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Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay

Chapter 1: PERPETUAL PEACE
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The essay presents lasting peace as a practicable moral objective and lays out specific political and legal conditions to achieve it: republican constitutions, a federation of free states to adjudicate disputes, limits on standing armies and secret treaties, prohibitions on territorial conquest, and a form of cosmopolitan law guaranteeing basic hospitality. It treats peace as a duty grounded in practical reason, distinguishes teleological from mechanical perspectives on political development, and contrasts moral statesmanship with mere expediency. Structured as preliminary and definitive articles with supplements, the work analyzes political realities and prescribes constitutional and international reforms to make enduring peace progressively attainable.

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Title: Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay

Author: Immanuel Kant

Translator: Mary Campbell Smith

Release date: January 14, 2016 [eBook #50922]
Most recently updated: October 22, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Turgut Dincer, Ramon Pajares Box and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PERPETUAL PEACE: A PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAY ***

PERPETUAL PEACE


“For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,

Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew

From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,

With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d

In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,

And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.”

Tennyson: Locksley Hall.


PERPETUAL PEACE
A PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAY

BY
IMMANUEL KANT

1795

TRANSLATED WITH INTRODUCTION
AND NOTES BY

M. CAMPBELL SMITH, M.A.

WITH A PREFACE BY PROFESSOR LATTA

LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C.
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY


First Edition, 1903
Second Impression, February 1915
Third             ”        February 1917