Kantian Ethics and International Relations

Abstract

Kant’s savage criticism of his immediate predecessors within the rationalist tradition supplies the key to his distinctive type of international political theory. Neither Pufendorf nor Vattel had shared Kant’s aspiration of paying ‘the Stoic-Christian ideal of the unity of mankind the supreme compliment of taking its political consequences seriously’;¹ each had failed in Kant’s opinion to appreciate that rationalism required a progressivist interpretation of international relations which conceived the perfectibility of world political organisation as a sublime historical goal. Rationalism had been severely compromised by the toleration of that condition in which obligations to humanity were second to obligations to the state. Under these circumstances, the deceptively simple supposition that wholly free states could produce a just and stable international order among themselves was as naive as it was dangerous.

Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel — miserable comforters all of them. (Kant)