Abstract
One of the most instrumental of treatises on war, Clausewitz’s formulaic representation of war as the continuation of politics, obscures ontological commitments that see war as formative of mature subjectivity and nationhood. Here the Hegelian commitment to war as the ultimate expression of complete individuality in relation to the state brings forth the experiential aspect of war and its place, in Hegelian thought, in the formation of the individual as citizen.2 In direct opposition to this discourse is Kant’s antipathy to war and his preference for a civic peace underwritten by the pacifying effect of law. Kant’s Perpetual Peace3 seeks to relegate war to the past, so that the modern, fully rational, progressive individual emerges as the author of a lasting peace that is the universal marker of progress against reaction, of civilisation against barbarism, of the civic order of the modern state against the chaos of the state of nature. What is historically significant about Kant’s treatise is that it becomes the baseline of liberal thought, and specifically liberal democratic thought, where a direct relationship is construed between a democratically constituted civic peace within and a predisposition for peaceful relations with other like states.
The concept of history, in which progress would have its place, is emphatic, the Kantian universal or cosmopolitan concept, not one of any particular sphere of life. But the dependence of progress on the totality comes back to bite progress.
Theodor Adorno1
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Chapter 3 Late Modernity, War and Peace
Theodor W. Adorno, “Progress”, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, translated by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 145.
On an analysis of Clausewitz’s association of war with mature (male) subjectivity, see Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 31.
Vivienne Jabri, Discourses On Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 41–50.
Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch”, in Kant, Political Writings, edited by Hans Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
See Michael Doyle, Ways of War and Peace (New York: Norton, 1997)
Nicholas Rengger, International Relations, Political Theory and the Problem of Order (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 112–31.
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Illuminations, edited with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 252.
Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).
Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment”, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (Penguin, London:1984), p. 39.
James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, “Introduction”, in J. Bohman and M. Lutz-Bachmann (eds), Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 1997), p. 4.
Jurgen Habermas, “Interpreting the Fall of a Monument”, German Law Journal, Vol. 4, No. 7, July 2003, p. 2; accessed at http://www.germanlawjournal.com, 6/2/06.
Jurgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, edited by Ciaran Cronin and Pablo de Greiff (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998), p. 179.
Jurgen Habermas, The Past as Future, translated and edited by Max Pensky and Peter Hohendahl (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), p. 21.
According to Schmitt, the “sovereign” is “he who decides the exception”, the moment of emergency wherein the law is suspended. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 1985).
Hans Joas, War and Modernity, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), p. 153.
Herbert Marcuse, “The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State”, in Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (London: Free Association Books, 1988).
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London and New York: Verso, 1979), p. 5.
Thomas McCarthy, “Introduction”, in Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), pp. xvi–xvii.
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. 7.
Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York and London: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1968), p. 92.
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© 2007 Vivienne Jabri
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Jabri, V. (2007). Late Modernity, War and Peace. In: War and the Transformation of Global Politics. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230626393_3
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