Kant’s political thought is rooted in his critical philosophy and offers a cosmopolitan perspective based on the notion of human life on a shared globe. It are people that practice politics. At a global level its study has humanity as its object, not only in a moral but also in a distinct political sense.
With his ‘peace through rightfulness’ approach Kant advances constitutive principles for shared life in a state, peaceful relations between states and interaction between individual subjects of different states. Mediating relations at the local and the global level - and between these levels - means bringing a doctrine of right to bear on life. The formal conditions as laid out in ‘Toward Eternal Peace’ have gained normative agreement from different sides and have been used in the paradigms of democratic peace theory, international liberal law and cosmopolitan thinking. The ensuing ‘Kantian peace ‘is most often seen - both by critics and supporters - as a universalist enterprise wherein morality and politics are conflated. Proceeding from principles to particulars involves a subordinating mode of thought as exemplified in the well-known preliminary prohibitive articles and definitive constitutive articles for rightful and peaceful world politics.
However, the political significance of the peace essay cannot be found in the concept of right alone. There is another reflective dimension to Kant’s peace essay that has not received equal attention: Kant’s rightful approach is embedded in a broader framework that also involves coordinating modes of thought involving reflective judgment. Consequently, the preliminary and definitive articles do not exhaust the significance of the essay.
In this paper I inquire what the coordinating modes of thought in Toward Eternal Peace contribute in addition to the well-known rights based approach. The perspective of critical symbolism allows me to inquire into the role of symbolic representation in the essay. First I focus on Kant’s use of analogy as a heuristic tool for conveying significance. The text of the essay is an expression of judgment - a political pamphlet - using the literary format of a peace treaty: ‘as if’ this where a treaty text that is binding upon all sovereigns and subjects, including a guarantee, a secret clause and annexes for correct interpretation. Kant thus offers a rhetorical benchmark for judging realpolitik by translating the conditions for political freedom to a global scale.
Next, I show how exemplification lends significance to the idea(l) of eternal peace as a meaningful horizon and inspiring prospect. By pointing to signs and indications in nature and history Kant offers an outlook for humanity that exceeds the limitations of particular allegiances. To conclude, I draw out the implications of the foregoing argument for current Kantian inspired thinking about international relations and global politics. Global politics requires imagination, enlarged mentality and the cultivation of judgment to value the potential for reform in given circumstances.
