) Moss grows in the frozen deserts around the Arctic
Ocean; the reindeer dig it up from the snow and liveon it; and the human inhabitants of those regions use
the reindeer as pack-animals and as food.
(2) Camels live in the salty sandy deserts ·near theequator·; one might think that the camel was createdjust so as to provide a use for those deserts, so that
nothing would be wasted!
Purposiveness in nature is even clearer when we know that
the Arctic contains not only furry animals but also the seal,
the walrus, and the whale—which provide the inhabitants
with food from their flesh and warmth from their blubber.
But nature’s care is ultimately wonderful when we see(1) that she provides the inhabitants of those barren
climates with wood; they don’t know how it got there,
but they need it for canoes, weapons, and huts; andwhen we seeWe
don’t observe this providence in—or infer it from—nature’s
cunning contrivances; but the analogy with human plansand designs enables us to supply it from our own minds,
bringing this concept into our thinking about nature; indeed,
we have to bring it in if we are to think of nature’s intricacies
as even possible. . . . We are dealing here with an idea thatreason gives to us in our moral thinking, namely the ideaof how actions relate to and harmonize with the purposes
for which they are performed. Considered from a theoreticalpoint of view, this idea is extravagant, out of bounds; but inpractice, e.g. in using the mechanism of nature to achieve
the ideal of perpetual peace, the concept has its feet on the
ground, and can be used. In a context like the present one,dealing with theoretical issues that don’t involve religion,•the word ‘nature’ is more modest and more fitting to thelimits of human reason than •the word ‘providence’, which
decks us out with wings like those of Icarus to take us toward
the secret of providence’s unfathomable purpose [in the ancientahead, planning, etc. You’ll see in a moment why this matters.]

Greek myth, Icarus was equipped with wings by his father, flew too high,and fell to his death]. [A clause embedded in that sentence restson the fact that for Kant a ‘theoretical’ question concerns
what causes what, while a ‘practical’ one concerns what weshould do, how we should act. The embedded clause simply
reminds us of his view that] when human reason is dealing
with questions about how effects relate to their causes, it
must remain within the limits of possible experience.

[In the third paragraph of this vast footnote, Kant says that the notion of God’s ‘concurrence’, his going-along-with events, though it is useless intrying to explain why events happen, has a good and even necessary use in our moral thinking. (In his terminology: this notion has no ‘theoretical’use but only a ‘practical’ one.) His explanation of this brings in materials from his moral philosophy, which we can’t profitably go into here.]14Perpetual Peace

Immanuel Kant

Two additions(2) how these natives are so occupied with their battles

against the animals that they live at peace with eachother—though what herded them together ·into thatpeaceful group· was presumably nothing but war.
Among the animals that man learned to tame, the first
weapon was the horse (the elephant was a later luxury).
Skill in cultivating certain types of grasses. . . .and adding
to the quantity and quality of fruits by transplanting andgrafting. . . ., could only happen in settled states where property was secure. After living in lawless freedom by hunting,6
fishing, and sheep-herding, men were forced into an agricultural way of life. Then salt and iron were discovered. Thesemay have been the first items traded among the various
peoples, and they were sought far and wide. In this way thenations came to have peaceful inter-relations, so that a given
nation could have understanding, agreements and peaceable
relations with very distant peoples.
While seeing to it that men could live everywhere in theworld, nature was at the same time despotically requiringthem to do so, even against their will. This requirement—this‘ought’—didn’t involve the concept of a duty to which they
were bound by a moral law; rather, nature enforced thisconduct through war. Here is an example:

The Samoyeds who live by the Arctic Ocean have muchthe same language as a people who live two hundred
miles away in the Altai Mountains, which shows thatthey come from a single racial root. A third people,
the warlike horse-riding Mongols, forced their way
between these two, driving the Samoyeds into themost inhospitable arctic regions where they certainly
wouldn’t have gone of their own accord.7
Similarly with Laplanders and Hungarians, closely related
in language but far apart geographically, having been forced
apart by the Goths and the Sarmatians. And consider theEskimos, a race entirely distinct from all others in America(perhaps even descended from primeval European adventurers): what can have driven them so far to the north if not war,
which nature uses to populate the whole earth? and whatelse can have driven the Pescherais as far south as Tierradel Fuego? War itself doesn’t need any causal explanation
because it seems to be grafted onto human nature; it evencounts as something noble to which men are drawn by theirlove of glory quite apart from any selfish motives. A warlike
spirit is greatly valued
not only for itself during war (which is natural)

6

7

Nothing is more opposed to a civilized constitution than the hunting lifestyle, because it isolates families so that they soon become strangers to one
another, scattered as they are in extensive forests; and before long they are enemies, because each needs space in which to obtain food and clothing.
Noah’s ban on ·feeding on· blood [‘flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, ye shall not eat’ (Genesis 4:6)]. . . .seems to have been originallynothing but a ban on •the hunting life-style, because in •it raw flesh must often have been eaten; so forbidding the eating of bloody meat carried
with it a prohibition on hunting.
You might ask:
‘If nature wanted these icy coasts to be uninhabited, what’s to become of the inhabitants if nature fails to bring driftwood to them? It’s
reasonable to believe that ·nature will fail in that, because· as civilization develops, the occupants of the temperate zones will make betteruse of the wood along their rivers than to let it fall into the water and be carried out to sea.’
I answer: Those inhabitants of temperate lands will bring wood to the arctic regions in trade, exchanging it for animal products from the rich seasaround the arctic coasts—if, but only if, nature has first forced these peoples to be at peace with one another.

15

Perpetual Peace

Immanuel Kant

but also
as something that is likely to start a war.
Who has that attitude? Well, American savages have it now,and European savages used to have it during the age ofchivalry. Wars have often been started merely to show thiswarlike spirit; war has been regarded as having an innerdignity, so that even some philosophers have praised it as anennoblement of humanity, forgetting the Greek saying that‘War is an evil because it creates more wicked men than itkills’. So much for the measures that nature takes, for her
own purposes, in relation to the human race, considered asa class of animals.

Two additions

each people near some other that presses on it, and it must
form itself into a ·law-governed· state in order to defend itself
against this neighbour. Now the only political constitutionthat entirely squares with human rights is the republicanone; but it is the hardest to establish and even harder topreserve, so that it’s often said that a republic would have to
be a nation of angels because selfish men aren’t capable ofa constitution with such a sublime form. But nature turns
this selfishness to a good end: the main thing is somethingthat men are capable of, namely the establishment of a goodorganization of the state in which men’s powers are arranged
pairwise so that the ruinous effect of one power is reduced orcancelled by its opposite number. The moral upshot of thisis the same as if none of these powers existed. Thus, man
is forced to be a good citizen even if he isn’t a morally good
person. In doing this, nature is doing the work that properly
belongs to the rationally grounded general will—·which has
all the members of a community think their way throughto a common set of principles and purposes·—this being
something that is regarded with reverence but doesn’t everactually come into action.
It may seem difficult to organize a state, but it can bedone—even for a race of devils, as long as they can think.
Here is the problem:‘You have a multitude of thinking beings who allwant universal laws for their preservation, but eachof whom is secretly inclined to make an exceptionof himself. Establish a constitution in such a way
that, although their private intentions conflict, theycounteract each other so that the public conductof these beings is the same as if they had no suchintentions.’
A problem like this must be soluble. It doesn’t require•knowing how to make men morally better—·a problem with

·The main topic: nature and perpetual peace·
Our concern now—the central one when we are thinking
about perpetual peace—is to find the answer to this:Man’s own reason sets the achievement of perpetual
peace before him as a duty—what does nature doabout this? That is, what does nature do to favour
man’s moral purpose, and how does it guarantee (bycompulsion but without prejudice to his freedom) that
he will do what he ought to do but doesn’t do under
the laws of freedom?
This question concerns all three levels of public law—namely,
civil law, international law, and the law of world citizenship.
When I say that nature wills that such-and-such occurs,
I don’t mean that she imposes a duty on us to do it (because
only free practical reason can impose duties); rather, I meanthat she herself does such-and-such, whether or not we arewilling.
·Now I have three things to say·.
(1) Even if a people weren’t forced by internal discord
to submit to constraint by public laws, war would compel
them to do so, in the way I have described: nature places
16Perpetual Peace

Immanuel Kant

that requirement might be insoluble·!—but only •knowing
the mechanism of nature; that knowledge is to be used onmen, organizing the conflict of their hostile intentions in sucha way that they must put themselves under the constraint oflaws, thereby establishing a state of law-governed peace. We
can see in actual states, even ones that are very imperfectly
organized, that they approach foreign relations in somethingclose to the way that the idea of right prescribes, ·the idea ofright being something provided by the source of all our moral
knowledge, namely practical reason·. But this conduct is
not a product of an intrinsic element of morality. (You can’t
expect to get a good constitution from morality; the truthis the other way around—you can expect a people to havea good moral culture if they have a good constitution.) The
mechanism of nature brings it about not through genuine
morality but through ·men’s· selfish inclinations. Thesenaturally conflict with one another, outwardly, but they canbe used by reason as a means for making room for its own
end—·i.e. reason’s own end·—namely the sovereignty of law,and through that to promote and secure, as far as the state
can do this, a condition of internal and external peace. So
here is the truth of the matter: Nature unstoppably wills
that the right should finally triumph. What we neglect to docomes about by itself, though with great inconveniences tous. . . .

point of view·—this is better than having the states sendroots and branches into each other until they turn into one
superpower. Why is it better? Because the superpower willturn into a universal monarchy. And what is bad about that?
The greater the extent of any government the weaker its laws;
so a soulless despotism, after uprooting the seedlings of good,collapses into anarchy. Yet every state (or its ruler) wants toestablish lasting peace in this way by itself ruling the world.
But nature wills otherwise. She has two ways of keeping
peoples separate and unmixed—•differences of language and•differences of religion.8 These bring with them a tendency
to mutual hatred and pretexts for war; but the growth ofcivilization and men’s gradual approach to greater harmonyin their principles finally lead to peaceful agreement. This
is not like the ‘peace’ that despotism (in the graveyard of
freedom) produces by sapping everyone’s energies; rather,
it is produced and maintained by lively level competition
among those energies.
(3) Just as nature wisely separates nations that the willof every state would gladly unite by subtlety or by force,
under the cover of international law, so also it unites, byharnessing everyone’s self-interest, nations that couldn’t
have secured themselves against violence and war by meansof any appeal to a law of world citizenship. Sooner or later inany state •the spirit of commerce will get the upper hand, and•it can’t co-exist with war. Of all the levers a state can pull,
the power of money is perhaps the reliable; so states findthemselves forced—with no input from morality—to promotehonourable peace, using mediation to head off war wheneverit threatens to break out. . . .

(2) The idea of international law presupposes the separateness of many independent but neighbouring states.
Unless a federative union keeps these states at peace with
one another, their very separateness is a state of war; but
according to the idea of reason—·i.e. from the strictly moral
8

Two additions‘Difference of religion’—what an odd phrase! It’s on a par with speaking of ‘different moralities’. There may well be different kinds of historicalfaiths—[Glaubensarten = ‘ways of believing’]—associated with different ways of promoting religion. . . ., and different religious texts (Zendavesta, theVeda, the Koran etc.), but these don’t involve differences in religion. There is only one universally valid religion. Those historical faiths and books are
merely containers that religion happens to have had, and they can change with times and places.

17Perpetual Peace

Immanuel Kant

That is how nature, using the mechanism of human
inclinations, guarantees perpetual peace! Admittedly it
doesn’t do this reliably enough to entitle us to predict asa matter of •theory that this peace will come; but it’s goodenough from a •practical point of view, ensuring that thisgoal is not merely chimerical, and thus making it our duty
to work toward it.

Two additions

as long as that is the situation, the philosophers will speak
up, as they always do if they aren’t stopped.
[Kant goes on to say that in affirming the above principle
he isn’t saying that the philosophers’ opinions should be
followed (in preference to those of the lawyers)—merely thatthey should be given a hearing. (iii) He then gives heavily
jocose reasons why philosophers’ views should indeed begiven preference over those of lawyers, and muses on thefact that law, medicine and theology are wrongly ranked
higher than philosophy because they are associated withpower whereas philosophy is not. (iv) Of the old statementthat ‘philosophy is the handmaid to theology’ he wryly asks:‘Does it walk in front of her with a torch, or go behind holding
her train?’ The section ends thus:]
We can’t expect kings to philosophize, or philosophers to
become kings. And it isn’t desirable either, because the possession of power inevitably gets in the way of the unclutteredjudgment of reason. But kings, and self-governing peoples
shouldn’t allow philosophers as a class to disappear or tofall silent. Rather, they should be allowed to speak openly,
because •they can throw light on the business of government,
and because •they aren’t capable of the machinations thatwould be needed if they were to dish out propaganda forsome cause.

2: The secret article[This next short section, added in the second edition, is aseries of ponderous jokes. (i) The first, about the notion of asecret ‘article’ or clause in a contract or law, has nothing to
do with the rest, but lets Kant retain the word ‘secret’ as hemoves on into his treatment of the principle:’States that are preparing for war should consult theopinions of philosophers about whether and how there
might be public peace.’
Any government would be embarrassed to be known toaccept and apply this, so a government will apply it secretly by ‘calling upon the philosophers quietly’ to give theiropinions. (ii) The way to do this, Kant says, is simply for thegovernment to allow philosophers to express their opinions,i.e. to refrain from any regulations that would shut them up;

18

Perpetual Peace

Immanuel Kant

Two appendices

Two appendices
1: The friction between morality and politics regarding perpetual peace
Morality is. . . .practical: it is the totality of unconditionallycommanding laws that we ought to obey. [‘Unconditionally’:

can we resolve the conflict between morals and politics?’
doesn’t even arise. Although the proposition ‘Honesty is
the best policy’ contains a theory which practice alas! often
refutes, there’s also a theory contained in ‘Honesty is better
than any policy’ and that is beyond refutation and is indeed
the indispensable condition of policy. . . . We can hope thatthe upshots of our actions will accord with our wishes, but
we can’t know for sure what good or bad consequences willensue through nature’s mechanism from any human action;
to do that we would need to survey the whole series ofpredetermining causes, and our reason isn’t yet enlightened
enough to do that. But reason gives us rules that tell us how
to •stay on the path of duty (in accordance with the rules of
wisdom) and thus to •achieve the ultimate end.

i.e. they say things of the form ‘Do x’ and ‘Don’t do y’, not things of theform ‘If. . . do f’ or ‘Unless. . . don’t do y’.] After granting authority to

the concept of duty ·that is inherent in such laws·, it would
obviously be absurd to plead ·on some occasions· that we
can’t do our duty; no-one is obliged to do something he can’t
do, so that plea amounts to dropping the concept of duty
altogether. So there can’t be any conflict between•politics, as an applied doctrine of right, and•morality, as the theoretical doctrine of right.
There’s no conflict between practice and theory, therefore;
unless the ‘theory’ in question is a general doctrine ofprudence, i.e. a theory of the maxims for choosing the bestmeans to achieve the purposes of self-interest. But that’s anentirely different thing from morality.

Now the practical man to whom morality is merely theory,
while accepting that our good-natured hope ·for perpetual
peace· can and should be realised, bleakly predicts that itnever will be. He claims to infer from the facts of humannature that people never will do what is needed to put uson the road to perpetual peace. ·To discuss this, we need tonote a distinction between (for example)[Kant is about to quote two commands, taking them verbatim from
Luther’s translation of the Bible, Matthew 10.16:
Seid klug wie die Schlangen und ohne Falsch wie die Tauben,
literally meaning
Be clever (like snakes), and guileless (like doves),
where ‘guileless’ means ’straightforward, free of twisty cunning’. The KingJames version puts it this way:
Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

•distributively, every German wants x, meaning thateach German person wants x, andThis version will use the literal meaning of Luther’s (and Kant’s) words.]•collectively, every German wants x, meaning that

Politics says ‘Be clever (like snakes). . . ’, and morality
adds the limiting condition ‘. . . and guileless (like doves)’. If
these two can’t hold together in a single command, thenpolitics and morality really are in conflict; but if the twocommands are both in force in any context, then the notionof a conflict between them is absurd, and the question ‘How

there is a general agreement among Germans thatx is desirable.
Applying that to our present topic·: There may be a•distributive unity of desire such that each individual wants
to live under a juridical constitution according to principles of19Perpetual Peace

Immanuel Kant

Two appendicesor can occur is a mere mechanism of nature—then •theconcept of right is an empty thought and •there’s nothing
to practical wisdom except politics, the art of using thismechanism for manipulating men. But if we find that we
can’t get out of •bringing the concept of right into politics,
even •promoting it to the status of limiting condition onpolitics, then it must be admitted that the two are compatible.
I can easily conceive of a moral politician, i.e. one who
construes political principles in a way that makes themconsistent with morality; but I can’t conceive of a politicalmoralist, one who constructs a morality so as to suit the
purposes of the practical politician.
A moral politician will have this as a basic principle:
When a state’s constitution or its relations to otherstates turn out to be defective in some way that
couldn’t have been headed off in advance, the rulersof the state have a duty to look into how this can be
fixed, as soon as possible, in a way that squares with
the ideal of the law of nature that reason presents tous; whether or not this involves self-sacrifice.
But it would be absurd to require anyone to deal withevery defect that turns up by immediately rushing in to
fix it; because that could involve tearing apart the tie between people in a civil society or between nations in theworld—doing this before a better constitution is ready totake the place of the defective one; and no morally acceptablepolicy would allow that. But it can be demanded of thosein power that they at least take to heart the maxim thatsuch defects must be repaired, so as to move ever closer tothe goal of the constitution that fits best with the laws ofright. It can happen that a state whose present constitution
ordains despotic sovereignty actually governs itself in the
republican way; as time passes the populace will turn out
to be its own legislator. . . ., ·and thus able to move fromfreedom; but that isn’t sufficient to bring this about. What isneeded for that result is a •collective unity of desire in which
all together want that result—this collective unity being what
creates a civil society as a single unit. To have this collective
unity, there must be a cause that takes all the particular
wills and makes a common will out of them; no one memberof the group can do this; so we have to rely on force to do this,creating the conditions in which eventually a system of publiclaw can be established. In practice we’ll find wide deviations
from this theoretical idea ·of a unified society expressing ageneral will·; we can hardly expect that a lawgiver who hasformed a nation from a horde of savages will have moral
sensibilities prompting him to allow them to establish aconstitution on the basis of their general will!
It will be said then that once a ruler gets power in his
hands he won’t allow the people to prescribe laws for him.
·And what holds for the ruler of a state in relation to his
subjects holds also for a state in relation to the world’s otherstates·. Once a state is ·independent, in the sense that it is·
not subject to any laws from outside it, it won’t in seeking its
rights in relation to other states allow them to set the rules
for this process. And, ·moving even further up the size-scale·,a continent that feels itself superior to another, even though
the other isn’t interfering with it, won’t lose any chance toincrease its power at the expense of the other, by robbery oreven by conquest. Thus all the theoretical plans for civil andinternational laws and laws of world citizenship evaporate,
turning into empty impractical ideas; and the only hope forsolid foundations for a political structure must come froma practical approach that is based on empirical facts abouthuman nature and isn’t shy about drawing its maxims fromfacts about how things go in the ·real human· world.
Of course if there’s no such thing as freedom, andtherefore no such thing as morality—if everything that does20

Perpetual Peace

Immanuel Kant

mere •government that is republican to a •constitution thatis republican·. What will bring it to this point is the influenceof the mere idea of the authority of law; it’s as though thatidea had physical power! If a violent revolution is caused by abad constitution, and out of its turmoil there illegally comesto be a more legal constitution, it would not be permissible
to lead the people back to the earlier constitution; althoughwhile •the revolution was going on everyone who was openly
or covertly involved in •it would rightly have incurred thepunishment due to those who rebel. As for relations between
states, a state can’t be expected to renounce its constitution
even if it is a despotic one (which has the advantage ofbeing stronger in relation to foreign enemies) so long as itruns the risk of being swallowed up by other states. So
it must be permissible to delay implementing any plansfor constitutional reform, postponing them until a more
propitious time.9

Two appendices

All they have are Praktiken [= tricks, dodges, manoeuvres] that they employ to further
their own selfish purposes; they tell the rulers what theywant to be told, and ·for them, no price is too high for theirobjectives·: they are willing to sacrifice the nation—indeed
the whole world. This is like what happens when lawyers go
into politics (I mean lawyers for whom law is a business or
profession, not a matter of legislation). Their task is not toworry over details in the laws but merely to apply the law as
it now stands; so the legal constitution that strikes them as
the best is the current one; and when that is amended fromabove, the new constitution seems to them to be the best; andtheir procedures consist all along in mechanical applicationsof stated law. Their skill in being all things to all men gives
them the illusion that they can judge constitutional principles in terms of moral concepts (and thus not empirically
but a priori). They make a great show of understanding•human beings (and so they should, given how many of them
they have to deal with!); but they don’t understand •humannature, and what can be made of it, because that requires ahigher anthropological vantage-point ·which they don’t have·.
If they do what reason says they should do, namely carrythese concepts into civil and international law, they haveto be bluffing, because they are still following their usual
routine of mechanically applying constraining laws handed
down from the rulers, whereas really only concepts of reason
can establish legal constraints according to the principles of
freedom, this being the absolutely rock-bottom requirement
govern it], but they don’t have any!

So it is always possible that practically clumsy•despotising moralists will make a mess of things by undue

haste in adopting or proposing reforms; but experience will
gradually bring them back from their collision with natureand lead them onto a better course. But the •moralizing
politician, by excusing unjust political principles on thepretext that human nature isn’t capable of the good as reason
prescribes it, only makes reform impossible and perpetuates
the violation of right.
These politically adept men talk in praise of Praxis[= something like: high-level theory about human conduct and how to
9’This is a permissive law of reason: an unjust legal system must be allowed to stay in place until it is ripe for complete reform, having been brought tothat state either by its own development or by peaceful pressures from outside it. Why? Because it is better to have even very unjust public law thanto have none at all, i.e. to have the anarchy that would result from hasty reform. So political wisdom will make it a duty. . . .•to introduce reforms
that square with the ideal of public law, and not •to use revolutions, even ones produced by nature itself, as an excuse for still greater oppression,
but rather •to treat them as nature’s call for fundamental reforms to produce a lawful constitution based upon principles of freedom—the only kindof constitution that can last.

21Perpetual Peace

Immanuel Kant

for a just and durable constitution. The supposedly ‘practicalman’ thinks that to solve the problem of establishing sucha constitution he doesn’t need the ideas of reason, but only
his own experience of which constitutions have been mostdurable in the past—although plenty of those have beenquite unjust. The maxims that he secretly makes use of aresomething like the following. [Kant states each of these in Latin.](1) Act first, then justify. Take every chance you can
get to usurp the state’s right over its own people or over aneighbouring people; the justification of this will be easierand more elegant after the fuss is over. . . . It is muchharder to use force when one has first to think up convincing
arguments and then wait for the counter-arguments. Thevery boldness of this performance gives an appearance of
inner conviction that the deed was legitimate, and the great
God Good Outcome is afterward the best advocate.
(2) If you did it, deny that you did. Whatever wrong you
have done, deny that it was your fault. If for example you
have brought your people to despair and hence to rebellion,
say that this came about through their obstinacy. If you
have conquered a neighbouring nation, blame this on humannature, saying that you have to use force because otherwise
the neighbouring state will get in first and use force to
10

Two appendicesconquer you.
(3) Divide and conquer. That is, if you are your nation’sruler, but only because a class of top people have chosen
you as their leader, break up the unity of that class and set
them at odds with the people, giving the people visions ofgreater freedom. Before long everything will •unconditionallydepend on your will, ·whereas when you had your position
only because you were chosen for it by the top people, yourretaining it was •conditional on their continuing consent·.
And dealing with foreign states, it is a pretty safe means tosow discord among them so that by seeming to protect the
weaker you can conquer them one after another.
Certainly no-one will now be taken in by these politicalmaxims, because everyone knows them; and one needn’t
blush at applying them, as though their injustice were too
glaring. Why not? Because great powers blush only at
the judgment of other great powers but not at that of thecommon masses. It is not that they are ashamed of revealing
such principles (for they’re all in the same boat regarding
the morality of their maxims); they are ashamed only whenthese maxims fail, for they can still rely on political prestige,
which consists in the expansion of their power by whatevermeans they choose.10

Even if we aren’t convinced that men who live together in a state have a certain wickedness in their nature, and blame the criminal elements in theirthinking on barbarism, i.e. the fact that they haven’t yet reached a high level of civilisation, this viciousness is clearly and indisputably shown in therelations amongst states. Within each state it is veiled by the constraint of the state’s laws, because the citizens’ inclination to violence towards one
another is countered by the stronger power of the government. This relationship not only gives a moral veneer . . . .to the whole ·life of the state· but,by stamping on any outbreak of unlawful inclinations, it actually makes it easier for the citizens to develop a moral attitude of immediate respect for
the law, ·i.e. respect for it just because it is the law·. Everyone thinks that he would venerate the concept of law and follow it faithfully if only he were
sure that others would do the same; the government does in part give him that assurance, thereby taking a long step towards morality. It isn’t yet amoral step—·i.e. it doesn’t go the whole way·—because morality is attachment to this concept of duty for its own sake, not depending on the hope ofa similar response from others. But since each one accompanies his good opinion of himself with the assumption that everyone else has a malicious
disposition, the over-all judgment of the whole group is that they are all pretty worthless. This is a matter of fact; I shan’t try to explain it, except
to say that it can’t be blamed on the nature of man as a free being. ·Anyway, things aren’t as bad as they might seem·: No-one can be absolutely
without respect for the concept of right; this respect solemnly confirms the theory that the person who has it is capable of conforming to it, and mustact according to it, however others may act.

22Perpetual Peace

Immanuel Kant****

Two appendicesouter relations) which reads ‘Whatever goal you havechosen, act in such a way that you can will that yourmaxim could become a universal law’?
There’s no doubt that (ii) has precedence. As a moral
principle it is unconditionally necessary—·it says flatly how
you must behave·—whereas ·any course of action demandedin· (i) is merely something we must do if, in the given
empirical conditions, we are to achieve our chosen goal.
If the goal (in our present case, perpetual peace) is one that
we have a duty to pursue, then it must be derived from(ii) the formal principle of the maxims of external actions.
The (i) principle of the political moralist, concerning civil
and international law and the law of world citizenship, is amerely technical problem—·a problem in political engineering, one might say·—whereas (ii) the problem of the moral
politician for whom it is an ethical problem is worlds awayfrom the other in its approach to perpetual peace, which
is sought not merely •as a material good (·comparable withseeking increased trade or reduced air-pollution·) but also
•as something we have a duty to achieve.
Any solution to (i) problems of political prudence requirea great deal of knowledge of nature, so that its mechanisms
can be used to get the chosen goal; yet there’s no certainty
here about how to get perpetual peace, whichever of thethree spheres of public law we come at it through. To keep
the people obedient and prosperous over a long period, is it
betterto use •discipline or •baits to tempt their vanity?
Is it better have government by•one man, •a committee, •a titled aristocracy, or •thewhole people?
We can’t be certain of any answers to these questions. ·As
regards the second of them·: History provides us with examples of failure for every kind of government (except for truly

From all these twistings and turnings of a non-moral doctrineof prudence in leading men from their natural state of
war to a state of peace, at least one thing emerges clearly:men •can’t do without the concept of right in their private
relationships any more than they can in their public ones,•shouldn’t venture openly to base politics on the elementaryrules of prudence, and •can’t refuse obedience to the conceptof public law (this is especially conspicuous in the case ofinternational law). On the contrary they should give it all
the honour due to it, even when they’re inventing dozens
of pretences and cover-ups to escape from it in practiceand claiming that its authority as the source and unionof all laws is due to a skillful use of force. Let us put an
end to this sophistry (if not to the injustice it protects), andforce the false representatives of power to admit that they
are advocating not right but might. . . . Let us get rid of
the hocus-pocus by which they are deceiving themselves
and others, and discover the supreme principle from which
the intention to perpetual peace stems. Let us show thateverything evil standing in its way derives from the fact thatthe political moralist begins where the moral politician
rightly ends, and that since he thus subordinates principles
to the goal (putting the cart before the horse), he defeats
his own purpose of bringing politics into agreement withmorality.
If we are to bring practical philosophy into harmony withitself, we must first answer this:In problems of practical reason, where should we
begin? With practical reason’s (i) material principle
or with its (ii) formal principle? That is, should westart with (i) the goal that we have chosen? or with(ii) the principle (concerned solely with freedom in23Perpetual Peace

Immanuel Kant

republican government, but only a moral politician would
even think of that). There’s even more uncertainty about
international law considered as established by the statutesof the individual states. Actually, all this is mere words,
based as it is on contracts that are signed by people who are
secretly resolving to break them ·whenever it suits them to·.

Two appendicesfollowed, it can through nature’s mechanism cause thedesired result and make the concept of law effective. [Thephrases in bold type in what follows echo the distinction that Kant has
drawn on pages 20–21.] For example: it is a principle of moral

politics that a people should unite into a state according tojuridical concepts of freedom and equality, and this principle
is based not on prudence but on duty. However muchpolitical moralists•quibble with this on the grounds that the natural
mechanism of a mass of men forming a society will
work in such a way as to undercut the principles andthe goal I have been talking about, or•try to prove their assertions by examples of poorly
structured constitutions, ancient and modern (e.g.
democracies without any representative [see note on
page 8] system),they don’t deserve to be heard—especially because sucha pernicious theory may itself cause the evil that it prophesies, throwing •human beings into the same class as allother living machines, differing from the others (·i.e. thenon-human animals·) only in •their awareness that •they are
not free, which makes •them in their own judgment the mostmiserable beings in the world.

[This connects with the serious point about secret reservations on page 1,
not with the mildly flippant mis-hit on page 18.] In contrast with that,the solution of (ii) the problem of political wisdom virtually

forces itself on us; it throws light that puts all pretence
to shame, and thus leads directly to the goal. Prudence,
however, tells us not to rush this, using force, but rather
to move towards the goal ·of perpetual peace· gradually, as
favourable conditions permit.
We could put it like this:‘Seek ye first the kingdom of pure practical reason
and its righteousness, and your end (the blessing of
perpetual peace) will necessarily follow.’[Kant is there adapting Luther’s version of Matthew 6:33, which in theKing James Bible reads: ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his
righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.’ Rememberthat for Kant pure practical reason is the sole source of absolutely basic
morality.][In what follows, Kant offers a colourful rendering of something thatsoberly means ‘Let justice be done, even if the world perishes’.] There’s

That is because morality has a unique feature, especiallywith respect to its basic principles of public law (and hence
in relation to the a priori approach to politics), namely:
the less it makes your conduct depend on your proposed end (i.e. the material or moral advantage you
aim to get), the more conducive it is to your achievingthat end.
That’s because what determines the law among men—whether the law within a nation or international law governing relations among different nations—is nothing but theuniversal will given a priori; and if this will is consistently

a saying that has become proverbial:
Fiat iustitia, pereat mundus
which means’Let justice reign even if it wipes out all the villains in
the world’.
It sounds a bit like posturing, but it is true; it’s a solid
principle of right that bars access to any of the paths thatwind through thickets of deceit or force. But it shouldn’t
be misunderstood: it doesn’t permit anyone to press his
24Perpetual Peace

Immanuel Kant

Two appendicesencountered along the way as in •tackling the principle ofevil in ourselves, the much more dangerously deceitful andtreacherous one that pleads the weakness of human nature
as an excuse for every transgression—•facing this head on
and defeating its crafty dishonesty.
In fact, the political moralist can say: Ruler and people, or
nation and nation, don’t wrong each other when they attack
each other by violence or fraud (though they do a generalwrong by refusing to respect the concept of right, which is the
only possible basis for perpetual peace). Because they haveboth acted lawlessly, each gets what it (or he) deserves when
they destroy each other, provided that enough of the humanrace still remains to let this game continue into the remotest
ages so that posterity can some day take these ·combatants·
as a warning example. Thus providence is justified in having
the course of events in the world go like this; for the moral
principle in man is never extinguished, and as civilization
advances, reason increases its ability to get hold of ideas oflaw—though at the same time the guilt of the transgressions
also increases. The Creation as such—i.e. the fact that arace of such corrupt beings ever was on earth—seems not
to be defensible by any theodicy (·i.e. any theory seeking
to reconcile God’s power and goodness with the world’s
obvious evils·), if we assume that humanity won’t and can’t
be improved. But we don’t have the elevated standpoint fromwhich to make any such judgment: our concepts (e.g. ourconcept of wisdom) don’t put us in a position to theorize
about the supreme power that is inscrutable to us.
That is the sort of despairing conclusion that we are
driven to if we don’t assume that •pure principles of righthave objective reality, i.e. that they can be followed, andthat •they should govern relations amongst people withinstates and amongst states within the world, whatever empirical politics may say to the contrary. Thus true politics

own right in an utterly inflexible way (which would conflictwith ethical duty); what it should be understood to do is tooblige those in power not to limit or to extend anyone’s rightbecause of sympathy or disfavour for others. This requires(a) an internal constitution for the ·individual· state, basedon pure principles of right, and (b) a constitution uniting thisstate with others, near or far, for the legal settlement of theirdifferences (analogous to a universal state). This proposition(b) will say just this:The political maxims mustn’t be derived from thebenefit or happiness that any individual state expects
to get from obeying them, and thus not from the goalthat any one of them chooses to adopt as its supreme(though empirical) principle of statesmanship; butrather from the pure concept of the duty of right (fromthe ought whose principle is given a priori by purereason), regardless of what the physical consequences
may be.
There’s no way the world will perish because the number ofevil men is reduced! Moral evil has the inescapable property
of being opposed to and destructive of its own purposes(especially in the relationships between evil men); thus it
gives place to the (moral) principle of goodness, even if it
does so in slow steps.
****
Thus objectively (i.e. in theory) there’s no conflict between
morals and politics. Subjectively, however, in men’s propensity for selfishness. . . ., this conflict remains. May it always
remain! Why? Because it serves as a whetstone of virtue—·i.e. something for virtue to scrape against and thus become
sharper·. The true courage of virtue. . . .consists not so muchin •resolutely confronting the evils and sacrifices that are25

Perpetual Peace

Immanuel Kant

can’t take a step without paying homage to morality. Politics
in itself is a difficult art, but there’s no such difficulty whenpolitics is united with morality, because this combination
cuts the knot that politics couldn’t untie when it was inconflict with morality.
The rights of men must be held sacred, whatever thecost of that may be to the ruling power. There’s no room

Two appendicesfor compromise here, no place for thinking up a system ofrights-constrained-by-practicality that can steer down the
middle between right on one side and expedient on the others.
All politics must bend its knee before the right; but this gives
it a hope of eventually, slowly, reaching the stage where it
will shine with an immortal glory.

2: How the transcendental concept of public law harmonizes morality with politics
If like a law professor I abstract from all the matter of publiclaw (i.e. abstract from all the empirically given facts about
how men relate to one another in the state and how states
relate to one another in the world), all that is left is the formof publicness. The possibility of being public is implied byevery legal claim, because justice can only be conceived as
open-to-everyone’s-knowledge, so that without publicness
there can be no justice—and thus no right, because rights
can be conferred only through justice.

Every legal claim must be capable of going public. Since
it is easy to judge whether a given claim is thus capable (i.e.
whether the principles the claimant is relying on could bemade public), we have here a criterion—easily applied andfound a priori in reason—by which to test the legitimacy of
any legal claim. . . .
When we have performed this abstraction, setting aside
everything empirical in the concept of civil or internationallaw (such as the wicked streak in human nature that makes
coercion necessary), we are left with what may be called thetranscendental formula of public law:
‘All actions that affect the rights of others are unjust
if their maxim is not consistent with publicness.’
This principle is to be regarded not merely as •ethical (asbelonging to the doctrine of virtue) but also as •juridical(concerning people’s rights). A maxim•that I can’t openly proclaim without defeating my own
purpose,•that must be kept secret if it is to succeed,•that I can’t publicly avow without inevitably arousing
universal opposition to my project,[When Kant describes his ‘principle of the publicness of the law’ as‘transcendental’ he means:
It is to be accepted because it is required for the very possibilityof something that certainly is possible—namely, required for the possibility of justice. This stands in contrast to
something that is to be accepted because it can be logically derived fromsecure premises—proved ‘dogmatically’, to use Kant’s technical term forthis (we’ll meet that just once, less than a page further on). In his Critiqueof Pure Reason, for example, Kant argues that the proposition Every event
has a cause•can’t be proved by a routine derivation from secure premises,but •has to be accepted because if it weren’t true we couldn’t
have knowledge of an objective world;
meaning that the case for it is transcendental, not dogmatic.]

26

Perpetual Peace

Immanuel Kant

is unjust. Why can we see a priori that it is bound to
be opposed by everyone? Because it obviously threatens
everyone with injustice. This principle is like an axiom inbeing indemonstrably certain and—as will be seen in thefollowing examples of public law—easily applied. Notice,though, that it is merely negative, i.e. it only enables us torecognise what is not just to others. ·A positive partner of it
will be introduced on page 29·.
(1) Regarding the law of the state, i.e. domestic law, aquestion arises that many hold to be difficult to answer, yet it
is easily solved by the transcendental principle of publicness.
The question is:‘Is rebellion a legitimate means for a people to employ
in throwing off the yoke of an alleged tyrant?’
Well, there’s no doubt that •the rights of the people havebeen injured, and that •when the tyrant is deposed thisdoesn’t subject him to any injustice. But it is utterly wrong
for the subjects to seek their rights in this way. If they failin the struggle and are then severely punished, they won’t
be suffering injustice any more than the tyrant would if theysucceeded.
If you try to sort out the rights and wrongs of thismatter by dogmatically deducing legal conclusions from legal
premises, you’ll go on for ever. The only way to avoid allthat verbiage is through the transcendental principle of the
publicness of the law. According to this principle, the crucial
question is this:On the way to establishing a civil contract, would
the people dare to make public the maxim of theirintention to rebel occasionally?
It is clear that if in establishing a constitution the people
stipulate that in certain conditions they will use force against
the chief of state, they are claiming to have a legitimate powerover him, which means that he won’t be the chief of state. Or

Two appendices

if the state is to be established on the basis that the people
and the chief of state have equally balanced powers over eachother, no state will be possible—though the purpose of thepeople was precisely to establish a state. So the rebellion’s
illegitimacy is made clear by the fact that its maxim would
have to be kept secret because if it were openly acknowledged
it would make its own purpose impossible.
But the chief of state doesn’t need secrecy in this way. He
can openly say that he will punish every rebellion with thedeath of the ring leaders, however fervently they believe that
he violated the basic law before they did; for when he realizes
that he has irresistible power he won’t worry that publishinghis maxims may defeat his purposes. (Irresistible power? Yes,
that must be assumed in every civil constitution; because
a ruler without it doesn’t have enough power to protect his
subjects from one another, and in that case he has no rightto command them.) It is consistent with all this to say that if
a revolt of the people succeeds, the chief of state returning
to the status of a subject can’t start a new revolt to return
himself to power, but he needn’t fear being called to accountfor his earlier administration of the state.
(2) Regarding international law: There can be no question of international law except in the context of a lawgoverned state of affairs (without which no-one can beawarded any of his human rights). [Kant characterises the‘domestic’ status (1) as innere = inner and the international status of(2) as äussere = outer.] That is because international law, justbecause it is •public, contains in its concept the •publicrecognition of a general will that assigns to each person his
rights. This law-governed status
must result from some contract, but not necessarily
from one that is based, as the contract establishinga single state must be, on laws of coercion. [This useof ‘based on’ (gegründet) is misleading. Kant presumably means27

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Two appendices(b) ‘If a neighbouring power becomes formidable by its
acquisitions and thus causes anxiety, can one assume that
because it could oppress other states it will want to? And
does this give lesser powers a right to team up and attack it
before it has done them any harm?’that a contract establishing a single state must specify penalties
for individuals who break the state’s laws, whereas a system ofinternational law might exist without any way of forcing pun-

It might
instead be the work of a free and enduring association,
like the federation of states that I discussed earlier[page 9].
But for there to be international law there must be somelaw-governed state of affairs, actively binding together thedifferent signatories to the contract; for without that there
is only the state of nature in which there are no publicrights. This brings us to a conflict of politics with morality(regarding the latter as a doctrine of right), and the criterionof publicness easily resolves it, though only if the statesdrew up their contract •with the purpose of preserving peace
among themselves and not •for conquest. Here are threecases of conflict, each stated along with its solution.
(a) ‘If one of these states has promised something toanother—aid, ceding a particular province, subsidies, or the
like—and a case arises where the former state’s fundamental
welfare depends on its being relieved of its promise, it mightseek relief by considering itself as having two roles: (i) as asovereign, not answerable to anyone else in the state; (ii) as
merely the highest official, who is answerable to the state.
In this dual capacity the state in role (ii) could relieve itselfof the obligations it undertook in role (i). Is it permissible forit to do this?’
ishment onto individual states that break the law.]

A state that announced that its policy was the one suggested
here for the lesser powers would bring the feared evil downon it even more certainly and quickly, for the greater power
would get in first. As for the alliance of smaller powers—thiswould be a feeble defence against a state that knew how toapply the maxim Divide and conquer! The proposed maximof political expediency, if made public, would necessarily
defeat its own purpose, so it is illegitimate.
(c) ‘If a smaller state is located so that it breaks up
the territory of a larger one, which can’t survive unless its
territory is continuous, doesn’t that justify the larger statein subjugating the smaller and absorbing it?’
It’s easy to see that the larger state couldn’t afford to let thismaxim become known; because if it did, the smaller states
would very early unite ·against it·, or other powers would
fight over the prey, and thus publicness would vitiate thispolicy. That’s a sign that it is wrong—and perhaps extremely
wrong, for the degree of wrongness isn’t proportional to thesize of the item that is wronged.
(3) Regarding the law of world citizenship, I shall say
nothing. Its analogy with international law makes its maxims
easy to state and evaluate.

·Certainly not·! If a state (or its chief) went public with thispolicy, other states would naturally keep their distance fromit, and even ally themselves with others so as to resist suchpretensions. This is a case where politics with all its cunning
would defeat its purpose if it were conducted openly; so thatmaxim must be illegitimate.

****
So this principle concerning the disagreement between the
maxims of international law and publicness provides a good
criterion for recognizing ·cases of· the nonconformity ofpolitics with morality (as a science of right). The next task is28

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Immanuel Kant

to discover what is needed for these maxims to agree with thelaw of nations. (We can’t get that by running our principle
backwards, saying that any maxim that can survive being
made public is therefore just, because if someone is powerfulenough he doesn’t need to conceal his plans, ·however unjust
they are·.) The condition that has to be satisfied if there to
be international law of any kind is that there should bea law-governed state of affairs. Without that, there is no
public law—only private law such as may obtain in the stateof nature. We have seen [starting at page 9] that the only legal
set-up that is compatible with the freedom of the individualstates is a federation of states whose sole purpose is themaintenance of peace. So politics can be in harmony withmorality only in a federal •union, and that is somethingthat is necessary and given a priori by the principles ofright. And the legal basis for all exercises of ‘political skill’is the establishment of this •union to its greatest possible
extent. If that is not the goal, then the political theorists’sophisms are mere folly and veiled injustice. This false
politics outdoes the best Jesuit school in casuistry! [See thenote on page 1.] •It has ‘mental reservation’: wording public
contracts in such a way that they can be interpreted to
one’s own advantage (relying for example on the distinction
between ‘status quo of fact’ and ‘status quo of right’). •It
has probabilism: attributing hostile intentions to others;
or even destroying other states, peaceful ones, claiming as
legal grounds the supposed probability of their rising toascendancy. Finally, •it has the peccatum philosophicum:
regarding it as only a trifle when a small state is swallowed
up to enable a much larger one to get nearer to somealleged greater good for the world as a whole. [The other

Two appendicestherefore supposedly less wicked than sins against God.]

Politics gets a lot of help from its double-tongued use of
morality, bringing in whichever branch of it suits its own purposes in a given context. The branches are (i) philanthropyand (ii) respect for the rights of men, and both are duties—(i)a conditional duty and (ii) an unconditional and absolutely
binding one. If you want to bathe in the sweet feeling of (i)benevolence, make sure first that you haven’t failed in your(ii) absolute duty. Politics communicates smoothly with (i)morality in its first branch. . . ., endorsing the surrender of
men’s rights to their superiors. But any contact with (ii) the
second branch of morality (as the doctrine of right) would
involve politics ·not in smoothly negotiating, but· in bending
its knee; so politics finds it advisable not to have any dealings
with (ii) the doctrine of right, denying that it even exists andreducing all duties to (i) mere benevolence. This underhand
procedure of secretive politics would soon be unmasked if
philosophy went public with its maxims (if they—·the powersthat be·—dared to allow this to happen).
With this aim, I propose another transcendental principleof public law, this time an affirmative one [compare thenegative principle on page 27]; it is to be formulated thus:‘Any maxim that needs to be made public if it is toachieve its aim agrees with both (a) politics and (b)right.’
Here is why. (a) A maxim that can attain its goal only by
going public must accord with the public’s universal end,happiness; and the proper task of politics is to promote this(i.e. to make the public satisfied with its condition). (b) And
if this goal can be reached only by means of publicness (i.e.
by removing all distrust in the maxims of politics), politics
must conform to the rights of the public, because otherwise
it wouldn’t be possible for everyone’s goals to be achieved,·in which case there wouldn’t, after all, be a general trust in

two are also given Latin names, but ‘peccatum philosophicum’ is retained
because there is no good English for it. Literally it means ‘philosophicalwrong-doing’: a sin against reason but not explicitly against God, and29Perpetual Peace

Immanuel Kant

politics·. I must postpone to another occasion the further
development and discussion of this principle. Here I will justsay this: You can see that it is a transcendental formulafrom the fact that it ·involves form but not matter, i.e.· refers·through its use of the word ‘maxim’· to the form of universal
lawfulness, but says nothing about any empirical conditions(concerning happiness) as material of the law.

Two appendicesus to infer (1) from (3), which is what Kant seems to claim.]****
If it’s a duty to bring about a state of public law, andif there is well-grounded hope that this can actually be
done, even if only through an endless process of ever closer
approximations, then perpetual peace—not to be confusedwith the outcome of wrongly so-called ‘peace-treaties’ (which
are really only armistices)—is not an empty idea. On thecontrary, as ways and means are gradually found, we hopeat an ever-increasing pace, perpetual peace is a task thatgrows ever nearer to achievement.

[Kant’s line of thought here seems to go like this:(1) P is a transcendental formula, so(2) P’s truth is required for the very possibility of something x, so(3) P has to do with the abstract concept of x, x’s ‘form’, notempirical facts about how x works out in the real world.
You’ll notice that this may allow us to infer (3) from (1); it doesn’t allow

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