Kantian Perspectives on Intervention: Transcending Rather than Rejecting Hobbes

Abstract

Here I argue that Kant is not a thoroughgoing Hobbesian in his approach to political philosophy and international relations. However I also suggest that Kant is heavily indebted to Hobbes for his conception of politics and has no wish to demolish wholly the Hobbesian edifice of an authoritative, centralised and well-ordered state. An analysis of those texts where Kant pays close attention to Hobbes’s work demonstrates that Kant’s approach to Hobbes’s thinking about politics is appreciative and subtle. Kant greatly valued the symbolic force of Hobbes’s depiction of the Leviathan and was at one with Hobbes’s conclusion that subjects should not contemplate resistance to, least of all rebellion against, the sovereign of an existing civil commonwealth. Kant worked with the model of the Hobbesian state that had shaped the Westphalian international political order of his time, and he greatly appreciated the contribution of the idea of a fully sovereign national state that held sway over religious dissent to political and legal philosophy. Kant aimed, however, to go several steps further than Hobbes in attempting to bring the many fully sovereign national states into a gradually expanding peaceful federation that would provide a solid basis both for international law and domestic order. It is true that Kant ended up adopting a cosmopolitan perspective but this is not a cosmopolitan perspective that seeks to nullify the civil commonwealth of Hobbes’s political philosophy but is rather subtly grafted on to it.