Imagine Peace

Abstract

Peace has no inherent meaning and thus it is only possible to study peace by studying the notions of peace inherent in specific collectives, systems of belief or persons. This book deals with the way the West imagined peace. Democratic peace theory formulates as a universal law what has been the rules guiding Western peacemaking in the twentieth century. The West found peace to be made by democracies, but the rules by which democracies made peace could not be explained by democracy itself. I will argue that civil society is constructed as the explanation for the perceived peaceful nature of democracy. Civil society is an understanding of the character of liberal societies which found its first expression in Adam Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). Ferguson synthesised a number of Enlightenment beliefs in an analysis of modern British society.