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Classical Theory in International Relations
Classical political theorists such as Thucydides, Kant, Rousseau, Smith,
Hegel, Grotius, Mill, Locke and Clausewitz are often employed to
explain and justify contemporary international politics and are seen
to constitute the different schools of thought in the discipline. However, traditional interpretations frequently ignore the intellectual and
historical context in which these thinkers were writing as well as the
lineages through which they came to be appropriated in International
Relations. This collection of essays provides alternative interpretations
sensitive to these political and intellectual contexts and to the trajectory of their appropriation. The political, sociological, anthropological,
legal, economic, philosophical and normative dimensions are shown
to be constitutive, not just of classical theories, but of international
thought and practice in the contemporary world. Moreover, they challenge traditional accounts of timeless debates and schools of thought
and provide new conceptions of core issues such as sovereignty, morality, law, property, imperialism and agency.
b e at e ja h n is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the
Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex. She
is the author of The Cultural Construction of International Relations (2000)
and Politik und Moral (1993).
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: 103
Classical Theory in International Relations
Editorial Board
Steve Smith (Managing editor)
Thomas Biersteker
Phil Cerny
A. J. R. Groom Richard Higgott
Caroline Kennedy-Pipe
Michael Cox
Kimberley Hutchings
Steve Lamy
Michael Mastanduno
Louis Pauly Ngaire Woods
Cambridge Studies in International Relations is a joint initiative of
Cambridge University Press and the British International Studies Association (BISA). The series will include a wide range of material, from
undergraduate textbooks and surveys to research-based monographs
and collaborative volumes. The aim of the series is to publish the best
new scholarship in International Studies from Europe, North America
and the rest of the world.
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
102 Andrew Linklater and Hidemi Suganami
The English school of international relations
A contemporary reassessment
101 Colin Wight
Agents, structures and international relations
Politics as ontology
100 Michael C. Williams
The realist tradition and the limits of international relations
99 Ivan Arreguı́n-Toft
How the weak win wars
A theory of asymmetric conflict
98 Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall
Power in global governance
97 Yale H. Ferguson and Richard N. Mansbach
Remapping global politics
History’s revenge and future shock
96 Christian Reus-Smit
The politics of international law
95 Barry Buzan
From international to world society?
English school theory and the social structure of globalisation
94 K. J. Holsti
Taming the Sovereigns
Institutional change in international politics
93 Bruce Cronin
Institutions for the common good
International protection regimes in international security
92 Paul Keal
European conquest and the rights of indigenous peoples
The moral backwardness of international society
Series list continued after index
Classical Theory in
International Relations
Edited by
Beate Jahn
cambridge university press
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© Cambridge University Press 2006
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For Benjamin
Contents
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
xi
xiv
1 Classical theory and international relations in context
Beate Jahn
2
3
4
5
Part I Intellectual contexts
Pericles, realism and the normative conditions of
deliberate action
S. Sara Monoson and Michael Loriaux
Immanuel Kant and the democratic peace
John MacMillan
‘One powerful and enlightened nation’: Kant and the
quest for a global rule of law
Antonio Franceschet
Rousseau and Saint-Pierre’s peace project: a critique of
‘history of international relations theory’
Yuichi Aiko
Part II Political contexts
6 The Savage Smith and the temporal walls of capitalism
David L. Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah
7 Property and propriety in international relations: the
case of John Locke
David Boucher
8 Classical smoke, classical mirror: Kant and Mill in liberal
international relations theory
Beate Jahn
ix
1
27
52
74
96
123
156
178
Contents
Part III Lineages
9 The ‘other’ in classical political theory: re-contextualizing
the cosmopolitan/communitarian debate
Robert Shilliam
10 Images of Grotius
Edward Keene
11 The Hobbesian theory of international relations:
three traditions
Michael C. Williams
12 Re-appropriating Clausewitz: the neglected dimensions
of counter-strategic thought
Julian Reid
Index
x
207
233
253
277
296
Notes on contributors
Yuichi Aiko is teaching Politics at Nishogakusha University, Tokyo.
He wrote his PhD thesis on The History of Political Theory in International Relations: Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Perpetual Peace Projects
in Intellectual Context. His major research interest lies in the historical
development of the ‘study of international relations’ and he is currently
working on Kant’s international political theory.
David L. Blaney is Associate Professor of Political Science, Macalester
College, USA. His research fields include the political and social theory
of international relations/international political economy and democratic theory, pedagogy and world politics. He has recently published,
with Naeem Inayatullah, International Relations and the Problem of Difference (2004). With Inayatullah, he is working on a book about Indians
and political economy.
David Boucher is Professorial Fellow in European Studies, Cardiff
University, and Adjunct Professor of International Relations at the University of the Sunshine Coast. His most recent publications include
Political Theories of International Relations (1998), British Idealism and Political Theory (with Andrew Vincent, 2000) and Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen:
Politics, Poetry and Protest (2004). Among his edited books are: The British
Idealists (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Social Justice (with Paul
Kelly, 1998), and Political Thinkers From Socrates to the Present (with Paul
Kelly, 2003).
Antonio Franceschet is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the
University of Calgary, Canada. He has published numerous articles
on liberal international thought and is the author of Kant and Liberal
Internationalism: Sovereignty, Justice and Global Reform (Palgrave 2002).
xi
Notes on contributors
Naeem Inayatullah is Associate Professor of Politics, Ithaca College,
USA. He is currently interested in applying the history of social theory
to aspects of popular culture such as music, film, literature and collective
memory. He has recently published, with David Blaney, International
Relations and the Problem of Difference (2004). With Blaney, he is working
on a book about Indians and political economy.
Beate Jahn is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex. Her publications include Politik und Moral (1993) and The
Cultural Construction of International Relations (2000). She is interested
in classical and contemporary international and political theory and is
currently working on a critical history of liberal internationalism.
Edward Keene is Assistant Professor at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author
of Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World
Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and International Political
Thought: A Historical Introduction (2005).
Michael Loriaux is Associate Professor of Political Science and CoDirector of the French Interdisciplinary Group at Northwestern University. He is interested in European integration, international monetary
relations, and philosophical underpinnings of International Relations
theory. Among his publications are France After Hegemony: International
Change, Financial Reform and Capital Ungoverned: Liberalizing Finance in
Interventionist States (co-authored). He has recently completed a book
manuscript European Union: Myth and Deconstruction of the Rhineland
Frontier.
John MacMillan is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Brunel
University. His primary area of research is the war/peace proneness of
democratic states. Recent publications include articles in Journal of Peace
Research, Review of International Studies and International Politics as well
as the co-edited volume, The Iraq War and Democratic Politics.
S. Sara Monoson is Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. She is the author of Plato’s Democratic Entanglements:
Athenian Politics and the Practice of Philosophy (2000) and has written on
Athenian democratic thought, Thucydides, and International Relations
theory.
xii
Notes on contributors
Julian Reid is Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of
War Studies, King’s College, London. His most recent work appears in
Millennium, Alternatives, Space and Culture and the Cambridge Review of
International Affairs. He is currently working on two books, Infinite War
and The Liberal Way of War (with Michael Dillon).
Robert Shilliam is Hedley Bull Junior Research Fellow in International
Relations at Wadham College, University of Oxford. His research project
seeks to integrate Historical Sociology and History of Political Thought
approaches. He has published in Millennium and History of Political
Thought.
Michael C. Williams is Professor of International Politics at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth. He is the author of The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations (Cambridge University Press,
2005) and ‘Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization in international politics’ International Studies Quarterly (December 2003).
xiii
Acknowledgements
While I was developing a new course on Classical Political Theory and
International Relations at the University of Sussex, it became clear to
me that there were numerous excellent and critical treatments of classical theorists in International Relations, albeit widely dispersed and
difficult to get hold of. This state of affairs, I felt, was unsatisfactory
not only because it effectively removed this literature from a broader
audience but also because it obscured the fact that reflection on the role
of classical theory has been an ongoing and systematic concern within
the discipline of International Relations. Moreover, as the contributions
to this book demonstrate, engagement with classical theory in the discipline is neither reduced to a particular intellectual or political position
nor to certain ‘issue areas’. It is hoped that this book will help to make this
literature more readily available as well as to demonstrate its systematic
and quite foundational nature for all areas of international thought.
Indirectly, then, the never-ending processes of restructuring at the
University of Sussex have led to the development of this book. Notwithstanding these ‘structural’ influences, my greatest thanks go to the contributors for the excellent quality of their work as well as for their
constructive cooperation in the course of producing this book. The
Department for International Relations and Politics at Sussex has generously provided some funding for initial library research. And I am
especially grateful to Robert Shilliam who undertook that task with the
most astonishing efficiency and intellectual sharpness. Justin Rosenberg
has, as usual, patiently listened to my musings on the subject of editing a book, provided feedback on my contributions, and corrected my
English. Thanks are also due to the referees of Cambridge University
Press who have made some very astute, helpful and generous comments
as well as to John Haslam for his support and efficiency.
xiv
Acknowledgements
Chapter 2 is an extensively revised version of S. Sara Monoson and
Michael Loriaux, ‘The Illusion of Power and the Disruption of Moral
Norms: Thucydides’ Critique of Periclean Policy’ in American Political
Science Review 92 (1998), 285–297 and is reprinted with the permission
of Cambridge University Press; Chapter 3 is an updated version of John
MacMillian’s ‘A Kantian Protest Against the Peculiar Discourse of InterLiberal State Peace’ in Millennium 24 (1995), 549–562 and is reproduced
with the permission of the publisher; and a different version of Chapter 8 has first been published as Beate Jahn, ‘Kant, Mill, and Illiberal
Legacies in International Affairs’ in International Organization 59 (2005),
177–207. We are grateful to Cambridge University Press and the editors
of Millennium for permission to reprint these articles here.
Brighton
Beate Jahn
xv
1
Classical theory and international
relations in context
Beate Jahn
The contemporary world is widely described as globalized, globalizing
or postmodern. Central to these descriptions is the claim of historical
change or even rupture. A globalized or globalizing world is juxtaposed
to an earlier international world just as the postmodern world has left
modernity behind. In the light of these claims of historical change it
is remarkable that classical authors1 reflecting on a modern or even
premodern, but certainly international, world still play an important
role in International Relations.
Three main uses of classical texts in contemporary International
Relations can be identified. First, classical authors are frequently cited
as precursors to contemporary theoretical approaches: Realists trace the
roots of their thinking back to Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes and
Rousseau; Liberals most prominently to Kant; the English School to
Grotius; Marxist approaches obviously cite Marx as well as Gramsci; and
Nietzsche as well as Hegel play an important role in Postmodernism.
Secondly, classical authors are used for the purpose of explaining
contemporary political developments and for the justification or even
propagation of specific foreign policies. A case in point is the – academically and politically – influential use of Kant in explaining the data of the
Democratic Peace and the implicit or explicit propagation of the spread
of democracy and market economy accompanied by a strict legal and
political separation of liberal from non-liberal states in contemporary
world politics.2
1 Classical authors are here understood to have written before the constitution of International Relations as a separate discipline; their work is thus characterized by a relatively
holistic approach to social and political life.
2 See, for the most influential formulation of the Democratic Peace thesis, Michael Doyle,
‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs’ in Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones and
1
Classical Theory in International Relations
Finally, classical authors are used to define and structure contemporary theoretical and political debates. Theoretical debates in International Relations are frequently presented – in the mainstream – as Liberal
or Kantian approaches versus Realist or Hobbesian/Machiavellian
approaches3 as well as – from the margins – for instance as Marxist versus Realist approaches.4 Similarly, contemporary political world views
and policies are defined with reference to classical authors and pitched
against each other. Most recently and very prominently, for instance,
Robert Kagan has characterized the European world view and approach
to international affairs as ‘Kantian’ and the equivalent American position as ‘Hobbesian’.5
These three different uses of classical authors in contemporary international thought and practice – providing philosophical foundations for
contemporary theories, explaining and justifying contemporary policies, and defining and structuring theoretical and political debates –
ultimately aim at illuminating contemporary theories, political practices, and theoretical and political debates. It is in order to provide a
foundation for contemporary international theories that scholars read
Machiavelli; in order to explain the contemporary liberal peace or propagate liberal foreign policies that scholars turn to Kant; in order to
classify and specify competing contemporary world views and policies that scholars refer to Kant and Hobbes. This motivation to explain
Steven E. Miller (eds.), Debating the Democratic Peace (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996),
pp. 3–57. The article was first published in two parts in Philosophy and Public Affairs 12
(1983), 205–235, 323–353. Kant is also prominently used in support of the Cosmopolitan
Democracy project heralded by David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); Daniele Archibugi,
‘Models of International Organization in Perpetual Peace Projects’ Review of International Studies 18 (1992), 295–317; and ‘Principles of Cosmopolitan Democracy’ in Daniele
Archibugi, David Held and Martin Köhler (eds.), Re-imagining Political Community: Studies
in Cosmopolitan Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), pp. 198–228; as well as Andrew
Linklater, ‘Citizenship and Sovereignty in the Post-Westphalian State’ European Journal of
International Relations 2 (1996), 77–103; and The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical
Foundations of the Post-Westphalian Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).
3 After E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981) had
famously introduced this distinction at the end of the 1930s, there is hardly a textbook in
International Relations which does not reproduce it – notwithstanding variations in the
authors aligned with each of these positions as well as different strands of thought within
them.
4 See, for example, Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society (London: Verso, 1994).
5 Robert Kagan, ‘Power and Weakness’ Policy Review 113 (2002). This classification
is widely reproduced not just in academic literature; see William Pfaff, ‘Kant and
Hobbes. Look Who’s Part of the Harsh Disorder’ International Herald Tribune (1 August
2002).
2
Classical theory and international relations in context
and understand the contemporary world, implicitly or explicitly, recognizes the necessarily historical location of our own motivations for
scholarly enquiry. And yet, it also relies on the assumption of historical
and intellectual continuity. These approaches to classical texts posit a
significant historical continuity in the development of individual theoretical approaches to International Relations, in the development of
international politics as well as in the structure of the theoretical debates
and political struggles between them.
Hence, we are confronted with a puzzling tension between widespread claims of more or less radical historical change and widespread
uses of classical authors based on the assumption of historical continuity. And it is not the case that only those theories that deny radical
historical change in the nature of international politics – most prominently Realist approaches6 – rely on the continuing relevance of classical authors; in most cases, the contradiction is located within rather
than between theoretical approaches. Postmodernists are inspired by
Nietzsche and even Clausewitz as are Globalization theorists by Kant.
In theory, this contradiction is easily resolved by the recognition that
both historical continuity and change mark European intellectual and
political development. And, indeed, contemporary theorists generally
accept the existence of both to varying degrees.7
Such a theoretical recognition of a mixture of continuity and change,
however, does not answer the question of which aspects in any given
classical text can be considered continuous with the contemporary
world and its problems and which fall into the category of change.
In the following pages I will first argue that a fruitful use of classical
texts for International Relations theory and practice today requires the
specification of elements of both historical continuity and change. And
I will show that much of the contemporary use of classical authors is
characterized by presentism; that is, it does not live up to this requirement with the result that contemporary assumptions are read back into
6 See, for example, Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State, and War (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1959), pp. 235f; and R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations
as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 7.
7 Ian Clark ‘Traditions of Thought and Classical Theories of International Relations’ in Ian
Clark and Iver B. Neumann (eds.), Classical Theories of International Relations (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1996), p. 1; Chris Brown, Terry Nardin and Nicholas Rengger (eds.), International Relations in Political Thought: Texts From the Ancient Greeks to the First World War
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 5.
3
Classical Theory in International Relations
classical authors instead of being opened up for reflection through the
use of classical authors.
In the course of this discussion I will identify three areas – the intellectual context, the political context and lineages of reception – in which
such historical specificity can be established. These three contextual
dimensions of inquiry provide the structure of this book which I will set
out in the final section of this introduction. The individual chapters in
the main part of this volume all reconstruct the intellectual and/or political context of classical texts or the trajectory by which these texts have
been included – or excluded – from International Relations theory and
practice. They demonstrate in a variety of cases that the reconstruction
of these contexts unlocks the rich potential of classical authors for illuminating and developing further contemporary international thought
and practice.
Continuity and discontinuity
A lack of continuity in actors, issues and concepts between the reflections
of classical authors and contemporary international thought and practice would render the former insignificant for the study of international
relations today. And, obviously, there exists some continuity between
European classical authors and contemporary international theory and
practice: classical authors reflected on social and political developments
which provide the historical bases of the contemporary European – and
through European expansion also to some extent non-European – world;
moreover, classical theories have shaped the conceptual framework for
our reflections on this world over time. Such continuity or ‘points of contact between one period and another’ undoubtedly needs to be established for any fruitful use of classical authors in International Relations.8
It may exist, for instance, in certain social and political phenomena which
the contemporary world shares with classical times. If Hobbes discussed
the problem of civil war – and ‘his’ civil wars have something concrete
in common with contemporary civil wars – his writings can contribute
to an analysis of contemporary civil wars. And yet, it may also be the
case that the necessary ‘point of contact’ between Hobbes’ and contemporary civil wars consists mainly in the use of the same term for
historically very different social and political phenomena. In this case,
Hobbes’ discussion of civil wars raises questions about the nature and
8
Brown et al. (eds.), International Relations, p. 5.
4
Classical theory and international relations in context
extent of historical change – rather than to provide possible solutions
for contemporary problems.
This example demonstrates two things. Firstly, both historical continuity and historical discontinuity may provide the basis for insights
into contemporary international affairs. Yet, they do so in different ways.
The greater the similarities between historical cases, the more we can
build on classical analyses – or their shortcomings. Moreover, if it turns
out that a classical analysis is satisfactorily applicable to contemporary
cases, the solution provided by classical analysts can also be discussed
as a possible solution for today. And even if the analysis is convincing
but the solution – with historical hindsight – found wanting, it can at
least be excluded from the range of contemporary options.
In contrast, discontinuities between classical and contemporary cases
do not allow us to follow in the footsteps of the classics with regard to
analysis or solution. Instead, they throw into relief areas of historical
contingency in social and political life. The identification of such areas
of contingency are valuable for their specification of what is open to
social and political change. Furthermore, they guide research into the
causes and consequences of historical change and thus lead to a better
understanding of contemporary phenomena. And, finally, such social
and political discontinuity coupled with conceptual continuity firmly
puts the question of the relationship between theory and practice – and
their historical development – on the agenda.
Secondly, given that historical continuity and discontinuity provide
different kinds of insight and call for different applications to contemporary cases – one based on identity, the other on difference – the elements
of continuity and discontinuity in any given text have to be specified.
That is, the attempt to apply Hobbes’ solution to contemporary civil wars
if the latter were radically different from the former could at best prove
futile, at worst disastrous. Moreover, inasmuch as we must assume that
every classical text contains a mixture of continuity and change in comparison with the contemporary world, the relevance of the totality of
these theories must be assessed in the light of the specific form this mixture takes. That is, those elements which are similar to the contemporary
world may not be the core ones for either a classical author’s analysis
of the problem or the basis of the proposed solutions. Alternatively, a
classical theory may appear to deal with phenomena alien to the modern world, or utterly outdated concepts, and yet – beneath the level of
appearance – it may turn out to be based on very similar social and
political forces or theoretical meanings.
5
Classical Theory in International Relations
Moreover, it can be argued that the element of discontinuity is at least
as important as the element of continuity. This may be so, firstly, because
a mixture of both in a classical text makes it likely that the argument as
a whole has to be relativized in the light of significant discontinuities.
But, secondly, and more importantly, elements of discontinuity allow
potentially for greater insights than elements of continuity. On the one
hand, as I will show presently for the use of classical authors in Interntional Relations, ‘the continuities . . . are so omnipresent that they have
made it all too easy to conceive of the past as a mirror, and the value of
studying it as a means of reflecting back at ourselves our own assumptions and prejudice’.9 In this situation, paying particular attention to the
discontinuities can help illuminate aspects of the contemporary world
which are otherwise generally overlooked. While in this instance the
importance of studying discontinuities stands and falls in relation to the
dominant practice, it may also be argued to have an independent value.
And this value lies in the fact that the discontinuities point the social
scientist towards those aspects of social and political life which are historically contingent and therefore open to social and political change.
And, hence, it is the identification of discontinuities which indicates
the areas of necessary further research into the conditions of change.
Nonetheless, the assumption of some element of continuity provides
the basis for engaging with classical authors in the first place. And,
indeed, this assumption is prominent in much of the reception of classical texts in International Relations. Unfortunately, however, more often
than not it lacks historical specification with the result that its overwhelming function is to ‘mirror’ back to us contemporary assumptions
and prejudices. The consequences of this presentism are, at best, the
irrelevance of classical texts for a better understanding of the contemporary world. At worst, however, this approach entails an unreflected
misrepresentation of classical texts as well as of the political issues
and intellectual debates at stake in them. And such misrepresentation,
since it functions to underline contemporary assumptions, entrenches
contemporary debates rather than deepens or broadens them, and it
buries – albeit unconsciously – a more constructive reading of classical authors under layers of ‘authoritative’ interpretations. Finally, the
overwhelming prominence of continuities – real or imagined – stands
in contradiction to recent claims of historical change.
9 Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), p. 111.
6
Classical theory and international relations in context
Intellectual contexts
Historical continuity is clearly the operative assumption in inventing traditions of international thought. It is argued that Realism can
trace its roots back to Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Rousseau,
Liberalism to Kant, the English School to Grotius and so on, because the
discipline of International Relations addresses certain fairly ‘timeless’
issues – such as war and peace – which have been reflected upon by
scholars over time.10 The construction of traditions of thought on these
issues, then, identifies ‘certain permanent normative orientations’.11
Stressing such continuity is seen ‘as a potent safeguard against the hubris
of the present’. It also provides ‘a constant point of reference against
which change can be measured’ and an opening for the question why
certain traditions have developed and become important.12
And yet, it is precisely the present intellectual and political context
which provides the starting point for establishing such traditions. That
is, the disciplinary definition of International Relations and its concerns –
war and peace, for instance – acts as a guide for selecting certain authors
and texts as relevant. It is the issue of war which unites Thucydides,
Machiavelli, Hobbes and contemporary Realists over time just as it is
the search for a road to peace which makes Kant attractive to Liberals. A closer look at the use of these classical authors in Realism and
Liberalism, however, reveals a curious contradiction. On the one hand,
the issues of war and peace provide a basis for continuity while, on
the other, these authors are used to furnish contemporary theories with
philosophical roots that lie outside the definition of the discipline. That
is, Hobbes provides a theory of human nature and the state which underpin contemporary theories of power politics between states. Similarly,
Liberals use the work of Kant to underline the domestic bases of international conflict and cooperation. In both cases, the attraction of the
classics seems to lie in their holistic – or interdisciplinary – approach to
social and political life which denotes a fundamental difference in the
intellectual context of classical and contemporary theory.
The significance of this difference, however, is not specified and
explored. The search for dimensions of social and political life which fall
outside the purview of the discipline of International Relations implicitly or explicitly acknowledges that the modern division of knowledge
has bequeathed to each of the resultant disciplines a common legacy: the
10
11
Michael Doyle, Ways of War and Peace (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 9.
12 Clark, ‘Traditions’, p. 7.
Clark, ‘Traditions’, p. 6.
7
Classical Theory in International Relations
need for philosophical reflection. The much invoked but rarely practised
interdisciplinarity is itself an expression of this need – the recognition of
the ultimate totality of social life inaccessible to individual modern disciplines. Since, however, contemporary philosophy is as much a victim
of this legacy as are the other social and political sciences and since all of
them operate according to specific and at times seemingly incompatible
methods, simply adding up different disciplines proves not only very
difficult but, arguably, does not address the problem. This is not to say
that different disciplines cannot enrich or even inspire each other. But
reflection on the totality of social and political life is characterized by
theorizing the nature of the relationship between its constitutive parts.
However, if the reflection on the nature of these relationships is what
is lacking in the contemporary social and political sciences, it can still
be found in classical authors who wrote either before or during that
(in)famous revolution of the sciences.
Arguably, it is this quality of classical writings – more than the
assumed continuities – which makes them attractive to contemporary
social and political thought and which explains why there is no modern discipline which does not provide, to a greater or lesser extent, an
account of its own ‘origins’ in classical theory as well as some ‘applications’ of classical writers to its contemporary problems. Indeed, providing the necessary ‘non-international’ foundations for contemporary
theories – the way in which ‘descriptive claims about human nature,
domestic politics, and world politics are related to one another’13 – is
precisely the function of Hobbes and Kant in contemporary theories of
International Relations.
And yet, the philosophical and domestic reflections of Kant and
Hobbes are just added onto the contemporary definition of International Relations. Hobbes provides a basis for Realist thought in human
nature and Kant’s republican constitutions underpin peace. The different spheres of social and political life are here constructed in a hierarchical and linear way; the discipline of International Relations is simply
conceived as the study of a specific level or ‘image’ of social and political life, as Waltz famously put it.14 What is lacking here is an analysis
of the historically specific way in which Kant and Hobbes reflected on
the interaction and mutual constitution of different spheres of social
and political life. Instead, contemporary definitions of the international,
the domestic and their relationship are read back into classical authors
13
Doyle, War and Peace, p. 36.
8
14
Waltz, Man, the State, and War.
Classical theory and international relations in context
thus excluding from the pantheon of relevant authors and texts those
which do not readily appear to address international issues as defined
by the contemporary discipline and precluding the opportunity to overcome the disciplinary distinctions shaping contemporary debates which
appeared to provide the attraction of reading Kant and Hobbes in the
first place. Last, but by no means least, due to the ‘contemporary’ construction of the relationship between different spheres of social and
political life, Kant’s and Hobbes’ conception of peace and war are in
danger of being misrepresented.
Establishing the concrete nature of the intellectual context of classical
texts is, thus, important for any conscious reflection on the limits and
possibilities of the definition of International Relations and its core concerns. Beyond this, however, the recovery of the intellectual context can
also illuminate the internal structure of the discipline. And here again
we find that the invention and use of classical traditions for the purpose
of defining and structuring contemporary theoretical as well as political
debates is often characterized by a lack of attention to specific historical
continuities and discontinuities. To stick with the examples of Hobbes
and Kant, by tracing Realism back to the former and Liberalism to the
latter, contemporary theoretical debates between these approaches are
themselves presented as ‘timeless’. Equally, the characterization of a
contemporary European approach to international politics as ‘Kantian’
and an equivalent American position as ‘Hobbesian’ stresses the permanency of normative and political orientations without regard to the
fact that these categories do not appropriately grasp the intellectual
debates and political contexts in which Hobbes and Kant wrote. Is it
irrelevant for International Relations scholars that outside the discipline
Hobbes is often included into – or even presented as a founder of – the
‘liberal’ tradition while Kant based his theory on the Hobbesian state of
nature?15
Hence, if this primacy of contemporary classifications and juxtapositions is not relativized by a more thorough recovery of the intellectual context of the classical texts themselves, it entails the danger of
a selective reading of the classics on the one hand and a waste of
their potential on the other. In the first instance, those aspects of a
particular author’s work which do not fit the paradigm are in danger of being left out or marginalized. And so are authors and texts
15 Andrezj Rapaczynski, Nature and Politics: Liberalism in the Philosophy of Hobbes, Locke
and Rousseau (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); and Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace
(New York: Macmillan, 1957), p. 10.
9
Classical Theory in International Relations
which do not appear to fit the contemporary classifications readily.
Furthermore, the relationship between classical authors may be seriously misconstrued. Contemporary theorists recognize the limitations
and dangers of reading these divisions back into classical authors. Such
procedures are ‘insensitive to the nuances of the distinctive ages and
concerns’, as mentioned above; they also encourage ‘intellectual conservatism’ and close down the agenda by providing a framework which
itself is not open to reflection and revision.16 And yet, this approach is
defended with the argument that such invented traditions provide the
foundations of a dialogue between alternative voices in International
Relations with the ‘potential for creative synthesis’ rather than fixed
classifications.17
This positive potential of inventing traditions nonetheless fails to
address the requirements for a constructive role of classical authors in
two ways. The shortcomings of these assumptions which Brown, Nardin
and Rengger have identified in the case of the ‘timelessness’ of the Realist approach, also hold for the dialogue between different ‘traditions’.
Namely that the tenets of a particular theory ‘can be illustrated by texts
drawn from any period past or present’ and that ‘all of these texts can
be treated as though they were written by our contemporaries’.18 The
dialogue made possible by reading contemporary intellectual and political distinctions back into history is, at best, a contemporary dialogue
in which the classical writers might as well be left out. Their inclusion,
however, suggests that we are confronted with a worst case scenario,
namely a contemporary dialogue in which classical authors are simply
coopted in support of the one or the other position. Apart from the fact
that in this scenario, just as in the previous one, classical texts do not
add anything to our understanding of today’s international affairs –
after all, they are just made to fit into contemporary preconceptions –
this cooptation is almost certainly accompanied by serious misinterpretation and it hides the critical and constructive potential of classical
texts.
The selective and instrumental reading necessary for fitting classical
authors into contemporary intellectual frameworks hides the breadth
and depth of their writings as well as the historical specificity of their
and our debates. And the dialogue itself, in whose name this approach
16
18
17 Clark and Neumann (eds.), Classical Theories, p. 257.
Clark, ‘Traditions’, p. 8.
Brown et al. (eds.), International Relations, p. 3.
10
Shafiul Alam
Prince,
University ofrelations
Dhaka. in context
Classical
theory
andIR59,
international
of inventing traditions is defended, does not become richer and more
varied through such cooptation of classical authors. Rather, it becomes
more entrenched and is itself presented as timeless.19 In contrast, paying
attention to the contemporaneous intellectual debates – that is to the differences rather than the similarities – provides alternative viewpoints,
conceptions and interpretations. These can be used to question contemporary theories and world views and the faultlines between them. Thus,
a reconstruction of the intellectual debates to which the classics themselves contributed is necessary to break the unreflected mould of contemporary debates; it simultaneously provides a basis for an alternative
reading of the classics in the light of their contemporaneous debates
and the possibility of reflecting on the grounds for the definition of
competing contemporary positions.
Political contexts
These shortcomings resulting from an omission to specify concrete areas
of continuity and discontinuity can also be identified with regard to the
political context of classical writings. The Democratic Peace thesis, for
instance, empirically identifies the absence or rarity of wars between
contemporary liberal states. And it is this contemporary observation
which appears to be explained in Kant’s discussion of republican constitutions. And yet, what this starting point overlooks is that Kant’s republican constitutions were conceived as solutions to wars between absolutist states – which were fought for entirely different reasons and under
entirely different conditions from wars in the contemporary world. Similarly, the fact that today’s world is not characterized by formal colonial
rule has led contemporary theorists to overlook the relevance of Kant’s
19
This does not mean that reflection on these established traditions is not critical in the
sense of questioning their definition and usefulness in individual cases. Hence, Martin
Wight, International Theory. The Three Traditions (London: Leicester University Press, 1994),
p. 259, even while developing the notion of a Realist, Rationalist and Revolutionist tradition continuously reflected on the overlaps between them as well as on the difficulties of
fitting classical authors into them, thus engaging in an ongoing process of redefinition and
relativization. Similarly, the intelligent and thorough analyses provided by the authors
in Clark and Neumann (eds.), Classical Theories, for instance, suggest that the classical
authors with one exception – Friedrich Gentz – do not satisfactorily fit into Wight’s traditions. And yet, while these investigations clearly question the definition and usefulness
of Wight’s traditions they do not systematically investigate alternative conceptions of the
discipline or its theoretical debates in the light of these differences.
11
Classical Theory in International Relations
as well as Mill’s discussions of colonialism and its informal roots as
relevant for today.20
The political context of Kant’s republican constitutions may be absolutism – and thus not identical with the contemporary world. Nonetheless, the conceptual continuity coupled with political discontinuity may
yet provide a constructive basis for discussing the relevance of republican or liberal constitutions for peace and war in the contemporary world.
The political context of republican or liberal constitutions – absolutist
states or liberal capitalist states – can provide an answer to the question
of which interests are represented through these institutions. Similarly,
recovering the political context of Mill’s writings – colonialism – can
point towards striking parallels in the contemporary world even though
policies of colonialism are today not consciously pursued.
In the absence of a thorough recovery of the contemporaneous political context, however, International Relations uses classical texts simply to confirm contemporary assumptions. In the process, it presents
rather anachronistic interpretations of classical authors – Kant is represented as a theorist of intervention and Mill as a theorist of nonintervention despite the fact that the former takes a principled stand
for non-intervention while the latter’s international theory rests on the
principle of intervention. Hence, the reconstruction of the concrete political context in which classical authors were writing is crucial for unlocking their potential to actually illuminate aspects of today’s international
relations.
Lineages
This more or less inevitable interpretation of classical authors in the
light of the intellectual and political context provided by the interpreter described above, points towards a final dimension of the use
of classical authors which requires explicit reflection. For if it is the case
that the contemporary use of classical authors tends to be shaped – to
a greater or lesser degree – by contemporary concerns and debates,
then classical authors will have gone through such a process of reception many times over before they enter the discipline of International
Relations. In the course of this historical trajectory of appropriation,
20 See Beate Jahn, ‘Kant, Mill, and Illiberal Legacies in International Affairs’ International Organization 59 (2005), 177–207; Beate Jahn, ‘Barbarian Thoughts: Imperialism in
the Philosophy of John Stuart Mill’ Review of International Studies 31 (2005), 599–618; and
Chapter 8 in this volume.
12
Classical theory and international relations in context
classical texts will have been variously translated, and selectively published and republished, as well as interpreted and reinterpreted. In using
classical authors, International Relations scholars must bear in mind this
‘ballast’ of intellectual and political interests collected in the texts of classical authors over time.
Many classical authors, for instance, have made their way into
International Relations via Political Theory. By relying on the general
interpretations of classical texts provided by Political Theorists which
are then complemented by rereading select pieces deemed particularly relevant in the international context, International Relations again
imports the modern disciplinary division of knowledge. For Political
Theory has neglected the international dimension of classical thought as
much as International Relations has neglected its domestic dimension –
and neither discipline provides a satisfactory account of the nature of
their respective interrelations.21
Moreover, paying attention to the particular trajectory by which classical texts have variously entered the discipline may well uncover intellectual and political concerns as well as interpretations on the side of the
‘importers’. Reflection on these motivations and interpretations is necessary on the one hand in order to relativize any single or hegemonic
interpretation and to allow for alternatives. On the other hand, these
interpretations may have shaped core concepts in the discipline; and in
this case a historical recovery of their roots is one way of opening up
these concepts for critical reflection.
Another ‘role for the intellectual historian is that of acting as a kind
of archaeologist, bringing buried intellectual treasure back to the surface’.22 But this, the recovery of those traditions or authors ‘which have
not found a voice’, is arguably impossible on the basis of a contemporary
starting point which does not pay attention to the specific political and
intellectual continuities, discontinuities and lineages. For without this
historical relativization the contemporary assumptions guide the inclusion and exclusion of authors and texts, issues and concepts, policies
and theories on the basis of the established voices.
In sum, traditional interpretations and appropriations of classical
authors in the discipline of International Relations have, despite an
abstract recognition of the importance of both continuity and change,
and despite repeated claims to recent historical change and rupture, prioritized historical continuity. And they have done so not by specifying
21
Brown et al. (eds.), International Relations, p. 7.
22
Skinner, Liberty, p. 112.
13
Classical Theory in International Relations
concrete elements of continuity – which would inevitably also entail an
identification of significant discontinuities. Instead, more often than not,
these interpretations stop short at the identification of certain continuous
political and intellectual issues and debates. And this form of inventing traditions does not actually function as ‘a potent safeguard against
the hubris of the present’. Stressing abstract historical continuities may
well be a safeguard against claims for a radically unique present, but it
may constitute simultaneously an arguably more serious hubris of the
present – namely one in which the present is presented as timeless and
thus naturalized and absolute.
Likewise, presenting contemporary theoretical or political positions
as a dialogue reaching back into the past without reference to the differences does not create a space for creative synthesis. Rather, it entrenches
the contemporary positions and buries those dimensions of classical
and contemporary thought which either cut across or do not fit the given
paradigm. Furthermore, the assumption of political and intellectual continuity without explicit and systematic reference to the discontinuities
only provides ‘a constant point of reference against which change can be
measured’23 within the framework of the contemporary paradigm defining these continuities. This applies to the definition of the discipline itself
in terms of its ‘timeless’ objects of enquiry as much as to the individual approaches within the discipline. That is, insofar as intellectual or
political discontinuities between a classical text and the modern world
are noted, they are presented as developments or variations within the
given framework rather than taken to question the application of the
framework to the classical text and, by extension, potentially also
the contemporary framework itself.
This widespread lack of reflection on historically specific – rather
than general or continuous – political and intellectual interests shaping
the production of social and political theory is not surprisingly also
extended to the trajectories by which classical authors have entered
the discipline of International Relations. That is, the historically specific
interests and perceptions of the translators and interpreters of classical
texts on their way into the discipline remain likewise unspecified – thus
depriving International Relations of the possibility of investigating the
various historical transformations of these texts as well as the meanings
and contradictions that may have become embedded in them over time.
23
Clark, ‘Traditions’, p. 7.
14
Classical theory and international relations in context
The contributors to this book, thus, consciously set out to recover the
intellectual and political context of classical texts and their lineages. But
they do so not in the spirit of presenting a ‘true’ or ‘correct’ interpretation of classical texts in their own right. Rather, they do so precisely
because they recognize that contemporary concerns guide our interest in classical authors. Yet, these contemporary concerns can only be
fruitfully illuminated and analyzed in the light of the concrete specification of continuities and change between classical and contemporary
concepts, issues and debates. In other words, the widespread claims
to radical historical change mentioned at the outset of this discussion, as well as their equally passionately pursued refutation, can only
be assessed if the nature and extent of this change can be specified.
And in order to achieve this aim, the intellectual and political context of classical texts and their lineages has to be rendered concrete,
too.
This approach overlaps with, and distinguishes itself from, two other
cognate literatures. Engagement with classical authors in International
Relations is sometimes included in the subfield of International Political Theory. This rather disparate field of study, according to Nicholas
Rengger, is in danger of gradually becoming more and more ‘rationalist’ or, in Robert Cox’s famous words, ‘problem-solving’.24 That is, it
identifies certain pressing problems of the day and mobilizes classical
authors, among others, for the purpose of providing solutions. Such an
approach, of course, fits the charge of presentism set out above and it is
not shared by the authors of this book who insist on contextualization
as an antidote to such anachronisms.
And this brings me to the second literature mentioned above. For
while ‘not all contextualists are Skinnerian’,25 contextualism is famously
24
Robert Cox, ‘Social Forces, States, and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory’ in Robert W. Cox and Timothy J. Sinclair (eds.), Approaches to World Order
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 88. In his review article, Nicholas Rengger identifies explicitly normative, poststructuralist and intellectual history approaches
as part of the field whose common denominator appears to be an opposition to IR as
a ‘positivist’ social science. See ‘Political Theory and International Relations: Promised
Land or Exit from Eden?’ International Affairs 76 (2000), 755–770. While this is important
common ground which the authors of this book share, there are nevertheless tremendous
differences between and even within normative, poststructuralist and intellectual history
approaches. Moreover, not all International Political Theory need necessarily engage – or
engage directly – with classical authors.
25 Duncan Bell, ‘Political Theory and the Functions of Intellectual History: a Response to
Emmanuel Navon’ Review of International Studies 29 (2003), 153.
15
Classical Theory in International Relations
associated with the work of Quentin Skinner.26 There, classical texts are
neither treated as ‘timeless contributions to a universal philosophical
debate, nor can their meanings simply be read off as determined by the
economic, political, and social context in which they were written’.27
Central to Skinner’s approach is the reconstruction of authorial intention through the linguistic and intellectual context which includes the
contemporaneous social and political background. Its aim is to show
‘how the concepts we still invoke were initially defined, what purposes
they were intended to serve, what view of public power they were used
to underpin’;28 and hence, ultimately, to open up present political discourse to its inherited meanings as well as to alternatives.
There is no space here for a general discussion of the advantages and
disadvantages of Skinnerian contextualism for International Relations.29
However, this book clearly shares with the Skinnerian approach the aim
of opening up contemporary political/international discourse through
a contextualization of classical works. And yet, it neither propagates nor
systematically adheres to the Skinnerian method. The most immediate
reason for this is that the authors of this book take their cue from problems they identify with traditional interpretations and uses of classical
authors in International Relations. And in doing so they require a more
flexible method. For unlike Political Theorists, scholars of International
Relations do not necessarily claim to present an authoritative interpretation of classical authors as such. Inasmuch as authorial intention can
be established, this may certainly be used to debunk traditional interpretations in International Relations.30 Quite frequently, however, the
authors of this book are concerned not with establishing the authorial
intention of a classical author but rather with demonstrating that the
changed political and social environment circumscribes the applicability of classical ‘analyses’ or ‘solutions’ to contemporary problems,31 or
with revealing alternative but neglected influences of classical authors.32
Hence, the motivation for our investigations are much more ‘presentist’
26 For an overview see James Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context – Quentin Skinner and his
Critics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988); and David Boucher, Texts in Context – Revisionist
Methods for Studying the History of Ideas (Lancaster: Martin Nijhoff, 1985).
27 Gerard Holden, ‘Who Contextualizes the Contextualizers? Disciplinary History and
the Discourse about IR Discourse’ Review of International Studies 28 (2002), 261.
28 Skinner, Liberty, p. 110.
29 See Holden, ‘Who Contextualizes the Contextualizers’, and Bell, ‘Political Theory’ for
a discussion of the use of Skinner in International Relations.
30 Aiko, Chapter 5 in this volume, applies Skinner’s method for this purpose.
31 See Jahn, Chapter 8 for example.
32 Reid’s Chapter 12 in this volume is a case in point.
16
Classical theory and international relations in context
than Skinner’s – yet not in the manner of the problem-solving tendencies
in International Political Theory.
Structure
In accordance with the aim of reconstructing the intellectual and political
context of classical theories as well as of their trajectories over time, this
book is divided into three parts focusing respectively on the recovery
of the intellectual context, the political context and the lineage of classical
theories. Before providing a more detailed description of the structure of
this book and its individual contributions, it is important to emphasize
that these divisions are by no means exclusionary. Since political and
intellectual contexts are mutually constitutive in the sense that ‘what it
is possible to do in politics is generally limited by what it is possible
to legitimise’ and this, in turn, ‘depends on what courses of action you
can plausibly range under existing normative principles’,33 the authors
who concentrate on the recovery of the intellectual context of classical
texts necessarily also touch upon the political context, and vice versa.
Similarly, investigating the lineages by which classical texts have entered
the discipline of International Relations – or have been excluded from
it – entails the recovery of the political and intellectual context of these
trajectories. Hence, the structure of this book simply points towards the
specific historical dimension each chapter focuses on without excluding
any of the others.
Thus, the contributions in the first part of this volume focus on the
recovery of the intellectual context missing from contemporary uses
of Thucydides, Kant, Saint-Pierre and Rousseau. In Chapter 2, S. Sara
Monoson and Michael Loriaux provide a close reading of Thucydides
which pays particular attention to the central role of antithetical reasoning in The History of the Peloponnesian War as a whole as well as in
the treatment of Pericles in particular. Thucydides praises the statesman
Pericles even while he continuously demonstrates the disastrous effects
of his policies. In this interpretation, Thucydides insists that morality
and social norms are a necessary basis for prudent policies or, to put it
the other way around, that Pericles’ Realpolitik proves to be an important
source of the Athenian disaster. By integrating Thucydides’ intellectual
and rhetorical strategy with the historical background, Monoson and
Loriaux undermine two of the major Realist claims about Thucydides.
33
Skinner, Liberty, p. 105.
17
Classical Theory in International Relations
Firstly, the separation between domestic and international politics cannot be traced back to Thucydides and the Greeks and, secondly, morality
and prudent politics instead of being incompatible actually depend on
each other. And it may be argued that the recovery of a necessary connection between domestic and international politics as well as between
prudence and morality is highly topical – not least for recent debates
about American foreign and domestic policies.
Kant is most prominently used today in the explanation of the
Democratic Peace and in the justification of liberal foreign policies. But,
as John MacMillan argues in Chapter 3, the justification of contemporary policies of intervention violates two core principles of Kant’s work.
Firstly, in distinguishing between the rights of liberal and non-liberal
states in the international system, it prioritizes the domestic constitution and thus overlooks the mutually constitutive nature of the domestic, international and transnational sources of war in Kant’s thought.
Secondly, the justification of differential rights and obligations for liberal and non-liberal states in the contemporary international system
violates Kant’s categorical imperative – the universal nature of rights.
MacMillan argues that a more inclusive reading of Kant, in particular
attention to the preliminary articles of Perpetual Peace, contradicts the
Democratic Peace interpretation and it recovers the critical potential of
Kant for judging contemporary international politics.
The same concern underlies Antonio Franceschet’s investigation of
the use of Kant in contemporary international law in Chapter 4. Here,
it is argued that the attempt to reform international law and to accord
unequal rights of sovereignty and non-intervention to liberal and nonliberal states can only be supported with reference to Kant on the basis
of a highly selective reading. In contrast, Franceschet provides a more
inclusive reading which shows that powerful liberal states arrogating
to themselves the right to coerce others into a liberal framework falls
squarely into the category of ‘private judgment’. In Kantian terms, however, private judgment is a characteristic of the state of nature rather
than a route to increased legalization. It is not ‘being a liberal state
that guarantees good political judgment’ but rather ‘being in a liberal,
law-governed state’ which best guarantees legalism. While on the one
hand undermining these recent interpretations of Kant in the field of
international law, Franceschet on the other recovers Kant’s constructive
potential for assessing policies which aim at increased legalization.
Yuichi Aiko, in Chapter 5, demonstrates the importance of the contemporaneous intellectual debates for the interpretation of Rousseau.
18
Classical theory and international relations in context
The characterization of Rousseau as a Realist is generally based on
his critique of Saint-Pierre’s peace project which, in turn, is seen as a
typical example of liberal or utopian thought on international affairs.
Aiko shows, however, that the intellectual debate to which Saint-Pierre
and Rousseau contributed was concerned with natural law. And in
this debate, both Saint-Pierre and Rousseau held, against the dominant position, that man’s moral constitution resulted from the political order rather than being predetermined by nature. The reconstruction of this intellectual context allows Aiko to show that, contra the
conventional reading, Rousseau was greatly inspired by Saint-Pierre
and complemented the latter’s peace project by working out the necessary domestic constitution for it in the Social Contract. In this reading, Rousseau contributes to an understanding of sovereignty as justice
rather than independence and, thus, to a normative dimension of the
core concept of sovereignty which is inaccessible to the discipline as long
as it interprets Rousseau within the framework of the Realist/Liberal
debate.
All four chapters respectively recover the rhetorical and theoretical
context and the contemporaneous intellectual debates of Thucydides,
Kant and Rousseau. The reconstruction of this intellectual context
demonstrates in each case that contemporary distinctions between
domestic and international politics do not apply to the classical texts.
Consequently, the integration of these spheres of social and political
life in the classical texts leads in all four cases to a reintegration of
morality and power. Thucydides’ prudent international policies are
doomed without a firm basis in social norms and Rousseau’s concept of
sovereignty is based on justice rather than independence while Kant’s
pursuit of perpetual peace can only be the result of the employment of
universally just and legal means.
These interpretations undermine widely accepted uses of Thucydides’, Kant’s and Rousseau’s theories in International Relations as
well as challenging established traditions of thought. If Thucydides and
Rousseau integrate the domestic and the international as well as being
crucially concerned with the mutually constitutive nature of power and
morality, the question arises on what grounds they may be incorporated into the contemporary Realist school of thought. And if a central element of Kant’s pursuit of peace consists in the recognition of
state sovereignty and international law, the grounds on which he is
juxtaposed to Thucydides and Rousseau, or Realism more generally,
have to be reassessed. Most importantly, all four chapters contribute
19
Classical Theory in International Relations
constructively to contemporary political and theoretical issues. Aiko’s
interpretation of Rousseau opens up the defining concept of the discipline of International Relations – sovereignty – to rethinking, while it
is almost impossible not to associate the Thucydides interpretation of
Monoson and Loriaux with contemporary attempts to separate power
and morality in general and in American foreign policy in particular.
MacMillan and Franceschet, on the basis of their Kant interpretation,
explicitly and critically challenge contemporary theory and practice of
liberal foreign policies while simultaneously indicating more promising
avenues for such policies.
The chapters in the second part focus on the investigation of the political context of classical texts. David Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah argue
in Chapter 6 that the encounter with, and ethnographic work on, the
Amerindians plays a crucial role in Adam Smith’s theory of Political
Economy. They provide the necessary basis for Smith’s theory of human
progress and they are used to ‘insulate a commercial society from moral
critique’. And yet, a closer look at the political and ethnological context
clearly shows that this use of the Amerindians also introduces a number of contradictions into Smith’s theory – and by extension into the
views of the Scottish Enlightenment as well as contemporary International Political Economy itself. Blaney and Inayatullah thus disrupt the
substantive narrative of International Political Economy and the definition of the discipline by introducing an ethnological context. They
also demonstrate that such a contextual reading of Smith recovers an
ethical dimension which allows for a critical judgment of contemporary
capitalism.
This theme is also taken up by David Boucher in Chapter 7. He argues
that John Locke’s influential theory of property in the Second Treatise
of Government is rooted in the attempt to justify colonialism. Despite
this international political background, Locke is generally seen as a
domestic political theorist and hence widely ignored in International
Relations. Boucher shows that with Locke himself, International Relations excludes the centrality of theories of property for the constitution
of the modern international order. The chapter, thus, challenges the disciplinary divide between Political Theory and International Relations
as well as providing the basis for a constructive investigation into
the role of property in the constitution of contemporary international
relations.
Beate Jahn reconstructs, in Chapter 8, the political context of
Kant’s Perpetual Peace and argues – in line with MacMillan and
20
Classical theory and international relations in context
Franceschet – that Kant cannot be used in support of the Democratic
Peace thesis or contemporary liberal foreign policies. Kant’s republican
constitutions were conceived as a solution to wars pursued by absolutist rather than liberal capitalist states. Liberal capitalist states and
their foreign policies, however, have been theorized by John Stuart Mill,
whose writings are widely neglected in contemporary International
Relations or so selectively appropriated that his justification of imperialism – which perfectly mirrors contemporary liberal thought – is not
discussed at all. Attention to the political context of Kant’s and Mill’s
work demonstrates that both have been coopted in support of contemporary assumptions and this, in turn, implies the lack of a discussion of
the shortcomings of liberalism domestically and internationally as well
as the continuing importance of imperialism in contemporary international affairs.
The contributions to this part recover the political context of classical
texts for the purpose of illuminating generally neglected dimensions of
contemporary international relations. Contemporary assumptions and
disciplinary divides have led to the marginalization of Smith, Locke
and Mill in the pantheon of classical authors with which the discipline
engages. The common themes of these authors, interestingly, all turn
out to revolve around issues of property and political and economic
inequality in the international system – in other words, around colonialism and imperialism. The relationship between European states and
Amerindians or non-Europeans more generally played a constitutive
role in the development of the modern international system as well as
international theory. It lies at the roots of developmentalist philosophies
of history represented in Locke’s conception of property as well as in
the Scottish Enlightenment and John Stuart Mill. Despite variations on
this theme over time, the historical continuity of those conceptions as
well as of their exclusion from explicit reflection constitutes a serious
challenge to the discipline of International Relations. For despite the
claim to investigate the link between politics and economy present in
the name, traditional International Political Economy (IPE) approaches
not only fail to engage in depth with classics such as Locke, Smith and
Mill – whose work constitutes IPE in the first place – they also fail to
engage with the important role of culture, power, politics and ethics in
the constitution of an ‘economic’ international order. By reconstructing
the political context in which these theories have first been developed,
all three chapters open up the possibility of a constructive engagement
with contemporary political and economic inequality.
21
Classical Theory in International Relations
In the third part of this volume, the authors investigate hegemonic
as well as marginalized lineages of classical theory in International
Relations. In Chapter 9, Robert Shilliam reconstructs Kant’s and Hegel’s
reaction to the French Revolution and argues that both developed their
understanding of ‘the modern political subject’ from a position of comparative ‘backwardness’. And both subsumed this actual multilinear –
or international – starting point under a unilinear (universalizing) philosophy of history in order to retain the possibility of Germany catching
up with its more advanced neighbour. In this reading, Hegel is not the
proponent of an ethical pluralism which can be juxtaposed to Kantian
universalism – an arrangement which provides the classical foundations of the cosmopolitan/communitarian debate. Moreover, this reinterpretation also challenges poststructural and postcolonial positions.
For it shows, firstly, that the European ‘self’ is an internally fractured
rather than an undivided entity opposed to a non-European ‘other’;
and, secondly, that both Kant and Hegel engage in ‘othering’ – but from
a ‘backward’ rather than a hegemonic position. On the basis of this
argument, International Relations is not confronted with the problem
of choosing between a universalist and a particularist ethical position,
but rather with the challenge of developing an ethical position towards
‘difference’ in the first place.
Edward Keene, in Chapter 10, reconstructs the way in which Grotius
has turned from a jurisprudential theorist to a political philosopher of
international society in contemporary International Relations. The roots
of the latter interpretation, argues Keene, lie in the European reactions
to the French Revolution. In their search for a ‘counter-revolutionary’
international law, legal textbooks were rewritten and based on prerevolutionary literature which insisted on sovereignty as the internal independence of states. In this context, Grotius was read as having anticipated the Westphalian concept of sovereignty and legal equality of states
which gradually developed into the modern states-system. Contemporary reliance on this ‘narrative’ leads to a twofold impoverishment of
International Relations. On the one hand, it marginalizes a whole body
of jurisprudential thought which could provide a much more varied
and rich picture of the – not always so natural, gradual and inevitable –
development of the modern states-system. The focus on the Westphalian
system, on the other hand, displaces alternative dimensions of political
thought and practice like republicanism and imperialism – leaving the
contemporary discipline firmly in the grasp of the ideological origins of
the conventional understanding of Grotius.
22
Classical theory and international relations in context
Michael Williams investigates a Hobbes revival in Weimar Germany
by authors such as Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss who profoundly
influenced Hans Morgenthau, in Chapter 11. In accordance with these
authors, Williams develops an interpretation of Hobbes which stands in
contradiction to the dominant Realist readings of this author either as a
rational choice theorist or as a theorist of international society. The ‘evil’
nature of human beings does not provide the starting point for Hobbes’
conception of politics but rather its solution. The exploration of this
neglected lineage does not only turn up an alternative interpretation
of Hobbes; it also allows for a better understanding of contemporary
neoconservatism which owes a lot in particular to Leo Strauss.
Finally, in Chapter 12, Julian Reid introduces a neglected lineage of
the interpretation of Clausewitz. Clausewitz has been central to International Relations as a strategic thinker. Reid shows, however, that
Clausewitz plays an equally important role in the development of modern counter-strategic thought. Foucault as well as Deleuze and Guattari
have taken Clausewitz’s concept of war and tied it to the development
of modern power not restricted to the state. And as such, war becomes
a ‘condition of possibility for the development of new forms of political
subjectivity’ which undermines the traditional disciplinary control of
the state. This account, apart from opening up the possibility of an alternative reading of Clausewitz and its potential application to the analysis
of contemporary non-state actors and political movements, also disrupts
the traditional disciplinary definition by delinking power and war from
the state; in other words, by seriously questioning the inside/outside
distinction so prominent in International Relations.
By investigating the historical and political context of the lineages
of classical thought, the chapters in this part demonstrate the limitations and historical burdens International Relations has unconsciously
taken on. Among these are the universalizing ethical responses of Kant
and Hegel to the French Revolution and the counter-revolutionary conception of sovereignty produced by nineteenth-century interpretations
of Grotius. In both cases, the inclusion of these particular conceptions
simultaneously implies the exclusion of alternatives – either in the form
of an ethical position towards difference or in the form of more varied
legal, historical and political discourses reflecting and shaping European
development. Similar results are also achieved by focusing on lineages
outside the discipline of International Relations. The Hobbes interpretation in Weimar Germany does not only provide an alternative understanding of Hobbes but also the basis for an analysis of contemporary
23
Classical Theory in International Relations
neoconservatism while Clausewitz’s role in counter-strategic thought
highlights the limitations of his interpretation in disciplinary strategic terms as well as his potential for a constructive grasp of non-state
actors in International Relations. Hence, the analysis of lineages of classical thought opens up the possibility of alternative interpretations of
Grotius, Hobbes, Kant, Hegel and Clausewitz and of the inclusion of
hitherto neglected authors. More importantly, however, it squarely puts
such core concepts as sovereignty, difference and war back on the agenda
and points towards the possibility of their radical reinterpretation. And
such reinterpretation clearly entails the potential to transform the nature
and definition of the discipline itself.
This collection of interpretations of classical authors based on the
analysis of their intellectual and political context as well as on the trajectories of their appropriation in the discipline aims to demonstrate
the rich potential of classical texts for the study of international relations. And this potential lies in three different but interrelated areas.
Firstly, the analyses presented here all contribute to a broader conception of the discipline itself based on the recovery of the predisciplinary
intellectual context of classical thought. They show that – and how –
political, economic, ethnological, philosophical, sociological, normative
and legal dimensions are constitutive of international thought and practice even in the present-day world. Secondly, the chapters unanimously
challenge traditional accounts of timeless debates and schools of thought
and recover a contextual understanding of classical authors which truly
provides the basis for ‘potential creative synthesis’. Finally, the contextual interpretations throw a new and different light on such core concepts and issues of contemporary international thought and practice as
sovereignty, morality, law, property, imperialism and agency, and thus
provide the basis for further constructive research into these areas.
24
Part I
Intellectual contexts
2
Pericles, realism and the normative
conditions of deliberate action
S. Sara Monoson and Michael Loriaux
Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War has lost none of its power
to fascinate. We are excited by the keen analysis, the apparent accessibility of the actors to rational interpretation, the ring of familiarity in the events the historian recounts. Above all, we are excited by
Thucydides’ claims to have written a work that will become ‘a possession for all time’, a work that we will ‘judge useful’ (I.22.4).1 But
useful how? As good counsel, a theory, an example to avoid (if so,
how)? Having treated Thucydides as a forerunner of modern realism,2 International Relations scholars today better appreciate the complexity of his text and often challenge the Realist reading.3 Political
Theorists have also turned to the text in growing numbers, interrogating its pessimism,4 its pervasive humanity,5 its subtle critique of
1 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are from the revised Crawley edition: Robert
B. Strassler, The Landmark Thucydides, A Newly Revised Edition of the Crawley Translation
with Maps, Annotations, Appendices and Encyclopedic Index (New York: Free Press, 1996). An
earlier version of this chapter, ‘The Illusion of Power and the Disruption of Moral Norms:
Thucydides’ Critique of Periclean Policy’, appeared in the American Political Science Review
(June 1998). Extensive revisions explain the change in title.
2 James E. Dougherty and Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr., Contending Theories of International
Relations (New York: Harper and Row, 3rd edn, 1990).
3 Laurie M. Johnson Bagby, ‘The Use and Abuse of Thucydides in International Relations’ International Organization 48 (Winter, 1994), 131–153; Michael Doyle, ‘Thucydides: A
Realist?’ in Richard Ned Lebow and Barry Strauss (eds.), Hegemonic Rivalry: From Thucydides to the Nuclear Age (Boulder CO: Westview, 1991). Steven Forde, ‘International Realism
and the Science of Politics: Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Neorealism’ International Studies
Quarterly 39 (1995), 141–161; Daniel Garst, ‘Thucydides and Neorealism’ International Studies Quarterly 33 (1989), 3–27; Richard Ned Lebow, ‘Thucydides, Power Transition Theory,
and the Causes of War’ in Hegemonic Rivalry.
4 Peter R. Pouncey, The Necessities of War: A Study of Thucydides’ Pessimism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1980).
5 Clifford Orwin, The Humanity of Thucydides (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press,
1994).
27
Classical Theory in International Relations
democracy,6 its account of the fragility of political unity7 or its analysis
of the tension between love of glory and commitment to the common
good.8
The variety of reactions and interpretations elicited by the text confirms the observation of a leading classicist that Thucydides forever
proves resistant to paraphrase and summation.9 That resistance owes
much to Thucydides’ pervasive use of antithesis as a tool of analysis.
Antithesis in the form of paired speeches (e.g. Cleon and Diodotus)
and dramatic juxtapositions (e.g. the Periclean funeral oration and the
plague narrative) is well known. But the presence of antithesis in the
treatment of Pericles, a part of the text usually thought to exhibit a more
straightforward teaching, has commanded less attention. Although
Thucydides presents Pericles as singularly praiseworthy (e.g. II.65), we
believe that the progress of his narrative, perhaps unbeknownst to the
author, interrogates that glowing assessment. The fuller, more subtle
treatment of Pericles as it emerges from the text as a whole, suggests
tension between two antithetical yet complementary attitudes regarding the possibility of conducting ourselves wisely. The first is a relentless
scepticism about humanity’s capacity to assure its welfare by relying on
a kind of strategic brilliance that is exercised in either ignorance or defiance of moral norms. The second is a conviction that moral norms must
be buttressed by the effective application of coercive power. Thucydides’
driving attention to both these views goes to the heart of much contemporary theorizing in International Relations regarding the appropriateness of moral or strategic action.
Thucydides’ use of antithesis
The view of the History as an ‘objective’ account of the war and its
author as a ‘scientific’ historian has been dead in the literature for some
6 Cynthia Farrar, ‘“Gyges” Ring: Reflections on the Boundaries of Democratic Citizenship’. Paper delivered at the Colloque International: Démocratie Athénienne et Culture,
sponsored by UNESCO and the Academy of Athens, 1993; Josiah Ober, ‘Thucydides’ Criticism of Democratic Knowledge’ in Ralph Rosen and Joseph Farrell (eds.), Nomodeiktes:
Greek Studies in Honor of Martin Ostwald (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993);
Arlene Saxonhouse, Athenian Democracy: Modern Mythmakers and Ancient Theorists (Notre
Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996).
7 J. Peter Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (Princeton NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1990).
8 Michael Palmer, Love of Glory and the Common Good: Aspects of the Political Thought of
Thucydides (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992).
9 W. Robert Connor, Thucydides (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 231.
28
Alam
Prince,
IR59, University
of Dhaka.of deliberate action
Pericles,Shafiul
realism
and
the normative
conditions
time. Scholars today focus more on the artistry of the work and the
intensity of the experiences it elicits, and express little confidence that
the author’s ‘teaching’ can be found in some specific episode, such as
the Melian conference, or in some isolated albeit strongly worded firstperson commentary, such as the praise of Periclean leadership at II.65.10
Scholars prefer to examine the text as a whole and specifically how the
interrelations of different aspects of the text (speeches, narrative, various
episodes, language patterns and literary devices) work to arouse the
emotions and intellect of the reader.
As stated above, much of the power of Thucydides’ style derives from
his use of antithesis, that is, the contraposition of claim and counterclaim
in close and rhetorically effective order. This ‘most instinctive, necessary
clothing of [Thucydides’] thought’ extends from the paired speeches to
the very structure of the work – the juxtaposition of phrase to phrase,
chapter to chapter, book to book of starkly contrasting images, such that
expectations nurtured at one point are dashed at another.11 Thucydides
dresses the images up rhetorically as matters of fact. But in the ensuing
narrative he reveals them to be social and intellectual constructs, which
the protagonists of the drama, through ambition, fear and conceit, proceed to dash or erode.
Awareness of the importance of antithesis helps us not only appreciate his style but understand his political philosophy. Antithesis, when
wielded with the skill and relentlessness of Thucydides, nourishes scepticism, doubt regarding anything and everything that one may have previously accepted as knowledge, wisdom or truth.12 In Thucydides’ era,
Athenian cultural life was marked by antidogmatic, sceptical and relentlessly critical practices. The corrosive power of such scepticism may be
what moved some Athenians, as represented by Plato’s Thrasymachus
and Callicles, to doubt the possibility of moral conduct and succumb
to a kind of ‘realism’, that is, to the idea that the prevailing notion of
the Good must simply embody the interests of powerful people. This is
10
See, e.g. Raymond Aron, ‘Thucydides and the Historical Narrative’ in Miriam Bernheim
Conant (ed.), Politics in History: Selected Essays of Raymond Aron (New York: Free Press,
1978); W. Robert Connor, ‘A Post Modernist Thucydides?’ The Classical Journal 72 (1977),
289–298; Virginia Hunter, Thucydides: The Artful Reporter (Toronto: Hackert, 1973); Orwin,
The Humanity of Thucydides.
11 John H. Finley, Thucydides (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), p. 46; see
also W. Robert Connor, ‘Polarization in Thucydides’ in Hegemonic Rivalry, p. 67.
12 On his antithetical style, see Jacqueline de Romilly, Les grands sophistes dans l’Athenes
de Pericles (Paris: Fallois, 1988), pp. 86–87, 97–99; Finley, Thucydides, p. 44; Simon Hornblower, Thucydides (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 45–52, 60–62;
and Connor, Thucydides, pp. 27–28.
29
Classical Theory in International Relations
the argument that Thucydides lends to the Athenian generals at Melos,
which Realists receive as a kind of ‘Realist manifesto’.
Antithesis in Thucydides’ treatment of Pericles
We reopen the file on Pericles because he comes across as the only actor
of the History who is ‘on top of things’. Thucydides’ attitude toward
Pericles seems to be one of ‘reverent admiration’.13 He is, after all, the
only speaker of the History whose words are never disputed by those
of an adversary. The text thus invites us to believe that good politics
must be Periclean politics. Alert to Thucydides’ use of the antithesis,
however, we suspect that on closer reading the text may be inviting us
to search for good politics in the critical examination of Pericles.
Thucydides’ catalogue of Pericles’ virtues is well known. Suffice it to
recall that, according to Thucydides, ‘for as long as [Pericles] was at the
head of the state during the peace, he pursued a moderate and conservative policy; and in his time its greatness was at its height’ (II.65.5).
Among the virtues displayed by Pericles are his skills as a military
leader (I.111.5, 114.5, 116.3, 117.2; II.31.12), his appreciation of and excellence in reasoned deliberation regarding political and strategic issues
(II.40.2–3, 62.5), his integrity (II.13.1, 65.8), his grasp of human psychology (II.59.3ff) and his generally accurate estimate of Athenian military
strengths and weaknesses (II.65.5). Moreover, he is a master of the art of
persuasion. He draws on his oratorical skills to stoke Athenian patriotism and self-confidence (II.40.1–41.5) and to win approval of his ideas
even as his popularity flags (II.59.2ff). In sum, his grasp of human psychology, his power to persuade and his military skill all contribute to his
ascendance among the Athenians and his ability ‘to lead them instead
of being led by them’ (II.65.8).
Nevertheless, we detect in the History as a whole a subtle interrogation of this glowing appraisal. While opposing the people on difficult
occasions, Pericles unwaveringly supports their desire for empire; while
extolling Athenian virtues, he undermines the norms of social cohesion;
while advocating a prudent course of action, he engages Athens in an
adventure that produces momentous turns of fortune.
Thucydides unquestionably attributes to Pericles a unique ability
to persuade citizens to adopt a strategy that involves hardship and
self-discipline, and to speak frankly to the Assembly to the point of
13
F. M. Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus (London: Edward Arnold, 1907), p. 50.
30
Pericles, realism and the normative conditions of deliberate action
contradicting the wishes (or whims) of the multitude. During the period
of Pericles’ prominence, ‘what was nominally a democracy [became]
in his hands government by the first citizen’ (II.65.9). Each of Pericles’
three speeches turns public opinion in a particular direction. And indeed
Thucydides explicitly distinguishes Pericles from all subsequent leaders precisely on this point. But although Pericles is quite unlike the crop
of leaders that succeed him, he does not differ from his successors as
regards his attachment to empire. During his leadership, the Athenians
boldly transfer the treasury of the Delian League from Delos to Athens
and use it to finance the adornment of the city. The alliance becomes an
archê, an empire. As crisis unfolds, Pericles positions himself as the
leader most capable of protecting the empire. He calls for only temporary restraint in adding to it: ‘[Do not] combine schemes of fresh
conquest with the conduct of the war’ (I.144.1). He does not rule out
enlarging it once the crisis has passed.
Thucydides seems to acknowledge this underlying continuity
between Pericles and his successors by Pericles’ and Cleon’s shared
application of the term tyranny to Athens’ empire (II.63.2 and III.37.2).14
The term ‘tyranny’ connotes much more than the extralegal seizure of
power. It conveys the violent abuse of power and the disregard or outright rejection of customary Greek norms of conduct. Pericles uses the
term to exhort Athenians to maintain their resolve. ‘To take [the empire]’,
he says, ‘perhaps was wrong, but to let it go is unsafe’ (II.63.3). Cleon
uses the term to convince the Athenians to punish rebellion severely,
and he does not concede, as does Pericles, that taking the empire ‘perhaps was wrong’. Cleon defends its justice and warns the Athenians
that showing mercy ‘will . . . pass sentence upon yourselves. For if they
were right in rebelling, you must be wrong in ruling’ (III.40.4).
Although Thucydides praises Pericles, the ‘first citizen’ (II.65.9), and
disparages Cleon, the ‘most violent man in Athens’ (III.36.6), Thucydides’ narrative highlights their shared attachment to empire. Both claim
realistically to assess what that attachment requires in terms of policy
and action. Both counsel steadfast resolve in carrying out policies once
14 Pericles says: ‘What you already hold is like a tyranny’ (hos tyrannida gar ede echete
auten [2.63.2]). Cleon says: ‘You don’t appreciate that what you hold, the empire, is a
tyranny’ (ou skopountes hoti tyrannida echete ten archen [3.37.2]). To preserve the important
parallel with Pericles’ language, we depart from Strassler’s rendering of Cleon’s use of
‘tyrannida’ as ‘despotism’. For sustained analysis of these passages, see W. Robert Connor,
‘Tyrannis Polis’ in John D’Arms and John W. Eadie (eds.), Ancient and Modern: Essays in
Honor of Gerald F. Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977). For other parallels
between the speeches of Pericles and Cleon, see Connor, Thucydides, p. 79, n. 1.
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Classical Theory in International Relations
they are adopted. Both urge assemblies not to reopen debate on policies simply because their execution proves difficult.15 For Euben, ‘given
Thucydides’ singularly explicit castigation of Cleon and his equally
explicit praise of Pericles, it is disconcerting to find so many similarities between them’.16
In the turmoil following the debacle at Syracuse, Athens itself falls
victim to the violence of tyranny. Athenian readers would have remembered how, towards the end of the war, the oligarchs behaved so brutally
that they earned the epithet the ‘thirty tyrants’.17 But when this happens,
the city is victimized not only by the actions of tyrannical leaders but
also by the harsh moral character that the people of Athens themselves
acquired through their dealings with their empire and now display in
their dealings with one another. The disconcerting similarities between
Pericles and Cleon nurture suspicion that Periclean policies, too, may
bear some responsibility for the dissolution of Athenian political life in
factionalism, mistrust and violence.
Indeed, though Pericles exhorted the Athenians to remain true to the
‘old ways’, to Athens’ foundational norms, he may not have promoted
normative cohesion among the Athenians as effectively as we are first
led to think. On the contrary, he may have accelerated the disintegration of Athenian solidarity and contributed to defeat. The one issue on
which the narrative is thoroughly consistent is the attribution of that
defeat to ‘intestine disorders’ (II.65.12), factionalism and growing atomization. For Athenians, affective attachment to the polis – their sense
of democratic citizenship – pivoted on a norm of reciprocity between
individuals and the city. They imagined democratic citizenship to be
characterized by mutual benefactions by citizens and polis. Civic devotion did not require adopting a slavish, self-sacrificing posture. Instead, a
thriving democracy required the cultivation of practices that provided
multiple opportunities both for citizens (regardless of social and economic standing) to perform benefactions for the polis and for the city to
perform benefactions for the citizens. The Athenians extolled devotion
to the common good, but they also represented private interests and
15
This is the position of Cleon in the Mytilenean debate and of Pericles regarding the
Megaran Decree and the strategy of collecting behind the walls.
16 Euben, Tragedy, p. 178. See also Hornblower, Thucydides, pp. 122ff, and Edward Hussey,
‘Thucydidean History and Democritean Theory’ in P. A. Cartledge and F. D. Harvey
(eds.), CRUX: Essays in Greek History presented to G. E. M. de Ste. Croix on his 75th
Birthday (London: Duckworth, 1985). Plato explicitly criticizes Pericles for pandering to
the Athenians in this way. See Gorgias, 515eff.
17 Connor, Thucydides, pp. 179–180.
32
Pericles, realism and the normative conditions of deliberate action
public interests as mutually obtainable. This is not to suggest that real
citizens never encountered conflicts between private and public interests. Thucydides’ History, as well as tragedy and many other literary
sources, indicate that such conflict was frequent. Nevertheless, the ideal
of citizenship as reciprocal exchange both defined a powerful political
norm and acted as a force for social cohesion.18
Thucydides’ Pericles claims to uphold this ideal. He says, ‘I am of
the opinion that national greatness is more for the advantage of private
citizens than any individual well-being coupled with public humiliation’ (II.60.2). In the funeral oration, Pericles praises this aspect of the
Athenian way of life.19 Yet, Pericles’ policies require that the Athenians
behave in ways that depart from this ideal. As he relates the effects of
those policies, Thucydides invites us to observe how Pericles’ policies
produce a growing tension between the civic ideal and actual conduct,
and to speculate how those policies threaten a normative understanding
that had functioned powerfully to nurture Athenian solidarity.
Pericles’ call to the citizens to collect behind the city walls is strategically brilliant but socially corrosive. The policy does not reward the
Athenians for the suffering they must endure in the same way that
the city traditionally rewards them for the more common sacrifice of
the body in combat. In Athenian practice, dying honorably in battle –
contributing one’s body to the polis (II.43.1) – is rewarded by the polis.
The soldier knows beforehand that, if he perishes, the polis will reward
his ‘contribution’ to the collectivity by attaching honour to his memory,
by burying him with pomp at public expense and by assuming certain responsibilities for his family, such as educating his orphaned children and supporting his elderly parents.20 Pericles’ policy, in contrast,
does not require the city to express any explicit gratitude toward the
18
The centrality of reciprocity in Athenian democratic ideology is increasingly noted in
recent scholarship. See Cynthia Farrar, ‘“Gyges” Ring’; Leslie Kurke, The Traffic in Praise:
Pindar and the Poetry of Social Economy (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Paul
Millet, Lending and Borrowing in Ancient Athens (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1991); S. Sara Monoson, ‘Citizen as Erastes: Erotic Imagery and The Idea of Reciprocity
in the Periclean Funeral Oration’ Political Theory 22 (1994), 253–276; Josiah Ober, Mass
and Elite in Democratic Athens (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Richard
Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). See also S.
Sara Monoson, Plato’s Democratic Entanglements (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press,
2000), for sustained discussion of reciprocity in the Athenian democratic imaginary.
19 Monoson, ‘Citizen as Erastes’.
20 The Athenian polis celebrated and displayed the generous way in which the city met
these responsibilities toward orphans in the ‘preperformance rituals’ that opened the dramatic competitions on the occasion of the grandest civic festival of the year, the City
Dionysia. See Simon Goldhill, ‘The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology’ Journal of Hellenic
33
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individuals who sacrifice their property rather than their bodies. Instead,
Pericles exhorts citizens to subordinate their private interests to a future
public good. ‘Cease . . . to grieve for your private afflictions and address
yourselves instead to the safety of the commonwealth’, he urges (II.61.4).
Pericles not only enjoins the citizens to make extraordinary sacrifices but
also minimizes their importance: ‘You may think it a great privation to
lose the use of your land and houses [but] you should really regard them
in the light of the gardens and other accessories that embellish a great
fortune and as, in comparison, of little moment’ (II.62.3).
In defence of his policies, Pericles makes no attempt at all to fit the
citizens’ acceptance of property loss into a model of reciprocal exchange.
He may promise participation in the enduring glory and pleasures
that attend citizenship in a dominant polis, but he does not stress any
‘exchange’. Rather, he uses his rhetorical skills to shore up the citizens’
resolution and their tolerance of ‘private afflictions’ (II.61.4), offering
himself as an example. He is resolute, though he, too, has lost property.
He admonishes the Athenians to be strong like him: ‘I am the same man
and do not alter; it is you who change . . . the apparent error of my policy
lies in the infirmity of your resolution’ (II.61.2). But he fails to appreciate that the Athenians have only himself, an extraordinary charismatic
leader, to help them achieve such resolve.21 Their daily activity – camping out, often in deplorable conditions, behind the walls – does not
provide them with the customary symbolic reinforcements and expiations that would make self-sacrifice on this scale tolerable. Though Pericles succeeds in assuaging the anger and frustration of the Athenians,
Thucydides reports that ‘still, as private individuals they could not
help smarting under their sufferings, the common people having been
deprived of the little that they ever possessed, while the higher orders
had lost fine properties with costly establishments and buildings in the
country and, worst of all, [had] war instead of peace’ (II.65.2). Only
when Pericles helps them vent their anger by accepting a fine do they
Studies 107 (1987), 58–76; and J. Winkler, ‘The Ephebes’ Song: Tragoidia and Polis’ Representations 11 (1985), 26–62.
21 Perhaps the success of Pericles’ policies was thereby predicated on the subversion of
normal institutions of Athenian democracy. This is one way to read Thucydides’ famous
comment regarding Pericles’ relation to democratic institutions: ‘What was nominally a
democracy became in his hands government by the first citizen’ (II.65.9). Pericles’ ability
‘at once [to] restore them [the multitude] to confidence’ (II.65.9) regarding a previously
chosen policy was also a capacity to oppose the democratic impulse to rethink, reconsider, reflect and possibly decide anew. As Saxonhouse argues in Athenian Democracy,
steadfast devotion to a policy is a stance uncharacteristic of democratic assemblies – their
distinguishing mark is the tentative, reversible status of all decisions.
34
Pericles, realism and the normative conditions of deliberate action
finally ‘become less sensitive to their private and domestic afflictions’
(II.65.4).
After Pericles’ death the Athenians lose the ability to subordinate private concerns to the pursuit of victory. The new leaders do not supply the
model and the rhetorical reinforcements to achieve this subordination.
The Athenians lost the war because they ‘allowed their private ambitions
and private interests . . . to lead them into [unwise] projects’ (II.65.7).
Pericles’ policy contributes to that development by departing from dominant normative understandings of citizen rights and obligations.
Pericles and the power of chance: the plague
Pericles is an extraordinary leader acting in unusual circumstances.
But aspects of Thucydides’ narrative invite us to ask if the exceptional
circumstances are not to an appreciable extent of Pericles’ own making. This is not to diminish the effect of events more or less beyond
Athenian control, particularly the eruption of conflict between Corinth
and Corcyra. But we must recognize that Pericles’ response to the events
leading up to the war – abandonment of the countryside and engagement in a potentially protracted war of attrition – is an uncommon
one.22 Thus, when the high mortality suffered by the Athenians crowded
behind the city walls during the plague – an unforeseen consequence of
Pericles’ uncommon policy – takes away the sole leader who might have
held the polis together under exceptional circumstances, we are forced
by Thucydides’ narrative (if not by any explicit first-person authorial
pronouncements) to question the wisdom of Pericles’ strategically brilliant and apparently prudent course of action. Aspects of Thucydides’
narrative style, moreover, lend rhetorical emphasis to those interrogations. Thucydides may not in his own voice ‘blame’ Pericles for the
ensuing problems but the ‘factual’ narrative begs the reader to consider
that terrible possibility.
Recall that Pericles recommends in his first speech that the Athenians
fight a war of attrition, confident that, because of their strategic
skill, exceptional wealth and naval supremacy, they will outlast the
Peloponnesians. Pericles’ recommendation that the Athenians forsake
the countryside is a startling one. But he makes it sound reasonable and
the Athenians support it. They are confident of victory and, the reader
is invited to think, with good reason. For the modern reader, Pericles’
22
During the Persian Wars, the Athenians were compelled to abandon the city by the
press of combat. No such compulsion obtains at the time of Pericles’ proposal.
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Classical Theory in International Relations
policies embody a prudent realism: he diminishes the city’s vulnerability to attack by land and invests in its advantage at sea. But in order to
find Pericles’ strategy credible one must discount the eruption of chance
(tychê). Thucydides does not suggest that Pericles ignores tychê. He refers
to it explicitly in his first speech (I.140.1). But Thucydides does suggest
that Pericles may not appreciate its full import. Pericles sees chance as
the source of possible sufferings that could threaten public resolve, but
he is apparently unaware that it can be the source of deeper and more
enduring effects.23
The plague provides the most devastating example of the eruption
of tychê in the entire History. Thucydides emphasizes its importance by
placing it, with almost no transition, after Pericles’ funeral oration. The
brutal juxtaposition swiftly contrasts the idealized image of Athenian
life in Pericles’ speech with the actual behaviour of the Athenians during the plague. Pericles portrays the Athenians as enjoying, among other
things, ‘ease in our private relations’ (II.37.3); ‘[lawfulness], particularly
such as regards the protection of the injured, whether actually on the
statute book or belong[ing] to that code which, although unwritten, cannot be broken without acknowledged disgrace’ (II.37.3); mutual trust
among citizens; and confidence in their good judgment, public spiritedness and courage. Several times he praises the Athenians for their
ability to endure ordeals with dignity: ‘We are still willing to encounter
danger; we have the double advantage of escaping the experience of
hardships in anticipation and of facing them in the hour of need as
fearlessly as those who are never free from them’ (II.39.4). He boasts: ‘I
doubt if the world can produce a man, who where he has only himself to
depend upon, is equal to so many emergencies and graced by so happy
a versatility as the Athenian’ (II.41.1).
When the plague hits, the Athenians initially struggle to nurse the
sick and dying but often end up succumbing to the illness themselves
(II.51.2). The majority soon collapses under the strain of the disease
23 See Lowell Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence in Thucydides (Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 1975); and Orwin, Humanity, p. 25, n. 28. Orwin’s position is closer to
the one we defend here. Cornford, in Thucydides Mythistoricus, pp. 82–109, discusses the
contrast between chance (tychê) and foresight (gnomê) in the narration of the events at
Pylos. We focus here on the plague because it receives such extensive treatment in the
text and because it assumes such importance in Thucydides’ narrative of the rapid decay
of social norms. Connor, Thucydides, p. 51, provides other instances of Pericles’ possible
lack of foresight. George Cawkwell, Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War (New York:
Routledge, 1997), pp. 44–45, suggests that insofar as Pericles’ policy succeeds, it does so
only accidentally.
36
Pericles, realism and the normative conditions of deliberate action
(II.52.2–4). The plague causes social customs (nomoi) to break down and
give way to multiple forms of ‘lawless extravagance’ (epi pleon anomias)
(II.53.1). In dramatic contrast to the orderly and elaborate public funeral
at which Pericles delivered his speech, the Athenians now neglect to
perform proper burial rites for their dead: ‘The bodies of dying men
lay one upon another. The sacred places in which they had quartered
themselves were full of corpses of persons that had died there, just
as they were’ (II.52.3). The Athenians panic, giving the lie to Pericles’
boast about their steadfastness in an emergency. They lose confidence
in their judgment and act not as self-reliant and responsible citizens but,
Pericles chides them, under the influence of slavish thoughts (II.61.3).
The rebuke is ironic, for Pericles earlier used the threat of enslavement
to justify resistance to Sparta and the adoption of his extraordinary
strategy (I.141.1). Athens, in other words, took up that resistance but
then failed to elude the servile condition that resistance was supposed
to prevent. Fear and the absence of manly virtue drive the Athenians slave-like to pursue immediate personal pleasures for as long as
their health permits in utter disregard for the law and social norms.
‘Perseverance in what men called honor was popular with none. . . .
Fear of gods or law of man there was none to restrain them’ (II.53.3). Far
removed from the idealized Athens of the funeral oration, we now see
the despair of a people besieged, casting aside its recollection of virtue
and obligation. ‘The plague offers the most violent challenge to the Periclean attempt to exert some kind of rational control over the historical
process.’24
Pericles’ strategy of abandoning the countryside intensifies the trials of the plague. ‘An aggravation of the existing calamity’, Thucydides notes, ‘was the influx from the country into the city, and this was
especially felt by the new arrivals. As there were no houses to receive
them, they had to be lodged at the hot season of the year in stifling
cabins, where the mortality raged without restraint’ (II.52.1–2). Plague
struck just as the Spartans invaded. Athenians, gathered behind the
walls, struggled to accept that their fields, livestock, orchards and homes
were, at that very moment, being ravaged by an enemy no less invisible than the plague. To underscore Athens’ misfortune, Thucydides
matter of factly reports that the plague never entered the Peloponnesus
(II.54.5). Even though ‘it was actually asserted that the departure of the
24 Adam Parry, ‘The Language of Thucydides’ Description of the Plague’ Bulletin of the
Institute of Classical Studies, 16 (1969), 106–118. Citation at p. 116.
37
Classical Theory in International Relations
Peloponnesians [who enjoy the luxury of mobility] was hastened by the
fear of the [plague]’, Thucydides writes, ‘in this invasion they remained
longer than in any other, and ravaged the whole country, for they were
about forty days in Attica’ (II.57.1–2). One wonders if Pericles’ strategy
is not flawed. His embarrassment is obvious in the more defensive tone
and rhetoric of the third speech. As spokesman for civic values in the
funeral oration, he speaks of ‘we’ and ‘us’, but in his third and final
speech he belabours the contrast between ‘me’ and ‘you’. References to
‘us’ disappear.25
Thucydides never suggests that Pericles himself is not equal to the
emergency. In his third speech, ‘He succeeded in convincing them; they
not only gave up all idea of sending to Sparta but also applied themselves
with increased energy to the war’ (II.65.2). But while describing the positive effects of his third speech, Thucydides almost casually informs
us that Pericles, too, has perished. ‘He outlived [the war’s] commencement two years and six months’ (II.65.6). Pericles might have helped
the Athenians negotiate unforeseen misfortune, but chance disrupts the
anticipated course of events. Pericles is dead. Thucydides might have
included some narrative account of the year that separates Pericles’
third speech from his death. He might have included some description
of the circumstances of that death, and, in so doing, eased the reader into
the knowledge of Pericles’ loss. Instead, Thucydides leaves the reader
asking: ‘Wait a minute, did Pericles just die?’ Thucydides makes us experience vicariously the shock and confusion that the Athenians felt. We
live the power of chance not only intellectually but emotionally. Through
the antithetical encounter of praise and disappointment, Thucydides’
treatment of Pericles, the most gifted of Athenians, has nourished a corrosive scepticism regarding humanity’s capacity to master its destiny
through strategic brilliance.
Humanity’s dependence on norms of
moral conduct
It would be hasty to conclude that the scepticism in Thucydides’ treatment of Pericles expressed ‘mere tragedy’, mere pessimism regarding
25
Connor, Thucydides, p. 65. Alcibiades will later exhort the Spartans to occupy the Attic
hinterland permanently. The vulnerability of the countryside is, he explains, Athens’ greatest vulnerability and the surest means of compelling the Athenians to sue for peace. Subsequent events will prove Alcibiades correct.
38
Pericles, realism and the normative conditions of deliberate action
humankind’s power to master its destiny.26 Thucydides does not doubt
the power of human intelligence but rather the ability of that intelligence
to chart a prudent course of action while disregarding norms of moral
conduct. The reader appreciates how Pericles’ overweening confidence,
both in his own talent and in the wealth of his city, breeds in him and
his compatriots the illusion that power has made them immune from
the sanctions of moral norms, which, in Pericles own words, ‘although
unwritten, cannot be broken without acknowledged disgrace’ (II.37.3).
Impressed by Pericles’ judgment and capacity for leadership yet suspicious of his abundant self-confidence, Thucydides invites us to observe
how prudent action relies on the guidance and restraint provided by
moral norms.
The most important discussion of conditions under which deliberate and prudent conduct is possible is found in the passage on the
Corcyraean civil war, or stasis (III.70–83). Thucydides describes how
factional conflict besets Corcyra as a result of war. The opposing factions, each emboldened by the prospect of reinforcement by an invading power, become increasingly ‘harsh’ toward one another until normal political interaction is no longer possible. Violence ensues, and ‘the
Corcyraeans engaged in butchering those of their fellow-citizens whom
they regarded as enemies’ (III.81.4). Under such conditions, Thucydides
explains, it became increasingly difficult, and finally impossible, for both
‘states and individuals’ (poleis and idiotai; III.82.2) to conduct themselves
prudently, moderately and deliberately. Instead, stasis drove them to
extremes, to behave with ‘reckless abandon’ (tolma gar alogistos; III.82.4)
and ‘frantically’ (emplektos; III.82.4). Thucydides characterizes the situation as one in which actors are unable to practise any measure of
‘hesitation’ (mellesis promethes; III.82.4), ‘moderation’ (to sophron; III.82.4)
and ‘practical intelligence’ (to pros hapan xuneton; III.82.4).27
26
See Euben, Tragedy, p. 194, n. 52, for an accounting of the camps (pessimist versus
modernist) into which fall many interpreters of Thucydides’ treatment of Pericles.
27 We depart from Strasser’s translation of xuneton, ‘ability to see all sides of a question’,
by proposing ‘practical intelligence’, which conveys the notion of commonly understood
virtue. See 1.79.2, where the term is used to describe the Spartan leader Archidamus,
who uses the term himself (1.84.3) to designate a characteristic virtue of the Spartans and
a reason for their stability and success in war. It appears again (II.IS.1) in reference to
Theseus, the mythic founder of Athens as a unified polis. Thucydides applies the term,
always positively, to a handful of revered historical Greek figures, including Themistocles
(1.74.1 and 1.138.2–3) and the Peisistratids (VI.54.5). He also applies it to actors of his history who cut a good and often brilliant figure, such as Brasidas (IV.81.2) and Hermocrates
(VI.72.2), as well as in discussing the oligarchs of 411 (VIII.58.4) and by implication
Pericles (II.34.6, 8). See A. W. Gomme, A Historical Commentary on Thucydides, revised
by A. Andrewes and K. J. Dover, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945–81), II.49.377.
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Classical Theory in International Relations
For Thucydides, war encourages actors to expect help from foreign
sympathizers, freeing them from the need to treat their adversaries with
consideration (III.82.2). As it disrupts normal human commerce, war
spawns desperation because it ‘takes away the easy supply of daily
wants’; ‘plunges’ cities and individuals into dire necessity;28 and ushers
in a situation in which words have no stable meaning (III.82.4). Sincere
good naturedness (to euethes) is laughed out of court (III.83.1), and there
is no trust (III.83.2).29 War disrupts the norms on which we rely for
some measure of predictability and civility in daily life, which are the
conditions of rational, deliberate, prudent action.
Thucydides’ precise words at III.82.1 help us appreciate the subtlety of
his insight. He pauses in his narration to note that revolution at Corcyra,
being one of the first revolutions to occur, made a strong impression.
‘Later on, one may say, the whole Hellenic world (pan to Hellenikon) was
convulsed (ekinethe).’ What kind of convulsion did the whole Hellenic
world suffer and with what consequences? The verb ekinethe (a form
of kineo, the root of ‘kinetic’) suggests movement and instability. The
image is one of chaos, flux, a destructive kind of motion. Thucydides
introduces the term as a noun, kinesis, in the first lines of the History
(I.1.2), and reintroduces the word into the narrative repeatedly, in some
form or other, like a Wagnerian leitmotif.30
By the time of the Corcyrean stasis, kinesis has placed in motion not
only men and navies, but the discursive environment of norms and laws
that make deliberate action possible. People and cities are losing their
reserve, the power to check their motion. They are acting on impulse
and fear. The things that war is now setting in motion, or stirring up,
are not only men, money, resources and ships but also the very customary understandings of what constitute ‘normal’ human values and
relationships. War is causing ‘the distortion of morality and values’.31
The breakdown of the norms that undergird social relations, captured
in Thucydides’ observation that even words lose their ordinary meanings, is leading to chaos, violence and the pursuit of immediate wants
28
Thomas Hobbes offers ‘plunges’ in translation of piptein. See David Grene (ed.), The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides, The Complete Hobbes Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1989).
29 To euethes combines ‘eu’ (good) and ‘ethos’ (custom or habit), and it thus designates
etymologically the moral virtue of being good as a matter not of calculation but of habit.
30 Connor, Thucydides, p. 21, n. 4, observes that kinesis ‘is an unusual word at this point
in the development of Greek, clear enough in general meaning but obscure and surprising in this [I.1.2] context’. The inference is, therefore, that it was not lightly or casually
employed by the author.
31 Hornblower, Thucydides, p. 156; see also Connor, Thucydides, p. 102, n. 57.
40
Pericles, realism and the normative conditions of deliberate action
without regard to their moral value (pleonexia). When those norms are
‘convulsed’, as they are at Corcyra, one cannot expect reason to provide
a useful guide to action. Reason requires that words convey meaning,
that the norms to which we commonly refer in judging the actions, intentions, moral character and trustworthiness of others are still generally
employed.
The Corcyraean stasis has the same effect as the Athenian plague
on humankind’s capacity to act reasonably. At Athens, when physicians found themselves unable to stem the tide of plague, reason
(logos) ‘was overpowered’.32 The same condition obtains in Corcyra. For
Thucydides, war is a ‘violent teacher’ (biaios didaskalos; III.82.2, translation modified) because it instructs by setting in motion that which
in times of peace is at rest. Thucydides opposes this kinesis of social
norms antithetically to hesychia, his term for peace. (Hesychia literally
means quiet or tranquility; the more common term for peace is eirene.)33
Thucydides employs the kinesis/hesychia antithesis to highlight the parallel between stasis at Corcyra and plague at Athens. In both instances
he opposes an image of kinesis with an antithetical image of hesychia.
In the case of the plague, the image of hesychia is developed in the
funeral oration. In the case of the Corcyraean stasis, it is developed
in the description of the Athenian purification of the island of Delos,
with its long excerpt from Homer’s Hymn to Apollo (III.104.1–6). In both
instances, Thucydides’ use of antithesis compels the reader to ponder the
contrast.
Pericles and the kinesis of customary norms
War and stasis destabilize norms and meanings and render reasonable,
prudent conduct difficult if not impossible to achieve. But it would belie
the complexity of Thucydides’ text to call war and stasis the cause of
that destabilization. Indeed, war and stasis themselves can, to a considerable extent, be seen as the consequence of a prior subversion of moral
norms. Thucydides, at V.25.1, inverts the variables. The Peace of Nicias
32
Connor, Thucydides, p. 100.
Thucydides generally uses the term eirene to designate formal peace treaties between
cities (as well as the absence of war that results) and hesychia to designate the absence of
turmoil, both within the city and in relations among cities. At VI.38.3 he explicitly contrasts
hesychia with stasis and the condition in which fellow countrymen behave toward one
another as toward an enemy (polemios). Note that the application of hesychia is not limited
to domestic peace (V.55.1–2). For eirene, see 1.29.4 and V.13.2, 14.1, and 26.2; for hesychia
see 1.70.9, II.22.1, and V.22.2 and 53.
33
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obtains, but Corinth and other Peloponnesian cities are trying mightily to ‘disturb’ the arrangement. The verb employed here is diekinoun
(which appends the prefix dia [thoroughly] to kineo, discussed above).
The episode invites us to take a longer view, to ask if the peace that
obtained before the outbreak of war was not similarly being ‘disturbed’.
We recall the broad indictment of Athens by the Corinthians (I.70.19).
There we find the ‘daring, dynamism, innovation, audacity, immoderation, presentism, and frenetic motion’ characteristic of stasis being
applied to the conduct of Athens in peacetime: ‘They were born into the
world to take no rest (hesychian) themselves and to give none to others’
(I.70.9).34
The corrosive effect of ‘frenetic motion’ saps the capacity of the Athenians as well as other Greeks to act with prudence and deliberation.
Early in the History, moral argument causes Athens to hesitate before
entering into the fateful alliance with Corcyra (I.31–44). Moral scruples
cause the Athenians to rethink their policy toward the rebellious Mytilenians. They still possess the power to pause, to listen to argument, to
reconsider, to check their motion and moderate their conduct. Yet, the
hold of norms has begun to weaken. As Euben points out, Diodotus, the
advocate of restraint and decency, is compelled by the press of argument
and the hubris of imperialism to ‘defend the more moderate human policy in relentlessly realistic terms that anticipate the Athenian arguments
at Melos’.35 This argument is self-defeating in the long run. Diodotus’
feigned realism saves the Mytilenians but legitimates the idea that imperialist rule is of necessity instrumental, a matter of expedience, beyond
the application of moral argument, as oppressive as it is ineluctable, and
in so doing subverts confidence in the legitimacy and value of moral discourse. Diodotus thus unwittingly invites those Athenians who may still
be willing to subject action to rational examination to shed their regard
for norms of decency in favour of a normatively disembodied strategic
calculus. By the time of the Melian dialogue, ‘a travesty of dialectic’,36
the process of decay is complete. ‘Athens is left with self-interest alone,
the desire for power without a culture to give it bounds and meaning.
34
Euben, Tragedy, p. 190.
Euben, Tragedy, p. 180; See Bagby, ‘Use and Abuse’; Saxonhouse, Athenian Democracy.
36 Hornblower, Thucydides, p. 62; See Connor’s treatment of the Melian dialogue in Thucydides, pp. 147–155: ‘Whatever our reactions to what happens to the Melians, it is hard to
escape a feeling of horror at what is happening to the Athenians.’ Quoted at p. 154. See
also Connor, Thucydides, pp. 87–88; Euben, Tragedy, p. 198.
35
42
Pericles, realism and the normative conditions of deliberate action
Not only is ambition of this sort unlimited, it is incoherent and irrational;
for without a comprehensible world there can be no way of reasoning
about it or acting within it.’37
The norms and understandings that provide guidance to everyday
social intercourse are subverted not only by violence but by ‘peacetime’
politics and political discourse. Pericles plays no mean role in this history of subversion. He is ‘not only at home in wartime, and tolerate[s] its
climate of aggression, but even foster[s] it’.38 At 1.127.3, Pericles ‘urges’
(horma) the Athenians to war. The verb hormao (cf. English ‘hormone’)
means to set in motion or to rush at something or someone, as in battle.
Pericles is a source of kinesis. He takes pride in making ‘every land and
every sea . . . the highway of our daring’ (II.41.4). In a passage that is
particularly suggestive of Thucydides’ complex attitude toward Pericles
(VIII.97.2), the historian offers the following judgment on Athens’ shortlived experiment with a mixed constitution: ‘For the first time in my
experience the Athenians appear to have governed themselves well.’39
The judgment includes Pericles’ rule and ‘implies censure of Pericles’
management of affairs’.40 It further stokes suspicion regarding Pericles’
statecraft. By pandering to the population, by challenging the customary
understandings of the bond between citizen and polis, by implementing
an extraordinarily bold war strategy that uprooted established patterns
of life, by offending the allies’ reverence for autonomia (political autonomy), Pericles is a source of kinesis and contributes significantly, though
perhaps unwittingly, to the deterioration of norms of social conduct. Not
only does he pander to Athenian pleonexia, or desire for more power and
wealth, but, by making Athens invulnerable to external assault, he tries
to free it from the need to cultivate ‘normal’ relations with other Greek
cities. He also tries to free the conduct of the war from the need to secure
the customary way of life of the majority of Athenian citizens, who are
37 James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984), p. 79.
38 Peter R. Pouncey, The Necessities of War: A Study of Thucydides’ Pessimism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 36.
39 Translation from Connor, Thucydides, p. 228 and n. 34, emphasis added (in conformity
with the text, which stresses ‘my experience’ with the enclitic particle ge). See the discussion
of translation problems in Hornblower, Thucydides, p. 160, who also (pp. 166–168) gives a
critical examination of Pericles’ stewardship, as do Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic Vision
of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
pp. 254–259; and Michael Palmer, Love of Glory and the Common Good: Aspects of the Political
Thought of Thucydides (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992), p. 113.
40 Hornblower, Thucydides, p. 160.
43
Classical Theory in International Relations
compelled to abandon that way of life to seek refuge behind the city
walls.41
But as Pericles and the Athenians undermine the legitimacy and influence of moral norms through rhetorical flair, brazen strategy and raw
violence, they not only create a revolutionary world that loses its moral
compass but also prove quite incapable of flourishing in the world they
create. In the end, the Athenians suffer as much as anyone from the collapse of political order throughout Greece and the concomitant decay of
‘those general laws to which all alike can look for salvation in adversity’
(III.84.3; cf. Pericles at II.37.3).42 The tragic lament of Nicias following the
defeat at Syracuse (VII.77.1–7), with its ironic use of language previously
employed at the Melian conference, makes this point with pathos.
The History offers a sustained exposition of humanity’s dependence
on moral norms – not for philosophically transcendent reasons but
because they are the necessary support of prudent conduct. When those
norms are in shambles, the protagonists of the History find it virtually
impossible to chart a rational course of action. ‘Thucydides’ history is
unquestionably aimed at an audience that values cleverness, sophistication, intellect and self-interest, but it does not simply affirm and
reinforce those values.’43 Gnomê (foresight or rational calculation) trips
on tychê (chance) or is coopted by orgê (passion).44 In some instances,
‘sound calculation leads to a poor outcome’;45 in others, carelessly concocted schemes, such as Cleon’s assault on Pylos (IV.27–41), succeed
beyond hope. We see the actors of the History treat morality and prudence as if they were rival terms. Thucydides invites us to consider the
cost of doing so.
What are the norms, and how free was Pericles to respect them?
The first question challenges us to identify specifically ‘international’
norms, since we have already discussed the importance of norms such
as reciprocity in domestic political life. This is an important issue for
International Relations scholarship, because ‘international norms’ are
at the core of one of the most abiding claims of Realist theory: morality is unachievable without first securing ‘political order’ through the
41
See Josiah Ober, ‘National Ideology and Strategic Defense of the Population, from
Athens to Star Wars’ in Hegemonic Rivalry, pp. 254–259, on the development of a defensive
ideology in Athens.
42 Though the authenticity of III.84 is disputed, we are convinced by Connor’s defence of
the passage in Thucydides p. 102, n. 60.
43 Connor, Thucydides, p. 15.
44 Connor, Thucydides, pp. 55–59, esp. 58, n. 18.
45 Mark V. Kauppi, ‘Contemporary International Relations Theory and the Peloponnesian
War’ in Hegemonic Rivalry, p. 18; cf. Connor, Thucydides, p. 118.
44
Pericles, realism and the normative conditions of deliberate action
exercise of power.46 It follows from this claim that we can discuss morality meaningfully only as it obtains ‘inside’ states. It is not meaningful
‘outside’ states, in the anarchical realm of international politics and war.
G. E. M. de Ste. Croix offers a reading of Thucydides that lends some
support to the Realist argument.47 But in general the stark dichotomization between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ does not hold up well in Thucydides’
text. It is beyond the bounds of this chapter to explore in any depth the
norms that regulated relations among Greek poleis, but it is important
to verify the existence of such norms in the text. Indeed, Thucydides’
claim, advanced in his analysis of the Corcyraean stasis, that both private persons (idiotai) and states (poleis) found prudent action increasingly difficult to achieve constitutes a rather explicit rejection of the
‘inside/outside’ dichotomy. The text reveals that norms of war and
diplomacy regulated the exchange of the dead (III.113.1–5; IV.97.2–
98.8), the treatment of prisoners and refugees, Olympic truces, diplomacy through proxenies, the obligations of allies and so on.48 Perlman
shows how the term archê evolved to become synonymous with dynamis,
despoteia, and even tyrannis, precisely because Athens showed such disregard for the norms of eleutheria (freedom) and autonomia, which, like
sovereignty and cuius regio in the Westphalian system, were constitutive
of the Greek system of city-states.49 Indeed, Thucydides seems to experience the war as a kind of civil war within a normatively unified space.
Hermocrates’ efforts to forge cohesion among Sicilians, a people who
‘go by the same name’ (onoma hen keklemenous; IV.64.3), serve as a foil to
the civil war that is raging on the mainland among people who are also
designated by a single name, ‘Hellenes’.50 Within this unified normative space, the actors in the drama, as well as the reader, are clearly able
to form judgments of the moral character of leaders of opposing cities,
that is, across political frontiers, on the basis of shared understandings
of such goods as justice, honour, mercy and other common virtues –
at least until those norms lose sway under the combined blows of an
46 E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), Chapter 9; Hans
Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946).
47 G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (Ithaca NY: Cornell University
Press, 1972).
48 At IV.97–8 is an interesting debate regarding what should be seen as custom (nomos)
and what should not. See Hornblower, Thucydides, p. 180, Connor, Thucydides, on Mytilene,
p. 91, and on Nicias, p. 163; and Pierre Ducrey, Warfare in Ancient Greece (New York:
Schocken Books, 1986), Chapter 9, on treatment of prisoners of war.
49 Shalom Perlman, ‘Hegemony and Arkhe in Greece: Fourth Century B.C. Views’ in Hegemonic Rivalry.
50 See Connor, Thucydides, p. 126, n. 42.
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overweening self – self-sufficiency, war and stasis. It is only when those
norms become inoperative that the reader finds it difficult to develop
a firm grasp of the moral character of such figures as Alcibiades and
Phrynichus, who dominate the final books of the History.
Do we really mean to argue, then, that Pericles ignored opportunities to legitimate, reaffirm and defend such norms of moral conduct by
adopting the policy course he did? The claim gives pause because scholarship in International Relations, goaded by Thucydides’ claim that the
war was ‘inevitable’ (I.23.6),51 is accustomed to searching for ‘necessary
outcomes’, treating Pericles as an extraordinary leader confronting the
great forces of history. But, in addition to Lebow’s well-argued complaint that the popular ‘power transition’ reading of ‘necessity’ is not
well supported by the text, it is simply impossible to identify any recurring set of factors in the History that render some pattern of outcomes
‘necessary’.52 It is true that ‘the Archeology’ (I.2–23) seems to suggest
such a theme by alerting the reader to the role of ‘historical forces’ in
the genesis of the History. But Thucydides’ interest in ‘historical forces’
all but vanishes in the narrative of the war. ‘There is, in Thucydides, no
systematic treatment of Spartan and Athenian weaknesses other than
those of character.’53 As the narrative unfolds, the attention paid to
individual moral character grows rather than diminishes. In the final
books, the historian’s attention is absorbed by the moral character of
two figures. Thucydides’ analysis of moral character suggests that it matters to history, that ‘individual human action can change the course of
history’.54
Hermocrates at Gela: realism, prudence,
and moral norms
Thucydides’ demonstration of our dependence on moral norms dilutes
his Realist credentials. In a provocative article, Forde argued that
Thucydides even counsels us to ‘resist’ Realism.55 But our alertness
to Thucydides’ use of antithesis makes us pause before advancing
51
The use of ‘inevitable’ to translate anangkasai is controversial. See Connor, Thucydides,
p. 32, n. 31.
52 Lebow, ‘Power Transition Theory’.
53 Hornblower, Thucydides, p. 33.
54 Hornblower, Thucydides, p. 146; see also Kauppi, ‘Contemporary International Relations
Theory’, p. 112.
55 Forde, ‘International Realism’, p. 154.
46
Pericles, realism and the normative conditions of deliberate action
categorical statements. Nicias, after all, resists Realism, and the outcome
is less than impressive. Recall, moreover, the Archeology’s account of
the mastery and accumulation of political and military power by the
Greeks, the devolution of that power on Athens as set out in the Pentekontaetia (I.88–118.2), and Thucydides’ amazement at the dimensions
of the kinesis with which he introduces the History. How could we expect
normative restraints to operate effectively when history confers such an
overwhelming advantage on a people? The claim that power politics is
ineluctable pervades the History. In the words of Diodotus, ‘it is impossible to prevent, and only great simplicity [euetheias] can hope to prevent,
human nature [tes anthropeias physeos] doing what it has once set its
mind upon [hormomenes], by force of law [nomon ischyi] or by any other
deterrent force whatsoever’ (III.45.7). The difficulty with Thucydides
is finding a coherent rule or prescription in the relentless succession
of antithetical claims. How does one reconcile the claim that prudent
politics requires guidance by moral norms with the claim that power
politics is inevitable? The text provides a hint in the remarkable speech
delivered by Hermocrates.
Hermocrates wants to promote reconciliation between two feuding
Sicilian cities, Gela and Camarina, to fend off Athenian intervention. He
begins by making clear Athenian interest in the feud. Athens, he claims,
seeks to ally itself with certain Sicilian cities only as a first step towards
subjugating the entire island. Moreover, those ambitions are, he states in
a realist sounding utterance, ‘very excusable’, since ‘it is just as much in
men’s nature to rule those who submit to them as it is to resist those who
molest them’ (IV.61.5). Hermocrates urges the two cities to settle their
differences so that Sicily can unite to dispel the Athenian threat. But why
should the cities of Sicily prefer the collective defence of their island
to the Athenian alliance? Realism counsels only the course of action
that is most likely to succeed at acceptable cost. Hermocrates, however,
evokes the sentiment of Sicilian identity: ‘We are neighbors, live in the
same country, are girt by the same sea, and go by the same name of
Sicilians’ (IV.64.3). His sentiment of Sicilian unity is not grounded in
some nationalist sympathy or solidarity. Indeed, national sentiment is
held in check by the more ancient rivalry between Dorians and Ionians.
The idea of Sicily, for Hermocrates, refers rather to a geographical space
in which shared norms have emerged in time to facilitate interaction,
deliberation and the settlement of grievances. ‘Do you not think that
the good which you have’, he asks, ‘and the ills that you complain of,
47
Classical Theory in International Relations
would be better preserved and cured by quiet [hesychia] than by war’
(IV.62.2)?
Hermocrates greets with scepticism the self-assurance that is bred of
power and strategic cleverness. He asks his listeners not to fall prey
to the illusion that strength is sure merely because it brings confidence
(euelpi) (IV.62.4). Given that scepticism, he equates prudent action with
the defence of Sicily as a space unified by shared norms. He likens war
among Sicilian cities to civil war. He evokes civil war using the forceful term oikeios polemos (IV.64.5) rather than the more common stasis.
The expression produces a powerful image of war in the household
(oikos). He invites his listeners to be terrified, frightened out of their wits
(ekplagentes), not only in the presence of the Athenians but also before
‘the undefined fear of this unknown future’ (IV.63.1). The image of civil
war, that is, the destruction of a normative space that enables reasoned
action and negotiation (with friends as well as enemies) should inspire
terror. Terror, in turn, should inspire concessions on the part of the feuding cities in order to preserve that normative space. Hermocrates’ argument recalls with irony the words of Pericles, who sought not only to
stir confidence in Athenian power and strategic skill but also to inspire
disdain for the adversary: ‘Disdain [hyperphron]’, Pericles states, ‘is the
privilege of those who, like us, have been assured by reflection of their
superiority to their adversary’ (II.62.4). In this same vein, Hermocrates’
invitation to make concessions contrasts sharply with Pericles’ principled rejection of any meaningful negotiation.
Against Pericles, Hermocrates asserts that power can cause people
to ‘confuse their strength with their hopes’ (IV.65.4). He realizes that
the temptation to test one’s power is strong. The defence of Sicily as
a normative space will therefore probably require the countervailing
application of military power. Hermocrates is not a peace activist. He is
trying to forge an alliance. He admits, as does the Realist, that violence
is inevitable or ‘natural’ in human affairs. He admits that Sicily’s cities
will probably wage war on one another again (IV.64.3). But prudence
dictates participation in the violent struggle for Sicily’s independence,
with the goal of preserving the social norms that make deliberate action
and prudence possible. He does not invite us to resist Realism but to
apply the Realist’s alertness to the permanence of power and violence
in human affairs in defence of norms of moral conduct. Pericles, in contrast, knows how to acquire and apply power, and Thucydides values
that mastery. But what is missing in Pericles is a full appreciation of
48
Pericles, realism and the normative conditions of deliberate action
what one might do with power such that the normative conditions for
its intelligent and prudent application can be sustained. To state the
argument more boldly, Realism, that is, the deliberate cultivation and
application of power, depends on the prior existence of a normative
space in which to be deployed. If that condition is not met, Realism is a
futile exercise in shooting blindly.
Hermocrates’ speech and policy are antithetical to Pericles’ earlier
speeches and policies. It does not engage Periclean policy directly, but
at the level of theory. We submit that the antithesis between Pericles
and Hermocrates contains a prescriptive lesson. At the same time,
however, we acknowledge how difficult it is to pin Thucydides down.
Hermocrates, in another passage, uses the language of ethnic solidarity (VI.80.3). Nevertheless, Thucydides employs all his rhetorical skills
to concentrate our minds on Hermocrates’ words at IV.59–64 and lend
those words centrality. The scene provides us with our first introduction to Sicily and Syracuse, the principal instruments of Athens’s defeat,
and to Hermocrates, a central figure in that defeat. At Gela, moreover,
Hermocrates gives the only speech, a privilege that compels the comparison with Pericles. Finally, his speech follows immediately and antithetically on the Athenian triumph at Pylos, an unexpected victory and
the highwater mark of Athens’ fortunes.
Thucydides and contemporary theory
Thucydides’ scepticism, as conveyed by his antithetical style of analysis, invites us to revisit Realism, whose ties to scepticism have been
noted but not systematically explored.56 Scepticism regarding humanity’s aptitude for moral improvement justifies the focus on power politics and self-help. Pericles, by this definition, is a Realist. The label fits
not only his attitude toward policymaking but also the philosophical
premises underlying that attitude. Pericles, like Thucydides, had ties
to the Sophists. He was closely linked with Protagoras, and his consort
56 See Charles R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), Chapter 1; Marshall Cohen, ‘Moral Skepticism and International Relations’ in Charles R. Beitz, Marshall Cohen, Thomas Scanlon and A. John Simmons (eds.), International Ethics (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Michael
Loriaux, ‘The Realists and Saint Augustine: Skepticism, Psychology, and Moral Action in
International Relations Thought’ International Studies Quarterly 36 (1992), 401–420; R. B. J.
Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993).
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Classical Theory in International Relations
Aspasia animated a lively intellectual ‘salon’ in which Sophistic thought
flourished. Pericles may have drawn more or less self-consciously on
Sophistic scepticism in order to ‘clear the decks’ of received wisdom
and thus make room for his strategic innovations.
But Thucydides’ subtle critique of Pericles questions the Realists’ ability to ground their political philosophy in sceptical premises. Scepticism
in Thucydides spreads from doubt regarding humanity’s capacity for
moral deliberation and action to doubt regarding humanity’s capacity
to deploy Realist policy in defiance of moral norms. Thucydides excites
such scepticism even when statecraft is, as in Pericles’ case, brilliantly
conceived. It is difficult to think of a Realist argument that might stave
off this metastasis of scepticism from doubt regarding human morality
to doubt regarding the human intellect’s self-sufficiency. Thucydides,
in any event, ‘makes it clear where he stood: it is not with the sophists
who denied the validity of any principle of morality but a short-sighted
self-interest’.57
Thucydides’ invitation to appreciate how norms function as a condition for deliberate action intersects with constructivist literature on
norms and law.58 The History shows how norms provide guidance in
a non-determinist manner. Thucydides’ reliance on a sceptical outlook
suggests a way that proponents of constructivism might philosophize
about the foundations of that perspective.59 Inversely, his acknowledgment of the inevitability of power relations should inspire caution in constructivists as they mount their assault on Realist Theory. His account of
politics in extraordinary times suggests that we can, and should, assess
how material struggle supports or unsettles norms.
57
Hornblower, Thucydides, p. 185, citing Gomme, Historical Commentary, revised by A.
Andrewes and K. J. Dover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945–81), p. 81.
58 Martha Finnemore, National Interests in International Society (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Peter J. Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Audie Klotz, Norms in
International Relations: the Struggle Against Apartheid (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press,
1995); Friedrich Kratochwil, The Humean Perspective on International Relations (Princeton NJ:
Center of International Studies, Princeton University, 1981); Friedrich Kratochwil, Rules,
Norms, and Decisions: On the Conditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in International Relations and Domestic Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Cecelia Lynch,
Beyond Appeasement: Interpreting Interwar Peace Movements in World Politics (Ithaca NY:
Cornell University Press, 1999); Alexander Wendt, ‘Anarchy Is What States Make of It’
International Organization 46 (1992), 391–425; Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics.
59 Kratochwil, Humean Perspective, sets out from David Hume. There is a parallel between
the argument developed here and Hume’s own rediscovery of the norms of the ‘common
life’ through the exploration of sceptical premises. Compare Terry Nardin’s discussion
of Michael Oakshott in Nardin, Law, Morality, and the Relations of States (Princeton NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1983).
50
Pericles, realism and the normative conditions of deliberate action
We cannot develop these ideas here, but we raise them to recall
Thucydides’ capacity to confront each generation’s particular theoretical enthusiasm with challenging and even deadly objections. In our
view, his capacity to resist encapsulation – not his putative status as the
founder of one or another school of thought – remains the reason his
work stands as a ‘possession for all time’.
51
3
Immanuel Kant and the
democratic peace1
John MacMillan
One of modernity’s central puzzles has been whether global politics
can be organized so as to improve on the seemingly limited and contingent possibilities of human freedom available in a sovereign states
system. That is to say, the corollary of state sovereignty, established to
provide security and freedom within the state, was international anarchy, which delimited and threatened that very security and freedom
through recreating the state of nature – which for Hobbes and Kant
was a state of war – in relations between states. A vital reason for
Kant’s enduring influence among scholars of International Relations,
and the basis for his status as a classic thinker in this field, is that he
addressed this conundrum in such a way as to promise both security and
freedom.
Whilst his seminal essay ‘Perpetual Peace’ (1795) did not offer any
guarantees (beyond the unsatisfying recourse to nature’s irresistible
will),2 his schema can at least muster sufficient empirical support in
the form of the Democratic Peace and related research agendas to have
taken it beyond the realm of political philosophy into that of empirical enquiry and practical politics. Indeed, the Democratic Peace has
emerged as the major ‘Kantian’ research agenda in the contemporary
study of International Relations and it is for this reason that this chapter
concentrates upon the reading of Kant that it has produced.
1
Millennium: Journal of International Studies. This chapter is an updated and expanded
version of John MacMillan, ‘A Kantian Protest Against the Peculiar Discourse of InterLiberal State Peace’ which first appeared in Millennium, [Vol. 24, 1995] and is reproduced
with the permission of the publisher.
2 See the ‘First Supplement: on the guarantee of a perpetual peace’ in ‘Perpetual Peace’, in
Hans Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991),
pp. 108–114.
52
Immanuel Kant and the democratic peace
Kant was introduced into the current debate upon liberal states and
peace by Michael Doyle in 1983 and is widely held to be the political
philosopher best suited to explain why liberal states appear to be able to
maintain peace among themselves, but not in relations with non-liberal
states.3 Since then, Kant’s work continues to feature prominently in
this literature and David Forsythe, Francis Fukuyama, Jack Levy, Bruce
Russett and Georg Sørensen have all accepted Doyle’s reading of Kant.4
Elsewhere, Kant’s association with the liberal peace debate is readily
observable in the titles of journal articles, such as ‘Kant or Cant: The Myth
of the Democratic Peace’, ‘Neorealism and Kant: No Pacific Union’,
to name but two.5 Kant’s authority has even extended beyond the academic world.6 Given the special authority Kant commands as a representative of the liberal tradition in International Relations, and especially
given the influence he wields in debates on the relationship between
democracy and peace, a careful examination of his writings is required.
In this chapter, I will contest the predominant interpretation of Kant’s
political writings in this debate, and argue that his unique authority
as a liberal philosopher has been exploited to establish a new series
3 Michael Doyle, ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part 1’ Philosophy and Public
Affairs 12 (1983), 205–235; ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part 2’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (1983), 323–353. See also Michael Doyle, ‘Liberalism and World
Politics’ American Political Science Review 80 (1986), 1151–1169; and Doyle, ‘Liberalism and
International Relations’ in Ronald Beiner and William J. Booth, Kant and Political Philosophy:
The Contemporary Legacy (London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 173–203.
4 David Forsythe, Human Rights and Peace: International and National Dimensions (London:
University of Nebraska Press, 1993), pp. 50, 156; Jack Levy, ‘Domestic Politics and War’
Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18 (1988), 653–673; Georg Sørensen, ‘Kant and Processes
of Democratization: Consequences for Neorealist Thought’ Journal of Peace Research 29
(1992), 397–414. Although Fukuyama’s thesis is rooted in his interpretation of Hegel’s
philosophy, significant here is his explicit reference to Doyle in the text, and the immediate context which draws upon liberal writers including Kant. See Francis Fukuyama,
‘The End of History?’ The National Interest 16 (1989), 18. Bruce Russett does not explicitly
acknowledge Doyle’s reading of Kant, although there do not seem to be any significant
differences between their respective interpretations. See Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War Order (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press,
1993). But, see also Cecelia Lynch, ‘Kant, the Republican Peace, and Moral Guidance in
International Law’ Ethics and International Affairs 8 (1994), 39–58.
5 Christopher Layne, ‘Kant or Cant: The Myth of Democratic Peace’ International Security
19 (1994), 5–49, and Denny Roy, ‘Neorealism and Kant: No Pacific Union’ Journal of Peace
Research 30 (1993), 451–454; Michael C. Williams, ‘The Discipline of the Democratic Peace:
Kant, Liberalism and the Social Construction of Security Communities’ European Journal
of International Relations 7 (2001), 525–553; Bruce Buchan, ‘Explaining War and Peace:
Kant and Liberal IR Theory’ Alternatives 27 (2002), 407–428; see also Daniele Archibugi,
‘Immanuel Kant, Cosmopolitan Law and Peace’ European Journal of International Relations
1 (1995), 429–456.
6 Benjamin Netanyahu, A Place among the Nations: Israel and the World (London: Bantam
Press, 1993).
53
Classical Theory in International Relations
of exclusionary practices by liberal against non-liberal states. I begin
by identifying the main features of the predominant interpretation of
Kant’s political writings. Then, I will discuss particularly problematic
points of interpretation. Throughout, I seek to offer a more inclusive
interpretation of Kant’s thought that acknowledges the intertwined fate
of liberal and non-liberal states and recalls the importance he attached
to justice as a necessary condition of an enduring peace.
The predominant interpretation of Kant’s writings
Doyle identifies three features of the political relations of liberal states
which, when combined, purport to explain the absence of war between
liberal states and the persistence of war between liberal and non-liberal
states. At the domestic level, liberalism introduces caution into the
affairs of states, since the consent of that same citizenry which will bear
the costs of war is required before military action can be undertaken.
At the international level, a consensus among liberals upon the rights
of states leads to their mutual relations being marked by respect, especially for the principle of non-intervention. At the transnational level,
relations are marked by the ‘spirit of commerce’, which leads states to
have a mutual interest in the welfare of other states as trading partners.7
It is the international level in particular that holds the key to explaining why liberal pacifism is (according to the orthodox Democratic Peace
position) limited to inter-liberal state relations: a ‘separate peace’. In
a liberal state, relations between the government and populace are
assumed to be characterized by consent; whereas, in a non-liberal state,
relations between the government and populace are assumed to be
characterized by coercion. Liberals will presume other liberal states to
be just, and therefore deserving of accommodation; but presume nonliberal states to be unjust, and therefore regard them with deep suspicion. Hence, while ‘fellow liberals benefit from a presumption of amity;
non-liberals suffer from a presumption of enmity’.8
This influential interpretation of Kant’s political writings has four
significant characteristics. First, the current literature tends to emphasize the differences and, indeed, the opposition between liberal and
7 Doyle, ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part 1’, pp. 229–232; Doyle, ‘Liberalism and World Politics’, pp. 1160–1162; and Doyle, ‘Liberalism and International Relations’, pp. 189–192.
8 Doyle, ‘Liberalism and World Politics’, p. 1161; ‘Liberalism and International Relations’,
p. 191, and Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, p. 32.
54
Immanuel Kant and the democratic peace
non-liberal states. These observations have created a potentially dangerous climate of assumptions and expectations regarding future patterns
of international relations. As Russett notes, ‘social scientists sometimes
create reality as well as analyze it. . . . Repeating the proposition that
democracies [read liberal states9 ] should not fight each other helps reinforce the proposition that democracies will not fight each other.’10 The
converse, however, is less heartening: by inference, repetition of the
claim that Kant explains why liberal states do fight non-liberal states
serves to establish an intellectual climate, in which war between liberal
and non-liberal states is made to appear ‘normal’.
Second, calls for reform are projected onto non-liberal states, inhibiting criticism of liberal states themselves. As such, the ideological context
of the research implicitly accords both ‘responsibility’ and ‘absolution’
for that violence that does occur between liberal and non-liberal states.
Regardless of the specific causes of any particular war, the underlying
‘problem’ is the persistence of non-liberal states, and the ‘solution’ is
the replication of the liberal democratic political model.11 The literature
rarely considers that existing liberal states might be in need of critical
self-examination, despite being replete with calls for change on the part
of others. Questions of social justice, the proper domestic civil–military
relationship, the establishment of accountability over the activities of
transnational corporations, the concentration of ownership of the media
and the preservation of civil liberties within liberal democracies do not
appear to have a place.12 Democracy, in this literature, is sparsely conceptualized and solely for export.
9 Read ‘liberal state’ in terms of the current usage. See, for example, Hidemi Suganami
who notes that ‘the key terms – “liberal”, “libertarian”, “democratic”, “republican”, “free”,
and “elective”, and so on – are sufficiently similar in meaning to warrant the use of
“liberal” to represent them all’, Hidemi Suganami, On the Causes of War (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1996), p. 101. Kant himself was referring, among other things, to the separation of
power between the legislative and executive branches of government. While it is true
that Kant was wary of rule by the demos, his reasoning behind the claim that republics
would be pacific indicates that he would be comfortable with a liberal democracy. Chris
Brown, however, questions whether Doyle’s ‘liberal states’ correspond with Kant’s notion
of republicanism. Chris Brown, International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches
(London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), p. 41. Throughout the piece, I refer to liberal states
according to this current usage.
10 Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, p. 136.
11 Doyle, ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs, Part 2’, p. 344, and Russett, Grasping
the Democratic Peace, p. 4.
12 These concerns are in the spirit of nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon liberals and radicals
and their twentieth-century heirs. See, for example, Alan J. P. Taylor, The Troublemakers
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957), and Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).
55
Classical Theory in International Relations
Third, according to the ‘separate peace’ school, until the liberal model
is universalized the prospects for peace are poor. Russett’s view is that
‘an international system composed of both democratic and authoritarian
states will include both zones of peace (. . . among the democracies) and
zones of war or at best deterrence between democratic and authoritarian
states’.13 Netanyahu projects this claim onto his own political purview:
‘here, in a nutshell, is the main problem of achieving peace in the Middle East: except for Israel, there are no democracies’. This theme has been
elevated by the G. W. Bush White House which has expressed its commitment to the ‘global expansion of democracy’ and believes that the
heart of peace in the Middle East is a ‘viable Palestinian democracy’.14
This view, however, ignores crucial questions regarding cooperation
between liberal and non-liberal states prior to the homogenization of
political forms. Such questions, however, were of crucial importance to
Kant.
A fourth feature of the current literature is that, while Kant advocated a confederation of states in order to establish a secure international environment within which states would be better placed to perfect their civil constitutions, membership of this confederation should
be restricted to liberal states. Fukuyama, for instance, claims that ‘if one
wanted to create a league of nations according to Kant’s own precepts . . .
it would have to be a league of truly free states brought together by
their common commitment to liberal principles’.15 Similarly, Netanyahu
asserts that Kant advocated a world federation of democracies ‘strong
enough to compel the arbitration of disputes’, and blames the earlier
failure of the League of Nations and United Nations on the inclusion of
‘dictators’.16
However, as the Democratic Peace discovered Kant it also rewrote
him, which is to say it provided a fresh interpretation of his
thought and his legacy in the light of the research agenda’s own
core concerns. Indeed, subjectivity of interpretation is not new:
Easley has recently analyzed historical trends in the interpretation
of Kant’s work from a sociology of knowledge perspective and persuasively shows that they have always been coloured by the wider
13
Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, p. 32.
Netanyahu, A Place among the Nations, p. 248. President G. W. Bush, Whitehall
speech, 19 November, 2003, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/11/
20031119-1.html
15 Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Harmondsworth Penguin, 1992), pp.
282–283.
16 Netanyahu, A Place among the Nations, p. 244.
14
56
Immanuel Kant and the democratic peace
international political conditions and questions of their time.17 In fact,
even as Kant’s dead body laid waiting for the Prussian soil to thaw, his
legacy was already being contested.18 In the case of the Democratic Peace
a major source of this subjectivity19 is revealed through examining the
function or role that Kant’s work has served. Theorists were principally
interested to find a thinker or grand idea that could lend support and
add weight to the specific empirical finding that liberal states or democracies tended not to go to war against one another. Note, for example,
Russett’s comment that ‘especially in the Vietnam era of US “imperial
overreach” . . . both academic observers and policymakers refused to
accept even the statement that democracies are peaceful towards each
other as a meaningful empirical generalization without some kind of
theoretical explanation indicating that it was not merely a coincidence
or accident’.20
To stress, the academic reading of Kant offered by the Democratic
Peace arose first and foremost as an attempt to explain a particular set of
empirical phenomena: the removal of the occasion of wars among liberal
states and not wars between liberal and non-liberal states. A corollary of
this, however, was that the discussion of Kant stressed the significance of
the distinction between liberal and non-liberal states, rather than duties
to develop global relations as a whole. While both Doyle and Russett
are clearly sympathetic to this latter theme,21 it remains overshadowed
17 Eric Easley, ‘The War Over Perpetual Peace’, unpublished PhD thesis, London School of
Economics and Political Science, University of London, (2002).
18 Manfred Kuehn, Kant, A Biography, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), pp. 1–7.
19 By the subjectivity of the Democratic Peace is here meant that the predominant – or
indeed any other – representation of the Democratic Peace is in part a function not only of
the ‘raw’ or unprocessed political-historical subject matter but also of the epistemological
and methodological assumptions and techniques of the construction of the Democratic
Peace as a ‘social scientific’ phenomenon. Accordingly, there are a number of possible,
actual and potential forms of democratic peace that could develop. For a fuller discussion
of these issues see John MacMillan, ‘Beyond the Separate Democratic Peace’ Journal of
Peace Research 40 (2003), 233–243; John MacMillan, ‘Liberalism and the Democratic Peace’
Review of International Studies 30 (2004), 179–200; John MacMillan, ‘Whose Democracy;
Which Peace? Contextualising the Democratic Peace’ International Politics 41 (2004), 472–
493.
20 Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, p. 11.
21 Doyle, ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part 1’, p. 230; and the neglected
but stimulating discussion of the proper course for a liberal foreign policy in ‘Kant, Liberal
Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part 2’, pp. 343–349. In a short discussion entitled ‘Democracy and Peace’, in Bruce Russett, Harvey Starr and Richard Stoll (eds.), Choices in World
Politics: Sovereignty and Interdependence (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1989), pp. 245–260,
Russett foregrounds the linkage between peace and justice, though in his main (and later)
work on the subject, Grasping the Democratic Peace, this theme was not prominent.
57
Classical Theory in International Relations
in the bulk of their work by the emphasis upon homogenization of
domestic political systems. This has led to the neglect of other central
elements of Kant’s political philosophy which would turn the spotlight
of responsibilities and reform upon existing liberal states. In this way,
the discourse benefits the strong and disadvantages the weak who might
benefit from a richer reading of Kantian notions of global justice.
Kant and the relationship between liberal and
non-liberal states
Certainly, Kant posited a link between republics and peace. However,
and crucially for Kant, those agents concerned to develop his perpetual
peace project ought to focus upon the gradual and pacific evolution of
global relations according to principles of right, rather than the homogenization of domestic political forms. To focus upon the replication of
a particular domestic political system greatly underestimates the scale
of Kant’s project, and serves to keep from the political agenda serious
questions of global justice which Kant and the liberal tradition have long
recognized as central to the establishment of peace.
In this section, I will argue that Kant did not sanction a rigid
dichotomization of the world between (peaceful) inter-liberal and
(warring) liberal/non-liberal zones. For Kant, the distinction between
republic and non-republic was frequently a matter of degree rather
than kind. Following from this, and contrary to orthodox interpretations, Kant intended that the confederation of states would include nonrepublics as well as republics. By way of perspective, I share with Lynch
the position that ‘Kant’s understanding of historical development and
change cannot be considered apart from his emphasis on ethical action
and moral purpose’, and that a focus upon the creation of specific kinds
of political structures should be avoided.22 Of those aspects of Kant’s
thought that have been neglected, his attitudes towards the attainment
of perpetual peace and the consequent guidelines for politics and policy
are fundamental.
Kant was sceptical about the prospects for the realization of his scheme
of perpetual peace. In any case, he was well aware that, even if it were
to eventuate, its realization would be a long and difficult task.23 For this
22
Lynch, ‘Kant, the Republican Peace’, p. 42.
Immanuel Kant, ‘Metaphysics of Morals’, p. 171, and ‘Idea for a Universal History
with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, pp. 47–48, both in Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political Writings,
23
58
Immanuel Kant and the democratic peace
very reason, Kant was primarily concerned to theorize for contemporary
conditions rather than for some, possibly unattainable, future point. He
recognized that international society comprised states that are ethically
and politically diverse, and was concerned to prescribe guidelines for
behaviour prior to the establishment of perpetual peace. Accordingly,
the burden of Kant’s political philosophy is as a guide to the process of
the evolution of international society. In this respect, the one course of
action Kant urged above all else was to recognize international law and
avoid recourse to the instrument of war: ‘war is not the way in which
anyone should pursue his rights’, even when in the state of nature.24
In this vein, I develop below the importance of Kant’s six preliminary
articles of perpetual peace as a code for state behaviour, while still in the
state of nature, to facilitate the evolutionary development of perpetual
peace.25
Recalling these fundamental aspects of Kant’s writings shows that the
current concentration upon securing a world in which the liberal state
form is the norm is misplaced. Certainly, there is little question that Kant,
like most liberals, would prefer other states also to be liberal: it is the only
form of constitutional and institutional framework which would permit
individuals to exercise full moral choice, and is a necessary condition
of Kant’s ultimate vision of perpetual peace.26 For Kant, however, the
significant point is that, prior to the attainment of a world of liberal
states, states must act according to principles of right. Foremost is to
pp. 131–175 and 41–53 respectively. Although Kant was sceptical, he insisted upon a
duty to strive towards ‘perpetual peace’ in the absence of proof that the objective was
impossible. For Kant’s scheme, see ‘Perpetual Peace’, also in Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political
Writings, pp. 93–130.
24 Kant, ‘Metaphysics of Morals’, p. 174.
25 See also Chris Brown, International Relations Theory, pp. 34–35. The six preliminary
articles are:
(1) ‘No conclusion of peace shall be considered valid as such if it was made with a secret
reservation of the material for a future war.’
(2) ‘No independently existing state, whether it be large or small, may be acquired by
another state by inheritance, exchange, purchase or gift.’
(3) ‘Standing armies (miles perpetuus) will gradually be abolished altogether.’
(4) ‘No national debt shall be contracted in connection with the external affairs of the
state.’
(5) ‘No state shall forcibly interfere in the constitution and government of another state.’
(6) ‘No state at war with another shall permit such acts of hostility as would make mutual
confidence impossible during a future time of peace. Such acts would include the
employment of assassins (percussores) or poisoners (venefici), breach of agreements, the
instigation of treason (perduellio) within the enemy state, etc.’
See Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, pp. 93–97.
26 Kant, ‘Metaphysics of Morals’, p. 174.
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act in accordance with the categorical imperative (that is, that practices
should be universalizable and persons regarded as ends in themselves)
in order to perfect the improvement of one’s civil constitution. Due to
the anarchic nature of the international system, Kant was at pains to
point out that, for the sake of the full realization of moral principles
in all states (including those regarded as actually existing republics), it
was important to recognize one’s obligations to non-republics and to
cooperate with them in order to mitigate the detrimental consequences
of a lawless international environment.
Although such obligations are incumbent even in the absence of reciprocity, Kant did urge the surrender of sovereign rights and the establishment of contractual relations, in order to foster the development of
mutual confidence. In ‘Perpetual Peace’, for instance, Kant writes that
‘it is impossible to understand what justification I can have for placing any confidence in my rights, unless I can rely on some substitute
for the union of civil society, i.e. on a free federation’.27 This combination of non-reciprocal and contractual obligations results in a dual
structure of ethics. On the one hand, they oblige the establishment of
contractual relations with others; whilst on the other, they maintain an
obligation to act morally (according to the categorical imperative) not
only in relations with fellow contractors, but with all states, and in the
absence of the condition of reciprocity. It would be in keeping with
Kant’s philosophy of history to regard non-liberal states not as noncontractors, but rather as potential contractors. The current literature on
the separate liberal peace emphasizes only those obligations that arise
between liberal states, and is virtually silent on the nature and implications of the obligations liberal states hold towards non-liberal states.28
Uppermost are the duties not to wage war to advance one’s rights (as
distinct from seeking redress), not to intervene and not to force commerce upon a state.29 States, for Kant, whether liberal or non-liberal, are
subject to obligations arising from moral-practical reason, whether in or
out of the state of nature and whether or not others recognize their own
obligations.30
27
Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 104. Kant actually means a confederation.
On this topic see Christopher Brewin, ‘The Duties of Liberal States’ in Cornelia Navari
(ed.), The Condition of States (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), pp. 197–215.
29 For an interesting (and pertinent) argument on the rights of states to restrict their
involvement in the world economy, see Immanuel Kant, ‘On the Common Saying: “This
may be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice”’, in Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political
Writings, p. 80n.
30 Kant, ‘Metaphysics of Morals’, pp. 164–75.
28
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Immanuel Kant and the democratic peace
This interpretation of Kant’s political writings can be defended most
forcefully through a reexamination of the three ‘definitive articles’ and,
in turn, the preliminary articles of Kant’s model peace treaty. The First
Definitive Article states that the civil constitution of every state shall
be republican, the second that the right of nations shall be based on
a federation of free states and the third that cosmopolitan right shall
be limited to conditions of universal hospitality.31 It is important at the
outset to clarify the nature of the relationship of these three articles to
one another.
The importance of the three should not be ranked as in order of presentation, or depicted as forming three concentric circles with the domestic
constitution being primary, an international confederation secondary
and then a tertiary notion of cosmopolitan rights and duties. Rather,
they should be regarded as of equal status, designed to enshrine the
rule of law in their particular realms of jurisdiction. Kant, in the First
Supplement of ‘Perpetual Peace’, identifies the political, international
and cosmopolitan as three distinct ‘areas of public right’.32 In writing of
them, he acknowledges their own autonomous dynamics which, taken
together, will promote the greater agreement over principles that leads
in turn to mutual understanding and peace. This interpretation of the
relationship of the three fields, marked by contemporaneous and complementary progression rather than a series of three distinct stages,
reflects Kant’s awareness of the anarchic nature of the international system as an impediment to domestic constitutional development.
In his discussion of the First Definitive Article, Kant outlines one of the
mechanisms which is intended to make republics more pacific than nonrepublics.33 In a famous passage Kant writes that because in a republic
the consent of those citizens who will bear the costs of war in blood and
money is required before war can be declared, such action will not be
undertaken lightly. By contrast, in a non-republic the head of state will
not have to make the slightest sacrifice and hence ‘it is the simplest thing
in the world to go to war’.34 However, in practice there is a long record
of liberal states circumventing this direct and immediate link between
the political classes and war either through the use of a professional
31
32 Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 112.
Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, pp. 98–108.
It is unfair to regard this as the only reason why Kant thought republics would be more
pacific than non-republics, since the principles of right upon which republics are founded
are probably the more important restraining influence upon the use of force. However,
there is no guarantee that republics will necessarily act according to these principles – as
they frequently demonstrate.
34 Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 100.
33
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army or conscription policies which privilege those groups closest to
the centres of power. Hence, claims that this mechanism in practice
differentiates liberal from non-liberal states ought to be treated with
caution.35 While this is not evidence of Doyle misrepresenting Kant, it
nevertheless suggests that it may be inappropriate to base claims about
a Kantian distinction between liberal and non-liberal states solely on the
First Definitive Article.
Kant’s Second Definitive Article of a ‘Perpetual Peace’ will be considered in more detail, since it is crucial for establishing whether there is
Kantian authority for a confederation comprised solely of liberal states,
or whether membership should extend beyond such an exclusive grouping. The second article proclaims that ‘the Right of Nations shall be
based on a Federation of Free States’.36 Doyle’s paraphrase of this article
runs ‘liberal republics will progressively establish peace among themselves by means of the “pacific union”’.37 Thus, he appears to interpret
‘free’ as synonymous with a republican constitution. As such, Doyle’s
interpretation of the criterion for membership of Kant’s confederation is
one in which a liberal domestic constitution is a necessary requirement.
Implicit in Doyle’s view is the assumption that, since republics are likely
to be more pacific than other forms of state, only they are able to qualify
for what Kant did, after all, say ought to be a ‘pacific [con]federation’.38
However, it is possible to show that Kant intended membership of this
confederation to be open to non-liberal as well as other liberal states on
two grounds.
First, Kant used the term ‘free’ to refer to status rather than form:
that is, states that are independent or sovereign rather than of a certain
regime type. According to Kant, ‘freedom’ is but one of three principles
upon which a republican constitution is founded: therefore, the terms
cannot logically be synonymous.39 Further, Kant’s definition of ‘external
and rightful freedom’ as ‘a warrant to obey no external laws except those
to which I have been able to give my own consent’40 clearly signifies the
meaning of sovereignty. This meaning is fundamental to the broader
35 The liberal response to this claim is likely to be a demand for more democratization,
see Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience, p. 76. For the argument that political practices
can be made more responsible and humane if decision makers directly face the consequences of their actions (and hence local, regional and global participatory democracy is
to be developed), see Robyn Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory: Towards an
Ecocentric Approach (London: UCL Press, 1992), pp. 170–176.
36 Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 102, emphasis added.
37 Doyle, ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part 1’, p. 226.
38 Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 104.
39 Ibid., p. 99.
40 Ibid., p. 99n.
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Immanuel Kant and the democratic peace
Kantian project of maximizing the opportunity for the autonomous selfdevelopment of each individual or state in accordance with the rights
of all.
Second, Kant’s illustration of the type of confederation he had in mind
clearly indicates the inclusion of non-liberal states. Kant writes that if
one powerful and enlightened nation can form a republic . . . this will
provide a focal point for federal association among other states. These
will join up with the first one, thus securing the freedom of each state
in accordance with the idea of international right.41
It is significant that Kant does not stipulate that the ‘other states’ ought
necessarily also to be republican, which is in keeping with the view that
each realm has to an extent its own development dynamic. Moreover,
in illustrating such a confederation in the ‘Metaphysics of Morals’, Kant
explicitly refers to states with diverse forms of government. He makes a
favourable reference to an assembly of the States General at the Hague
in the first half of the eighteenth century, to which ‘the ministers of
most European courts and even of the smallest republics brought their
complaints about any aggression suffered by one of their number at
the hands of another’, and which ‘all neighbouring states’ were free to
join.42 Clearly, this was not sufficient to prevent the use of force between
states, but it does illustrate that, contrary to Doyle’s interpretation, Kant
approved of membership in such a confederation extending beyond
states with a liberal domestic political system.43
When one takes Kant’s understanding of the interactive relationship
between the nature of the international system and the form of domestic political system into account, it becomes readily apparent that Kant
believed republics had a duty to establish a confederation not only with
other republics, but also with non-republics. Kant was acutely aware of
how the anarchic nature of the international states system not only jeopardized peace by leaving states in the state of nature in relation to one
another, but that the system itself also served to limit domestic social and
political development. Kant’s seventh proposition in ‘Idea for a Universal History’ explicitly states that ‘the problem of establishing a perfect
civil constitution is subordinate to the problem of a law-governed external relationship with other states, and cannot be solved unless the latter is
41
43
42 Kant, ‘Metaphysics of Morals’, p. 171, emphasis added.
Ibid., p. 104.
Cavallar has recently lent support to this revised interpretation. See Georg Cavallar,
Kant and the Theory and Practice of International Right (Cardiff: University of Wales Press,
1999) p. 115.
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also solved’.44 Indeed, Kant does in fact sanction an authoritarian constitution as appropriate for a state such as Prussia in order to ‘preserve its
own existence between powerful neighbours’.45 That states themselves
can operate as agents for the modification of the international system is
illustrated by his hope cited above that an enlightened republic would
establish a security community.
Thus, not only does Kant recognize that states have obligations to
subject their external relations to the rule of law, regardless of their form
of civil constitution, but he also acknowledges that a fully developed
republican constitution is unattainable outside such a framework. Consequently, it would be not merely immoral, but self-defeating to restrict
the membership of a confederation to republican states. It is a point
worth emphasizing that, for Kant, given anarchy, no civic constitution
can be perfect, and the quality of existing constitutions can be considered
as a matter of degree. With reference to the ‘separate peace’ approach,
this aspect of Kant’s analysis of international relations renders absurd
the notion that ‘peace’ can wait until the world comprises liberal states.
It is only through a delicate process of, on the one hand, mitigating the
circumstances of international anarchy and, on the other, constitutional
development, that peace and republics (in the full Kantian sense) will
emerge.
Of course, Kant was also interested in the agencies of political development. While it is true that Kant did identify the long-term mechanism of ‘asocial sociability’, he also held out hope that states were
capable of self-conscious reform and insisted they had a duty to do
so. He argues that, even if autocracy and aristocracy, the two constitutional alternatives to democracy, ‘are always defective in as much as
they leave room for a despotic form of government, it is at least possible
that they will be associated with a form of government which accords
with the spirit of a representative system’.46 Thus, although it is correct
that Kant ‘never tires of denouncing the bellicosity of despots’,47 he did
not consider all non-republics to be equally despotic. He argues that
‘the smaller the number of ruling persons in a state and the greater their
powers of representation, the more the constitution will approximate
44
Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History’, p. 47. See also Kant, ‘Theory and Practice’, in Reiss
(ed.), Kant: Political Writings, p. 92.
45 Quoted in Georg Cavallar, Kant and the Theory and Practice of International Right, p. 5.
(Taken from ‘The Contest of the Faculties’, in Kant: Political Writings, pp. 182–183).
46 Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 101.
47 Andrew Hurrell, ‘Kant and the Kantian Paradigm in International Relations’ Review of
International Studies 16 (1990), p. 195.
64
Immanuel Kant and the democratic peace
to its republican potentiality, which it may hope to realise eventually
by gradual reforms’.48 Support for the process of gradual reform was
developed elsewhere, for in the ‘Metaphysics of Morals’, he writes that
‘it is the only means of continually approaching the supreme political
good, perpetual peace’.49
Two substantive points reinforce these last two paragraphs. First,
while Kant does regard republican constitutional forms as being the
type best suited to the avoidance of war, he also recognizes that not
all non-republics are bellicose, and that anarchy impedes the constitutional development of all states. Hence, both liberal and non-liberal
states are faced with a common plight in the transcendence of anarchy. While there undoubtedly are regimes whose leaders deliberately
seek personal aggrandizement and military conquest, the majority are
more likely to be concerned with the very difficult, yet conventional,
political task of providing for the security and welfare of the populace with limited resources and in difficult conditions. Such states, liberal or otherwise, are, in Barry Buzan’s terms, engaged primarily in the
struggle for ‘security’ rather than the struggle for ‘power’.50 For Kant, it
would be important for the promotion of security and the development
of liberalism that such states are offered shelter under a liberal security
umbrella.
Second, on the question of intervention, despite his belief that
republics are more pacific than non-republics, Kant did not believe that
regime type was a criterion for the legitimacy of intervention. First,
Kant is, in general, a strong non-interventionist, as is evident in the
Fifth Preliminary Article of ‘Perpetual Peace’.51 However, there is an
apparent exception to this in the ‘Metaphysics of Morals’, where Kant
writes that an ‘unjust enemy’ can ‘be made to accept a new constitution
of a nature that is unlikely to encourage their warlike inclinations’.52 For
Kant, though, an ‘unjust enemy’ is defined as ‘someone whose publicly
expressed will [in the field of international right], whether expressed in
word or in deed, displays a maxim which would make peace among
nations impossible and would lead to a perpetual state of nature if it
48
49 Kant, ‘Metaphysics of Morals’, p. 175.
Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 101.
Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: The National Security Problem in International Relations
(Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983), pp. 157, 173–213.
51 ‘No state shall forcibly interfere in the constitution and government of another state’,
Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 96. The legitimacy of humanitarian intervention is not, to
my knowledge, an issue that Kant addressed directly and is beyond the reach of this
discussion.
52 Kant, ‘Metaphysics of Morals’, p. 170.
50
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were made into a general rule’.53 Hence, such an enemy is defined not
by regime type, but by behaviour. As such, Kant’s notion of intervention holds similarities to the theory of collective security which penalizes
aggression, not regime. Kant’s conception of international right, then,
was one in which all states, not merely liberal states, were under a duty
to confederate. This did not legitimate interference in domestic affairs,
but did bind states to observe certain common rules in their relations
with one another. Kant did not, however, consider this anything but a
compromise. In order to manage the tension between the need to coexist with non-republics whilst maintaining the belief that the republican
constitution ‘is the only perfectly lawful kind’,54 he introduces (but does
not use consistently) the distinction between a legal and a lawful constitution.55 The distinction is not a comfortable one, but is consistent with
the notion that true law can be founded only on right, though we must
respect the current system of legal regulation as the best we have for
the time being.56 ‘For any legal constitution’, he writes, ‘even if it is only
in small measure lawful, is better than none at all, and the fate of a premature reform would be anarchy.’57 Kant, then, was acutely sensitive to
the fragility of order in political life. He strongly supported the need to
respect existing levels of order as representing a better basis for moral
and constitutional development than the chaos that would result from
their overthrow.
There are, then, certain tensions within Kant’s work deriving from the
obligation to act according to the categorical imperative in relations with
all; to respect the existence of legal arrangements, even if they do not
wholly embody principles of Recht (‘right’); and the longer-term project
of working towards the submission of the rights of persons and states
to Recht. Although Kant holds a well-defined notion of the good, it is
imperative to respect the notion of right; and thus not to attempt to gain
the desired ends by unethical means.58
Kant was concerned with international relations as an historical, evolutionary process. Moving from a lawless condition in the three areas
of public right, civil, international and cosmopolitan, Kant did indeed
see a gradual evolution in all three spheres marked by an increasing
53
54 Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 101.
55 Ibid., p. 118.
Ibid.
For a brief discussion of this aspect of Kant’s attitude towards the current system of
international law, see Hurrell, ‘Kant and the Kantian Paradigm’, pp. 187–189.
57 Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 118n. In the same endnote, Kant also writes that the creation
of a lawful constitution based on the principles of freedom is the only one which will last.
58 This point is particularly pronounced throughout the ‘Metaphysics of Morals’.
56
66
Immanuel Kant and the democratic peace
convergence of principles. Ultimately, if the reign of perpetual peace
according to Kantian principles were to commence, then the republican
civil constitution would indeed be a necessary (though not sufficient)
condition. However, in that Kant was concerned with the processes
through which the international system would develop, he emphasized
the importance of maintaining peace in order to facilitate this development. In this pursuit, Kant recognized that existing republics were as yet
ethically incomplete, and that at least some non-republics were, alongside the deterministic process of asocial sociability, reforming themselves to become republics. In contrast to the ‘separate peace’ approach,
the above reading of Kant stresses his awareness of the moral and political interdependence of liberal and non-liberal states, and his insistence
that the strong recognize their obligations and do not abuse their power
in relations with the weak.
Sovereignty, the evolution of the
international system and the importance
of the preliminary articles
Some recent discussion of Kant’s work has highlighted the tension that
exists between his deference to state sovereignty and his promise of the
possibility of international reform. The first of two major arguments is
that globalization is rendering the state ineffective as a political authority and hence greater supranational organization is required if one is
to achieve the desired levels of representation, regulation and accountability of global forces. The second is that the intrinsic contradictions of
the sovereign-state system mean that permanent peace is unattainable
in the absence of systemic reform.59
However, whilst Franceschet, for example, rightly notes that ‘there
cannot for Kant be an independent, representative body over and above
the contingent will of the sovereigns’,60 the possibility that peoples and
states might nevertheless consent to the dispersion of authority in certain
areas remains. This does, however, put significantly greater weight on
moral and attitudinal developments within states in accordance with
Linklater’s point that for Kant ‘the deeper issue was to enlarge the
59
See Antonio Franceschet, ‘Popular Sovereignty or Cosmopolitan Democracy? Liberalism, Kant and International Reform’, European Journal of International Relations 6 (2000),
277–302; R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993).
60 Antonio Franceschet, ‘Popular Sovereignty or Cosmopolitan Democracy?’, p. 294
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moral, as opposed to the political, boundaries of community, so that
stronger cosmopolitan sentiments would cancel the tendency of states
to act as self-regarding autonomous units’.61 Whilst this presents many
challenges, the weight of the point is only greater if one considers the
alternative: some form of supra-state integration against the will of the
citizenries. That such moral development is, at best, slow is however
not only a function of the power of nationalist and patriotic ideologies
but also the lack of a clearly articulated and persuasive political vision
and moral justification of an alternative global politics.62
The willingness of states to develop their moral horizons in a more
internationalist and cosmopolitan direction is, then, essential for international political reform. Yet the difficulty of such development remains.
Kant himself envisaged two tracks of systemic evolution: that of deliberate political reform and the ‘natural’ or ‘teleological’ track. For Kant,
the teleological dimension could be taken literally as his faith in reason as an objective, autonomous force enabled him to maintain confidence in the belief that, eventually and after many false starts, humanity would converge upon the principles that he articulated along with
their legal–institutional expression as presented in the definitive articles of ‘Perpetual Peace’ and elsewhere. However, it is this very faith in
the autonomous or objective existence of reason – let alone the notion
of nature’s divine plan – that has been challenged by contemporary
social theory and the expansion of international society. As Linklater
notes, Kant’s ‘belief in immutable and universal laws of reason clashes
with modern sensibilities which emphasise the social construction of
knowledge and the diverse, and changing, cultural conceptions of moral
truth’.63
However, a modified – if necessarily reduced – working interpretation of this track requires only that actors exercise rational choice in
61 Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1998) pp. 36–37.
62 See, however, Larry Siedentop, Democracy in Europe (London: Penguin, 2001) for an
effort to present such an argument for the European context. The Cosmopolitan Democracy project has been at the forefront of putting the case for, in effect, a global multi-layered
social democratic world order (see for example David Held, Democracy and the Global
Order (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). This promising research agenda will
become more persuasive when it develops the empirical bases of its argument by showing through a series of case studies how, in practice, the distanciation of social relations
negatively influences the possibilities for local democracy and self-determination. It is
worth remembering, however, that moral claims for superseding the nation state remain
contested within contemporary political theory and that powerful arguments for its defence remain; see for example, David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
63 Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community, p. 38.
68
Immanuel Kant and the democratic peace
specific contexts that may be developed or weighted to increase the gains
and lower the costs of greater international cooperation. Accordingly,
whilst this may or may not contribute to greater integration, confederation or even federation, and whilst there is the possibility of unforeseen
negative consequences of cooperation, it stands to change the significance of the sovereignty question through modifying the character of
inter-state relations such as to increase the prevalence of positive-sum
interactions. This line of argument has its roots in the conventional liberal pursuit of internationalism over the narrow pursuit of self-interest
or realpolitik. Options include but are not restricted to choices between
a rules-based international order against one directly determined by
relative power capabilities; (just) trade against autarchy; the structure
of costs and benefits associated with the use of force; and the wider
normative and political attraction or repulsion generated by the character of contemporary liberal regimes and the liberal internationalist
project. This structural track, whilst not ‘natural’ or strictly teleological,
does represent the possibility of a normative and institutional evolutionary environment within which increasingly ambitious reform could
be undertaken.
It is, then, the interaction between the structural and reformist tracks
that presents probably the best hope for the Kantian development of
the international political system and for overcoming the reluctance
of sovereigns to reform. That this removes any vestiges of faith in a
genuinely ‘natural’ evolution to a liberal international political system,
let alone eternal peace, not only renews the challenge to human agency
but also raises questions of how one decides upon the processes and
principles of such evolution and of who is to be included in this process.
The globalist possibilities that this presents is in keeping with the earlier
point that Kant recognized the fates of liberal and non-liberal political
communities to be intertwined. From this premise, the default position
of the Democratic Peace that in relations between liberal and non-liberal
states one might rely on prudence or deterrence (therein based on the
presumption of ongoing violence) falls well short of what Kant himself
envisaged and omits a major and neglected part of his schema.
The problem is not primarily the neglect of the other definitive articles – which have attracted greater attention in more recent work64 –
but neglect of the preliminary articles. The function of the definitive
64
See for example Bruce Russett and John Oneal, Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations (New York: Norton, 2001).
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articles was to institutionalize the conditions for the final abolition of
war and entrench the development of peace between states. This was to
be grounded in law and required, ultimately, a high level of solidarism
in the international system, if not necessarily the universal adoption of
liberal political systems.65 The preliminary articles, however, have a different emphasis, which is to create the conditions and establish the practices (or culture) of international relations in which states feel sufficiently
secure to proceed with confidence not only towards the requirements
of the definitive articles but also to the greater objective of establishing
the state of peace itself. Cavallar writes that the preliminary articles are
‘norms for a semi-juridical condition, after the state of nature has been
left, but a juridical condition has not yet been (fully) achieved’.66
What radically distinguished the preliminary articles from the maxims developed by the ‘sorry comforters’ – Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel –
was that they were designed not as a ‘justification for military aggression’,67 but to foster the institutions and culture of peace. Some were to
be instituted immediately, others could be deferred, but their character
as practical measures pertinent to the actual conditions of eighteenthcentury Europe strongly suggests that their exact content may be revised
in accordance with the changed historical conditions of the early twentyfirst century. Their spirit, however, is akin to the contemporary notion
of ‘positive peace’ and rests on the assumption that aiming only for
the absence of war – through for example prudence or deterrence – is
likely to fall well short of the mark as peace is something that needs
to be actively and deliberately built. At the heart of Kant’s preliminary
articles, then, one finds such themes as the development of international norms, trust-building measures and the reform of the institutional
capacity of the state for militarism, all of which remain highly salient in
today’s pluralist international society.
Earlier in this discussion the point was made that readings of Kant’s
work are marked by subjectivity, which in turn implies that interpretations require justification beyond any claims of ‘better’ textual analysis.
65
Rawls makes clear that liberals need not require other peoples to develop along liberal
lines and that there are non-liberal political forms (‘decent hierarchical peoples’) that
liberals do not have the right to try and ‘convert’ and are obliged to tolerate in the positive
sense of being ‘equal participating members in good standing of the Society of Peoples’.
See John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)
pp. 94, 59.
66 Cavallar, Kant and the Theory and Practice of International Right, p. 53.
67 ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 103.
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Immanuel Kant and the democratic peace
Whilst the persuasiveness of the reading offered here rests largely on
specific textual interpretation of what Kant might have himself meant,
it also recognizes the need for justification through an engagement with
such contemporary theoretical debates as the standing of liberal claims
to universal moral and political truth, the extent and bases of liberal
duties and the rightful bases of procedural order and participation in
international relations. These issues are central to contemporary liberal
normative theory as found in strands of Rawlsian and Habermasian
enquiry and politically in the Cosmopolitan Democracy project. Whilst
the interpretation offered here may not satisfy all the exponents of these
projects I would contend that it embodies and connects with many of
their concerns in a way that the orthodox Democratic Peace reading of
Kant’s work does not. Ethically, a shift towards an updated version of the
preliminary articles concerned with the development of a more mature
and rule-governed anarchy goes some way to avoid the neo-imperialist
connotations of assuming the right to specify the proper constitutional
form for others to follow and to open up greater political space for a
wider, global dialogue about the normative and institutional requirements of peace.
In this interpretation, attention to the preliminary articles rebalances
the unsatisfactory position of the Democratic Peace on liberal/nonliberal state relations. Neither freedom nor peace can be attained through
isolating the democratic realm from wider international society or by
neglecting the pressure the international political environment exerts
upon domestic constitutional and political development. Thus whilst
the absence of war between democracies is the central plank of the
Democratic Peace, this is only one aspect of a true, Kantian democratic
peace. Pinning hopes on the expansion of democratic regimes, without greater effort to tackle the deeper causes of insecurity and to build
a culture of peace in international relations, is unlikely to realize this
greater vision. Indeed, it is the focus upon the definitive articles and
the neglect of the preliminaries that has enabled the Democratic Peace
to reproduce the sense of separateness and division between the democratic and non-democratic realms. In neglecting this preliminary stage
of Kant’s peace project the Democratic Peace risks sanctioning the maintenance of an unsustainable ‘fortress of peace’ among a relatively small
group of existing liberal democracies, offering its citizenries a peace that
is underdeveloped and insecure due to having been severed from a truly
global conception of justice.
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Finally, if one were developing the preliminary articles for the present
day it is worth reflecting on the appropriate scale of ambition and risk
given certain long-term historical changes. Kant wrote at the outset of
the liberal era in a system characterized by the institutions and culture of the ancien regime and in which inter-state war was a common
occurrence. There were, at most, two or three states that could plausibly be characterized as ‘republics’ and these possessed very limited
power and influence in the international system at large. Contrast this
with the present situation in which liberal democracies are more numerous, powerful and influential than ever before and include the world’s
only global superpower. Moreover, the international environment too
has evolved from a particular ‘state of nature’ characteristic of the eighteenth century to one in which major areas of international relations,
including to some extent the use of force, are governed by a considerable
body of law and norms. Given such development, one might reasonably expect liberal states to muster the moral and political resources for
a more generous and ambitious, yet at the same time reflective, internationalism, in keeping with contemporary understandings about both
the social and political causes of insecurity and underdevelopment in
the global system and normative positions on the importance of inclusivity. That such higher expectations are patently not part of regular
political discourse, and that the liberal internationalist legacy is itself
deeply threatened by the rise of political conservatism and fundamentalism, is telling of the thinness of the Kantian legacy in contemporary
international relations, no matter how often his authority is invoked as
the underwriter of Democratic Peace.
A starting point from which to respond to this thinness is contained
in the Secret Article of ‘Perpetual Peace’ in which Kant states that ‘the
maxims of the philosophers on the conditions under which public peace
is possible shall be consulted by states which are armed for war’. Implicit
in this is a challenge to scholars and intellectuals to actively engage with
the causes of violence and the bases of peace in global politics and the
ensuing implications for foreign policy. To this end, the chapter closes
by taking note of Kant’s own relationship to his wider political environment. Besides being a ‘classic thinker’, Kant was also an intellectual
dissident, a so-called ‘renegade professor’, who at the age of seventy
was ‘threatened by the King with unpleasant measures for [his] continued obstinacy’, possibly including banishment, after having knowingly
provoked the Prussian censor.68
68
Kuehn, Kant, pp. 378–383.
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Immanuel Kant and the democratic peace
Conclusion
The above discussion highlights the subjectivity of readings of Kant’s
work in general and that by the Democratic Peace in particular. The analysis suggests that the emphasis upon the homogenization of domestic
political systems in the literature upon liberal states and peace has misrepresented the burden of Kant’s political philosophy and that the political agenda that has been developed from such an interpretation carries
hegemonic implications. This manifests itself through rationalizing and
privileging the leadership and separateness of that small group of powerful and developed states from where the discourse has emerged.
The revised interpretation of Kant’s thought on the implications of
the relationship between liberalism (or democracy) and peace offered
here has sought to resituate Kant’s support for republics in a broader
moral and political context. This is rooted in the assumption that the fate
of liberal and non-liberal states is intertwined and that both share the
common predicament of how to develop their security from the condition of anarchy. The discussion highlights, among other things, Kant’s
view that the powerful members of the international system have wider
obligations than those acknowledged in the ‘separate peace’ literature,
particularly with regard to the general bases and development of common security measures in the present pluralist international system. In
so doing, the emphasis upon the need to rediscover the importance of
the preliminary articles of ‘Perpetual Peace’ seeks to bridge the unnecessary and most likely counter-productive divide between the Democratic Peace and the contiguous research agendas of human security and
normative international theory. Finally, the piece notes the importance
of active and critical scholarly engagement with contemporary politics
and notes that Kant himself was prepared to take risks in this regard.
73
4
‘One powerful and enlightened
nation’: Kant and the quest for a
global rule of law
Antonio Franceschet
‘[T]he possession of power inevitably corrupts the free use of reason.’
– Kant1
In recent years ‘classical’ international law as a body of rules, norms and
conventions has been assailed by scholars and questioned by world leaders. In particular, the rules concerning sovereign equality and effective
power (or control over territory) as the most salient criteria for membership in international society have been challenged. Such rules are problematic because they are supposed to be applied neutrally with regard
to regime types, thus ignoring the significant differences between liberal democratic and non-liberal/authoritarian regimes. Classical international law (or right) is indifferent to internal political institutions and
thus countenances governments that wield power in a lawless (or rights
abusing) fashion. For generations of liberal philosophers and lawyers,
this formulation of international law is problematic and contradictory.
From Immanuel Kant to the present, critics of classical international
law have put forward versions of the following argument: There can
be no truly effective global rule of law among states if international
law permanently acquiesces to the absence of the rule of law within
states.
This chapter examines the use of Kant’s international legal arguments by contemporary scholars. Kant provides genuine inspiration
for a critique of classical international law. He is a harsh detractor
of traditional international norms and practices among states that
simply authorize the illegitimate use of political power. However, I
1 Immanuel Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’, in Kant: Political Writings,
ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1795] 1991), p. 115. Hereafter
referred to as PP.
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‘One powerful and enlightened nation’
contend that contemporary scholars put forward a view of legal relationships among states that Kant was careful to avoid. Today’s self-styled
Kantians argue that it is the differences between liberal and non-liberal
states that ultimately authorize some states to decide the need for, and
to prosecute wars against, non-liberal others. By contrast, Kant worried
that all states, liberal or otherwise, could continually threaten and limit
chances of perpetual peace by exercising unilateral judgments through
force.2
For Kant, the constant danger is that unilateral, private judgments
corrupt and undermine the exercise of political power. This problem is
more pronounced for Kant in international politics, which has no effective sovereign to ground the legalism of a political community’s general
will. In international politics unilateral judgments backed by force are
inevitable but not impossible to imagine overcoming, Kant hopes. To
the extent that they recur it is to the continued detriment of the realization of an effective and lasting global rule of law. For today’s liberal
Kantians, however, this danger is not emphasized. Instead, the contemporary concern is with the legal status of liberal and non-liberal states
in international society. Fernando Tesón and Anne-Marie Slaughter are
two high profile legal scholars who employ Kant to challenge the notion
of sovereign equality and universal membership in international society;
they particularly reject the notion that liberal and non-liberal states
can be bound equally by common legal restraints. However, Tesón and
Slaughter each exaggerate the legal supremacy of liberal states in Kant’s
thought. In contrast to these authors, I argue that for Kant it is not being
a liberal state that guarantees good political judgment; it is instead being
in a liberal, law-governed state that is the best guarantee of legalism. In
other words, it is the rules or framework of politics rather than the actors
(and their virtues) that matter most.
Without a world republic, Kant claimed, there could not be an enforced
rule of law as it exists within states. Thus his proposed voluntary federal
union among states (both liberal and non-liberal) is for him a semijuridical regime aimed at only a negative goal – stopping war. Kant
expresses hope that good fortune will enable ‘one powerful and enlightened nation’ to initiate the first steps to federal union.3 But he does not
believe such a state (or group of enlightened states) have special prerogatives or duties to enforce a global rule of law onto a recalcitrant political
2 See Patrick Capps, ‘The Kantian Project in Modern International Legal Theory’ European
Journal of International Law 12, 5 (2001), 1003–1025.
3 PP, p. 104.
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Classical Theory in International Relations
world. Kant’s international legal thought is therefore not a doctrine for
intervention and preemptive wars, humanitarian or self-defensive.4 To
the extent that Kant allows some latitude for these actions – and he
arguably does – it is not because he thinks they will directly bring about
true global legalism.5 He rather indicates that they are yet further and
sorry exercises of private judgment in the state of nature, inevitable with
the sovereignty that states continually claim.
Kant suggests that perhaps nature can employ such failings and incite
all states to relinquish their lawless freedom or sovereignty.6 But the positive actions of the ‘one powerful and enlightened republic’ are decidedly
limited. In contrast to today’s ‘coercive Kantians’, Kant himself is attentive to the risk that political moralism corrupts the judgments of any
state, particularly the powerful ones. Additionally, he expressed concern about the existence of self-selected law enforcers using the ideals
of global legalism and international right to expediently advance their
own power. With such possibilities, he argued that precipitous attempts
to go beyond a provisional and pacifistic legalism among all states –
both inside and outside his federation – could frustrate and undermine
its ultimate end of justice.
This chapter is in two parts. The First part outlines Kant’s critique
of classical international law and compares it with the arguments that
contemporary liberal legalists put forward against today’s status quo,
particularly the universality and inclusiveness of the United Nations
(UN) Charter’s legal paradigm. The Second part analyzes the way Kant
is employed today by scholars arguing in favour of: strong distinctions
between liberal and non-liberal regimes; limited membership in fundamental international legal arrangements; and, most controversially, to
authorize coercion. The central argument I put forward is that Kant’s
international legal legacy does not lend easy support to the simple identification of liberal states’ moral concerns with rightful authorization to
coerce others into compliance.
4 For an interpretation of Kant’s thought as supportive of anticipatory wars (much like
the ‘Bush Doctrine’ found in The National Security Strategy of the United States of America
of 2002), see Roger Scruton, ‘Immanuel Kant and the Iraq War’, 19 February 2004,
www.opendemocracy.com (accessed June 16, 2004). See also Susan Meld Shell, ‘Kant on
Just War and “Unjust Enemies”: Reflections on a “Pleonism”’ Kantian Review 10 (2005),
82–111.
5 See Georg Cavallar, Kant and the Theory and Practice of International Right (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), Chapters 5, 7.
6 PP, pp. 105, 108–114.
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‘One powerful and enlightened nation’
‘Sorry comfort’: taking aim at classical
international law
Kant writes the classic critique of international law. Classical international law is by no means a clear, uncontested entity. It is a construct
used by various waves of liberals, including, retrospectively, Kant, dissatisfied with the immoral and unjust nature and consequences of extant
legal rules among states. Such law is deficient in the light of the superior
standards of the rule of law that putatively prevail inside the sovereign
state. For Kant, as discussed below, this is the ideal of the ‘original
contract’.
Classical international law is a moving target. This is particularly
the case because many of the reforms and changes advocated by liberals, including Kant, over the centuries have eventually been adopted
in extant practice. In Kant’s time, classical international law included
the right of sovereign states to go to war to vindicate their rights.
Today, however, long after the Hague Conventions, the UN Charter
and Nuremberg judgments – all legal steps towards formally outlawing and criminalizing international aggression – liberals have adopted
a so-called Kantian critique of classical international law. Reexamining
Kant’s critique is therefore a useful exercise.
In ‘Perpetual Peace’ Kant reproaches Grotius, Vattel and Pufendorf
as ‘sorry comforters’ with misplaced admiration for the law of nations:
‘their philosophically and diplomatically formulated codes do not and
cannot have the slightest legal force, since states as such are not subject to
a common external constraint’.7 The classical legal rules among states,
particularly the right to go to war (jus ad bellum), are not the mark of
true legality but are only one-sided maxims that engender what Kant
calls ‘unrestricted relations’.8 Kant’s critique here has an a priori basis.
No action in a structural context of ‘unrestricted relations’ can be just or
lawful, strictly speaking. It does not matter whether an individual state
has good intentions or not in this context, its actions (its very independent existence) are unjust. It does not matter whether the consequences
of a state’s actions are harmless or not, they are unjust for the same
reason. Thus Kant argues that the right to go to war is contradictory.
States can only execute such a ‘legally’ sanctioned action like war on the
pain of self-contradiction. All other states claim the same right, making it logically impossible to execute the ‘right to war’ as a universal
7
Ibid., p, 103.
8
Ibid.
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Classical Theory in International Relations
rule. Rather than civilizing and restraining international conduct, classical international law is sorry comfort en route to the ‘vast graveyard’
of perpetual war.9
Contemporary liberal international lawyers draw inspiration from
this devastating critique, but they do so from a different historic vantage point. The catastrophic world-historical wars of the early-twentieth
century brought states to accept greater legal limits on force and to
embrace, at least as aspiration, a collective security pact in the UN
Charter. As Gerry Simpson notes, this limited challenge and reform
to classical international legality satisfied only one strand of liberal
thinkers, those he terms pluralists.10 This is because the Charter essentially outlaws aggressive wars and authorizes legal sanctions against
violators while at the same time preserving sovereign equality and the
right of states to maintain their own form of government.
However, the other strand of liberal legalism exemplified by scholars
like Tesón and Slaughter has always been unsatisfied with the compromises the Charter makes. The Charter ends up providing ‘sorry comfort’
of a different type: as a grand bargain among states in 1945, particularly between the ideological adversaries in Moscow and Washington,
it acquiesces to classical international law’s indifference to internal governance or regime type. Although collective security, human rights (and
within that context, democratic governance) were inserted into international law through the UN, they were put in a subordinate position to
sovereign equality. The Charter is thus viewed as yet another instance
of sorry comfort – codes without the slightest legal force.
Tesón states his contemporary ‘sorry comfort’ accusation as follows:
‘An international legal system that authorizes individuals to exercise
despotic political power (as classical international law does) is morally
deficient in a fundamental way.’11 In his view, the international legal
order entrenched in the Charter must be reformed by, among other
things, disenfranchising illiberal states from the international community by revoking their sovereignty.12 Only liberal democracies should
be included together in a peace league because only they are genuinely
and institutionally committed to the rule of law both inside and outside
their territorial boundaries.
9
Ibid., p. 105.
Gerry Simpson, ‘Two Liberalisms’ European Journal of International Law 12, 3 (2001),
537–571.
11 Fernando Tesón, A Philosophy of International Law (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1998), p. 15.
12 Ibid., p. 25.
10
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‘One powerful and enlightened nation’
Slaughter criticizes classical international law’s uncritical and dogmatic acceptance of sovereign states as presumptively equal subjects.
Under the Charter’s rules, it does not seem to matter whether a state is
formed through Machiavellian force and fraud or by a legitimate social
contract. Slaughter sees the UN Charter era’s legal order as less and
less relevant (and thus, implicitly as a ‘sorry comfort’) in the light of the
very different way that liberal states actually behave vis-à-vis non-liberal
states.13 She also sees sovereign equality and non-interventionism in the
Charter paradigm as outmoded in the light of the recent threats posed
by unjust, non-liberal states with regard to weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and widespread human rights abuses.14 The Charter does
not provide for meaningful legality because it obfuscates the juridically
superior and separate relationships that liberal states enjoy to themselves, and the juridically inferior relationships between liberal and
non-liberal states.15
Tesón and Slaughter are by no means alone in making contemporary
versions of Kant’s ‘sorry comfort’ critique of classical international law.
Thomas Franck and Michael Reisman are other significant critics of the
Charter’s legal order.16 For these authors, an international legal order
that accommodates as a matter of principle non-liberal governments that
violate human rights and resist democracy cannot provide justice. Tesón
and Slaughter are significant because, more than any others, they have
drawn from Kant’s legacy not just to formulate a critique of international
law, but also to ground prescriptions for how best to reconstruct and
reform the global legal order.
Kant and the global rule of law
The basic premise of Kant’s critique of classical international law is
rather simple: might (power) cannot alone determine legitimately what
is right (lawful). How does one conceive or build a legitimate global
13
Anne-Marie Burley [now Slaughter], ‘Law Among Liberal States: Liberal Internationalism and the Act of State Doctrine’ Columbia Law Review 92, 8 (1992), 1907–1996.
14 Lee Feinstein and Anne-Marie Slaughter, ‘A Duty to Prevent’ Foreign Affairs 83, 1 (2004),
136.
15 Slaughter, ‘Law Among Liberal States’, p. 1909.
16 See Thomas M. Franck, ‘Legitimacy and Democratic Entitlement’, in Gregory H. Fox
and Brad R. Roth (eds.), Democratic Governance and International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 25–47, and W. Michael Reisman, ‘Sovereignty and
Human Rights in Contemporary International Law’, in Democratic Governance and International Law, pp. 239–258.
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legalism, then? In this section I outline the way today’s liberal legalists
appropriate Kant’s thought selectively to support plans for reforming
today’s international legal system. Interestingly, Kant is invoked for the
following purposes:
• to make strong distinctions in international law between liberal and
non-liberal regimes;
• to limit membership in any pacific federation to liberal states;
• to authorizing or empowering liberal states to use force and intervention to create a more advanced global legal order.
Tesón and to a lesser degree Slaughter misconstrue Kant’s thought in
ways that overlook the subtlety of his critique of international law, his
warnings about power and judgment, and the potential for powerful
states to abuse the aspiration of legalism through political moralism.
Distinguishing liberal and non-liberal regimes?
From the early 1980s political scientists such as Michael W. Doyle used
Kant to argue that liberal states behave fundamentally differently from
others in their foreign policies.17 They do not engage in war with each
other, only with non-liberal regimes. Tesón and Slaughter each endorse
the so-called Democratic Peace thesis and argue that it has important
implications for international legal order.18 Just as regime type matters
in explaining patterns of foreign policy (contra Realism) it also matters
for patterns of international legal relations.
Tesón concedes that he puts forward a ‘reconstruction’ of Kant’s position and thereby jettisons the robust commitments to sovereignty and
non-interventionism found in Kant’s political writings. These are not the
essential core of Kant’s legacy, Tesón claims, and can be set aside.19 It is
individual rights that are the essential ends of Kant’s political thought;
all political institutions, domestic and international, are but instruments
justified by how well they serve to guarantee rights. ‘Normative individualism’ is the label Tesón ascribes to this Kantian doctrine and he
holds that Kant was the first to argue that international law ought to
17 Michael W. Doyle, ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs’ (Parts 1 and 2), Philosophy
and Public Affairs 12 (1983), 205–235 and 323–353.
18 Tesón, International Law, p. 11; Anne-Marie Slaughter, ‘Towards an Age of Liberal
Nations’ Harvard International Law Journal 33, 2 (1992), 395 and Slaughter, ‘Law Among
Liberal States’, p. 1909.
19 Tesón, International Law, pp. 2, 19–20.
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‘One powerful and enlightened nation’
be ultimately premised on the individual’s rights rather than the state’s
sovereignty.20 The First Definitive Article of ‘Perpetual Peace’, ‘The civil
constitution of every state shall be republican’, is cited by Tesón as evidence of the individual’s ethical priority in international law. He adds
that Kant ‘revealed, for the first time, the connection between freedom
and the foundations of international law, thus foreseeing the human
rights revolution of the twentieth century’.21
Slaughter distances herself somewhat from Tesón, and suggests that
Kantian liberal internationalism is not captured by ‘the alluring simplicity of formulas designed simply to privilege the individual against
the state’.22 But she shares with Tesón the view that the differences
between liberal states with constitutional provisions safeguarding individual rights and those without are salient and relevant in international
law. And she holds Kant out as the classical exponent of the view that
international law need not be based solely on states qua states, but on the
superiority of liberal states with constitutional and institutional restraints
on the use of political and military power.23
There is a good case to be made in favour of the superiority of liberal regimes based on Kant’s thought. But it should not be exaggerated.
If liberal regimes are equivalent to those Kant calls republican, that is,
they have a division of powers among executive, legislative and judicial authorities, and legislate in the light of the general will or consent
of citizens – they are then superior regimes according to Kant’s political philosophy. For one thing, these regimes are less likely to engage in
war as a means to vindicate rights for a number of reasons (Kant mentions in particular that leaders are restrained and that citizens are prudent and risk averse).24 However, unlike today’s liberals, Kant refrained
from easy assumptions that existing states will have already achieved
juridical perfection even if they have more or less republican constitutions. Rather than point to the intrinsic virtues of actually existing
‘enlightened’ republics, Kant argues that the relevant standard for judging is something he calls ‘the original contract’.25 As Tesón and Slaughter
are correct to note, Kant believed that an external standard based on
rights, popular sovereignty and constitutionalism is a legitimate means
of judging sovereign states in international law. However, Kant holds
20
21 Ibid., p. 2.
Ibid., p. 1, Chapter 2.
Slaughter, ‘Towards an Age of Liberal Nations’, p. 405.
24 PP, p. 100.
Ibid., p. 395.
25 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 92–3.
22
23
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that the ‘original contract’ is a transcendental ideal that is not just external to non-liberal states: it is external to all states qua states. Kant’s political philosophy thus does not make as categorical a distinction between
states in world politics as today’s liberal law scholars assume. The often
noted tendency of Americans (who are not alone in this regard) to hold
their polity as the living embodiment of an external standard for the
world is something that Kant would reject.26
All states for Kant, whether republican or not, have made some
progress towards the original contract standard because they have transcended the state of nature, which is a particular deficiency that international political relations (i.e. ‘unrestricted relations’) have not yet and
perhaps can never accomplish. Kant’s philosophy thus does not give
easy support to separating the world into inherently peace-loving liberal states and intrinsically unjust, violent non-liberal states. Given that
all existing states have significant distance from the original contract,
and given that within states there is a provisional legality (what he terms
as ‘legal’, if not ‘lawful’ relationships27 ), Kant actually embraces, at
least as a temporary measure, classical international law’s accommodation of different regime types. Such a temporary measure does not
eliminate the absolute duty that all states have to reform in the light of
the ‘original contract’ – but it would render illegitimate any one state or
group of states judging the others as intrinsically deficient and thus not
legal equals.
A separate law?
If, as Democratic Peace scholars argue, there is a ‘separate peace’ among
liberal states, is there (should there be) a ‘separate law’? Tesón and
Slaughter put forward arguments that point to the exclusion of nonliberal states from putatively strengthened, deeper forms of legalism.
Both draw on Kant to suggest that a more advanced form of the rule
of law among states depends upon non-universal, limited membership.
Tesón declares:
If international law is to be morally legitimate, therefore, it must
mandate that states respect human rights as a precondition for joining
the international community. Immanuel Kant was the first to defend
this thesis. . . . The Kantian thesis, then, is that a morally legitimate
26 See David P. Forsythe, Human Rights and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), Chapter 6 on American exceptionalism.
27 PP, p. 118.
82
‘One powerful and enlightened nation’
international law is founded upon an alliance of separate free nations,
united by their moral commitment to individual freedom, by their allegiance
to the rule of law, and by the mutual advantages derived from peaceful
intercourse.28
At times Tesón argues that there is also a ‘requirement that all states
must be liberal democracies’ to join the international peace federation
too, although human rights take pride of place.29 In any case, he makes
it clear that, from his version of Kantian theory, no legally based peace
alliance can include states that lack the institutional constraints on political power found in liberal states: ‘observance of human rights is a
primary requirement to join the community of civilized nations under
international law. It follows that there cannot be a federation or peace
alliance with tyrannical states.’30
Slaughter attempts to avoid Tesón’s normative language and instead
purports to explain the separate legal order that she claims has already
emerged between liberal and non-liberal states. She examines the way
courts in liberal states defer to the actions of non-liberal states by respecting state sovereignty and by letting the political executive in the liberal
state respond to any conflict of laws. But courts in liberal states will
review and interpret the legality of the actions taken by other states’
institutions, thus making legality rather than politics (i.e. bargaining,
diplomacy, negotiation) the basis of a conflict resolution. Like Doyle,
she argues that Kant foresaw and explained an empirical pattern of
separation between liberal and non-liberal states.31 Whereas
liberal states operate in a ‘zone of law,’ in which [for example] domestic courts regulate transnational relations under domestic law . . .
Nonliberal states [by contrast] . . . operate in a ‘zone of politics,’ in
which domestic courts either play no role in the resolution of transnational disputes or allow themselves to be guided by the liberal [state’s]
branches.32
Slaughter argues that it is non-liberal states themselves that have
decided to jealously guard their sovereignty by resisting internal, liberalizing reforms.33 It is self-exclusion and the maintenance of sovereignty
at great potential political and economic cost:
States that openly prefer to follow a non-liberal path may be all too
willing to keep their sovereignty at any price. But the many states that
now [in the post-Cold War era] seek to restructure their policies and
28
31
29 Ibid., p. 3.
30 Ibid., p. 7.
Tesón, International Law, p. 2, emphasis in original.
32 Slaughter, ‘Law Among Liberal States’, p. 1910.
33 Ibid., p. 1913.
Ibid.
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economics in accordance with liberal precepts might be induced to
welcome some reforms of judicial review of the validity of their acts
by foreign courts.34
Slaughter argues here that inclusion in the liberal zone of law is a voluntary choice of states, which at first blush is much closer to Kant’s actual
view than is Tesón’s enforced exclusion. However, she adds that the
voluntary nature of this choice is rightly manipulated by liberal states
with a view to promoting internal reforms in target, non-liberal states.
Slaughter is clear that the purposive normative agenda driving the separation of a liberal zone of law is to provoke changes that otherwise
would not occur – to induce choices from non-liberal political leaders
that they might not take on their own. Slaughter argues the reluctance
of courts within the zone of law to interpret acts of non-liberal states is
not ‘“deference” to non-liberal sovereigns’ but rather is ‘the ostracism
of an outlaw – a state outside the conception of law shared by liberal
states’.35
Ultimately, both Tesón and Slaughter attribute the justifiability of separate and, as we shall see below, unequal treatment of states as consistent
with Kant’s view of the creation of a more advanced form of global legality. But this attribution rests on a misreading of ‘Perpetual Peace’, one
that is not uncommon among proponents of the Democratic Peace thesis. Tesón puts it as follows: ‘The requirement of a republican form of
government [in the First Definitive Article] must be read in conjunction
with the Second Article: “The law of nations shall be based on a federation of free states.” The first two articles prescribe that international law
should be based upon a union of republican states.’36 Tesón thus interprets Kant’s ‘free’ state as liberal state rather than, as Kant intends, as
a ‘voluntary’ union of states independently choosing to join. Slaughter
makes the same interpretation, reading ‘free’ as liberal.37 But as Georg
Cavallar notes, ‘Kant never explicitly contends that all member states
of the federation have to be republican’. He adds that Kant could have
written the word republic rather than free states if he had wanted this
to be the case.38 ‘Each nation’, Kant makes clear in the Second Definitive
Article, ‘for the sake of its own security, can and ought to demand of
the others that they should enter into a constitution, similar to the civil
one, within which the rights of each could be secured.’39 Certainly Kant
34
37
38
35 Ibid.
36 Tesón, International Law, p. 3.
Ibid.
Slaughter, ‘Towards an Age of Liberal Nations’, p. 394.
39 PP, p. 102, emphasis added.
Cavallar, Kant, p. 115.
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‘One powerful and enlightened nation’
recognized that republican states were more likely to be genuinely oriented towards perpetual peace, but limiting the peace federation to only
principled, ‘enlightened’ states was in his view mistaken. Just as a nation
of devils (oriented towards the instrumental satisfaction of selfish ends)
can form a lawful state, a federation of differently constituted states can
perceive the benefits of security and freedom that a peace alliance can
bring.
There is a deeper issue behind Kant’s resistance to making the internal characteristics of a state a precondition for inclusion into an international peace federation. The exclusions of non-liberal states that Tesón
and Slaughter describe are premised in large part on imposing costly
or punitive measures against a non-liberal state, thus again bringing
into question the problem of unilateral judgments backed by power
rather than the force of law. Kant expresses concern that any self-styled
peace federation would employ power to forcibly induce compliance, a
dynamic he associates entirely with the flaws of the state of nature. He
writes:
This federation does not aim to acquire any power like that of a state,
but merely to preserve and secure the freedom of each state in itself,
along with that of the other confederated states, although this does not
mean they need to submit to public laws and to coercive power which
enforces them, as do men in the state of nature.40
At several points in ‘Perpetual Peace’ Kant expresses strong misgivings
about states using the appearance of legalism, shallow as it is in global
politics, as a power resource against weaker states. In particular, Kant
describes how the law of nations, as a basis for European states to claim
their inherent civilizational superiority compared to other peoples, was
used as a basis for slaughtering others outside Europe.41 In a similar
passage he claims Japan is entirely justified, despite its manifest lack of
republican institutions, in restricting contact with the far more powerful
Europeans.42 Until a world republic develops, the semi-juridical nature
of the law of nations – even Kant’s more advanced, critical version –
has but provisional, rather than absolute, legitimacy. For this reason he
suggests that the law of nations ought to be open, universal and noninstrumental in its treatment of states as ends in themselves, regardless
of internal characteristics. Kant does not in any way deny or remove the
responsibility of states to reform and perfect their internal institutions
40
Ibid., p. 104.
41
Ibid., p. 103.
42
Ibid., pp. 106–7.
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in the light of the ‘original contract’. However, he believes that states
are also notoriously ill-positioned and self-interested in employing their
power to uphold their own private interpretations of legal rules.
Authorizing liberal enforcement
For Tesón and Slaughter, liberal states are set apart from others because
of their domestic organizing principles. These principles account for liberal states’ legitimacy but also for their inclusion in the more advanced
legalism of a Kantian peace federation. Does it follow that liberal states,
individually and together, also have a right to uphold international law,
forcibly, against those states that are excluded from the peace federation?
Here I suggest that contemporary liberal legalists tend to exaggerate the
role that Kant gives states in international legal relations, thus empowering such states in a way that could only further frustrate the realization
of perpetual peace and justice.
Tesón argues that a Kantian international law authorizes liberal
states to enforce rules against non-liberal states. Non-liberal states lack
this right against all other states, and there is no conceivable reason
that liberal states could or would be the target of lawful coercion.
Slaughter backs away from linking Kant to coercive enforcement measures, claiming that Kant is a ‘libertarian’ who eschews supranational
legal mechanisms.43 But she here overlooks the possibility that Tesón
puts forward: that there is no contradiction between legitimate international law enforcement and a decentralized legal order lacking supranational mechanisms.44 Also, Slaughter’s position is still clearly that liberal
states are authorized legally to use a variety of foreign policy measures
against non-liberal regimes in order to promote liberalization, including, as mentioned, exclusion from economic benefits. Significantly, like
Tesón, Slaughter assumes that liberal states take the lead and a hierarchical position in the globe in enforcing liberal democratic standards
against others. In more recent work she has included a right (if not duty)
for liberal states to take anticipatory coercive action against rogue states
(but without invoking Kant – for this reason, my chief focus in what
follows is Tesón).
It is the fact that liberal states have democratic and rights-respecting
institutions that legally authorizes them to engage in humanitarian
43
44
Slaughter, ‘Towards an Age of Liberal Nations’, p. 396.
Tesón, International Law, pp. 21–22
86
‘One powerful and enlightened nation’
intervention, according to Tesón.45 Although one can very plausibly
show that Kant authorized humanitarian interventions and anticipatory
war, it is a serious misunderstanding of his work to argue that liberal
states alone have this licence, and that they will exercise it in a way that
enables, rather than frustrates, the development of global legalism.
Throughout this chapter I have been using the concept of ‘non-liberal’
to describe all states that are not formally democratic and that, principally for this reason, do not guarantee or succeed in protecting human
rights. As we have seen, Tesón argues these states should be excluded as
equal subjects from international law while Slaughter claims they have
self-selected themselves for different, unequal treatment. Although it is
possible to invoke Kant as someone who recognized the need for coercion against a particular non-liberal state, he did not believe that coercion was authorized against non-liberal states per se. As Cavallar notes,
‘Paragraph 60 [of Metaphysics of Morals] is the only instance where Kant
allows for legal coercion in international right.’46 Keeping in mind that
his peace federation is non-coercive, this one exception is worth quoting
at length:
There are no limits to the rights of a state against an unjust enemy (no
limits with respect to quantity or degree, though there are limits with
respect to quality); that is to say, an injured state may not use any means
whatever but may use those means that are allowable to any degree that
it is able to, in order to maintain what belongs to it. – But what is an
unjust enemy in terms of the concepts of the right of nations, in which –
as in the case of the state of nature generally – each state is judge in
its own case? It is an enemy whose publicly expressed will (whether
by word or deed) reveals a maxim which, if it were made a universal
rule, any condition of peace among nations would be impossible and,
instead, a state of nature would be perpetuated.47
Force against non-liberal states cannot be justified simply if they pose
what Kant calls a passive injury to others (due to their mere independence in the state of nature). As we see below, he argues that all states
have ‘outgrown’ the need to be coerced into submission under common
authority, they have become moral persons in that they are a society of
human beings living under common laws.48 As this passage indicates, it
is only states that pose a clear active injury to others that can be lawfully
coerced. States qua states, not states with non-liberal internal organizing
45
47
46 Cavallar, Kant, p. 109.
Ibid., pp. 16–19.
48 PP, p. 104.
Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 118–9.
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Classical Theory in International Relations
principles, are judged by their maxims with regard to the overarching
goal of perpetual peace.
For Tesón, by contrast, all non-liberal states are judged to have inherently defective forms of sovereignty for which there is no ‘equality before
the law’ provision.49 Non-member (i.e. non-liberal) states have been
attributed with mens rea and the liberal state/alliance is in a position to
act as a competent judge against it. As Tesón states:
[T]yrannical governments are outlaws. However, they are not outside
the law of nations. Like domestic criminals, they are still bound by
elementary principles, such as the rules that prohibit crimes of aggression and war crimes. While outlaw governments do not benefit from
the rights conferred by membership in the alliance, they retain some
rights [e.g. leaders have individual rights to due process in criminal
proceedings].50
Also,
[w]hile war is absolutely banned within the alliance, force will sometimes need to be used by individual states or members of the alliance
acting in concert against enemies of the alliance. Therefore, a war of selfdefence by a democratic government and its allies against a despotic
aggressor is a just war.51
Famously, for Kant ‘even a nation of devils’ can solve the problem of
justice, so long as they possess reason.52 Similarly, morally imperfect
states can achieve, in principle, through his perpetual peace project, a
provisional rule of law among them. Just as there are limits to morally
mandated coercion within states vis-à-vis citizens, Kant tries to establish
limits to morally mandated coercion among states. (For ‘it is certainly
not their internal moral attitudes’, Kant says, that lead states to seek
peace.53 ) In any case, it is certainly true that Kant anticipated the need
to use coercion against states that might engage in gross violations of
human rights or who harboured designs to acquire and use weapons
of mass destruction.54 But the coercion would be for these reasons and
thus for reasons that are independent from states’ internal constitutions; it is
because states behave aggressively and unjustly (that is, make perpetual
peace impossible) that they can be coerced, and not because of what they
are, i.e. non-liberal.
The ‘powerful and enlightened nation’ is for Kant to set an example and to ‘provide a focal point for federal association among other
49
52
Tesón, International Law, p. 6.
53 PP, p. 113.
PP, p. 112.
88
50
54
51 Ibid., p. 20.
Ibid., p. 19.
Shell, ‘Kant on “Unjust Enemies”’, p. 82.
‘One powerful and enlightened nation’
states’, not to claim authority over putatively inferior juridical subjects. Certainly Tesón is correct to emphasize that Kant built popular
sovereignty and individual rights into the foundations of international
law. However, this does not alter Kant’s misgivings about including
coercive rights by states over others into international right. The key to
understanding Kant’s concerns is the fundamental distinction he makes
(and Tesón overlooks) between morality and legality. This distinction
relates directly to the problem Kant has with unilateral judgments and
the use of political power.
On the one hand, Kant uses the domestic analogy to suggest that
sovereign states, like individuals in the state of nature, have a duty
to relinquish their lawless freedom in exchange for law-governed relations. On the other, he is clear that sovereign states cannot be rightfully
coerced, as can individual subjects, to enter into a juridical condition.
The domestic analogy is of continued importance, however. Neither
individuals nor states can be coercively forced to behave morally by
an external agent, they can only be forced to behave in conformity with
morality by being made to obey legal rules.
Within states, legal rules are grounded in the ‘general will’ rather than
each individual’s private judgment about what is right and good. Without a competent judge to decide according to rules, there is a state of
nature in which each person’s judgment about what is moral is asserted
with force. There is no way to determine which individual’s claim is in
true conformity with the categorical imperative (morality). Kant claims
that sovereign states (by their mere existence) substitute the private
right of individuals with a system of public right; in so doing, states
eliminate the legitimacy of (and need for) any unilateral vindication of
what is right. But states can mandate only ‘legal’ obedience on the part
of subjects to respect the rules concerning each citizen’s outer freedom.
And states have a duty to ensure that extant legal rules conform gradually to the ‘original contract’, an externalized version of the categorical
imperative in which the freedom of the individual is made compatible
with the freedom of all others.
The domestic analogy is of continued relevance for Kant in separating
legality and morality among states. Kant argues that, like individuals,
states can only be coerced into performing actions in conformity with
morality if there is the element of consent. However, here the domestic
analogy breaks down. He argues that individuals’ consent with the legal
order inside a sovereign state can be assumed a priori (as the ‘general
will’) because no person could conceivably exercise right without it.
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Classical Theory in International Relations
But among states Kant believes that a priori arguments do not have the
exact same force. Unlike individuals, states have ‘outgrown’ the need
for coercion because they have at the very least transcended the state of
nature within.55 Although they have a moral duty to reform domestically in the light of the original contract, and to join a peace federation
vis-à-vis their external conduct with other states, such a duty does not for
Kant automatically justify a world state that would coerce states. Kant
argues that the international peace federation cannot employ coercion
precisely because it is not (yet) grounded in a general will of all nations:
some states remain outside the federation and, even more significantly,
all states refuse to rescind their sovereignty or lawless freedom.
Tesón flatly rejects Kant’s requirement that lawful coercion be based
on a general will, not simply on particular judgments of one group of
states asserting what is right and good. He writes,
Kant himself advocates an international law among separate nations
that entails a decentralized system of authority. Judgments of the legality of wars [or the use of coercion] are no different than judgments of
legality generally, so if there are no courts for the former there are no
courts for the latter.56
But Tesón here conflates the assertion of mere opinions with regard to
what is legally right with the assertion of lawful authority to coerce. Certainly within sovereign states Kant argued that the gap between these
two things had been effectively closed; yet he continually refused to
equate these two things among sovereign states.
Patrick Capps provides an excellent example of how two states can
have conflicting opinions with regard to what is legally right, each
grounded upon plausible moral claims with regard to coercive action.57
The Nicaragua case brought before the International Court of Justice
(ICJ) in the mid-1980s involved the Nicaraguan and American governments appealing to legality and, simultaneously, the morality each
believed was at stake in international law. Nicaragua claimed that the
United States’ coercive measures taken against it (particularly, the mining of its harbours) were unjustified violations of international law, i.e.
aggression. The US claimed that actions against Nicaragua’s Sandinista
government were legal acts of collective self-defence. It alleged that
Nicaragua, linked to the Soviet Union and Cuba, was supplying arms
and assistance to rebels in neighbouring El Salvador. Both governments
55
57
56 See Tesón, International Law, pp. 21–2.
PP, p. 104.
Capps, ‘Kantian Project’, pp. 1016–1018.
90
‘One powerful and enlightened nation’
also made arguments that the just use of force was ultimately dependent
on democratic self-determination and human rights; and each judged
Nicaragua’s government in a totally different light. The US interpreted
democracy to mean ‘political pluralism, human rights, free elections,
non-alignment, and a mixed economy’, as defined by the Organization of American States.58 Nicaragua’s government, according to Roth,
‘interpreted democracy and human rights to require . . . a major redistribution of wealth and power in society in advance of the fixing of
permanent institutions’.59 Now, the ICJ ruled in favour of Nicaragua,
but the US famously rejected the ruling. In the absence of judicially
enforceable general will, there is a clash of ‘moral’ perspectives of the
legal. As Capps argues, according to Tesón’s view of Kantian international law, both Nicaragua and the United States could unilaterally
claim their actions of (collective) self-defence were lawful: ‘both states
have a justification to use force in support of democracy and human
rights’.60
Tesón thus misses one of Kant’s fundamental points with regard to
the global rule of law. International law will lead to war, not perpetual
peace, and injustice rather than justice if it is based on clashing unilateral
judgments backed by force. A situation in which each state’s judgment
about what is right and good is the state of nature, and this is precisely the
condition Kant believes makes perpetual peace an impossible to achieve
ideal. Unilateral judgments universalized in international politics would
lead to ‘a war of extermination, in which both parties and all right [i.e.
legality] itself might be simultaneously annihilated, [and] would allow
perpetual peace only on the vast graveyard of the human race’.61 When
(liberal) states resort to coercion and ultimately justify it in terms of the
moral ends of a foreign policy, they put themselves in the position of
a juridical superior over inferiors. This is simply not what Kant had
in mind with regard to the role of the ‘one powerful and enlightened
nation’.
Kant’s vision of international reform is evolutionary, and his critique
of classical international law ought to be viewed in those terms. He
rejects the authorization of liberal states to use coercion for moral reasons because a general will among states is (currently) impossible among
sovereign states. In the meantime, just as the peace federation he proposes is a surrogate for a world republic, the law of nations he proposes
is a provisional, incomplete approximation of true global legalism.
58
Ibid., p. 1017.
59
Brad Roth, quoted in ibid.
60
Ibid, p. 1018.
61
PP, p. 96.
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Classical Theory in International Relations
What today’s liberal legalists like Tesón misunderstand is that Kant
hoped perpetual peace could be approximated through a subtle movement in international law from unilateral judgments to ‘omnilateral
judgments’ to use Capps’ expression.62 A peace federation would move
somewhat away from the state of nature and yet fall far short of a world
republic – it would be a semi-juridical context in which, in a limited way,
right would not be decided through force (of the stronger). Kant writes
of the semi-juridical context as follows:
And this status juridicus must be derived from some sort of contract,
which unlike that from which the state originates, must not be based
on coercive laws, but may at most be a state of permanent and free
association . . . without some kind of lawful condition which actively
links together the various physical or moral persons (as in the case
of the state of nature), the only possible form of right is a private
one.63
Should a state resort to coercion, whether liberal or not, and for whatever reason, they will have re-ignited a state of nature situation. It is
only vis-à-vis the unjust enemy that Kant suggests there is a shared,
defensive perspective that many states can and ought to take to protect
the limited gains made through the peace federation. The unjust enemy
displays
a maxim by which, if it were made a universal rule, any condition
of peace among nations would be impossible and, instead, a state of
nature would be perpetuated. Violation of public contracts is an expression of this sort. Since this can be assumed to be a matter of concern to
all nations whose freedom is threatened by it, they are called upon to
unite against such misconduct in order to deprive the state of its power
to do it.64
Although this suggests that Kant believed a peace alliance could act to
defend their interests together, and in acting, substitute for a genuine
public authority in international affairs, he quickly reminds readers that
it is indeed only a surrogate. He states,
It is redundant, however, to speak of an unjust enemy in a state of nature;
for a state of nature is itself a condition of injustice. A just enemy would
be one that I would be doing wrong by resisting; but then he would
also not be my enemy.65
62
64
Capps, ‘Kantian Project’, p. 1019.
Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, p. 119.
92
63
PP, p. 127.
Ibid.
65
‘One powerful and enlightened nation’
It is not coercive enforcement that enables the possibility of a global
rule of law for Kant; it is precisely refraining from coercion that allows
all states to agree to general principles or rules that could eventually be
used for public enforcement in a world republic. In that situation, states
would settle ‘their disputes in a civil way, as if by a lawsuit, rather than
in a barbaric way (the way of the savages), namely by war’.66
Kant was perfectly aware that a world republic might never come, and
for that reason he called perpetual peace ‘an unachievable ideal’.67 He
also expressed scepticism about whether a semi-juridical peace federation could last without collapsing, having grown too large and ambitious, into an exhausted empire.68 Here, too, he acknowledged something that contemporary liberals like Tesón have been perhaps overly
sanguine about: the role of power in corrupting or destroying the possibility of justice. The world republic is rejected as an immediate solution
by Kant because it would likely be a despotic threat to the freedom of
nations and individuals. The peace federation, too, were it to spread too
widely or take on coercive powers, even if composed of liberal republics,
could become despotic. This would be particularly the case were it to
dress up its unilateral judgments through force as if it were authentic
public law. Kant argued that a coercive peace federation would in fact
simply do what classical international law (as ‘sorry comforter’) would
have authorized, that might determines what is right.
Conclusion
Kant’s international legacy is a contested and often ambiguous foundation from which different liberals have drawn materials for alternative
political and ethical projects.69 While some readings of Kant are certainly
more plausible, there is always the route that Tesón proposes, which is
to reconstruct what he takes to be the ‘spirit’ of Kant for contemporary purposes. There is also the route that Slaughter (following Doyle)
takes by converting Kant’s highly complex philosophy and forming a
stylized hypothesis from certain aspects of it. Both of these ways of
using the classical theorist that is Kant will often rest on blatant misreading of certain things, e.g. the fact that Kant did not make a fundamental distinction between liberal and non-liberal states in international
law.
66
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid.
Ibid.
See Antonio Franceschet, Kant and Liberal Internationalism: Sovereignty, Justice, and Global
Reform (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
69
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Classical Theory in International Relations
Kant’s classical writings on international law in fact give us many
reasons to remain critical of any claims by states, liberal or otherwise,
to make force the ultimate basis of their legal authority. Certainly we
can judge the justice of international relations from a priori principles, as
does Kant; but states’ actions are never themselves the direct products
of pure moral principle. Dangers arise when states present their policies
as such. ‘Perpetual Peace’ diagnoses brilliantly the phenomenon of the
political moralist, and not only the unjust enemy, as a significant threat
to the prospects of a global rule of law. For the judgment of all states is
limited and contaminated; and the unconstrained use of state power can
impede the pursuit of justice. Just ends ‘cannot be realized by violent
or precipitate means, but must be steadily approached as favourable
opportunities present themselves’.70 Today’s liberal legalists are correct
to believe that Kant would not be entirely satisfied with the legal order
of today, i.e. that of the UN Charter. But he would certainly resist the
notion that one group of states can unilaterally amend that order because
they are liberal. To the extent that such states can impose a new world
legal order on others it is not because they are liberal but because they are
powerful.
If massive human rights violations, aggression and terrorism are to
be put under lasting legal control and ended it cannot be done through
a new doctrine of (liberal) Great Power responsibility. This would be
an all too contingent basis for justice and human rights.71 Kant quotes
ironically a Gallic prince’s expression, ‘Nature has given the strong
the prerogative of making the weak obey them.’72 By the same token
‘Perpetual Peace’ puts forward the view that justice cannot be simply
a matter of the strong having a prerogative to protect the weak. Kant’s
rejection of classical international law and of the ‘sorry comfort’ that
its proponents have typically provided never leads him to embrace the
path of pure expediency. Rather than reject extant legal rules and customs among states altogether (because they lack force), then, Kant ends
up arguing that we ought to amend classical international law slowly
and for as long as it takes to achieve the consent of states qua states.
Thus, the UN Charter’s norms on force (today’s ‘classical’ legal rules)
70
PP, p. 122.
See Thomas W. Pogge, ‘Moralizing Humanitarian Intervention: Why Jurying Fails
and How Law Can Work’, in Terry Nardin and Melissa S. Williams (eds.), Humanitarian Intervention: Nomos XLVII (New York: New York University Press, 2005), pp. 158–187.
72 PP, p. 103.
71
94
‘One powerful and enlightened nation’
ought still to be the guideposts, even as they ought to be reformed.73
As Kant writes, ‘It would be contrary to all political expediency, which
in this case agrees with morality, to destroy any of the existing bonds
of political or cosmopolitan union before a better constitution has been
prepared to take their place.’74
73 See Jean L. Cohen, ‘Whose Sovereignty? Empire Versus International Law’ Ethics &
International Affairs 18 (2004), 1–24.
74 PP, p. 118.
95
5
Rousseau and Saint-Pierre’s peace
project: a critique of ‘history of
international relations theory’1
Yuichi Aiko
‘History of international relations theory’ can begin only with the birth
of ‘International Relations (IR)’. For only when international (or interstate) relations are conceived as an independent social sphere, can ‘international relations theory’, and hence its history, exist. Historians in
this area have nevertheless neglected this self-evident ontological limit,
reading contemporary disciplinary frameworks back into history.2 Consequently, they overlook the historical context of classical thinkers and
miss the opportunity to reflect on the very historicity of modern IR theories themselves.
The purpose of this essay is to bring this fault to light. I do this by challenging the traditional understanding of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–
1778) and by developing an alternative ‘contextual’ interpretation of
Rousseau’s reading of the peace project written by the Abbé de SaintPierre (1658–1743).
In the history of international relations theory, Rousseau is generally
seen as a ‘realist’.3 There are many variations of this claim but ultimately
it rests on the fact that Rousseau was pessimistic about the prospect for
1
Special thanks to Professor Martin Shaw, Ms Rhiannon Lambert and in particular the
editor, Dr Beate Jahn, for their valuable comments and helpful proofreading. But, of course,
I am solely responsible for any errors.
2 In the category of ‘historians of international relations theory’ I include the IR scholars
who are in one way or another committed to interpreting the classical texts of ‘international
relations’. This categorization can be unfair to some of those scholars because they may not
be ‘historians’. I nevertheless use the label with the intention of promoting more awareness
for the role of ‘history’ in interpreting classical texts. Unless IR scholars are explicit that
their reading of classical texts is not historical, their interpretations can be criticized as
either ahistorical or historically mistaken, as I claim in this essay.
3 Of course, there are some exceptions to this ‘orthodoxy’. The most interesting among
those is Michael C. Williams, ‘Rousseau, Realism and Realpolitik’, Millennium: Journal of
International Studies 18 (1989), 186–189.
96
Rousseau and Saint-Pierre’s peace project
fundamental changes in the war-prone ‘anarchical’ inter-state system.
Kenneth N. Waltz, for example, asserts that Rousseau was a typical theorist of ‘the third image’ who believed that the anarchical international
system naturally perpetuates conflicts between states.4 Ian Clark locates
Rousseau’s theory within ‘a general tradition of despair’ because he,
although desiring the reform of the inter-state system, eventually ‘holds
out not a shred of hope that it can be attained’.5 Howard Williams characterizes Rousseau’s IR theory in an identical manner since ‘Rousseau’s
conclusion on the prospects for world peace is a tragic one’.6 Richard
Tuck also concludes that ‘Rousseau offered little hope of an end to this
state of war between modern states’.7
What gives apparent certainty to such a ‘Rousseau-realist’ thesis are
some remarks in his ‘review’ of Saint-Pierre’s peace project, Extrait du
projet de paix perpétuelle de Monsieur l’abbé de Saint Pierre (1761) and
Jugement sur le projet de paix perpétuelle (1782). In Jugement, for instance,
Rousseau states: ‘although the project [of Saint-Pierre] is very wise, the
means to execute it indicate the simplicity of the author. . . . Let us admit
that . . . he saw very well their effects once they are established, but
he childishly judged the means to establish them’; and, ‘Without doubt
perpetual peace is a very absurd project at the moment’.8 The claim
that Rousseau was a ‘realist’ seems well substantiated here; it appears
undoubted that he painted Saint-Pierre as a naive ‘idealist’.9
My contention is however that this orthodox interpretation of
Rousseau’s international relations theory is historically mistaken. The
fundamental problem here is that the idealist-realist dichotomy is uncritically taken as the framework for reading Rousseau’s ‘review’, which
4 Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959),
pp. 180–186.
5 Ian Clark, Reform and Resistance in the International Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 61, 67.
6 Howard Williams, International Relations in Political Theory (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1992), p. 78.
7 Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order
from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 205–206.
8 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes III: Du contrat social, écrits politiques (Paris:
Gallimard, 1964), pp. 392, 396. Hereafter, I call this work simply OC. All quotations from
this work are translated by me.
9 For the argument that Rousseau was a ‘realist’ critic of an ‘idealist’ Saint-Pierre, see F. H.
Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations between
States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 46; F. Parkinson, The Philosophy of
International Relations: A Study in the History of Thought (London: Sage, 1977), p. 62; Stanley
Hoffmann and David Fidler (eds.), Rousseau on International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1991), pp. liv–lv; Williams, International Relations, pp. 74–75; and Tuck, The Rights of
War and Peace, p. 206.
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Classical Theory in International Relations
results in ignoring the meaning of his theory in its time and place.10
This dichotomous reading is so ingrained in the history of International
Relations theory that even critics, such as Torbjørn L. Knutsen, merely
present ‘idealist elements’ in Rousseau’s argument as grounds for an
alternative reading.11 And yet, the dichotomy as conceived by contemporary IR scholars did not exist for Rousseau and his contemporaries –
and neither did IR itself – since it was introduced into IR only in 1939
through the publication of E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis.12 It is
thus historically problematic to use the dichotomy for the interpretation
of Rousseau’s ‘review’, or even to understand this work simply as about
‘international relations’. Until recently, however, this fatal mistake was
largely missed by historians of international relations theory, as a result
of their surprisingly ubiquitous lack of reflection about the meaning and
activity of ‘historians’.13
In this chapter I will provide an historical interpretation of Rousseau’s
‘review’ by placing it in the intellectual context of mid-eighteenthcentury France. This context is neither a discourse on the ‘idealist-realist
dichotomy’ nor ‘inter-state relations’: rather, a more inclusive intellectual framework that was at stake for Rousseau and his contemporaries,
namely, natural-law theory and its transcendence. I will show, firstly,
that Saint-Pierre’s international relations theory was a source of inspiration for Rousseau’s ‘political theory of the state’ in his contest with
natural-lawyers.14 In this light, secondly, Rousseau’s ‘review’ is read
10
Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, The Republican Legacy in International Thought (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 6.
11 Torbjørn L. Knutsen, ‘Re-reading Rousseau in the Post-Cold War World’ Journal of
Peace Research 31 (1994), 247–262. David P. Fidler makes a similar argument: ‘Desperately
Clinging to Grotian and Kantian Sheep: Rousseau’s Attempted Escape from the State of
War’ in Ian Clark and Iver B. Neumann (eds.), Classical Theories of International Relations
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 130–134.
12 Recent studies reveal that Carr’s labelling of ‘utopianism (idealism)’ is a misrepresentation of what was actually discussed during the inter-war period. See David Long and
Peter Wilson (eds.), Thinkers of the Twenty Years’ Crisis: Inter-war Idealism Reassessed (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995).
13 ‘History of political thought’ has been aware of this ‘anachronism’ for a long time. See
Quentin Skinner’s ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’ History and Theory
8 (1969), 3–53. In IR, on the other hand, this problem began to be recognized only in recent
years. See Duncan S. A. Bell, ‘International Relations: The Dawn of a Historiographical
Turn?’ British Journal of Politics and International Relations 3 (2001), 116–120.
14 Merle L. Perkins and Grace G. Roosevelt were well aware of this connection between
Saint-Pierre’s peace project and Rousseau’s social-contract theory, but their contributions
have not been sufficiently recognized in IR. See Perkins, The Moral and Political Philosophy
of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre (Geneva: Librairie E. Droz, 1959), pp. 97–133; and Roosevelt,
Reading Rousseau in the Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), pp. 90–
119.
98
Shafiul Alam
Prince,
IR59, University
of Dhaka.
Rousseau
and
Saint-Pierre’s
peace
project
as a document of sympathy with, rather than denouncement of, SaintPierre. Thirdly, Rousseau, in agreement with Saint-Pierre, understood
sovereignty as the ‘moral freedom’ of the state. Both thought that the
state can be truly ‘sovereign’ only when it dutifully follows law in its
relations with other states, not when it is without constraints (as understood in IR today). And finally, Rousseau criticized Saint-Pierre’s peace
project as impractical because it did not go far enough; Saint-Pierre had
left the problem of absolute rule by princes – the major cause of wars –
unresolved.
The argument is developed in four parts. First, I set out the historical
development of Rousseau’s political theory and its connection with his
study of Saint-Pierre’s works. Second, I read Rousseau’s ‘review’ in a
new light, focusing particularly upon the commonalities between SaintPierre’s peace project and Rousseau’s social contract theory. Third, I
shed light on some new aspects of Rousseau’s international relations
theory that are largely unrecognized in IR. And finally, I will draw out
some more general implications of this case study for the history of
international relations theory.
The historical context
Rousseau’s social-contract theory was one of the first significant
challenges to the orthodoxy of modern natural-law theory in mideighteenth-century France. Taking this context as a starting point, it
is interesting to see that Rousseau was developing the alternative to
natural-law theory while studying Saint-Pierre’s works intensively. I
argue that Saint-Pierre’s model for perpetual peace provided Rousseau
with a crucial inspiration for the idea of the social contract. This ‘debt’
is suggested primarily by the fact that Rousseau in Economie politique
and the Geneva Manuscript called the association of the social contract a
‘confederation’.
Rousseau’s opposition to modern natural-law theory
According to his autobiography, Les confessions, Rousseau’s concern for
politics began between 1743 and 1744. Working at the French Embassy
in Venice then, he observed all the defects of this prosperous but quite
corrupted republic, and was convinced that ‘everything is rooted in
politics and . . . no people would ever be other than the nature of their
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government made them’.15 This discovery led Rousseau to plan to write
Institutions politiques, in which he wanted to discuss the relationship
between man’s moral state and political constitutions. In fact he never
completed the project but published ‘the least worthless part’ of what
he managed to write.16 This part we know today as Du contrat social
(1762).
A dominant theory was however taking a quite different stance on
the subject of politics and morality then. In France this theory – modern
natural-law theory – was extremely popular among French philosophes
as a result of Jean Barbeyrac’s very successful translations of Samuel
Pufendorf in 1706–1707.17
The basic assumption of modern natural-lawyers is that man is essentially a social being. This is based upon an ‘instrumental’ understanding
of human society that man, while being an animal which seeks satisfaction of his self-interests, realizes empirically that society is the best means
to fulfil this desire. Two leading natural-lawyers at the time in France
expressed this as follows: ‘men were moved by want to gather into
states, to the end that they might render more civilized and rich a life’
(Pufendorf); and ‘Avarice is after all the principal instrument with which
one built society’ (Voltaire).18 ‘Natural law’, the fundamental moral law
for all human beings, was also derived from this idea of man’s instrumental sociality. Pufendorf, for instance, states as the first principle of
this law that ‘Every man ought to do as much as he can to cultivate and
preserve sociality’.19 French philosophes basically agreed; Montesquieu
for example counted ‘the desire to live in society’ as a principle of the
concept of natural law.20
15
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1953),
p. 377.
16 OC, p. 349.
17 On the popularity of the Pufendorfian natural-law theory among French philosophes,
see Robert Derathé, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps (Paris: Librairie
Philosophique J. Vrin, 1970), pp. 28–30. On the impact of Barbeyrac’s translations on the
development of the French natural-law theory, see Tim Hochstrasser, ‘Conscience and
Reason: The Natural Law Theory of Jean Barbeyrac’ Historical Journal 36 (1993), 289–90.
18 Samuel Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium libri octo: Book II trans. C. H. Oldfather and
W. A. Oldfather (New York: Oceana, 1964), p. 958; and Voltaire, ‘Traité de métaphysique’
in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire: Tome XX, nouvelle edition (Paris: Garnier Frères, LibrairesEditeur, 1879), p. 222. The translation is mine. About the claim that Pufendorf had an
‘instrumental’ understanding of society, see J. B. Schneewind, ‘Pufendorf’s Place in the
History of Ethics’ Synthèse 72 (1987), 134–136.
19 Samuel Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, ed. J. Tully, trans. Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 35.
20 Montesquieu, The Spirits of the Laws, trans. and eds. Anne M. Coher, Basia Carolyn
Miller and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 6–7.
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Rousseau and Saint-Pierre’s peace project
We find the same ‘instrumentalism’ also in the view of modern
natural-lawyers on political authority. They believed that the mere existence of men’s sociality cannot guarantee peaceful coexistence in reality,
so political authority, or the state, needs to be established in order to
ensure security and justice in society. Taking Pufendorf’s argument as
an example, ‘respect for [natural] law cannot guarantee a life in natural liberty with fair security’; therefore, ‘Truly the effective remedy for
suppressing evil desires, the remedy perfectly fitted to the nature of
man, is found in states.’21 Among the French philosophes, Jean-Jacques
Burlamaqui argues that it is ‘by far wiser’ to have a government because
some men should abuse their natural freedom in the state of nature.22
For Montesquieu, ‘A society could not continue to exist without a government’ because men readily fall into ‘the state of war’ as soon as they
form a society.23
Of great importance is that this theoretical conception of the relationship between morality and politics is at odds with Rousseau’s Venice
discovery. While the dominant theory of the age holds that man’s natural
sociality leads to the establishment of a government/state, Rousseau’s
newly attained conviction supports the opposite formulation: that it is
government that forms man’s (moral) nature. The implications of this
difference are most clearly demonstrated in the judgment of absolute
monarchy. Pufendorf and many ‘progressive’ French philosophes, such
as Voltaire, had no objection to the government of absolute monarchy
because, as long as the government functions as the means to secure
people’s lives and justice, its form, logically speaking, does not matter.
For Rousseau, on the other hand, absolute monarchy was undoubtedly
the worst kind of government because it deprives men of their freedom, that is, of the very basis of their morality. Rousseau therefore had
to attack the dominant natural-law theory and attempted to offer an
alternative in his project on Institutions politiques.24
21
Pufendorf, On the Duty, p. 134.
J. J. Burlamaqui, The Principles of Natural and Politic Law: Volume II, trans. Thomas
Nugent, second edition (London: J. Nourse, 1763), esp. p. 14.
23 Montesquieu, The Spirits of the Laws, pp. 7–8.
24 Many scholars have pointed out that Rousseau was a critic of the natural-law theory, especially that of Pufendorf. See René Hubert, Rousseau et l’Encyclopédie: essai sur la
formation des idées politiques de Rousseau (Paris: Gamber, 1928), pp. 31–49; C. E. Vaughan,
Introduction to The Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau: Volume I (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1915), pp. 16–18; and, Robert Wokler, ‘Rousseau’s Pufendorf: Natural Law and the
Foundations of Commercial Society’ History of Political Thought 15 (1994), 373–402. Derathé
however stresses the continuities, rather than discrepancies, of Rousseau’s political theory
with the natural-law theory. See his Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps.
22
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The development of Rousseau’s social-contract theory and his
study of Saint-Pierre
Rousseau began to engage with the project of Institutions politiques
around 1750, but this made a marked progress only after the spring
of 1756.25 His conviction about the Venetian discovery was however
strengthened throughout the early 1750s since debates on his Discours
sur les sciences et les arts (1751) more and more persuaded him that ‘all our
vices stem ultimately not from our nature but from the ways in which we
have been badly governed’.26 On the basis of this Rousseau launched
his open attack on the natural-law theory in Discours sur l’inégalité in
early 1754. His criticism is directed at the confusion of law in society
and ‘natural law’, and especially at an inadequate understanding of the
state of nature as a basis for natural law. Modern society is morally so
corrupted that the ‘law’ based on this society cannot but reflect this
corruption. The existing natural-law theory, which mistakenly derives
the notion of natural law from man’s social state, thus cannot be a
proper signpost for man’s morality. It does not answer the question
of what kind of government/state is the best from a moral point of
view.
Rousseau’s Du contrat social (1762) was meant to fill this gap; it aimed
to provide the model of a political constitution in which justice is guaranteed and the freedom of each member is secured. When composing
Discours sur l’inégalité in early 1754, however, Rousseau had not yet
developed this new theory.
Without entering now the researches that are still to be done on the
nature of the fundamental pact of every Government, I constrain
myself, following the common opinion, to consider here the establishment of the political Body as the contract between the people and
the magistrate that it chooses.27
Here Rousseau certainly indicates his dissatisfaction with ‘the common
opinion’, but still accepts this theory of the ‘contract of submission’.
This theory is based on the notion that the people are subjected to the
sovereign (usually a single monarch) in exchange for the provision of
25
Rousseau, The Confessions, p. 377.
Robert Wokler, ‘The Discours sur les sciences et les arts and its Offspring: Rousseau in
reply to his Critics’, in Simon Harvey, Marian Hobson, David Kelly and Samuel S. B. Taylor
(eds.), Reappraisals of Rousseau: Studies in Honour of R. A. Leigh (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1980), p. 267.
27 OC, p. 184.
26
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Rousseau and Saint-Pierre’s peace project
security and welfare, which was, indeed, a common type of contract
theory that natural-lawyers relied upon. The acceptance of absolute
monarchy by some lawyers stemmed partly from this contract theory;
when the ‘enlightened’ monarch ensures the safety and welfare of the
people, he fulfils the contract and must be considered legitimate. In Du
contrat social, however, Rousseau neither accepts absolute monarchy nor
endorses this ‘unequal’ contract theory. It follows from this that his critique of the natural-law theory was not yet fully developed when he
wrote Discours sur l’inégalité.28
The first sign of Rousseau’s discovery of the social-contract theory
appears in Economie politique published in November 1755. This work
refers to one of the key concepts of the theory – the general will – for
the first time, and the notion of ‘natural equality of men’ is also placed
as a condition of what he conceived as a just political constitution.
It is no more unbelievable that the general will consents that a member
of the State, whatever he is, harms or destroys another, than that the
fingers of a reasonable man scratch his eyes out. The security of the individual is truly founded upon the public confederation [la confédération
publique]; . . . this convention will be dissolved by right if the one who
can be otherwise saved dies in the State. . . . For, when the fundamental
convention is broken, one can no longer see what right or interest can
hold the people together in the social union, unless it is kept by force,
which causes the dissolution of the civil state.29
It is clear that Rousseau rejects the unequal treatment of a citizen within
the state here. He argues that, if even a single person is permitted somehow lawfully to ‘destroy’ another in this ‘public confederation = civil
state’, the political association can no longer stand as just. In terms of precision and comprehensiveness the ‘social-contract theory’ in Economie
politique is not yet fully developed, but it constitutes an advance in that
Rousseau saw the equal treatment of all men as a necessary condition
for a moral state.30
Comparing Rousseau’s discussion of private property and natural law
in Economie politique and Discours sur l’inégalité, some scholars hold that
the argument of the latter is more advanced and therefore postdates
28 About this development of the contract theory, see for instance, J. W. Gough, The Social
Contract: A Critical Study of its Development, second edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957),
esp. pp. 1–7.
29 OC, p. 256.
30 Vaughan holds that the idea of the social contract was still underdeveloped in Economie
politique. See The Political Writings, pp. 230–231.
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Economie politique.31 However, Helena Rosenblatt’s convincing argument shows that Rousseau was closely involved in the political conflict
between the aristocrats and the bourgeois during his short stay in Geneva
in summer 1754 and that Economie politique was subsequently written
for the purpose of presenting his support for the bourgeois demands.32
This implies that Rousseau composed the work not before Discours sur
l’inégalité but some time between his return to Paris from Geneva and the
publication of the work, that is, between autumn 1754 and summer 1755.
It is presumed that during this period he developed his social-contract
theory or, at least, its prototype.
Interestingly, it is during this period that Rousseau studied SaintPierre’s works intensively. Returning from Geneva in autumn 1754, he
was commissioned to make ‘a selection from the works of the Abbé de
Saint-Pierre by the Abbé de Mably’.33 Without having read the works
of Saint-Pierre before, Rousseau accepted this task. He most probably
began to work in late 1754.34
It may appear a pure coincidence that Rousseau came up with the
idea of the social contract while he was abridging Saint-Pierre’s works.
Rousseau’s use of the term ‘confederation’ however suggests a crucial
link between these two seemingly unrelated events. He used this term in
Extrait and Jugement for Saint-Pierre’s inter-state alliance for perpetual
peace.35 On the other hand, he used it in Economie politique and The
Geneva Manuscript (the earlier draft of Du contrat social), in this case for
the political association, or the state, of the social contract.36 The term
appears four times altogether in Economie politique but only once in The
Geneva Manuscript.37 The latter is nevertheless the clearest expression
outside Extrait and Jugement of what Rousseau meant by ‘confederation’:
31
See John Hope Mason, The Indispensable Rousseau (London: Quartet Books, 1979), p. 74;
and Hubert, Rousseau et l’Encyclopédie, pp. 62–63.
Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract
1749–1762 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 198.
33 Rousseau, The Confessions, p. 379.
34 Rousseau reminisced this episode later in a letter on 5 December 1760, saying that ‘Six
years ago when Mr. the Comte of Saint-Pierre gave me the manuscripts of the late Mr.
the Abbé, his uncle, I started abridging his writings’. See, Correspondance complète de Jean
Jacques Rousseau: Tome VII (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1969), pp. 339–340.
35 Saint-Pierre himself never used the term ‘confederation’ but ‘union’, ‘société permanente’
or ‘alliance générale’.
36 Rousseau used the term ‘confederation’ in one of his political fragments, too. He says
that ‘The first object that the people proposed in the civil confederation [confédération
civile] was their mutual assurance, that is, the guarantee of the life and freedom of each
by the whole community’ (OC, p. 486). According to Derathé, the content of this fragment
corresponds to Rousseau’s discussion in Economie politique. See OC, p. 1520.
37 OC, pp. 246, 256, 270, 271.
32
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Rousseau and Saint-Pierre’s peace project
[T]he act of the primitive confederation [confédération primitive]
includes a reciprocal engagement of the public with individuals, and . . .
each individual, contracting with himself, as it were, finds himself in
double relations, namely, as a member of the Sovereign to each individual, and as a member of the State to the Sovereign.38
This remark is an excellent synopsis of the idea of the social contract;
it concisely explains that equal individuals contracting with each other
constitute together the single sovereign that relates itself, in return, to
each of these individuals as the enforcer of the general will. Perhaps
satisfied with the precision and compactness of this remark, Rousseau
consequently re-used it in Du contrat social but for a single alteration: he
replaced the term ‘confédération primitive’ with ‘association’.39
Of course, one cannot deduce Saint-Pierre’s influence on Rousseau’s
social-contract theory from the use of ‘confederation’ in Economie politique and The Geneva Manuscript alone. Indeed, it is not unusual in
French that ‘confédération’ stands for associations other than a ‘confederation of states’ (for instance, Confédération générale du travail), so
Rousseau may have just followed the normal use of the term when
calling the social-contract association of individuals a ‘confederation’.
And yet, there are reasons to believe that Rousseau’s model of a just
political constitution was ‘inspired’ by Saint-Pierre’s ‘confederation’.40
In addition to the fact that Rousseau’s preparation for Extrait and Jugement on the one hand and his composition of The Geneva Manuscript on
the other were made almost simultaneously, Saint-Pierre’s confederation of peace and Rousseau’s social-contract association resemble each
other considerably in terms of their foundational ideas (I will show this
resemblance in the following section).41 We cannot know today why
Rousseau decided to replace the term ‘confédération’ with ‘association’ in
Du contrat social. A probable explanation is that he intended to avoid
terminological confusion; in this work the term was intended only to
38
39 Ibid., p. 362.
Ibid., p. 290.
This is also the view of Murray Forsyth. See Union of States: The History and Practice of
Confederation (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1981), p. 92.
41 For Derathé, Rousseau wrote the majority of the Manuscript between 1758 and 1760
(based on the Introduction in OC, pp. lxxxiii–lxxxiv). Vaughan’s speculation is that the
composition was made during 1761 (The Political Writings, p. 434). The question of when
Rousseau composed Extrait and Jugement is more controversial. While Vaughan and
Charles William Hendel think that it was around 1756 (Vaughan, The Political Writings,
p. 360; and Hendel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau Moralist: Volume I (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1934), p. 198); Sven Stelling-Michaud argues that it was some time between 1758–
1759 (Introduction to OC, pp. cxxiii and cxxxii.). Stelling-Michaud’s conclusion seems
more convincing because it is based on wider sources.
40
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mean the alliance of small republican states.42 In any case, the initial
use of the term to denote the social-contract association strongly suggests Saint-Pierre’s influence on Rousseau. His ‘review’ of Saint-Pierre’s
peace project now has to be reinterpreted in light of this intellectual
‘debt’.
Rousseau’s ‘review’ of Saint-Pierre:
a document of sympathy
While Rousseau regarded Saint-Pierre’s peace project as ‘impractical’,
it is striking how much Rousseau’s theoretical position had in common
with Saint-Pierre’s in the context of eighteenth-century French political
discourse; much more, indeed, than is usually recognized in IR literature. I therefore argue that his ‘review’ of Saint-Pierre should be read as
a document of sympathy with, rather than criticism of, the argument of
his predecessor. Rousseau was dissatisfied with Saint-Pierre’s theoretical inconsistency, without doubt; he nevertheless ‘learned’ a lot from
Saint-Pierre’s political theory.
One of the main reasons for the impression that Rousseau was a ‘critic’
of Saint-Pierre is that he professed his dislike of Saint-Pierre’s writings
many times. He describes Saint-Pierre’s manuscripts as ‘twenty-three
diffuse and muddled volumes full of boring passages, repetitions, and
false or short-sighted views’, and says that ‘a thorough examination of
his [Saint-Pierre’s] political works showed me only superficial views’.43
The task of abridging thus became a ‘painful labour’, and Rousseau
came close to giving up the entire project. Yet, he persisted because he
felt indebted to the Comte de Saint-Pierre, the nephew of the Abbé, who
had kindly given him the manuscripts for this project.44 In any case, this
trouble made it inevitable for Rousseau to scale down his original plan
to produce an abridgement of all the works of Saint-Pierre and to write
a short biography of the author. What he produced were only two pairs
of ‘reviews’ on Saint-Pierre’s Polysynodie and peace project towards the
end of the 1750s, four pieces altogether. Judging from this evidence
alone, Rousseau is not a follower of Saint-Pierre’s argument; indeed,
he appears as a critic, even mocking Saint-Pierre, as most IR students
believe.
42
44
About this use, see OC, p. 431.
Ibid, p. 393.
106
43
Rousseau, The Confessions, pp. 380, 393.
Rousseau and Saint-Pierre’s peace project
And yet, what needs to be stressed is that this general repugnance
to Saint-Pierre’s works did not prevent Rousseau from realizing ‘that
the manuscripts which the Count de Saint-Pierre had given me were so
many treasures’.45 On Saint-Pierre’s peace project especially, Rousseau
states in Jugement that, contrary to its appearance, it is a work of great
importance and should be taken very seriously: ‘the work of the Abbé
de Saint-Pierre on perpetual peace may seem at first glance ineffectual for creating it and unnecessary for maintaining it; “it is therefore
a vain speculation”, said some impatient reader. No. It is a solid and
thoughtful book, and it is very important that it exists’.46 These words are
significant; for they suggest that, in contrast to the common understanding in IR, Rousseau sympathized with Saint-Pierre’s work in general and
his peace project in particular. Of course, this remark may have been
mere lip-service or a formality; I nevertheless argue that, confronted
with the natural-lawyers at the time, Rousseau indeed found ‘treasures’
in Saint-Pierre’s writings. Among them the most crucial is Saint-Pierre’s
approach to the issue of politics and morality, which proved very useful
for dismantling the dominant natural-law theory. Although Rousseau
was unhappy with the general quality of Saint-Pierre’s works, he still
thought that Saint-Pierre had been moving in the right direction regarding an alternative to the orthodox theory of the age.
Rousseau’s moral and theoretical agreements with Saint-Pierre
More than anything else, the very foundation of Rousseau’s sympathy with Saint-Pierre lay in the latter’s selfless devotion to the cause of
morality. Les confessions reveal that reading Saint-Pierre’s moral writings ‘confirmed me [Rousseau] in the opinion I had formed on some
of his letters . . . that he had much more intelligence than I had previously imagined’.47 Indeed, Saint-Pierre began to ponder the means for
perpetual peace because he was so shocked by all the moral ‘evils’ that
wars bring about.48 Rousseau, full of respect for this noble concern of
his predecessor, says in Extrait that ‘no author deserves public attention better than the one who proposes the means to put the project [for
perpetual peace among states] in execution’.49 Rousseau also noted that
Saint-Pierre had been very outspoken about the French government,
45
46 OC, p. 591.
47 Rousseau, The Confessions, p. 393.
Ibid.
Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe (Tours: Fayard, 1986),
edited by Simone Goyard-Fabre, pp. 9–10. All the translations from this below are mine.
49 OC, p. 563.
48
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running considerable risks. Although Saint-Pierre only faced expulsion
from the French Academy, Rousseau still admired his courage for the
sake of enhancing morality in society.50 For Rousseau ‘the truth’ was
always ‘not so much metaphysical as moral’.51 In this sense Saint-Pierre
was, as Rousseau says in Jugement, a truly praiseworthy figure who was
sincerely devoted to ‘the public good’ without seeking his ‘personal
interest’.52
Rousseau’s sympathy with Saint-Pierre’s (international) political theory was however not limited to the level of moral motivation. The more
important reason for Rousseau’s sympathy lies in the fact that his theoretical view on the relationship between morality and politics was quite
close to that of Saint-Pierre.
Throughout his intellectual career, Saint-Pierre wrote a number of
‘projects’ that were, he thought, very useful for augmenting the public
good. The most well-known of these is his project for perpetual peace
but he also developed other plans, including ‘the eradication of barbaric
pirate ships’, ‘roads usable in winter’ and ‘perfecting the governments
of states’. Behind this we find Saint-Pierre’s conviction that man’s nature
is not predetermined by birth and can hence be altered. Although it was
accepted that man’s actions are always underpinned by amour-propre, the
passionate desire to fulfil self-interests, Saint-Pierre held the view that
this desire does not determine man’s moral propensity: ‘amour-propre
makes both all vices and all moral goods, depending upon whether it
is rightly or badly understood’.53 It is this conviction that led him to
believe the following formula: ‘men can be curbed only by the laws of
society’.54
Saint-Pierre thus started his peace project by posing the following
rhetorical question: ‘whether this evil [war] is so truly attached to the
nature of sovereignties and sovereigns that there is absolutely no remedy’.55 He answered this question in the negative and argued that it is
actually the political constitution among sovereigns that had long caused
the wars that occurred so frequently in Europe: ‘The present constitution of Europe can never produce anything other than almost continual
50
Rousseau, The Confessions, p. 394.
Rousseau à Dom Léger-Marie Deschamps, à Montmorenci le 25 juin 1761, in Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau: Tome IX, p. 28. The translation is mine.
52 OC, p. 591.
53 Merle L. Perkins, ‘Unpublished Maxims of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre’ French Review 31
(1958), p. 499. The translation is mine.
54 Perkins, The Moral and Political Philosophy of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, p. 45.
55 Saint-Pierre, Projet, p. 10. Emphasis added.
51
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Rousseau and Saint-Pierre’s peace project
wars; this is because it can never procure any sufficient certainty for
the execution of treaties.’56 How can one then prevent this problem of
wars from occurring? Only by transforming the present political constitution of Europe into the one that provides a ‘sufficient certainty for
the execution of treaties’. Saint-Pierre submitted a model for an alternative inter-state system – confederation – in his project; it is, he thought,
the only system that can force each sovereign member-state to act
morally.
Notice here that Saint-Pierre’s argument that the moral ‘evil’ of war is
caused by the form of political constitutions is identical with the principle that Rousseau discovered in Venice. Therefore, when he read SaintPierre’s works for the first time during his open confrontation with
the natural-lawyers in the mid-1750s, he would have thought that he
‘unearthed a buried treasure’ – a conception of the relationship between
morality and politics similar to his own. Naturally then, Rousseau did
not object to Saint-Pierre’s conclusion about the cause of inter-state wars.
He points out in Extrait that ‘if the present system is indestructible, it
is constantly in a stormy state; this is because, between the powers of
Europe, there are the action and reaction which, without overthrowing them altogether, kept them in continual agitation’.57 Rousseau also
agreed with Saint-Pierre on the means to solve this problem. Since he
accepted the establishment of Saint-Pierre’s model for an alternative
inter-state system – a ‘confederation’ – as reasonable, he said in Jugement (if somewhat ironically): ‘Let us not say any longer that his [SaintPierre’s] system was not adopted because it was not good; let us say
instead that it was too good to be adopted’.58 In the light of these agreements it is plausible that Rousseau, overall, found Saint-Pierre’s peace
project solid and convincing. In relation to the dominant paradigm of
the modern natural-law theory at the time, Saint-Pierre and Rousseau
in fact shared a similar alternative.
On the basis of this fundamental (if largely tacit) agreement, Rousseau
saw Saint-Pierre’s pacific confederation as a generalizable model for a
just political constitution; it could be applied not only to the inter-state
sphere but also to domestic society, in order to make men moral. This
is probably the reason for Rousseau’s use of the term ‘confederation’ in
Economie politique and The Geneva Manuscript. He discovered the idea of
the social contract underlying the constitution of the state in Saint-Pierre’s
inter-state model for perpetual peace.
56
Ibid., p. 11. Emphasis added.
57
OC, p. 572.
58
Ibid., p. 599.
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The correspondence between Rousseau’s social-contract
association and Saint-Pierre’s confederation
In order to substantiate the thesis that Rousseau ‘imported’ the model
of a just political constitution from Saint-Pierre’s inter-state confederation, we must compare the social-contract association in Du contrat social
with it. The social-contract association has two core features: first, this
constitution consists of free and equal individuals alone; and second,
in this constitution, only ‘the general will’ expressed as law has ultimate authority over its members. In Rousseau’s Extrait, both features
are directly and indirectly stated as the key components of Saint-Pierre’s
model for perpetual peace; and, of course, they can be traced in SaintPierre’s peace project itself.
The first core feature of Rousseau’s ‘social-contract’ constitution is
that it consists of free and equal individuals only. In Du contrat social
he categorically rejects, as the principal condition of the social contract,
that even a single figure is treated differently from all the rest. This
marked the emergence of a new contract theory in history because it
rejected the traditional idea of the ‘contract of submission’. Entering
into an unequal contract with a superior is nothing but a renunciation of
freedom, the essence of humanity, and makes one a slave. He therefore
severely attacked preceding contract theories, most notably Grotius’,
that contain this idea of the contract between the ruler and the ruled.59
For Rousseau, every single member of the constitution must be equally
bound by the same rule all the time; even the monarch must not be
exempted from this.
Turning to Saint-Pierre’s peace project, we find repeated emphasis
on the ‘mutuality’ and ‘equality’ of states in the ‘confederation’. First,
searching for means to terminate all wars, Saint-Pierre ‘found that all
those means are reduced to making mutual promises’.60 He also says
that ‘I intended to show only one thing, namely, that it is infinitely more
advantageous for every man to be in a permanent society with his equals,
or with those that are almost his equals, than not to be there; and from this
I have concluded that the Christian sovereigns will always lack infinite
happiness unless they make a permanent society among themselves’.61
Once the confederation is formed, commercial exchanges between states
should be promoted under conditions of equality: ‘the chief point in
commerce is that no nation is to be preferred to another, and all to be
59
61
Ibid., pp. 355–358.
Ibid., pp. 34–35.
110
60
Saint-Pierre, Projet, p. 10. Emphasis added.
Rousseau and Saint-Pierre’s peace project
equally free to come to sell and buy merchandises’.62 To put these points
the other way around, allowing even a single member to receive special
treatment would be disastrous for the confederation: ‘if the sovereigns
reserved the least pretensions one upon the other, there would be but
a chaos of new rights contradicting each other . . . and there would be
almost no certain principle for decisions.’63
In the Extrait, Rousseau did not particularly emphasize the ‘mutuality’ and ‘equality’ of states as a key component of the model of the
pacific confederation. There is, however, no doubt that he recognized
the importance of this principle when he explained that each state is
to be almost equal in power in order for this confederation to last: ‘for
forming a solid and durable confederation, it is necessary to put all the
members of it in such mutual dependence that no one is singly in a
position to resist all the others’.64 Rousseau also says in Extrait that a
‘confederate government’ is the government that treats each member
equally: ‘a form of confederate government, which, uniting the peoples by the bonds similar to those that already unite individuals, places
equally one another under the authority of law’.65 Equality among members is the necessary condition for states to form a confederation and to
be in peace for ever.
Interestingly, Rousseau indicates in the last quotation that treating
every member equally is a condition required for both the union of
‘peoples’, or states, and the union of ‘individuals’. This suggests that
Rousseau was quite aware that this feature of Saint-Pierre’s pacific confederation could be transferred to his theory of the state. Moreover, the
same remark also indicates that Rousseau recognized the purpose of
Saint-Pierre’s confederation as establishing the rule of law; each member state, joining in this inter-state constitution, is put equally ‘under the
rule of law’. This is actually the idea that forms the second core feature
of Rousseau’s ‘social-contract’ constitution. Entering into the social contract, all free and equal individuals are, like all states in Saint-Pierre’s
confederation, to be placed under the rule of law expressed as ‘the general will’.
In Du contrat social, Rousseau vigorously rejects that any individual
will is prioritized over the will of the whole. This is because every individual will, whether of the ruler or anyone else, seeks only his own interests and not the common interest.66 In place of the rule of the individual
62
66
Ibid., p. 180.
Ibid., p. 371.
63
Ibid., p. 175.
64
OC, p. 573.
65
Ibid., p. 564. Emphasis added.
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will, the rule of ‘the general will’ is to be established; and this rule is the
same as the rule of law because ‘when the matter on which one decides
is general, so is the will that decides. This is the act that I call law’.67
What can produce this rule of law, then? Rousseau maintains that ‘force
produces no law’.68 Although force, especially the ruler’s, can physically
compel people to be obedient, it never creates the law that makes men
truly moral. It is the social contract alone that can produce law. When
this contract is concluded, all contractors have to agree that they cease
to live in the state of war, and that they live together in ‘the civil state in
which all rights are fixed by law’.69
Remarkably, Saint-Pierre presents the same contrast between the lawful state and the state in which force dominates. And, like Rousseau, he
holds that his pacific confederation (or ‘permanent society’ in his own
terms) establishes the rule of law in place of the rule of the jungle.
What means do they [different sovereigns] have to end their differences, and to put limits to their pretensions? We know all the means;
there are only two sorts, according to the two sorts of the pretenders;
either force or law. For either the two pretenders make a part and are
members of some permanent society, or they do not make a part of
it. If they do not make a part of it, their differences can be terminated
neither by laws nor, consequently, by the judges or interpreters of laws.
As they have the misfortune of being deprived of the advantage of a
perpetual commerce and of a permanent society, they also have the
misfortune of being deprived of the advantage of laws that distribute
to each what belongs to him legitimately. . . . Since they [present European sovereigns] have had no permanent society among them yet, they
have no law whereby to decide their differences without war . . .70
Further, Saint-Pierre says that law must be for the general interest of
every member: ‘they [sovereigns] would not consent to it [law] if, in that
law that they wish to impose upon themselves for utility and common
security, some were worse treated than others, namely, if the law were
not equal for all’.71 This also echoes Rousseau’s understanding of the
law expressed as ‘the general will’.
Rousseau does not fail to mention these points in Extrait. He recognizes that the purpose of Saint-Pierre’s confederation is to place each
state ‘equally under the authority of law’, and refers to the contrast of
this rule with the current state of Europe by calling it ‘the state of war’.72
This unlawful state is based on the rule of the selfish individual will:
67
71
Ibid., p. 379.
Ibid., p. 170.
112
68
72
69 Ibid., p. 378.
Ibid., p. 355.
OC, pp. 564, 587.
70
Saint-Pierre, Projet, p. 23.
Rousseau and Saint-Pierre’s peace project
the public law of Europe ‘is full of contradictory regulations that are in
harmony only with the right of the stronger; so that, reason . . . always
turns to the personal interest even in doubtful cases, which makes war
inevitable’.73 Rousseau therefore explains that Saint-Pierre’s confederation ‘gives the group of states the perfection that it has lacked . . . by
forcing all the parties to co-operate for the common good’.74 One must
prevent that ‘members depart [from the confederation] at their own
pleasure as soon as they believe that their private interests are clashing with the general interest.’75 All of these statements indicate that
Rousseau correctly grasped the core ideas of Saint-Pierre’s project. It
is very likely that Rousseau found crucial ideas for his social-contract
theory in Saint-Pierre’s peace project.
In summary, Rousseau left various ‘signs’ in Extrait, Jugement and elsewhere indicating his basic sympathy with Saint-Pierre’s peace project.
The source of this agreement lies in Saint-Pierre’s approach to politics
and morality which echoed Rousseau’s Venice discovery. Saint-Pierre’s
concept of a ‘confederation’ for peace, moreover, looked to Rousseau
like the very prototype of a just political constitution; he therefore used
it in his social-contract theory.
Rousseau’s ‘international relations theory’ must now be re-assessed
in light of this interpretation.
Reassessing Rousseau’s theory of
international relations
Historians of international relations theory have long regarded
Rousseau as a ‘realist’. Taking into account that Rousseau found the
model of a just political constitution in Saint-Pierre’s ‘confederation’,
however, the more plausible conclusion is that he longed for the establishment of the ‘social-contract’ between states as much as Saint-Pierre
had done before him. In fact, for Rousseau, tackling injustice in interstate relations is an indispensible condition for attaining justice within
the state: ‘between man and man we live in a civil state and are subjected
to laws; between people and people we each enjoy natural liberty. . . .
Because living simultaneously in the social order and in the state of
nature, we are subjected to the inconveniences of both, without finding
certainty in either’.76 The need for the establishment of the confederation between states is therefore beyond controversy; in this respect
73
Ibid., pp. 568–569.
74
Ibid., p. 574.
75
Ibid.
76
Ibid., p. 610.
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Classical Theory in International Relations
Saint-Pierre’s project for peace is certainly ‘solid’ and ‘thoughtful’ for
Rousseau.77
Objections to this interpretation may entail the argument that, even if
there was no ‘realism’ as such in Rousseau’s time, his international relations theory was still anticipating the emergence of what we today in IR
call a realist theory. This claim would emphasize that Rousseau’s concept of sovereignty sanctified the ‘independence’ of each sovereign or
that in the end he rejected Saint-Pierre’s peace plan as impractical. There
is, however, no clear textual basis in the ‘review’ for such claims. On the
contrary, the work provides a very different explanation of Rousseau’s
concept of sovereignty as well as of the meaning of ‘impracticality’ with
regard to Saint-Pierre’s project.
Rousseau’s concept of sovereignty as moral freedom
In IR Rousseau’s concept of sovereignty has often been seen as one of the
earliest formulations of ‘external sovereignty’. External sovereignty –
independence from any other external political authority – is the notion
that the discipline has placed at the centre of its theorization of ‘international relations’; and this concept has been regarded as an ideological
barrier to any attempt to create an overarching political authority above
‘sovereign’ states. In Du contrat social Rousseau called sovereignty ‘indivisible’ and ‘inalienable’, which has been read as clear support both
for the ‘unity’ of the nation and the principle of ‘non-intervention’ as
the minimum denominator of sovereign statehood.78 Jens Bartelson, for
instance, claims that Rousseau understood sovereignty for the first time
as the representation of ‘the inside/outside’ – the fundamental idea that
demarcates ‘domestic politics’ and ‘international politics’ – and thus
pre-empted its subsequent emergence in IR.79
However, in Rousseau’s ‘review’ of Saint-Pierre’s peace project, a very
different understanding of the concept of sovereignty emerges. SaintPierre defined it not as ‘independence’ but as ‘moral freedom’ which
removes the incompatibility between remaining a sovereign and joining
a confederation with other sovereigns. If the ‘review’ is a document that
indicates Rousseau’s sympathy with, rather than opposition to, SaintPierre’s argument, we must assume that Rousseau accepted this concept
of sovereignty as moral freedom.
77
78 OC, pp. 368–369.
Ibid., p. 591.
Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), pp. 212–213.
79
114
Rousseau and Saint-Pierre’s peace project
In his peace project Saint-Pierre responds to many probable ‘objections’ to his proposal. One of those objections is that he ‘does not pay
sufficient attention to the prerogative of independence, the prerogative
essential to sovereignty’.80 By way of response, Saint-Pierre first defines
‘freedom’ in the following way: ‘the more one can do what pleases one
without opposition, without needing to fear its results, namely, without
offending anybody, the more freedom one has’.81 Saint-Pierre then rhetorically asks whether one can be truly free if one is allowed to kill and
to benefit from booties. Saint-Pierre’s answer is negative. He concludes
that:
diminishing their [the sovereigns’] dependence and as a consequence
augmenting their independence are achieved by making use of permanent Arbitration, namely, by using the same invention that a long time
ago formed the primitive, permanent Society between the chiefs of
families . . . which brought them trust, security, communication, arts,
sciences, wealth, religions, justice, charity, esteem, friendship, indulgence and all the qualities and talents that contributed to make men
more virtuous and happier.82
In short, for Saint-Pierre, full ‘independence’ of a sovereign is attained
only in society with others where trust, security, justice and so on are
guaranteed. In other words, when no sovereign is able to offend the common interests, each can be ‘free’ as well as ‘independent’. Accordingly,
that a sovereign joins a pacific confederation with other sovereigns actually matches the requirement for ‘true’ sovereignty (or independence)
rather than to indicate its loss.
Rousseau of course did not fail to mention Saint-Pierre’s formulation
of the concept of sovereignty in Extrait. He states that, in the pacific confederation, every member state can strengthen its sovereignty rather
than weaken or lose it: ‘it is very clear that it [the judicial tribunal of
confederation] does not at all diminish the rights of sovereignty, but,
on the contrary, affirms them’.83 The reason for this is that, within this
confederation, each sovereign gains the guarantee of security, by being
able to keep ‘not only his state against foreign invasion, but also his
authority against all the rebellions of his subjects’.84 After all, ‘there is
all the difference between dependence upon others . . . and belonging
to the polity [confederation] in which each member is a chief by turns.
For, in the latter, one’s freedom is assured by the pledges one gives the
80
84
Saint-Pierre, Projet, p. 451.
Ibid.
81
Ibid., p. 497.
82
Ibid., p. 523.
83
OC, p. 583.
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Classical Theory in International Relations
polity’.85 Elsewhere, Rousseau points out that the ‘absolute independence’ of sovereigns is the corollary of continual wars among them:
‘the state of disorder and war, which necessarily engenders the mutually absolute independence of all the sovereigns in the imperfect society
that rules them in Europe today’.86 Sovereignty is thus neither the right
of ‘absolute independence’ nor the right to do whatever one wants to
do; it is rather the right of freedom in Saint-Pierre’s sense, the right to
submit oneself to the rule of the pacific confederation. In Rousseau’s
international relations theory, therefore, sovereignty does not only go
hand in hand with joining the confederation, but actually requires it.
The confederation affirms the sovereignty of each member and, after
all, its freedom.
Interestingly, Saint-Pierre’s definition of sovereignty is almost identical with the way in which Rousseau explains the concept of ‘civil and
moral freedom’ in Du contrat social. This concept is what he presented as
the truly human concept of freedom, the fundamental concept that lies in
his social-contract theory. Not only did Rousseau find Saint-Pierre’s formulation of sovereignty very persuasive; it might even be the case that
he took this concept of moral freedom also from Saint-Pierre’s understanding of sovereignty. Here is Rousseau’s discussion of the concept of
freedom in Du contrat social.
In the ‘normal’ sense of the term ‘freedom’, men become inevitably
‘unfree’ once they enter into the social-contract with others. For, as
a result of this contract, the actions of the contractors are put under
the restrictions of laws or ‘the general will’, and thus they no longer
act free of constraints. However, Rousseau argues that this is no more
than men losing their vulgar and barbaric ‘natural freedom’, instead
of which they acquire genuinely human freedom, namely, ‘civil (social)
freedom’ and ‘moral freedom’. By ‘natural freedom’ Rousseau means
the freedom that can be limited by its possessor alone; this is a ‘crude’
freedom because it allows a man to do whatever he wants. ‘Civil freedom’, however, is the freedom to acknowledge that men possess only
what they can possess rightly in society; ‘moral freedom’, which alone
makes a man truly his own master, is the freedom to obey the moral law
that men enforce upon themselves by themselves.87 Rousseau understands the transition from natural freedom to civil and moral freedom
as ‘a remarkable change, which substitutes instinct with justice in his
conduct and gives his actions the morality that has been lacking so
85
Ibid., p. 584.
116
86
Ibid., p. 587.
87
Ibid., p. 365.
Rousseau and Saint-Pierre’s peace project
far’.88 The social contract is therefore the means, and the only legitimate
means according to Rousseau, for men, who are free by definition, to
become free in the true sense of the term.
This is the same formulation that Saint-Pierre used for the relationship
between sovereignty and confederation. Whereas in Rousseau men can
be truly free only in the political association of the social contract, for
Saint-Pierre sovereigns can be truly free, that is ‘sovereign’, only in the
pacific confederation. Similarly, men lose their ‘natural freedom’ with
lawful restraints, and sovereigns lose their ‘absolute independence’ with
lawful restraints. On the basis of this correspondence it is unlikely that
Rousseau rejected Saint-Pierre’s understanding of sovereignty; rather,
it seems that he inherited it and even used it in his explanation of civil
and moral freedom in Du contrat social.
In contrast to the common belief in IR, accordingly, Rousseau was not
the theorist of ‘sovereignty as absolute independence’. He was the theorist of ‘sovereignty as moral freedom’, the concept that morally obliges
all sovereigns to form a pacific confederation and to act lawfully towards
each other. Rousseau’s international relations theory aimed, after all,
at the construction of an inter-state system in which each sovereign
becomes truly free. His concept of sovereignty was not an obstacle to
this purpose.
Rousseau’s critique of Saint-Pierre’s peace project
There is one more question to be answered. Why did Rousseau reject
Saint-Pierre’s peace project as impractical in the end? Was he, after all,
an early ‘realist’?
Rousseau’s real intention in criticizing Saint-Pierre’s project as
impractical is, I submit, to argue that his predecessor was not consistent enough. Saint-Pierre was ‘naive’, not because his project itself was
utopian, but because he believed that absolute monarchs would agree on
the usefulness and necessity of a confederation.89 Rousseau had no such
confidence in princes. ‘[A]ll the occupation of kings . . . is related to only
two objects: to extend their domination externally and to make it more
absolute internally’.90 Princes do not wish to realize perpetual peace
between states; their interests lie in an unstable and insecure inter-state
system.
88
89
Ibid., p. 364.
David Boucher, Political Theories of International Relations: From Thucydides to the Present
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 302.
90 OC, p. 592.
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Rousseau’s distrust of princes is consistent with his social-contract
theory which defines the monarch as an administrator who merely executes what the sovereign decides. And the sovereign is not the monarch
but the collective of individual citizens, the people, who are tied together
by the social contract. At the end of Jugement, Rousseau claims that a
confederation can be established only by ‘revolutions’.91 The scale of
this political transformation should, indeed, be ‘revolutions’ since all
domestic societies need to be reconstituted on the basis of the social contract (which also means, in Rousseau’s view, that all societies are to be
turned into small states) before they can unite under a confederation.92
Because these ‘revolutions’ are a precondition for perpetual peace, its
achievement should take a painfully long time; and it ‘would perhaps
do more harm in a moment than it would prevent it for centuries’.93
In Rousseau’s view, Saint-Pierre failed to recognize the necessity for
establishing a just political constitution at the domestic level. Although
providing the right solution to men’s immorality at the inter-state level,
his predecessor was naive enough to trust the good will of princes,
despite the fact that their absolute rule is one of the main causes of men’s
moral corruptions, wars. As long as this moral wrong is left unchanged,
the emergence of a pacific confederation is simply an unrealistic dream.
A confederation between states has to be built for achieving perpetual
peace, to be sure, but this can occur only when each domestic society is
based on the social contract.
For Rousseau, the transformation of ‘internal’ as well as ‘external’
politics is a single, inseparable agenda for making men moral. It is this
recognition that led him to demolish Saint-Pierre’s project as impractical
eventually; and it is this recognition that distinguishes his international
relations theory radically from that of modern IR.
Conclusion
Historically Rousseau’s (international) political theory did not differ
much from that of Saint-Pierre. Their approach to politics – to regard
man’s morality as a product of the political constitution – was identical in their own intellectual context in that it cast significant doubts
91
Ibid., p. 600. About the meaning of Rousseau’s ‘revolution’, see Forsyth, Unions of
States, pp. 91–92.
92 J.-L. Windenberger, Essai sur le système de politique étrangère de J.-J. Rousseau: la république
confederation des petits états (Paris: Alphonse Picard et Fils, 1900), pp. 189–236.
93 OC, p. 600.
118
Rousseau and Saint-Pierre’s peace project
on the dominant view of the modern natural-law theory that human
nature – seeking to fulfil their self-interest – was predetermined and
served as the basis of political association. Because of this theoretical
affinity, Rousseau realized that Saint-Pierre’s peace project contained
the model of a just political order. The notion of a pacific confederation suggested to Rousseau a new form of association consisting of
only equal members, and then he took full advantage of this idea in his
social-contract theory. We can trace Rousseau’s inspiration back to SaintPierre through the term ‘confederation’ which he used to depict the
‘social-contract’ association as well as Saint-Pierre’s association of states
for peace. Indeed, Saint-Pierre’s pacific confederation and Rousseau’s
‘social-contract’ political constitution resemble each other considerably
in their key aspects.
It is therefore misleading to regard Rousseau’s international relations
theory as ‘realist’. This interpretation rests on Rousseau’s rejection of
Saint-Pierre’s peace project in terms of its practicality, but, in the light
of their theoretical affinity, it is more plausible to assume that Rousseau
felt great sympathy with Saint-Pierre’s theory in general and his peace
project in particular. In this respect Rousseau’s concept of sovereignty
is the most prominent indicator that his international political theory
differs in a crucial sense from the so-called realist theory while demonstrating theoretical continuity with Saint-Pierre’s. As opposed to the
realist notion of ‘sovereignty as absolute independence’, both Rousseau
and Saint-Pierre argued for the notion of ‘sovereignty as moral freedom’, the concept that regards ‘true’ sovereigns as those who form a
‘social-contract’ association with each other in order to become truly
free and independent. Rousseau denounced Saint-Pierre’s peace project
as impractical, but it was only because it did not tackle the injustice
of absolute monarchy as a precondition for perpetual peace. He saw
domestic and international injustices as inseparable. This reading of
Rousseau’s ‘review’ of Saint-Pierre’s peace project thus challenges the
claim that he is a ‘realist’ thinker.
Yet, this case has more general implications. It demonstrates, firstly,
that ‘history of international relations theory’ has hitherto failed to
appreciate the historical meaning of classical texts, which is typically
illustrated by the ‘Rousseau-realist’ thesis that is based on the contemporary idealist-realist dichotomy. As an antidote to this ‘reading the present
back into history’, this essay supports the strategy to situate past texts
in their historical intellectual context. This context may not be fully
recoverable, but any attempt to ascertain it can still prevent the most
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Classical Theory in International Relations
anachronistic results. In arguing for an historical approach to classical
authors, I do not claim that this ‘contextual’ reading is the only or right
way to read classics. But I am arguing that the appreciation of historical
contexts is a necessary condition for those who call themselves ‘historians’ of international relations theory.
This case study secondly suggests that these historians cannot limit
their attention to ‘International Relations theory’, in the narrow contemporary sense of the term. Reading Rousseau’s ‘review’ historically
demonstrates that his thinking was not at all circumscribed by a narrow
understanding of ‘international relations’ as such. He did not separate
international relations theory from the political theory of the state, and
thus he was able to apply Saint-Pierre’s pacific confederation of states
to the model of a just political constitution for individuals. To put this
the other way around, modern IR interpreters have failed to acknowledge the ‘inspirational source’ for Rousseau’s social-contract theory and
hence his basic sympathy with Saint-Pierre’s theory in general, because
they have not been sufficiently free from the narrow disciplinary definition of ‘international relations’ in approaching past texts. Historians of
international relations theory need to challenge the compartmentalization of disciplines today rather than to read them back into history. After
all, the value of classical authors lies precisely in their holistic conception
of society and politics.
120
Part II
Political contexts
6
The Savage Smith and the temporal
walls of capitalism1
David L. Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah
Indian kinship economics, which, I . . . understand not as pre-capitalist
but as anticapitalist, constitute a powerful and continuing critique of the
waste of an expansive, acquisitive capitalism that . . . [Europe] could
not afford to entertain. The loss in social vision was, and is, incalculable.
Eric Cheyfitz2
In the standard literature in International Political Economy (IPE), Adam
Smith serves as a marker for a ‘classical liberal school of economics’. This
‘economics’ derives from Smith a ‘shared and coherent set of assumptions’ about the drive to truck and barter as the impetus to inevitable
and inexorable human material improvement and the existence of ‘inviolable laws’ of economic life that mandate free markets internally and
free trade internationally.3 Others within IPE and International Relations (IR) have complicated this view4 even if their efforts have failed
to dislodge the standard reading. Additional readings may be useful
for those who embed economics within a richly debated history. In this
chapter, we emphasize the role the Amerindians play in Smith’s work.
Reading Smith against the theme of ‘savagery’ allows us to: (1) focus on
1
This chapter represents the beginnings of a larger project. We thank Chuck Green, Xavier
Guillaume, Sandra Halperin, Beate Jahn, David P. Levine, Khaldoun Samman and Robert
Shilliam for helpful comments and suggestions.
2 ‘Savage Law’, in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (eds.), Cultures of United States
Imperialism (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 118. Emphasis in original.
3 Robert A. Isaak, Managing World Economic Change: International Political Economy 3rd edn
(Upper Saddle River NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000), p. 4, makes the claim about the existence of a
liberal ‘school’. Most texts begin with this same assumption. The account of liberalism as
possessing ‘shared and coherent’ assumptions can be found in Robert Gilpin, The Political
Economy of International Relations (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 26–
31, 44, 81.
4 See especially Craig N. Murphy’s interesting use of Smith in International Organization
and Industrial Change: Global Governance Since 1850 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994).
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Classical Theory in International Relations
an often neglected intellectual influence on Smith – the Jesuit Father
Lafitau; (2) critically examine the comparative ethnology that Smith
uses to develop a theory of human progress and insulate commercial
society from moral critique; and, perhaps most fruitfully, (3) recover
potential ethical resources that help us assess the present state of global
capitalism.
Linking comparative ethnology and Smith may seem surprising, since
neither Smith nor any of the key Scottish social thinkers made the voyage to the New World.5 Nonetheless, their encounters with the Indians
were no less profound than those of earlier adventurers, missionaries
and scholars whose reports they inherited. It was in and through these
reports that the Scots journeyed. Their travels were, as Anthony Pagden
puts it, ‘cognitive’, a ‘travel in the mind’s eye’.6 In their constructions of
the Indians’ place in human history, the Scots identify the Indians as travellers on a common human path. In the minds of Smith and his fellow
Scots, the Indians had embarked on a great journey towards Europe –
that is, towards Europe’s present.
The need to chart the location of the Indians had a prior history.
Since the ‘discovery’ of the Americas, Europeans had struggled to make
sense of continents and peoples both unfamiliar and difficult to situate within the confines of scriptural and classical authority.7 Many
regarded the New World peoples’ physical and social distance from the
singular moment of Edenic creation as a correlate of their degeneration
from Christian faith and civilized behaviour. Reports of cannibalism,
human sacrifice and low levels of artistic and scientific development
confirmed the distance of the Amerindians from the norms of human (i.e.
European) practice. Numerous thinkers sought to contain the disorder
the Indians represented by placing them below the threshold of humanity, thereby allowing enslavement or extermination. Or, if their humanity was accepted, the differences the Indians exhibited were translated
into a form of infancy or childhood that might be corrected and guided
through European tutelage. The pedagogical component of imperialism was thus deployed quite early. Over the next century, others would
build on this understanding by designating the North American natives
as examples of the earliest state of human existence.
5 The partial exception is Adam Ferguson who visited the American Colonies in the spring
of 1778 as an emissary. He was not allowed behind the American lines.
6 Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 30.
7 See Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of
Difference (New York: Routledge, 2004), Chapter 2.
124
Shafiul
Alam
IR59,walls
University
of Dhaka.
The Savage Smith
and
thePrince,
temporal
of capitalism
By the mid-eighteenth century, the novelty of the Amerindians had
worn off and the moral threat of cannibalism and human sacrifice had
receded. For most Enlightenment thinkers, the demands of a scientific
history of humankind replaced the imperative to preserve scriptural
and/or classical authority. The Indians continued to represent difference, but the remaining important marker of the Amerindians – low
levels of development – would be incorporated into emerging theories
of moral or civic philosophy. The temporal separation of the Indians and
Europeans became, in the hands of Smith and the Frenchman Baron de
Turgot, a theory of historical development with four ages or stages: hunting and gathering, shepherding, agriculture and commerce.8 The movement from one stage to another appears internal or immanent to processes at each stage, as, in Smith’s words, ‘a great, an immense machine,
whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects’.9 The temporal distance between Indians and Europeans,
previously bridgeable only by the activities of the missionary, could now
be understood within an ‘abstract and philosophical’ scheme that locates
the American Indian at the very beginnings of human society.10 The differences suggested by Indian life are rendered benign as superceded
ways of existence.
But the past need not appear so agreeably relinquished. Smith was
aware of Rousseau’s treatment of ‘savagery’ as a source of critical reflection on emerging commercial societies.11 Thus, ‘cognitive travel’ could
involve serious reflection on the meanings and purposes constitutive of
contemporary societies. ‘The past’, as Ashis Nandy suggests, is available as ‘an open-ended record of the predicaments of our time’. What
is required, and perhaps exemplified by Rousseau’s civic humanist critique, is ‘an attempt to read the past as an essay on human prospects,
and . . . the ability to live with one’s constructions of the past and deploy
them creatively’.12 ‘[T]ime-travel’, thus, potentially ‘reshapes the past
and the future’ by holding ‘them up as mirrors to the present’.13
8 See Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), Chapters 3 and 4.
9 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie
(Indianapolis IN, Liberty Fund, 1976), p. 316.
10 Ibid.
11 See Smith, ‘A Letter to the Authors of the Edinburgh Review’ in W. P. D. Wightman
and J. C. Bryce (eds.), Essays on Philosophical Subjects (Indianapolis IN: Liberty Fund,
1980), pp. 250–254.
12 Ashis Nandy, Time Warps: Silent and Evasive Pasts in Indian Politics and Religion (New
Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), p. 1.
13 Ibid., p. 5.
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Smith drew much of his knowledge of the Amerindians from Father
Joseph François Lafitau’s Customs of the American Indians. Ronald Meek
notes that Lafitau’s work was given a ‘special role’ by Smith and others because it was seen to have ‘provided a convincing demonstration
of the fact that contemporary American society could be regarded as a
living model – conveniently laid out for study, as if in a laboratory – of
human society in the “first” or “earliest” stage of its development’.14 The
decisiveness of Lafitau’s impact may seem surprising since his principal
aim – to reassert a Christian eschatology – was far from the minds of
Smith and other Scottish Enlightenment figures. Nonetheless, his work
was recognizably scientific by Enlightenment standards and it provided
an opportunity for the kind of cognitive travel necessary to the Scots’
comparative historical method. And, as we will note, Lafitau’s translation of his travels to the Americas as travels in time foreshadows Smith’s
protective encasement of commercial society behind temporal walls. We
examine Lafitau’s work in the first section of this chapter.
In the second section, we examine in greater detail the shape of
Scottish Enlightenment historiography and the role that encounters with
the Indians play in Smith’s formulation of a ‘conjectural history’ and the
‘four-stages theory’. If Lafitau is anxious to assert a uniform source of
religiosity in the face of religious difference, the Scots control the amazing diversity of forms of human society, both historically and contemporaneously, with the assertion of a uniform and progressive human
nature. Progress in Smith’s hands takes on the form of a stadial theory
of movement through four ascending stages of social and human development. The Amerindians play a crucial role in establishing the content
of the earliest stages of humankind, since they are associated with the
very infancy of human history. The consequences of this move are that
ways of life that differ from Smith’s commercial society are relegated
to the past. As Smith travels cognitively, not only across space, but also
across time, he denies the ‘co-evalness’ of others, eliminating alternative
ways of life as a source of critical reflection on the present. The theory
of development separates, thereby, contemporary (therefore relevant)
political and ethical concerns from those rendered irrelevant by their
association with savagery or barbarism.
Despite Smith’s vigorous effort to mute the voices of the savage past,
we suggest that he also takes up Ashis Nandy’s call for uncovering the
critical implications of time travel. While our cognitive travels need to
14
Meek, Ignoble Savage, p. 57.
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The Savage Smith and the temporal walls of capitalism
differ markedly from the Scottish Enlightenment’s dominant practices,
Smith’s own work reveals echoes that provide resources for contemporary critiques of global capitalism.
Lafitau: to the Indians and back
Like those before him, Father Joseph François Lafitau’s most famous
work, Moeurs des sauvages Ameriquains comparées aux moeurs des premiers
temps [Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times] (1724), struggles to reconcile an understanding of the origins
of the Americans with scriptural claims of the species’ singular origins.15
For us, what distinguishes Lafitau (1681–1746) from others is that he is
recognizably an Enlightenment thinker who has considerable influence
on the Scots.16
Consistent with this picture of Lafitau as an Enlightenment figure,
Fenton and Moore speculate that his early life in the busy port of Bordeaux stimulated his ‘dreams of the New World’ and spurred interest
in missions in North America as well as his later scholarly vocation.17 In
this way, Lafitau is easily associated with a spirit of scientific curiosity
akin to that embraced by the Enlightenment. Others paint a different picture, highlighting Lafitau’s description of his book as an attempt to refute
the work of sceptics like Pierre Bayle, who asserted the mere conventionality of religious belief. This view seems to associate Lafitau more
with an earlier period of dogma.18 The tensions between these views
allows us to paint Lafitau as a liminal figure, occupying a pivotal space
between religious debate and secular and scientific history. While this
characterization accurately captures something about Lafitau, it perhaps
anachronistically overdraws the distinction between religious authority
and scientific history. Lafitau regards science and religion as overlapping
categories so that a move towards a scientifically precise history serves
and enhances religious authority.
15
Joseph François Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of
Primitive Times, Volumes I and II, edited and translated by William N. Fenton and Elizabeth
L. Moore (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1974), pp. 33–34, 327–330. See also Michel de
Certeau, ‘Writing vs. Time: History and Anthropology in the Works of Lafitau’ Yale French
Studies 59–60 (1980), p. 54.
16 Meek, Ignoble Savage, Chapter 4, makes the strongest case for this influence; See also
Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indians and the Origins of Comparative
Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 205.
17 William N. Fenton and Elizabeth L. Moore, ‘Introduction’, in Lafitau, Customs of the
American Indians, p. xxix.
18 See Pagden, Fall, pp. 200–5.
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By the eighteenth century questions about the status and origins of
the Amerindians were far from over, though these controversies flowed
along now familiar contours. Deliberations on the origins of the peoples
of the Americas usually supported the idea of a single creation and necessarily referred to a migration from Asia to the Americas that had been
firmly established in the work of the Jesuit José de Acosta (1540–1600).19
Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590) had shaped the debate
by insisting that barbarism existed in multiple forms, that comparisons
among peoples be given a firm empirical basis, and ‘that all the peoples
of the world could be graded for civility’.20 This final claim spurred
argument, including the important late-seventeenth/early eighteenthcentury ‘Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns’. Does the
ancient world represent a ‘golden age’? Or, does the modern era
promise social and scientific advance beyond all other forms of human
society, including the ancients? This dispute was at its height when
Lafitau studied at seminaries in Pau and Paris.21 The crucial result of
this controversy for his work was the practice of casting ‘“Antiquity” as
a single category’22 applicable to both Amerindians and ancient peoples.
By Lafitau’s time, the practice of drawing extensive parallels between
ancient and contemporary paganism was well established, preparing
the ground for his effort to locate ‘conformities’ across various ‘heathen’
peoples.23
Lafitau’s claims in Customs of the American Indians place him at the
centre of the monogenist tradition, defending the scriptural account
of the unity of creation in the face of the discovery of new lands and
peoples. For Lafitau, this defence required translating the myriad differences offered by the peoples of the New World into a recognizable
register of similarities and differences.24 On the one hand, similarities
are explained via the process of migratory diffusion, by tracing ‘the origins of these peoples in the dark ages of antiquity’.25 As Pagden puts it,
‘new and troubling peoples’ can be assimilated to European understanding by treating them as descendents of Eurasian peoples of whom they
19
This is not to ignore the continued existence of various polygenist theories of dual or
multiple creations well into the eighteenth century.
20 Pagden, Fall, p. 198.
21 Fenton and Moore, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxix and xliii.
22 Pagden, European Encounters, pp. 92–93. See also Certeau, ‘Writing vs. Time’, pp. 45–46,
on the creation of ‘antiquity’ as a category.
23 Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 1959), p. 19.
24 See Fenton and Moore, ‘Introduction’, p. xlvii.
25 Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians I, p. 25.
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The Savage Smith and the temporal walls of capitalism
had knowledge.26 Identifiable similarities between the Amerindians and
ancient peoples are seen as the product of diffusion – of social and linguistic practices moving around the globe along established migratory
paths. Thus, the contemporary Huron and Iroquois reflect, in Lafitau’s
text, vestiges of their origins as Lycians or Spartans. More generally,
the various parallels between ancient religiosity, government and marriage practices vindicate the picture of the Old World origins of the
Americans.27 On the other hand, differences are explained with a familiar claim about decay or degeneration.28 Movement across time and
space (and thereby away from the perfection of creation and the centres of revelation) produces a degeneration of religious practice, moral
belief and linguistic structures. Thus, the decayed state of the Amerindians is verified principally in relation to Christian moral and religious
truths and Eurasian languages. Common origins explain the similarities
between Amerindians and the ancients; the dispersal of humans across
space accounts for their differences.
Lafitau struggled with a second issue that profoundly shaped his text.
More than simply establishing a singular creative episode, he aimed to
establish a singular basis for all religious experience in an original revelatory act.29 His main targets were sceptics who argued that religious
belief emerged simply from social convention or perhaps from fear of
the unknown.30 Lafitau’s effort to place the universality of religious
sentiment on a more secure foundation, one based on God’s creation
and his acts of revelation, led him to insist that the primitive monotheism of the first human social unit – the family formed by Adam and
Eve – be seen as the generative moment for human religiosity.31 Many
ancient and contemporary peoples, without the benefit of continuing
revelations, have strayed from the original path, though a careful examination of their religiosity exposes vestiges of that original monotheism imparted at creation. Here, Lafitau de-emphasizes customs and
26
Pagden, European Encounters, p. 29.
On the Hurons and Iroquois, see Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians I, pp. 67–69.
The entire text is designed to draw ‘conjectures’ based on comparisons of ancient and
Indian practices.
28 Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians I, pp. 30–31, 34–35. See also Inayatullah and
Blaney, International Relations, pp. 50–57.
29 The account in Pagden, Fall, Chapter 8, is especially good.
30 Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians I, p. 29. See also Pagden, Fall, p. 200, and Manuel,
The Eighteenth Century, p. 146.
31 It should be noted that this is also the generative moment of human sociality. See
Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians I, Chapter VI. See also Certeau, ‘Writing vs. Time’,
pp. 54–55.
27
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practices that are particularly vulnerable to degeneration across time
and space, and stresses more the commonalities of imagery and myth.
He locates the deepest commonalities among peoples – ancient and
contemporary, barbarous and civil – in the realm of ‘symbolic representation’, and uses this realm to demonstrate the single and original
inspiration for religious faith.32 In this way, Lafitau places the human
experience in its great variety, across both space and time, within what
he calls a ‘symbolic theology’.33
Enlightenment figures dismissed such ‘anti-rationalist’ conclusions.
Voltaire’s tone is especially mocking but Adam Smith also finds many
of Lafitau’s major conclusions unsound. Though they deride some elements of his method and ignore the sections on religion, Lafitau still
inspires the Scots.34 Lafitau is noteworthy, if for no other reason, than the
near exhaustiveness of his sources. He epitomizes the emerging view,
as Certeau explains,35 that far-flung times and places might be available for the contemporary thinker in the form of collections of material
artifacts and archives of written reports. Exhaustiveness alone, however, is insufficient to recommend Lafitau to Smith and others. Collections and archives remain silent unless their secrets are voiced; meaning
is revealed only when the accumulated vestiges of ancient times and
reports of contemporary peoples are systematically compared. Lafitau
was not the only thinker who works to establish similarities between the
Ancients and the North American Indians. What distinguishes him from
contemporaries is the ‘wide-ranging character’ of the comparisons,36 his
‘scrupulously factual account of the evidence’,37 the ‘tabularization of
ethnographic knowledge into a systematic and comprehensive form’,38
and that he is the ‘most sophisticated and explicit as to his method’.39
Lafitau wishes to avoid the errors of previous authors who rely on
‘imperfect and superficial records only’, resort to ‘conjectures [that] are
so vague and uncertain that they rather give rise to more doubts than
clarifying the existing ones’, and claim linguistic connections based on
a poor knowledge of the languages involved.40 He stresses that his
32 The quoted phrase is from Pagden, Fall, p. 204. See also Fenton and Moore, ‘Introduction’, pp. lxxvi–lxxvii.
33 Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians I, pp. 35–36.
34 Pagden, Fall, pp. 205 and 246 fn. 29.
35 Certeau, ‘Writing vs. Time’, pp. 43–45.
36 Meek, Ignoble Savage, p. 63.
37 Pagden, Fall, p. 201.
38 Ter Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001), p. 65.
39 Fenton and Moore, ‘Introduction’, p. xlviii.
40 Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians I, p. 26.
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The Savage Smith and the temporal walls of capitalism
knowledge is based on personal experience, knowledge of local languages and reliable eye-witness accounts.41 But, most importantly, he
explains how a comparison of the Ancients and the Indians allows us
to understand both much better:
I have not limited myself to learning the characteristics of the Indian
and informing myself about their customs and practices, I have sought
in these practices and customs, vestiges of the most remote antiquity.
I have read carefully [the works] of the earliest writers who treated
the customs, laws and usages of the peoples of whom they had some
knowledge. I have made a comparison of these customs with the other. I
confess that, if the ancient authors have given me information on which
to base happy conjectures about the Indians, the customs of the Indians
have given me information on the basis of which I can understand more
easily and explain more readily many things in the ancient authors.42
The scientific power of this process of comparison comes from the capacity to move back and forth across developmental time. As Anthony
Pagden describes it:
The reflective, informed and ‘sensible’ being possesses the ability to be,
in this [imaginative] way, literally in more places than one. And it is
precisely this capacity for cognitive travel which constitutes his power
of scientific understanding. For all scientific knowledge, and the power
that knowledge brings with it, demands just such movement. And all
movement follows the same trajectory. It begins as going out and ends
as coming back.43
Likewise, Ter Ellingson describes Lafitau’s method of comparison as a
‘time-shifting’ that overcomes geographical distance in order to establish a ‘common kinship’ among peoples.44 That is, the collections and
archives used to document the practices of the Ancients and the Indians (and establish common origins) are understood ‘without recourse
to dates or places’.45 Questions about the historical distance between
forms of paganism or barbarism can be set aside where time is apparently erased. As Certeau explains, ‘The historical question receives
a formalist treatment’: Lafitau draws from a ‘stock of monuments,
piled up without chronological order, elements which are susceptible of
being formally compared and which fit together symbolically as general
categories’.46
41
43
45
42 Ibid., p. 27. See also the description in Pagden, Fall, pp. 198–199.
Ibid., pp. 26–27.
44 Ellingson, Myth, p. 77.
Anthony Pagden, European Encounters, p. 30.
46 Certeau, ‘Writing vs. Time’, p. 47.
Fenton and Moore, ‘Introduction’, p. xlviii.
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By placing antiquity and contemporary barbarism within a common
‘symbolic theology’, Lafitau provides a picture of the Amerindians as
full members of the human species, ‘[m]en being everywhere born with
the same good or bad qualities’.47 In this way, he follows in the footsteps
of earlier Catholic thinkers, Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de las
Casas.48 He rejects as fanciful or prejudiced descriptions of the Indians
as devoid of common features of human society:
I have seen, with extreme distress, in most of the travel narratives,
that those who have written of the customs of primitive peoples have
depicted them to us as people without any sentiment of religion, knowledge of a divinity or object to which they rendered any cult, as people
without law, social control or any form of government; in a word, as
people who have scarcely anything except the appearance of men. This
is a mistake made even by missionaries and honest men who, on the
one hand, have written too hastily of things with which they were not
sufficiently familiar and, on the other, did not foresee the disastrous
consequences which could be drawn from the expression of an opinion
so unfavourable to religion. For, although these authors have contradicted themselves in their works and, at the same time that they say that
these barbarians have neither cult nor a divinity whom they worship,
they also say things, as Mr. Bayle himself has observed, which presuppose a divinity and a regulated cult. It results, nevertheless, (from this),
that we are prejudiced by the first statement and become accustomed
to forming a conception of these Indian and barbarians which scarcely
differentiates them from beasts.49
Here, Lafitau is far from locating the Amerindians in a golden age,
placing them in some privileged place in relation to a natural state of
humankind; nor does he characterize the Indians as degenerated or
beastly. Indeed, at times Lafitau compares the Indians quite favourably
with his contemporary Europeans, especially regarding manly virtues.50
Lafitau instead achieves a series of careful observations about Indian
societies. Some of Lafitau’s reports – on age-grades, kinship relations and the position of women in Indian societies – are considered
quite acute and unsurpassed by professional anthropologists until the
47
Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians II, p. 299. See also Customs I, pp. 89–91.
See our discussion of Vitoria in Inayatullah and Blaney, International Relations, pp. 58–
65, 81–82. On las Casas see Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the
Other (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), Chapter 3 and pp. 185–193.
49 Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians I, pp. 28–29.
50 See also Pagden, Fall, p. 202; Ellingson, Myth, pp. 78–79
48
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The Savage Smith and the temporal walls of capitalism
nineteenth, or perhaps even twentieth, centuries.51 However, because
Lafitau’s project revolves around restoring the original unity of all religious experience and a defence of the possibility of missionary activity, it
remains at some distance from the central concerns of his Enlightenment
contemporaries, as we shall see.
A second implication of his method extends well beyond his explicit
project and better explains Lafitau’s role in Enlightenment historiography. Certeau’s revealing claim, that Lafitau replaces the Bible with his
historical system, gives us an initial hint of that importance.52 In the
Christian worldview, time is given meaning only via the actions of an
‘external agent’ – God the creator and mover of history towards its final
end. Temporal events or secular history necessarily gain meaning only
via ‘subordination to eschatology’.53 Nonetheless, this ‘millenarian formula’ lacks the ‘means of explicating the succession of particulars in
social and political time’ and the emerging imperative is to fill that
gap with a natural philosophy rooted in careful observation of human
experience.54 Lafitau might be seen as a transitional figure in relation to
that imperative. Despite his ostensive religious motivations, he makes a
‘scientific gesture’, setting himself apart from ‘his social ties and attachments’ and placing himself in the position of an autonomous observer
and producer of a system of knowledge.55 In this, Lafitau represents
an ‘enticing’ image of scientific practice, seducing us with its claim to
overcome the diversities and discontinuities of time in order thereby ‘to
produce the formal system of an absolute knowledge’.56 It is this aspect
of Lafitau’s work that appeals to the Scots. Though they were likely
to distance themselves from his ‘immediate polemical intention’, they
were drawn to the notion that locating the ancients and contemporary
primitives at the beginning of time could help explain the patterns of
human behaviour, namely, by suggesting ‘that all human cultures could
be interpreted as the workings out in time of certain known and stable
characteristics of the human mind’.57 Or, as Fenton and Moore explain,
though Lafitau ‘was neither historical nor evolutionary in the strictest
51
Fenton and Moore, ‘Introduction’, pp. cvii–cxix; Martha Haroun Foster, ‘Lost Women
of the Matriarchy: Iroquois Women in the Historical Literature’ American Indians Culture
and Research Journal 19 (1999), pp. 122–124.
52 Certeau, ‘Writing vs. Time’, p. 54.
53 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic
Republican Tradition (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 31–32.
54 Ibid., pp. 47–48.
55 Certeau, ‘Writing vs. Time’, pp. 53–54.
56 Ibid., pp. 59–60. See also Fenton and Moore, ‘Introduction’, pp. lxiv–lxv.
57 Pagden, Fall, p. 208.
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sense of these terms’, he contributed ‘documentation to substantiate the
“law” of progress’.58
Though treated as a substantial achievement by the Scots, our reaction to his work foreshadows our response to the historiography
of the Scottish Enlightenment. His practice of ‘time-shifting’ forces
an understanding of the Amerindians (and the Ancients) into terms
that are his alone.59 Travel outward to the Indians and the Ancients
requires travel back to the self, with considerable damage to his understanding of the particular and distinct histories of both. As Certeau
evocatively puts it, Lafitau’s comparison ‘silences’ both the ancients
and the savages.60 If Lafitau travels out and then back, he devalues the
goods – the vestiges of antiquity and the reports of the new world – on
the way home. More hopefully, we might say, he brings home collections
and archives whose secrets wait to be sufficiently voiced.
Smith and the Indians: time, space and
moral science
The Scottish Enlightenment is noted for its distinctive variant of the doctrine of progress: Smith’s ‘conjectural history’ and the ‘four-stages theory’. Though ‘conjectural history’ builds on Lafitau’s work, Smith’s use
of this technique diverges in a crucial respect. Where Lafitau embraces
a scientific method to give credibility to a particular eschatological
scheme, Smith embraces science as a modern calling that sets the modern apart from the superstitions of the past. If God remained a concern,
it was as the rather distant ‘author’ of creation, constructing a natural
order the laws of which humankind might discern.61 In that quest to
comprehend the natural order, human beings assumed a central place
in the creation (if not quite authorship) of their own world.62 However,
Smith and Lafitau converge at another point. For both, the new peoples
and continents ‘discovered’ and ‘explored’ by Europeans were sources
58
Fenton and Moore, ‘Introduction’, p. xliv. See also Meek, Ignoble Savage, pp. 54 and 61.
60 Certeau, ‘Writing vs. Time’, p. 63.
Pagden, European Encounters, p. 53.
61 Adam Smith, ‘The History of Astronomy’ in Wightman and Bryce (eds.), Essays on
Philosophical Subjects, pp. 48–53. See also D. D. Raphael, ‘Adam Smith: Philosophy, Science
and Social Science’ in Stuart C. Brown (ed.), Philosophers of the Enlightenment (Atlantic
Highlands NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), pp. 77–93, and Andrew Skinner, ‘Economics and
History – The Scottish Enlightenment’ Scottish Journal of Political Economy 12 (1965), p. 22.
62 Robert Wokler, ‘Anthropology and Conjectural History in the Enlightenment’ in
Christopher Fox, Roy Porter and Robert Wokler (eds.), Inventing Human Science: EighteenthCentury Domains (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 33–34.
59
134
The Savage Smith and the temporal walls of capitalism
of some anxiety. The Scots, like Lafitau, needed to make the amazing
diversity of peoples and societies consistent with the principles of a
natural order.63 In their minds, managing this diversity required the
kinds of travel associated with the scientific practice of comparative or
‘conjectual history’.
The Scots imagined themselves living in a scientific age. Newton’s
knowledge of a world of bodies subject to laws inspired a search for similar laws governing human behaviour and institutions. Francis Bacon,
perhaps more than any other, articulated what was also Newton’s intuition – that natural and moral science might advance in step. Bacon’s
mapping of knowledge – rooted in ‘the three faculties of Memory, Imagination, and Reason, to which corresponded the three divisions of human
learning’, namely ‘history, poetry and philosophy’ – inspired the Scots
to create a moral science or a natural philosophy with human beings at
its centre. 64
For the Scots, as for Enlightenment thinking more generally, a ‘science
of man’ was necessarily an empirical science, rooted in experience and
evidence. Since the Scots began with the assumption that humans are
social beings, the evidence on which to base a science of man might be
drawn from numerous sources, reflecting societies far-flung in time and
space. The evidence available might be personal, rooted in the thinkers’
own experience or it might come to them via Bacon’s ‘Memory’. The
latter made available vast amounts of ‘indirect and secondary’ material
about ‘the contemporary “savage” world of the Americas, Asia and
Polynesia and the world described by ancient authors’.65
What the Scots saw in the recorded evidence of human societies was
a complex picture of amazing diversity, but this very diversity potentially stood in opposition to a moral or civic science on a Newtonian
plan.66 Part of the solution was to locate recurring patterns in human
societies. Following the example of Montesquieu perhaps, the social
thinker would identify the common chains of causes and effects that
explained these patterns.67 The assumption, as we noted above, ‘was
63
The importance of the problem of diversity for the Scots is stressed by Christopher J.
Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1997), Chapter 4.
64 Ibid., pp. 52–53.
65 We draw here on Berry, Social Theory, pp. 52–54, 61; the quotation is from p. 61.
66 Michael J. Shapiro, Reading ‘Adam Smith’: Desire, History, and Value (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), p. 48 and Berry, Social Theory, pp. 74– 75, remark on the potentially paradoxical relationship of the evidence and the scientific ambition.
67 See Berry, Social Theory, Chapter 3; David Carrithers, ‘The Enlightenment Science of
Society’, in Fox, Porter and Wokler (eds.), Inventing Human Science, pp. 243–244.
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that everything in society and history, just like everything in the physical realm, was bound together by an intricate concatenation of causes
and effects which it is the main task of the student of man and society –
i.e. the social scientist – to unravel’.68
Thus, for the Scots a science of man required the telling of tales – the
writing of historical narratives and articulating a ‘project’ of profound
‘philosophical speculation, so as to incorporate all this disparate material into a truly philosophical account’.69 Travel narratives, including
Lafitau’s, could serve as no more than ‘raw material’ or, perhaps, inspiration. Even the noted chains of causes and effects do not alone produce
a moral science of the kind Smith and the other Scots envisioned. Rather,
the social thinker must turn these causal chains to the purpose of telling
a historical story with a clear moral point. Minimally, this requires finding a kind of cause that will explain the great uniformity they see (or
seek) in human societies. As Andrew Skinner notes: ‘The key to this
problem was found, as Hume had insisted it must be, in the constant
and universal principles of human nature.’70 With a given set of characteristics of human nature – ‘Hume lists ambition, avarice, self-love,
vanity, friendship, generosity and public spirit’ – the Scots could identify patterns that operate regardless of context. In this way, ‘[a]ll human
behavior, even if it has a “local” character, is explicable because it is
governed by regular springs which have uniform effects’.71
However, the evidence still suggested a great variation in forms of
human society. Though these might be explained as the consequence of
placing a fixed human nature in varying physical settings (i.e. variations
in climate and fertility of the soil), the Scots resisted the potentially
relativistic implications of such an approach – that the social theorist can
say little beyond that differences in geography produce different forms
of society.72 For Smith and the Scots, a moral science produces practical
guidance about the direction of human society; about where, reflecting
68
69 Pagden, European Encounters, pp. 84–85.
Meek, Ignoble Savage, p. 1.
Skinner, ‘Natural History in the Age of Adam Smith’ Political Studies XV (1967), p. 41.
71 Berry, Social Theory, p. 69.
72 Montesquieu’s employment of physical causes – climate, geography – might well
reduce the clutter of empirical evidence, but the Scots believed that Montesquieu’s scheme
failed to provide a clear basis for making moral distinctions. On Montesquieu, see Ernst
Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston: Beacon, 1951), pp. 210–215. For the
Scots’s reaction, see Fania Oz-Salzberger, ‘The Political Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment’ in Alexander Broadie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to The Scottish Enlightenment
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 170–171.
70
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The Savage Smith and the temporal walls of capitalism
the Scottish Enlightenment’s teleological moment, human society must
necessarily and appropriately go.73
Thus, the Scots add a crucial second element: the idea that human
nature itself contains an impetus to progress. Human beings, as distinct
from (other) animals, seek to improve their condition and capabilities –
a condition Smith believes ‘comes with us from the womb’.74 The interaction between a common human nature and varying circumstances
came to be seen, then, in a much different way. Though variable climate
and geography may be of some importance, the key differences in the
environment are those humans themselves create. The Scots argued that
man, following his natural propensities, inevitably produces results
well beyond his original intentions; that man, in reacting to a particular
situation, must ultimately produce a qualitative change thus creating
a new situation within which the same forces must operate.75
History takes on a decisively progressive direction and the diversity of
social forms can be understood as variations in degrees of progress. In
this move, difference is read along a temporal register. Historical and
contemporary diversity is no longer understood principally in terms of
differences in the character of the spaces they occupy. Rather, differences
across societies in the ancient or contemporary world may be thought
of as products of uneven development.76 History is given a new moral
reading – as ‘a repository of exemplars, for good or for evil’.77 Thus,
barbarism and superstition, whether contemporary or past, may be put
safely behind, as superceded time. And Smith, as we will see, regards
this temporal register as stadial, involving movement through clearly
discernable and ascending stages.
Adam Smith famously describes those stages in his lectures of 1762–3.
Smith outlines four stages – ‘1st , the Age of Hunters; 2dly, the Age of
73
See Donald Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Richard E. Teichgraeber, III, ‘Free Trade’
and Moral Philosophy: Rethinking the Sources of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (Durham NC:
Duke University Press, 1986); and Samuel Fleischacker, On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations:
A Philosophical Companion (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
74 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin
Cannan (Chicago University of Chicago: Press, 1976), p. 362 [II.iii].
75 Skinner, ‘Economics and History’, p. 5.
76 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 486–487, notes that this move translates the components of cyclical theories of history into theories of progress.
77 Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 6
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Shepherds; 3rdly, the Age of Agriculture; and 4thly, the Age of Commerce’78 – as part of an historical understanding of property rights. He
rejects the idea that property is among the ‘naturall rights’. Rather, the
most powerful ‘causes from which property may have its occasion’,
namely ‘Occupation, by which we get any thing into our power that
was not the property of one before’, varies in its importance depending
on the form of society.79 Smith explains this principle at some length:
In Tartary, where as we said the support of the inhabitants consist(s)
in herds and flocks, theft is punished with immediate death; in North
America, again, where the age of hunters subsists, theft is not much
regarded. As there is almost no property amongst them, the only injury
that can be done them is depriving them of their game. Few laws or regulations will [be] requisite in such an age of society, and these will not
extend to any length, or be very rigorous in the punishments annexed
to any infringements of property. . . . In the age of agriculture, they
are not so much exposed to theft and open robbery [as are herds and
flocks], but then there are many ways added in which property may
be interrupted as the subjects of it are considerably extended. The laws
therefore tho perhaps not so rigorous will be of a far greater number
than amongst a nation of shepherds. In the age of commerce, as the
subjects of property are greatly increased the laws must be proportionately multiplied. The more improved any society is and the greater
length the severall means of supporting the inhabitants are carried,
the greater will be the number of their laws and regulations necessary
to maintain justice, and prevent infringement of the right to property.80
In addition, variations in the rules governing occupation of land, ownership of houses, forms of exchange and inheritance practices correspond
to the modes of subsistence that characterize the successive ‘Ages’ of
man.81
The Scots are hardly the first to deploy the idea of ‘ages’ of human
progress, but the distinctiveness of Smith’s ‘four-stages theory’ is worth
emphasizing. First, each stage corresponds to a particular mode of
acquiring subsistence or, in a later language, a mode of production.
Second, as human societies advance through these successive modes,
we can expect corresponding changes (or, generally, improvements) in
institutions, laws and manners.82 Human society gradually loses its
78
Adam Smith, ‘Report of 1762–3’, in R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael and P. G. Stein (eds.),
Lectures on Jurisprudence (Indianapolis IN: Liberty Fund, 1982), p. 14 (para. 27).
79 Smith, ‘Report of 1762–3’, p. 13 (paras. 25–26).
80 Ibid., p. 16 (paras. 33–35).
81 Ibid., pp. 14–49 (paras. 27–115).
82 See Meek, Ignoble Savage, p. 2; Skinner, ‘Natural History’, pp. 42–45; Berry, Social Theory,
pp. 93–99.
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The Savage Smith and the temporal walls of capitalism
rudeness; as the arts and industry advance so are the individuals in
society refined.83 Some, like Ronald Meek, see this formulation as a precursor to Marx’s historical materialism,84 but our current purpose is
less to trace out such influences than to examine the logic of ‘conjectural
history’.
‘Conjectural history’ rests on a combination of methodological
principles: (1) the use of systematic comparison; (2) conjectures,
premised on assimilating ancient peoples and contemporary savages
as a single coeval category; and (3) the equation of human infancy with
savagery. We have noted that careful employment of historical comparisons gave eighteenth-century social thinkers’ work the status of science:
comparison reveals patterns of commonality and difference that serve
as the building blocks in the isolation of causal chains that reveal the
orderly character of human society. For Smith and the Scots, human history is a series of social experiments that might be compared.85 Though
comparison might, thereby, facilitate ranking of the relative achievements of societies in various arenas of human endeavour, it does not yet
justify the claims of a stage theory. Elaborating human history as a series
of stages requires recourse to the second and third principles, allowing
a series of carefully constructed, albeit ‘a priori conjectures’.86
The claim that Scottish Enlightenment thinkers deployed ‘conjectures’
has a long history. It is found first in Dugald Stewart’s short biography of
Adam Smith (1793).87 For Stewart, the challenge faced by Smith was to
trace the entire history of human progress from its origins to the present.
However, the historian faces a seemingly insurmountable constraint:
the lack of any direct evidence of the early times of human society. This
absence must be filled by conjecture. As Stewart explains:
In this want of direct evidence, we are under a direct necessity of
supplying the place of fact by conjecture; and when we are unable
to ascertain how men have actually conducted themselves upon particular occasions, of considering in what manner they are likely to have
proceeded, from the principles of their nature, and the circumstances
83
Ibid., pp. 180–181.
Ronald L. Meek, ‘The Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology’ in J. Saville (ed.),
Democracy and the Labour Movement (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1954), pp. 84–102.
85 Berry, Social Theory, pp. 62–63, attributes this idea to Hume but notes its influence also
on Smith, John Millar, Lord Kames and William Robertson.
86 Aaron Garrett, ‘Anthropology: the “Original” of Human Nature’, in Broadie (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to The Scottish Enlightenment, p. 81.
87 Dugald Stewart, ‘An Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, L. L. D.’ in
Wightman and Bryce (eds.), Essays on Philosophical Subjects, pp. 269–351.
84
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of their external situation. In such inquiries, the detached facts which
travels and voyages afford us, may frequently serve as land-marks to
our speculations; and sometimes our conclusions a priori, may tend to
confirm the credibility of facts, which, on a superficial view, appeared
to be doubtful or incredible.88
Stewart referred to ‘this species of philosophical investigation’ as ‘Theoretical or Conjectural History’.89
This is not to disparage Smith for a cavalier attitude toward evidence,
but to examine how Smith was able to translate the amazing diversity
of ‘facts’ available to him into a stadial theory of history. Our discussion of Lafitau suggests part of the answer. Lafitau’s assimilation of
contemporary Indians with the ancients allowed ‘facts’ about each to
inform an understanding of the other. His example was crucial in Smith’s
effort to discern the nature of early human societies, and Smith turned
directly to Lafitau for evidence about the Amerindians.90 If the peoples
of the ancient world, particularly the various barbarous groups, and the
contemporary savages could be placed on the same temporal register,
then Smith could begin to delineate a common stage of human progress
(or lack thereof) exhibited by barbarians/savages. Thus, the Amerindians became exemplary of the ‘savage’ and works like Lafitau’s became
definitive sources on that stage of human development.
Lafitau hints at the possibility that various ancient peoples and current
North American Indians might be similarly placed at the very beginnings of human history. There was certainly a precedent for this since
Locke had declared: ‘in the beginning all the World was America’.91
Smith himself, as Dugald Stewart noted, provided a philosophical basis
for this claim.92 In ‘Considerations Concerning the First Formation of
Languages’, Smith begins with a thought experiment meant to illustrate the origins of language. Imagine two ‘savages’, he asks, somehow
isolated from society and without language. The savages ‘would naturally begin to form that language by which they would endeavor to
make their mutual wants intelligible to each other, by uttering certain
sounds, whenever they meant to denote certain objects’. Smith prods
the reader to follow his surmise (conjecture) that, as with infants, the
88
89 Ibid.
Ibid., p. 293.
See Berry, Social Theory, pp. 62–64; Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 501; Meek, Ignoble
Savage, Chapter 4.
91 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), II, p. 301.
92 Stewart, ‘An Account’, pp. 292–293. The role of conjectural theories of language is
discussed by Pagden, European Encounters, pp. 129–140.
90
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The Savage Smith and the temporal walls of capitalism
beginnings of language would be restricted to a process of nomination, a stream of proper names for ‘concrete’ objects. Only later would
our savages begin to learn and apply ‘a considerable degree of abstraction and generalization’.93 The analogy of childhood and savagery was
powerful; it allowed Smith and his fellow Scots to treat materials about
the Indians as evidence of the ‘infancy of society’.94 Combined with the
historical optimism built into the idea of a progressive human nature,
barbarism/savagery could be seen as the initial stage in human societies’ development from infancy to maturity. Where England, France
and, potentially, Scotland serve as exemplary of human maturity, human
progress also may be read backwards – from a commercial society to its
earlier origins.
For the Scots the savage operates as a ‘mirror’ against which they
assess the progress of their own and other commercial societies. In The
Wealth of Nations, it is the paltry livelihood of the savage that serves as
the basis of comparison when assessing the distributional consequences
of a developed division of labour:
Among the savage nations of hunters and fishers, every individual
who is able to work, is more or less employed in useful labour, and
endeavors to provide, as well as he can, the necessaries and conveniences of life, for himself, or such of his family or tribe as are either
too old, or too young, or too infirm to go a hunting and fishing. Such
nations, however, are so miserably poor, that from mere want, they are
frequently reduced, or, at least, think themselves reduced, to the necessity sometimes of directly destroying, and sometimes of abandoning
their infants, their old people, and those inflicted with lingering disease, to perish with hunger, or to be devoured by wild beasts. Among
civilized and thriving nations, on the contrary, though a great number
of people do not labor at all, many of whom consume the produce of
ten times, frequently of a hundred times more labour than the greater
part of those who work; yet the produce of the whole labour of the society is so great, that all are often abundantly supplied, and a workman,
even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious,
may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniences of life
than it is possible for any savage to acquire.95
93
Adam Smith, ‘Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages’ in Adam
Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J. C. Bryce (Indianapolis IN: Liberty Fund,
1985), pp. 203–206.
94 Berry, Social Theory, p. 92.
95 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 2 [Introduction]; see also Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 16
[I,I] and ‘Report of 1762–3’, Lectures on Jurisprudence, p. 338 [VI, 19]. Donald Winch, Riches
and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge:
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Where the division of labour distinguishes civilized society, savage society is conceived as ‘the absence of division of labor’.96 The rude, the
savage, and the barbarous stand in almost polar opposition to the commercial, the civilized. And, we would assert, a stadial account of human
development becomes possible because filling in the intermediate steps
is easier once you ‘know’ the beginning and the end.97
In this way, Smith and the Scots develop ‘conjectural history’ as a
moral science. Human improvement, though the product of individual
action (within the bounds set by human nature), produces social and
moral advance. Not only are patterns of social and moral advance visible to scientific inquiry, but scientific inquiry itself is seen to be a product
of this process of human development, superceding ‘superstition, ignorance and dogma’.98 A human science diagnoses the mysteries of the
past and simultaneously provides an account of its own power to discern those mysteries. This is done without asserting the role of some
external agent in history. All that is required is the gradual, but persistent, operation of human nature: moral advance is produced without
plan or conscious design. The order that social inquiry discerns is spontaneously generated – the ‘harmonious movements’ of an ‘immense
machine’.99
Our difficulties with Smith’s moral science partly parallel those we
locate in Lafitau. Like Lafitau, Smith shifts time, so that the Indians,
though contemporaneous, appear instead as exemplary of some initial
age of human society. Understood only in contradistinction to modern, civilized society, the Indians do not speak in their own terms;
their histories are submerged under the historical constructions of the
Enlightenment scientist. Indian self-understandings and their views of
European societies are muted. The Indians do not speak, and unlike
Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 59, comments on this consistent pattern of comparison.
96 David P. Levine, Economic Studies: Contributions to the Critique of Economic Theory
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 37.
97 Perhaps this explains why we find the ‘four stages theory’ less of a mystery than does
Pocock, though he does argue that the ‘concept of barbarism’ was crucial to the formation
of that theory. See J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought
and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985), pp. 115–116.
98 Roger Smith, ‘The Language of Human Nature’, in Fox, Porter and Wokler (eds.),
Inventing Human Science, pp. 100–101.
99 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 316 [VII.iii.I.2]. On the Scots’ embrace of spontaneous order, see Naeem Inayatullah, ‘Theories of Spontaneous Order’ Review of International Political Economy 4 (1997), 319–348.
142
The Savage Smith and the temporal walls of capitalism
Lafitau, Smith does not try to humanize them. While Lafitau incorporates the Indians into the wholeness of human social life, Smith’s
‘conjectural history’ works to position Indians as no more than the
foundational bedrock from which he pushes off his universal moral
story.
Ernst Cassirer suggests that all Enlightenment thinking struggled
with the problem of the relationship between the general and the particular.100 We have seen the Scots searching for principles that would allow
them to reduce the diversity of experience to general patterns. Indeed,
for the Scottish Enlightenment, ‘the reduction of the diversity of institutions to some intelligible pattern’ is precisely ‘the hallmark of successful
social science’. This reduction serves an essential moral purpose in that it
is not the particular but the universal that garners ethical significance.101
The universal pattern of human history shown in Smith’s ‘four-stages
theory’ provides a moral and practical basis for assessing encounters
between self and others. Diversity, particularly the diversity of political
and ethical views, is contained by temporal displacement; other forms of
life become a backward form of contemporary civilization. As Michael
Shapiro notes, in Smith the rich diversity of ‘the ordinary’ is obscured
by the emphasis on the ‘exemplary’.102 In this way, the ‘exemplary’ is
given the power to drown out the voices of the diverse particularities
of human existence.
In addition, Smith’s ‘four-stages theory’ translates the diversity associated with a geo-cultural mapping of space into developmental time.
Smith normally maps these geo-cultural spaces onto what he calls
‘nations’ – a term describing any social unit from tribes to empires. Adjacent nations in Europe may exist in the same advanced temporal stage or
may be separated in time by uneven processes of development. Nations
far in physical distance from Europe might lay quite near to Europe
temporally (e.g. China), though most of the rest of the world was seen
as far-flung both spatially and temporally. However, the paradigmatic
case, as seen above, opposes the social space of a developed, civilized
Europe to savage or barbarous spaces in Africa, Asia and the Americas.
Smith’s primary project in The Wealth of Nations is to explain the differences in wealth associated with this temporal distance between savage and civilized nations (and, secondarily, those falling in between).
What he does not explicitly allow, as we show below, is an overlap of
100
102
101 Berry, Social Theory, pp. 76, 88.
Cassirer, Enlightenment, p. 197.
Shapiro, Reading ‘Adam Smith’, p. 57.
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temporal boundaries. In this way, Smith effects a compartmentalization
of time into distinct national units, a Westphalianization of developmental time.
Combining the previous two points, we can begin to understand
how Smith barricades modern commercial society within a temporal/ethical fortress. Both time and space operate as a set of boundaries
that demarcate ‘nations’ by developmental level. Where moral judgment
is informed by a stage-theory of history, the institutions and practices
of the civilized serve as the basis for evaluating those of temporally
backward nations. This results in the present, as the height of human
historical achievement, being protected from potentially critical values
and visions of seemingly past societies. As long as the boundary between
the civilized and the savage remains clearly in place, the values of a commercial society automatically take precedence: its values – wealth, social
refinement – remain thereby the basis for assessing other (superceded)
forms of life as well as for judging its own successes and failures. In this
way, a commercial society can only be evaluated as failing or succeeding
in its own terms – by failing to provide wealth or refinement. Thus, even
a critique of the present validates that current forms of societies occupy
a superior temporal position.103
Like Lafitau, Smith ‘believed that traveling in space also meant traveling in time’.104 This equation of time and space makes sense where
the ‘four-stages theory’ rules the understanding of history. The social
theorist moves through the ages of man as he consults contemporary
narratives of faraway places. This is conceptual movement, since, as
we have noted, Smith did not travel physically to the places he arrayed
along a temporal register. As Pagden evocatively puts it, Enlightenment
historians traveled from ‘text to text’, searching for truthful witnesses
whose evidence might prove exemplary of the patterns of history.105
Along the way, Smith places other contemporary societies into a time
different from his own. We see this practice as exemplary of the dominant patterns of Enlightenment Modernity, infusing a temporocentrism
into much of contemporary social theory and practice.106 This denial of
103 Shapiro, Reading ‘Adam Smith’, p. 52; See also Oz-Salzberger, ‘Political Theory’, pp.
169–170.
104 Christopher Fox, ‘Introduction. How to Prepare a Noble Savage: The Spectacle of
Human Science’, in Fox, Porter and Wokler (eds.), Inventing Human Science, p. 16.
105 Pagden, European Encounters, p. 86
106 See Inayatullah and Blaney, International Relations, pp. 99–102. We draw on Johannes
Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
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The Savage Smith and the temporal walls of capitalism
the ‘co-presence’ of others serves to shield modern society from external criticism. It also purges all versions of global democracy that resist
assimilation to a distinctly modern pattern. Those who exemplify the
pinnacle of human history comprise a chronocratic elite; their travels,
whether real or conceptual, serve to confirm their status as scientists and
purveyors of practical wisdom. However, this is only one aspect of the
story, since, as we suggest in the next section, ‘co-presence’ is the ‘real’
of travel – something that the traveller both avoids and desires. Travel
anxiety produces a double effect: it is what the traveller avoids in order
to contain co-presence’s potential criticism; and it is what the traveller
seeks so that co-presence can catalyze critical self-consciousness.107
The Savage within the walls of political economy
Such critical consciousness hardly seems germane for Smith, for whom
history tends to assume a ‘providentialist’ guise.108 Smith’s quietism is
due, in part, to the influence of the Stoics, who he describes approvingly:
The Stoics were of the opinion, that as the world was governed by the
all-ruling providence of a wise, powerful, and good God, every single
event ought to be regarded, as making a necessary part of the plan of the
universe, and as tending to promote the general order and happiness
of the whole: that the vices and follies of mankind, therefore, made as
necessary a part of this plan as their wisdom or their virtue; and by
that eternal art which educes good from ill, were made to tend equally
to the prosperity and perfection of the great system of nature.109
As Smith moves from the events of the cosmos to those of society,
the theological hue of this passage shifts to a kind of mystic science.
Smith attests that ‘[h]uman society, when we contemplate it in a certain abstract and philosophical light, appears like a great, an immense
107 We draw on Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 24–25; Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative:
Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 31; and
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge,
1992), pp. 6–7.
108 Skinner, ‘Economics and History’, p. 22 and Shapiro, Reading ‘Adam Smith’, pp. xix–
xxx, 50. But see also the contrary view of Fleischacker, On Adam Smith’s Wealth of
Nations, pp. 44–45.
109 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 36 [I,ii,3,4]. Smith’s view has been described as a
kind of Christian stoicism by Ingrid A. Merikoski, ‘The Challenge of Material Progress:
The Scottish Enlightenment and Christian Stoicism’ The Journal of the Historical Society II
(2002), 60–65.
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machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects’.110 Despite this confidence in the beneficial effects
of history, Smith is ‘haunted’, as Richard Teichgraeber describes it, by
the ‘moral shortcomings in commercial society’.111
Haunted as he might be, and despite the fact that Smith gives substantial play to the failings of commercial society, we see Smith working to restore the dominance of the salutary historical narrative after
every notably critical discussion. The transition from savagery to civilization is not always a complete progression; at numerous points,
the time of the other disturbs the temporal confidence and security
of commercial society, though commercial society is consistently vindicated in direct comparison. In particular, Smith recognizes that commercial society is weakest in its impact on the great masses of common
labourers. Nonetheless, he goes to great lengths to show that a commercial society improves the lives of common people. In the end, simple
reforms readily meliorate the weakness; commercial society is always
vindicated. Still, as we shall see, some of Smith’s comparisons leave
open greater space for a critical treatment of modern capitalism than he
admits.
These rather serious cracks in his temporal fortress are necessarily
present. If a benign God rules the world, and human society runs like
a beneficial machine, then even the sinful and unnatural are parts of a
grand design. The difficulty associated with the Amerindians becomes
not so much that they sin against God and conscience, as was the case
for many prominent thinkers of earlier centuries, but how to account for
their appearance within the historical machine. The problem is not what
to do about the Indians in a practical sense, but how to account for them
philosophically. Smith verges on tautology here. If even folly and vice
produce agreeable effects, can there be anything that does not somehow
produce order? Are there events or actions whose difference the machine
cannot assimilate? Verging on tautology, as we shall see, is not the same
as producing a tautological system; despite our intentions, something
always escapes our desire and capacity to tame. Indeed, Smith falls short
of meeting the full requirements of his Stoic leanings: his time travel
highlights some advantages held by the savages and he implies that the
past and the future are underspecified and therefore more open-ended
than supposed by his explicit commitments.
110
111
Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 316 [VII.iii.1.2].
Teichgraeber, ‘Free Trade’, p. 128.
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The Savage Smith and the temporal walls of capitalism
Though Smith assumes that nations may be placed easily along a
temporal hierarchy of development, the overlap of spatial and temporal boundaries disallows an easily manageable and predictable moral
cartography. The simplest example is that of the Scottish Highlanders
who are European spatially but can be equated with the Amerindians temporally. Lacking in division of labour, wealth and refinement,112
the Highlands appear as an ‘ethnological hinterland’113 or ‘sociological museum’.114 Though seemingly incorporated within the schema of
‘conjectural history’, the ‘backwardness’ of the Scottish Highlands is
more troubling because of its spatial and psychological closeness. Scottish universities had flourished for a century or more. The union with
England helped spur economic advancement in lowland cities to the
extent that Scottish Enlightenment figures would think of lowland Scotland as a commercial society. Most important, Scottish thinking had
likely surpassed that of England in its importance. Nevertheless, speaking an odd English and living among a less than refined populace, the
Scots could not quite shake the sense of themselves as provincial.115
If the Highlanders could be equated with a savage state of mankind,
they were an other painfully near.116 These perhaps internal others also
offered examples of the kind of generosity, martial spirit and sense of
honour that seemed eclipsed by commercial society.
The overlapping of temporal boundaries is seen most forcefully when
Smith blurs the analogy between infancy and savagery that informs his
own stage theory. Despite his tendency to oppose the sentiments of the
savage and the (civilized) moral philosopher, as we saw above, Smith
also suggests their overlap:
A Child caresses the fruit that is agreeable to it, as it beats the stone
that hurts it. The notions of a savage are not very different. The ancient
Athenians, who solemnly punished the axe which had accidentally
been the cause of the death of a man, erected altars, and offered sacrifices to the rainbow. Sentiments not unlike these, may sometimes,
112 Smith, ‘Report of 1762–3’, Lectures on Jurisprudence, pp. 107, 146, 380; ‘Report Dated
1766’, Lectures on Jurisprudence, pp. 540–41; Wealth of Nations, pp. 21–22 [I, iii], 88–89 [I,
viii].
113 Jerry A Muller, Adam Smith, in His Time and Ours (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999) pp. 22–23.
114 Andrew Skinner, ‘Natural History’, p. 37.
115 We draw on Berry, Social Theory, Chapter 1; Muller, Adam Smith, Chapter 1; and Roger
Emerson, ‘The Contexts of the Scottish Enlightenment’ in Broadie (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 9–30.
116 Robert Shillam refers to this as a ‘psychology of backwardness’. See his Chapter 9 in
this book.
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upon such occasions, begin to be felt even in the breasts of the most
civilized, but are presently checked by the reflection, that the things
are not their proper objects.117
Here Smith duplicates Lafitau’s method of equating savages and
ancients and reinforces the analogy to infancy. Simultaneously, however, Smith provides a moment where the sentiments of the child, the
savage and the ancient are co-present ‘in the breasts of the most civilized’. Overlaps between self and other, inside and outside, developed
and developing ages/stages erupt within Westphalianized time. Here
we have a problem that engages Smith’s energies; he seems anxious
about whether such trespassing sentiments will be smoothed by the
social machine.
Despite this disclosure, Smith equivocates; he claims that a refinement
of manners naturally accompanies the advance of human society. Commercial society’s normal operations should promote a balance among
the passions, thereby generating the qualities of self-command: moderation, generosity, humility and frugality.118 And yet, because he seems
less than confident that the smoothing effect of the social machine will
extend to all within society, Smith devotes considerable energy to making sure that the passions will indeed be balanced and that his preferred
virtues will in fact emerge.
For example, he worries about religious zealotry and factionalism. In
early stages of development factions do not consolidate because people
are divided into hundreds and thousands of sects. In modern societies,
however, the state must consider that
[t]he interested and active zeal of religious teachers can be dangerous
and troublesome only where there is, either but one sect tolerated in
the society, or where the whole of a larger society is divided into two
or three great sects; the teachers of each acting by concert, and under
regular discipline and subordination.119
To ameliorate the problems of ‘faction and fanaticism’, which ‘have
always been by far the greatest corrupters’,120 Smith turns to the visible hand of political intervention. He pins his hopes on public education
and public entertainment. The most important intervention is the promotion of ‘the study of science and philosophy’. For Smith, ‘[s]cience is
117
118
119
120
Smith, ‘History of Astronomy’, pp. 48–49 [III.2]. Emphasis added.
Muller, Adam Smith, p. 95 and Teichgraeber, ‘Free Trade’, pp. 13–14.
Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 314 [V.I.iii].
Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 156 [III, 3, 43].
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The Savage Smith and the temporal walls of capitalism
the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition’. Where
the cool and abstract light of philosophical reflection fails, which it will
for many, Smith turns to a less studious remedy: ‘the frequency and
gaiety of the publick diversions’. The state should encourage those,
‘who for their own interest would attempt, without scandal or indecency, to amuse and divert the people by painting and poetry, musick,
dancing’.121 While Smith’s enlightened age had supposed that the era
of superstition was long past, a fear of religious fanaticism and factionalism still seems apparent.
Despite this moment of doubt, Smith is quick to restore civilized society to its position on the summit of human achievement. Savages and
barbarians, though not without some desirable traits, lack much that we
associate with humanity:
Barbarians . . . being obliged to smother and conceal the appearance
of every passion, necessarily acquire the habits of falsehood and dissimulation. It is observed by all those who have been conversant with
savage nations, whether in Asia, Africa, or America, that they are all
equally impenetrable, and that, when they have a mind to conceal the
truth, no examination is capable of drawing it from them . . . The torture itself is incapable of making them confess. . . . The passions of
the savage . . . are . . . mounted to the highest pitch of fury. Though
he seldom shows any symptoms of anger, yet his vengeance, when he
comes to give way to it, is always sanguinary and dreadful. The least
affront drives him to despair. His countenance and discourse indeed
are still sober and composed, and express nothing but the most perfect tranquility of mind: but his actions are often the most furious and
violent.122
So ‘ignoble’ does the savage appear that we cannot but appreciate the
great changes that history has wrought.
Nevertheless two issues in particular, namely the corrupting effect of
specialization and the problem of poverty, demonstrate how Smith’s
ambiguity may be productive for contemporary debates in political
economy. First in Smith’s mind are the problems associated with specialization. In Lectures on Jurisprudence, we find a powerful set of passages concerning what Smith calls the ‘inconveniences’ of the division
of labour.123 These concerns are replicated quite famously in Book V of
Wealth of Nations:
121
122
123
Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 318 [V.I iii]
Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 208 [V.2.11]
Smith, ‘Report Dated 1766’, pp. 539–541.
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In the progress of the division of labor, the employment of the far
greater part of those who live by labor, that is, of the great body of
the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of
men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man
whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, the
effects of which too are, always the same, or very nearly the same,
has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never
occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and
generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human
creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part of any rational conversation, but
of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the
ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of
his country, he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally
incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him
regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life
of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him
incapable of exerting his strength with vigor and perseverance, in any
other employment than that to which he has been bred.124
Turning the common labourer into a specialist has a number of negative
consequences: it makes him ‘stupid’, incapable of ‘rational conversation’, unable to ‘conceive any generous, noble, or tender sentiment’ and
therefore inept at forming judgments concerning the ‘duties of private
life’. The worker becomes unqualified to ascertain the ‘interests of his
country’, and powerless in ‘defending his country in war’. In direct
contrast, the absence of a division of labour in savage and barbarous
societies means that: there exist ‘varied occupations’; inventiveness is
‘kept alive’; ‘every man is a warrior’; every man is a ‘statesman’ and
each is able to ‘form a tolerable judgment concerning the interest of
society’.125 While specialization provides a material plenty unavailable
to savage and barbarous societies, this advantage is ‘acquired at the
expense of [the labourer’s] intellectual, social and martial virtues’. The
sober consequence is that, ‘in every improved and civilized society this
is the state into which the laboring poor, that is, the great body of the
people, must necessarily fall’. From these passages it is difficult to tell
124
Smith, Wealth of Nations, pp. 302–303 [V.i. iii.i].
150
125
Ibid., pp. 303–304 [V.i.iii.ii]
The Savage Smith and the temporal walls of capitalism
if Smith believes, as he asserted earlier, that the working classes are
better off than savages. Indeed, so worried is Smith about the fate of
the workers that he again invokes the visible hand of the state. If the
state does not provide countermeasures, warns Smith, ‘all the nobler
parts of the human character may be, in a great measure, obliterated
and extinguished in the great body of the people’.126
In stark contrast to his quietist sensibilities, Smith advocates government intervention, lest commercial society destroy the very thing
it advances – namely, ennobling and civilizing wealth. Here, savage
society seems to provide a mirror reflecting the moral failings of a commercial society. In case we think that Smith has become a romantic, he
reasserts his dominant theme: a more limited division of labour is not
an alternative for the present. Savage and barbarous societies, though
useful as a foil, are temporally superceded and can not offer additional
insight about how we might live today. Instead, a reformed commercial society – one that combines wealth creation with a state sponsored
programme of character refinement – must extend itself to ‘the greater
part of men’. Smith argues for a commercial society, but one in which
the state must act to reverse the morally degrading effects of wealth
creation. How much state reform of capitalism seems necessary is, of
course, a question that continues to spark debate. Thus, Smith opens
and sustains a tension precisely where his name is often summoned to
close debate on claims associated with the Washington Consensus that
free markets and free trade guarantee a path to a future Eden.
Beyond this gesture towards liberal reform, Smith’s treatment of
poverty suggests a more radical direction. In line with his dominant
theme, Smith asserts again and again that a commercial society produces greater material well-being for common people than previous
forms of society. Indeed, this is the key criterion by which to assess
contemporary society:
No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater
part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides,
that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people,
should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be
themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged.127
He promises earlier in the text that, in a ‘well-governed society’, the
‘universal opulence extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people’.128
126
Ibid., p. 303 [V.i.ii.ii].
127
Ibid. p. 88 [I. viii].
128
Ibid., p. 15 [I.i].
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Classical Theory in International Relations
Recall, additionally, his claim that the poorest in commercial society
were far wealthier than savage kings. However, such comparisons are
not entirely favourable to commercial society, where, Smith admits, we
will find ‘indigence’: ‘Wherever there is great property, there is great
inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the
many.’129
Unsurprisingly Stoic, Smith turns this gap into one of the major advantages of a commercial society. The relative well-being of the ‘ordinary
day-labourer’ is linked to the role of law in maintaining ‘the rich in
the possession of their wealth against the violence and rapacity of the
poor, and by that means preserve that usefull inequality in the fortunes of mankind which naturally and necessarily arises from the various degrees of capacity, industry, and diligence in the different individuals’.130 Similarly, Smith, in his parable of the ‘unfeeling landlord’,
explains that the wealth of the landlord, though spent only on his selfish desires, employs vast numbers of people, spreading subsistence
to many. Thus the ‘vain and insatiable desires’ of the rich lead them,
as if ‘led by an invisible hand’, to ‘divide with the poor the produce
of all their improvements’ and ‘without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society’.131 Inequality, even where
opulence and indigence stand in striking opposition, proves not the
stark weakness that Smith seemed to indicate. Nonetheless, as our
discussion below of the damage done by relative poverty will indicate, Smith himself provides resources for challenging this sanguine
conclusion.
A deeper tension may be read from the juxtaposition of rather puzzling comments about savage society. Smith suggests that ‘extremities of
hunger’ impose on the savage a kind of ‘Spartan discipline’.132 It is precisely this condition of scarcity that Smith believes a commercial society
brings to an end. However, Smith also presents savages as possessed of
the leisure to pursue music and dancing:
It seems even to be amongst the most barbarous nations that the use and
practice of them is both most frequent and most universal, as among the
negroes of Africa and the savage tribes of America. In civilized nations,
the inferior ranks of people have very little leisure. . . . Among savage
129
130
131
Ibid., p. 232 [V.i.b]
Smith, ‘Report of 1762–3’, Lectures on Jurisprudence, p. 338 [vi.19].
132 Ibid., p. 205 [V.2.9].
Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 184–185 [IV.i.10–11].
152
The Savage Smith and the temporal walls of capitalism
nations, the great body of the people have frequently great intervals
of leisure, and they have scarce any other amusement; they naturally,
therefore, spend a great part of their time in almost the only one they
have.133
This abundance of leisure for savages is quite damaging to Smith’s claim
about the nature of their poverty. They cannot ‘spend a great part of their
time’ in music and dancing unless they can readily meet their minimum
requirements as biological beings, a requirement that would seem to
belie claims about their poverty.134
What might seem puzzling given Smith’s historical narrative is perfectly consistent with the way of life of hunters and gatherers according
to Marshall Sahlins.135 It is precisely the presence of abundant leisure
that justifies treating hunters and gatherers as ‘affluent’. Hunters and
gatherers combine a low level of needs and wants with relatively abundant means to meet those needs, leaving them abundant free time.
Turning the tables on the economist quite convincingly, Sahlins concludes that scarcity, rather than being nature-given, is in fact produced
by ‘market-industrial society’.136 It is this society that shrinks leisure
time by expanding needs and wants beyond the capacity of the society to readily produce them. Hegel, drawing on the work of Scottish
Enlightenment figures, noted similarly that the emergence of a modern
market society itself promotes individual expression and self-seeking.
And while that society generates wealth to support individualization
and self-seeking, it also creates poverty that subjugates the least advantaged such that the working classes suffer a loss of the ‘feeling of right,
integrity and honor’ that makes them part of society.137
Though we have perhaps tread into an area where Smith might claim
that ‘absolute’, not ‘relative’, poverty is his concern, Smith’s own language of ‘tolerably well’ indicates that ‘necessities and conveniences’
are both involved in understanding poverty. He recognizes quite well
the social stigma and alienation accompanying relative poverty. ‘The
poor man’, as Smith writes, ‘is ashamed of his poverty’. This is hardly
133
Adam Smith, ‘Of the Nature of that Imitation which Takes Place in What are Called
the Imitative Arts’ in Wightman and Bryce (eds.), Essays on Philosophical Subjects, p. 187
[II.i].
134 See Levine, Economic Studies, Chapter 2, and Naeem Inayatullah, ‘Theories of Spontaneous Order’.
135 Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (New York: Aldine, 1972).
136 Ibid., p. 4.
137 Georg Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen G. Wood (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 182–183, 187, 241–244. See also Schlomo Avineri, Hegel’s
Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), Chapter 7.
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surprising since indigence produces a kind of social invisibility: ‘The
poor man goes out and comes in unheeded, and when in the midst of a
crowd is in the same obscurity as if shut up in his own hovel.’138
If this is so, even assuming Smith’s most optimistic assumptions about
a commercial society, we cannot sustain the claim that poverty is a condition distinct to savage societies. Rather, poverty is strikingly associated
with, perhaps even tied to the emergence of, commercial society. Poverty
cannot be assumed as an original condition for which commercial society is the antidote.
Like irrational sentiments and violent factionalism, poverty cannot
be relegated to the past. Nor can our cognitive travels so readily ignore
the moral resources offered by ‘superceded’ forms of society. Nevertheless, as we have seen, Smith’s dominant mode of relating to poverty
(and other realities of commercial society) is either to relocate them to
the past or to dilute their potency by pointing to the advantages of
the age of commerce relative to past ages. Smith’s stance indicates that
poverty and moral corruption serve as the ‘real’ of a wealthy commercial
society – something a commercial society can neither solve, nor avoid.
In contrast to his dominant practice, we can see that there is a part
of Smith that engages the ‘real’ of travel. He creates a horizon within
which engaging the other of commercial society – what Cheyfitz in the
opening epigram calls the kinship economics of the Indians, what Sahlins
calls the original affluent society of hunters and gatherers, or what Smith
himself alludes to as the singing and dancing economy of savages – serves
as a potential learning experience for his European commercial society
and for those of us who remain immersed in modern capitalism.
Conclusion
Ashis Nandy notes that where political and ethical recourse to various
‘pasts’ (including those now being lived) is foreclosed, it impairs our
capacity to imagine alternative ‘visions of the future’.139 Our claim is
not that Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment offer us nothing of value.
Rather, Smith’s engagement with the Amerindians, however quaint, is a
key part of the historical record theorizing capitalist society. The importance of these past sets of cognitive travels, in Quentin Skinner’s terms,
is that they offer us a ‘repository of values we no longer endorse, of
138
139
Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 51 [I.iii.2.2.].
Nandy, Time Warps, p. 5.
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The Savage Smith and the temporal walls of capitalism
questions we no longer ask’. The challenge is to recover this moment so
that we might be able ‘to stand back from, and perhaps even to reappraise, some of our current assumptions and beliefs’.140 Though we resist
the temptation to move across space/time like the Scots, we nevertheless can learn much from their travels. Seeing how Smith constructs a
temporal fortress around commercial society alerts us, as Skinner might
suggest, to contemporary constructions that deploy similar ethical barriers. Such awareness may allow us, as Nandy recommends, to consult
the experiences of an outmoded past – including the savages Smith displaces from the present – as resources in our reflections on the shape of
the present and future.
Despite the temporal walls and spatial boundaries Smith builds in
order to protect liberal capitalism, we can also retrieve alternative
moments and recessive spaces that restore the co-presence of others
as critical ethical resources. An encounter with Adam Smith requires a
more careful engagement with his texts and context than is characteristic of much of contemporary political economy. Equally, an encounter
with those societies that various theories relegate to dead history might
require contemporary political economy to receive and absorb their
criticisms.
140
Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), p. 112.
155
7
Property and propriety in
international relations: the case of
John Locke
David Boucher
Introduction
It is a common assumption, although not undisputed, that Locke’s Two
Treatises of Government considerably influenced the framers of both the
‘Virginian Declaration of Rights’ (1776), and shortly afterwards, in the
same year, ‘The Declaration of Independence’. The second declaration
informs us that our Creator has bestowed upon us certain ‘unalienable
Rights’, among which are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
In the former declaration all men are acknowledged to have inherent
rights, including ‘the means of acquiring and possessing property’.1
It is this right of acquiring and of possessing property, acknowledged
in ‘The Declaration of Independence’, that had in fact been central to
discussions about the relations of Europeans to non-Europeans in International Relations. And it is the importance of property in such discussions that I want to explore in this chapter, with specific reference
to John Locke, but also with a wider frame of reference to the classic
thinkers in International Relations. I use the case of Locke in order to
illustrate the importance of theories of property in discussions of International Relations. It is, I think, another instance of extending domestic
considerations and conceptions to the international sphere. It is not surprising that property rights have such a significant place. Property was
central in late medieval and early modern European history in defining the political person. Property was the qualification for entry into
the public arena. It brought with it political rights that non-property
holders, and those with little property, did not have. This is why Mary
Wollstonecraft wished to establish the equality of women to the rights
1 The claim is made, for example, in A. I. Meldon, Human Rights (Belmont CA: Wadsworth,
1970), p. 10. The Declarations are reproduced as Appendices I and II.
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Property and propriety in international relations
of private ownership, and not just because she thought it would make
them economically independent. They would become political persons
in their own right.
Each European state, of course, had its own settled property laws,
and how you acquired and exchanged property was legally defined.
Among states in the European arena territorial disputes arose, but the
issue of ownership and acquisition was not by and large addressed in
this context. It was in the context of colonialism that such issues became
contested. In America, Africa and Australia there was land that may
with just title become occupied and owned by nationals of European
states, and it was important that these states acknowledged that title.
In some cases the prior ownership of the land by indigenous populations was acknowledged, and the title to that land passed by means of
exchange, a transactional relationship. More controversially, however,
was the prevalent contention that indigenous peoples had no claim to
ownership because they lacked some essential qualification to give them
just title, such as in Locke’s case failure to cultivate, that is, mix their
labour with, the land. In addition, it could be claimed, as it was for
parts of America and the whole of Australia, that the land was empty,
unoccupied, unused. This is the infamous doctrine of terra nullius. The
doctrine of terra nullius denied both that native peoples were owners
of lands, in Vattel’s famous phrase they simply ‘ranged through’ rather
than ‘inhabited them’, and also it denied that native peoples possessed
sovereignty, because they did not constitute political societies.2 Thus
the land was there for the taking and title to it could be claimed by
displaying the conventional signs of ownership, such as occupancy and
possession.
In a discipline obsessed with contemporary relevance and imbued
with a utilitarian, or consequentialist attitude to scholarship – that it
must be useful or it cannot be any good – it may be wondered of what
relevance are such antiquated disputes about property? In the first place,
at the macro level, they serve to explain how the world in which we live
came to be what it is. The world’s only superpower is a product of this
European expansionism. In the second place, the doctrine of terra nullius
and its denial of sovereignty to indigenous peoples has served permanently to exclude such nations within nations from the international
sphere; they are diplomatically, in bilateral and multilateral relations
2 Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law (1758), Book One,
Chapter 7, Section 81.
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Classical Theory in International Relations
among states, and by international organizations such as The League
of Nations and the United Nations, denied direct representation, and
are deemed to be virtually represented (to use Burke’s phrase) by the
dominant culture.
Locke’s chapter on property
The chapter on ‘Property’ in Locke’s Second Treatise is justifiably famous,
but it is by no means clear why it appears at all. Most of the rest of
the Second Treatise is addressed to justifying obligations to the state, and
determining the conditions when those obligations may be disregarded,
that is, giving magistrates the right to resist arbitrary government. It is
not concerned with the broader conception of property that Locke uses
elsewhere in the treatise to refer to self-ownership, and the implied ownership of natural rights. The chapter is more often than not discussed
in isolation from the rest of the argument.3 Indeed, stylistically it differs
from the rest of the Second Treatise, and there is evidence that it may
have been composed at a different time.4 Richard Tuck suggests that
Locke’s chapter on property in the Second Treatise was very likely composed about 1681 or after.5 The chapter on property conceivably had
a different purpose from the rest of the Two Treatises, and may indeed
have a different context as a referent by which to illuminate its meaning. It is often suggested that The Glorious and Bloodless Revolution of
1688, when James II was replaced on the throne by William of Orange
and Mary, the daughter of the deposed king, because of his attempt to
re-Catholicize England, provides the context in which the Two Treatises
may be best interpreted, offering as it does a justification for rebellion
– the famous appeal to heaven. To place it in this context raises a significant puzzle. Given that Robert Filmer had long been dead, and that
his arguments for the patriarchal authority of the king played no part in
the arguments of those who opposed the depositon of James II, why did
Locke devote the whole of the First Treatise to distinguishing between
3
D. A. Lloyd Thomas, Locke On Government (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 89–90.
See Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s ‘Two Treatises of Government’
(London: Unwin Hyman, 1986), p. 463, fn 251. Ross Harrison suggests that: ‘its importance
is independent of the value of Locke’s thoughts about the foundation and dissolution of
government.’ Harrison, Hobbes, Locke and Confusions’s Masterpiece (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), p. 219.
5 Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order
from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 169–170.
4
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Property and propriety in international relations
paternal and political power and its implications with direct and continuous reference to Filmer?
It is quite plausible that Locke meant his Two Treatises to be a contribution to the Exclusion Crisis during which time Filmer’s Patriarcha
was resurrected in defence of the right of Prince James, Duke of York,
to accede to the throne. Indeed, Locke himself was a casualty of the
Royalist backlash in the aftermath of the Exclusion Crisis. He strongly
supported Lord Shaftesbury’s attempt to change the constitution, by
opportunistically using the scare over the Popish Plot, to press for the
Exclusion Bill.6 When in 1881 the King moved Parliament to Oxford,
the Whigs appear to have been resolved to resort to military resistance if the Exclusion Bill was defeated for a second time. Locke took
an active part in soliciting accommodation for members of Shaftesbury’s entourage. When military resistance evaporated on the defeat
of the Exclusion Bill the government went on the offensive, Shaftesbury
escaped to Holland, and after the failure of the Rye House Plot to kidnap
Charles II and James Duke of York on their way back from the Newmarket races, Algenon Sidney, Lord William Russell and the Earl of Essex
were arrested in June 1883. Essex committed suicide and Sidney and
Russell were hanged. Later that summer the government had Locke in
its sights, and he fled to Rotterdam fearing the same fate as Sidney, who
at his trial had his criticisms of Sir Robert Filmer cited as evidence of his
sedition.
At Oxford University Locke did not read any radical writers such as
Lilburne and the other Levellers. There is no evidence that he would
have wished to implement any of their radical programmes, including
extending the right to vote. Neither the arguments of the Levellers nor
the Diggers constituted a significant threat against the Whigs of Locke’s
6 Because of the fear of Catholicism and of arbitrary government, the two went hand in
hand for opponents of Catholicism, a Test Act was passed in 1673 in order to differentiate
between Anglicans and Catholics. Office holders were required to swear an oath of allegiance acknowledging the monarch as head of the Church of England. Its purpose was to
exclude Catholics from public office. James Duke of York, Charles II’s brother, was forced
to give up his public office of admiral because of his refusal to take the oath in 1678. In
the same year Titas Oates, an activist protestant opponent of Catholicism disingenuously
swore in court that there was a French and Catholic plot to depose the King. Although
the claim had no foundation, it created enough hysteria to precipitate the second Test Act
which demanded of all members of parliament, Commons and Lords, the swearing of
an oath of allegiance and endorsement of an anti-Catholic declaration. The Duke of York
was exempted from the terms of reference of the second Test Act. The Exclusion Crisis
(1680–81) refers to the attempt by the House of Commons to exclude James, Duke of York,
from succession to the throne because of his known Catholic sympathies. The Commons
also demanded the expulsion from office of all those who supported James’ succession.
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Classical Theory in International Relations
day. There is little evidence that the rights of private property were being
seriously questioned at the time he wrote the Two Treatises. Indeed, the
original title to property in a state of nature is significantly qualified with
the invention of money, that is, the consenting to attribute an exchange
value to scarce metals that have no intrinsic value, and the terms of holding property are allowed by Locke to be determined by each political
society and its government.
On Locke’s account governments are instituted to protect property.
Pursuing its obligation, a government enacts laws that regulate property
from that time on. Property now becomes what the rules say it is, and
no man can own property without consenting to those rules. To accept
property implies accepting the rules and acknowledging the legally constituted sovereign.7 Regarding the internal arrangements of European
states that had well-established property laws it is difficult to see why
Locke would have wanted to establish claims that applied prior to their
existence. Indeed, he explicitly excludes the possibility of labour being
the sole or most common legitimate claim to private property in civil
society. It is, he argues, the ‘original Law of Nature for the beginning of
Property’ (Second Treatise, 30).8 It is conceivable, as D. A. Lloyd Thomas
suggests, that the theory was in fact an assault upon the arbitrary and
expedient raising of funds by Charles II without the consent of Parliament.9 On this interpretation Locke would have had a stronger case had
he made reference to the property laws of England. The theory may, of
course, have multiple purposes. Among its purposes was one, relating
not so much to the internal arrangements of the state, with which the
Two Treatises are predominantly concerned, but to relations among states,
and between states and areas of the world that had not yet established a
recognizable (on European standards) political society. European states
were in competition with each other for these extra-European territories, and once having acquired them, were under pressure to establish
by what right they owned or exercised dominion over them. Establishing this right was not so much to satisfy those dispossessed of propriety
by such acquisition, but to lay title against competitors who may have
similar designs, and to discredit those settlers whose dealings with the
7 See John Dunn, ‘Consent in the Political Theory of John Locke’ in John Dunn, Political
Obligation in Its Historical Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 37.
8 Cf. Thomas L. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1988), p. 161.
9 Lloyd Thomas, Locke On Government, p. 91.
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Property and propriety in international relations
Indians were based upon acknowledging indigenous peoples’ property
rights.
The importance of property
Because property defined one’s political persona, and qualified one for
participation in the public realm, the psychological importance of property was extended to the international sphere, and particularly where
there was a lot of it at stake, namely, in the Americas.
Philosophers in relation to rulers, and as stakeholders, were in many
respects like artists, dependent upon patrons and often employed to
compose philosophical justifications of current political practices. Marsilius of Padua, for example, was employed by Ludwig of Bavaria to
support him in his dispute against Pope Clement VI over the independence of secular from spiritual authorities.10 Hugo Grotius provided a
defence for the East India Company, De Jure Pradae, the twelfth chapter
of which was to become the famous booklet Mare Liberum (Freedom of the
Seas), in order to impress upon the states of Europe that the Dutch had
as much right to trade in the East Indies as the Spanish and Portugese.11
Nor were philosophers indifferent to establishing their own political
stake in society through property ownership and trade. Grotius’ aristocratic family had extensive interests in the Indies trade, and both Hobbes
and Locke, for example, had property interests in the Americas. Thomas
Hobbes, while secretary to Lord Cavendish in June 1622, before the dissolution of the Virginia Company in 1624, was given by his employer a
share in the company in order to stack the cards in Cavendish’s favour in
the court of the company. Locke’s interests in north America are impeccable. Locke had a direct involvement with colonialism through his
patron Lord Shaftesbury, and both were responsible for justifying the
settlement of Carolina against the charge that such a policy would enfeeble England. Locke’s knowledge of America was in fact extensive. He
read books on its exploration and discovery, had investments there,
and was practically involved with the administration of aspects of its
affairs.12 During the 1660s and 1670s, while in the employ of the Earl
10 David Boucher, Political Theories of International Relations: From Thucydides to the Present
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 119.
11 Barbara Arneil, ‘John Locke, Natural Law and Colonialism’ History of Political Thought
XIII (1992), p. 588.
12 Herman Lebovics, ‘The Uses of America in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government’ Journal
of the History of Ideas XLVII (1986), pp. 575–6.
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of Shaftesbury, Locke was secretary to the Lord Proprietors of Carolina
and Secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations. Locke believed
that a properly managed colonial policy in America would be the key
to England’s economic success.13
If the peoples in the Americas had a title to property, especially the
‘vacant’ or ‘waste’ lands, then their political personas also had to be
recognized, and European claims to ownership would be tenuous and
in contravention of the law of nature and of nations. Should, however,
such rights have to be acknowledged, it was not an insurmountable
impediment to deprive the American Indians of them. Among the many
issues at stake in establishing the right of European states to a title in
American lands was first, whether the aboriginal peoples had a prior
claim or right, and if so, under what conditions may they be deemed
to relinquish it? Answers to these questions varied considerably, and
were often swayed by the nationality of the author, and they occupied
a central place in discussions of the natural law and the law of nations,
and were also integrally related to humanitarian intervention and just
war theory in which the issues of property and reparations came into
play once a just cause was established.
Spain experienced centuries of fighting against the Moors of Africa.
Spanish soldiers were crusaders in their own country and finally
defeated the infidel in 1492 with the fall of the last Moorish stronghold
of Granada. The newly discovered continent of America now became
a considerable attraction to Spanish adventurers in search of fortune.
The ascendancy of Spain in Europe throughout the sixteenth century
was maintained by its colonial trade and the importation of bullion.
The Spanish conquest of the Americas gave prominence to questions
that had hitherto not been at the forefront of the minds of theologians,
jurists and philosophers. The discovery of new territories raised the
question by what right a foreign power could occupy and take possession of lands inhabited by other peoples. To legitimate such acquisition
familiar terms of reference had to be invoked. A theory of property
needed to be developed in order to justify the occupation of the lands
of ‘primitive peoples’, subject these people as slaves and even massacre
them. The question of the justice of acquisition was immensely important. At the heart of the issue was the question of property and the terms
of its appropriation and ownership. The violation of such terms could,
13
Barbara Arneil, ‘Locke and Colonialism’ Journal of the History of Ideas 55 (1994), 593–597.
Also see Arneil, ‘John Locke, Natural Law and Colonialism’.
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Property and propriety in international relations
indeed, provide an additional pretext for the acquisition of territories.
A significant degree of talk about just war relates to the violation of
property rights and the restitution of the loss. The justice of restitution
and reparations gave further justification for dispossessing the Indians
of their land.
The right to occupy unoccupied land – the
doctrine of terra nullius
Alberico Gentili (1552–1608) somewhat disingenuously claimed
Tacitus as an authority, and used an idea that Thomas More articulated in his Utopia, to conclude from the presupposition that there is a
universal human society, that exiles, out of necessity, were entitled to
wage offensive wars in their quest for habitable territory, and that vacant
lands may be colonized by people who need them for their own use.
This justification of appropriation rarely found expression in French or
Spanish writers, but was to become increasingly important for Dutch
and English apologists for colonizing the new world.14 The right was
to figure prominently in Locke’s justification of acquisition, without the
requirement of necessity. The fact that the land was deemed empty was
justification for occupancy, but occupancy in itself did not in the eyes of
many apologists give sufficient grounds for title, or ownership. Occupancy had to be equated with possession. The doctrine of terra nullius
therefore needed to be supplemented with a theory of property that
established a moral title to the ownership of the land. Possession was
equated with cultivation. For Locke, the Indians certainly had a natural
right to property just like everyone else, they just hadn’t exercised it,
and what is more they were in dereliction of their duty to God to make
the soil as productive as possible by cultivating the land. People had an
obligation to cultivate the land (Locke and Vattel), and if they did not
they had no right in preventing those who would. Vattel suggests that:
‘The cultivation of the soil . . . [is] an obligation imposed by nature on
mankind.’15
14
Tuck, Rights of War and Peace, pp. 47–50.
Vattel, Law of Nations, Book One, Chapter 7, ‘Of the Cultivation of the Soil’, Section 81.
Vattel was quite clear that occupancy was not enough: ‘The law of nations will, therefore,
not acknowledge the property and sovereignty of a nation over any uninhabited countries, except those of which it has really taken actual possession, in which it has formed
settlements, or of which it makes actual use’.
15
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With increasing numbers of colonists arriving in Virginia after 1607,
in the West Indian Islands, and New England from 1620, Gentili’s and
More’s arguments came to greater prominence. Whereas the seizing
of lands effectively constituted conquest, the apologists for the settlers
were reluctant to describe their occupation in such terms. To do so would
have invoked the laws of war and conquest under natural law and the
law of nations, and would have afforded the English Crown a greater
degree of authority over the activities of the settlers. Settlement on unoccupied land, on the other hand, entailed the settlers taking with them
the laws of their own land. Another implication that was later to become
more explicit was that settlers acquired rights over the land they occupied, but not, at least initially, over the peoples of those lands, whereas
conquest had the clear corollary of acquiring rights over the inhabitants.
While there was some obscurity surrounding this distinction, at least in
the practice of the colonists, Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) was clear that
the colonists had no political control over the Indians, but on the contrary it was the aboriginals who had a right of control over the colonists.
He identified a law of nature that made it permissible for individuals
to acquire and retain those things that are useful for life, but excluded
injuring others, and taking possession of something that belonged to
someone else, that is, the laws of inoffensiveness and abstinence.
Acknowledging that the colonists had an emphatic right to occupy
the vacant territories, he nevertheless believed that they should recognize some degree or kind of imperium in the indigenous rulers. Silently
taking his lead from Gentili, Grotius argued that barren or waste lands
that are not deemed to be the property of anyone because they were
uncultivated, should be given to strangers on their request, or indeed,
may justifiably be occupied by them, acknowledging, however, that
jurisdiction continued to reside in the indigenous peoples.16 There was
a distinction to be made between the use of the land by American
Indians and ownership. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), although less fulsome in his discussion, subscribed to the view of More, Gentili and
Grotius that the lands of the Americas were plentiful enough to accommodate a people that was still increasing in population and needed to
expand into extra territories. This did not give settlers a right to massacre
the natives, but they could constrain them to live closer together.17
16 Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, trans. A. C. Campbell (Westport CN: Hyperion, 1993, reprint of 1901 edition), Book II, Chapter 2, Section 17.
17 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), p. 239.
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Property and propriety in international relations
Philosophers did not completely disregard the rights of indigenous
peoples, and indeed, refuted claims by foreign governments to dominion in the Americas. Such writers as Vitoria and Grotius were vociferous
in acknowledging some basic rights inhering in the American Indians.
For example, the Portuguese sought to monopolize trade in the Indian
Ocean and in 1605 one of its ships and cargo was captured by a Dutch
East India vessel. The services of Grotius were called upon to vindicate
the Dutch.18 Grotius defended Dutch attempts to defeat the Portuguese
monopoly in the Indian Ocean. Grotius drew upon Vitoria (1483–1546)
to argue that the American Indians had natural rights to public and private property, and could not be deprived of them on religious grounds,
nor on the pretext of converting them to Christianity. They were subject
to the same natural law as Christians and had to be treated accordingly.
No title could be claimed on the grounds of their insanity or irrationality
because they were both clever and wise people.
Grotius’s theory of property relied upon the condition of occupation.
As such it would deprive the Portuguese of their title to property in
the Spice Islands, but it was also directed at denying the Portuguese
ownership of the seas on the ground that, unlike the land, it could not
be occupied.19 The sea, like the air, was held in common by mankind,
and to attempt to occupy it for exclusive use was a violation of the use
right of mankind, and could not be justified on the ground that it was
necessary to the preservation of peace. The sea is so vast that everyone
can share in its benefits including sailing and fishing. Unlike ponds and
rivers the sea is not naturally contained, and in fact constitutes more
of the earth’s surface than land.20 The idea of the freedom of the seas,
like that of free movement and access to markets, benefits those who are
capable of taking advantage of these rights. Those who are not, as a result
of these freedoms, may find themselves the victims of exploitation, as
indeed the American Indians did.
Grotius allows title to private property on the ground that it diminishes conflicts and promotes the preservation of peace. Grotius’s theory
of property relies upon a common use right in order to generate title
18
Thomas A. Horne, Property Rights and Poverty (Chapel Hill NC: University of North
Carolina, 1990), p. 11.
19 Stephen Buckle, Natural Law and the Theory of Property: Grotius to Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 14.
20 Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, Book I, Chapter 2, Section 3. Also see W. E. Butler,
‘Grotius and the Law of the Sea’ in Hedley Bull, Benedict Kingsbury and Adam Roberts
(eds.), Hugo Grotius and International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990),
pp. 213–214.
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to ownership by means of possession. The condition of possession was
designed to defend Dutch commercial and colonial aspirations. Possession of mobile or moveable property simply meant seizure, whereas
fixed or immovable property like land required the marking of boundaries, or construction of some sort.21
Land used only by hunters and gatherers was to be deemed vacant
because it was uncultivated, and remained common and available for
appropriation.22 European monarchs held great tracts of land in the
Americas on behalf of the whole community of their subjects. Such
land was a legitimate possession if there was a demonstrable intention to divide it into private sections for cultivation. This justified what
in fact both the English and Dutch were practising in the Americas,
and demanded that their ‘legitimate’ claims be respected by other European monarchs.23 First sighting was not, therefore, a legitimate ground
for title to ownership. Occupancy was an important criterion to undermine possible claims to ownership on first sighting. Property claims
had to be public. No property rights could be generated by subjective
thought because no one could guess at what someone else intended to
appropriate. Richard Tuck, for example, remarked in passing that by
putting forward this theory of property, ‘Grotius had provided a useful
ideology for competition over material resources in the non-European
world’.24
For Grotius sociality basically consisted in respecting one another’s
rights, and he used the American Indians to illustrate the operation of
this principle in the state of nature. Tully has argued that ‘“Sociableness”,
for Pufendorf, as for Grotius, is characterised essentially by the negative duty of respecting what belongs to others’.25 On the contrary, selfpreservation and the preservation of society, two principles that were
later to constitute for Locke our duty to God, were for Pufendorf (1632–
1694) the fundamental laws of nature from which all others followed.26
Contrary to Grotius, sociality for Pufendorf was not merely a matter
21 Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 61–62.
22 Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, Book II, Chapter, 2, Sections 4 and 17.
23 Arneil, ‘John Locke, Natural Law and Colonialism’, pp. 589 and 593.
24 Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, p. 62.
25 James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and his Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 86.
26 Samuel von Pufendorf, The Elements of Universal Jurisprudence, trans. W. A. Oldfather
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), OB. IV, 4. Pufendorf says: ‘That each should be zealous
so to preserve himself, that society among men be not disturbed.’ He was later to give a
much more active role to the individual for promoting society.
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Property and propriety in international relations
of respecting other people’s property rights. Pufendorf conspicuously
departed from Hobbes’ position. Self-preservation for Hobbes carried
with it no moral duty to preserve others. For Pufendorf our natural
sociableness inclines us towards peace, and makes us averse to the war
of all against all. Peace is our natural condition whether inside or outside a commonwealth, and ‘to undertake a war without provocation, is
both improper and unprofitable’.27
Grotius’ theory of property constituted a justification of colonialism,
whereas Pufendorf’s is far more protective of the rights of natives. Both
authors contend that God gave the earth to men in common. They did
not own it collectively, but were granted a right to use it. This did not
amount to collective ownership. It is what Pufendorf called a negative
community in which no one has property rights. A positive community
is one in which property is communally owned.28 The things of the earth
are not infinite in supply, and use by one may prevent use by another. As
the population increases competition for use increases. It is as a result of
conflict over use rights that private property emerges.29 Private property, for Pufendorf, is a moral quality that has no ‘intrinsic effect upon
things themselves, but only produce a moral effect in relation to other
men’.30 Private property, if it is conducive to peace, is consistent with
nature, and although it is a human institution, it is nevertheless natural.
Proprietorship develops historically in response to circumstances and it
is perfectly acceptable that elements of primitive community have been
retained by ‘backward peoples’.31
A use right, for Grotius, gives users exclusive right over that which
is used. Agreement is not necessary, because a simple sign of seizure or
occupancy will do. Private property is a necessary development out of
the original use right as communities become more complex. It becomes
imperative that agreements among individuals acknowledge what each
27
Samuel von Pufendorf, On The Law of Nature and Nations: Eight Books, trans. C. H.
Oldfather and W. A. Oldfather (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 2, ii, 9. Also see Alfred
Dufour, ‘Pufendorf’ in J. H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) p. 268.
28 Pufendorf, Law of Nature, Book Four, Chapter, iv, Section 2. Arneil argues that Grotius
postulates a positive community and thus common ownership of the earth. My own
reading accords with that of Stephen Buckle. Arneil, ‘John Locke, Natural Law and Colonialism’, p. 597; Buckle, Natural Law, pp. 36–37. It is significant that Pufendorf took Grotius
to be describing a negative community.
29 Pufendorf, Law of Nature, Book Four, Chapter iv, Section 7 and Grotius, Rights of War
and Peace, Book Two, Chapter ii, Section, 1.
30 Pufendorf, Law of Nature, Book Four, Chapter iv, Section, 1.
31 Pufendorf, Law of Nature, Book Four, Chapter iv, Section, 13.
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has appropriated as his or her own. It is then ex post facto acknowledgement.32 Pufendorf takes a different view. He argues ‘that dominion presupposes absolutely an act of man and an agreement, whether tacit or
express’.33 In other words use or occupancy do not in themselves imply
private ownership, nor does the expended labour create a title to property. Property is a moral quality and requires agreement to create the
moral effect of obligation. The original division of land among members
of communities or nations required an express pact, but at the same time,
Pufendorf suggested, agreements were made which allowed first occupancy of land, not already designated, to be a sign of ownership.34 In
effect, then, tacit consent is deemed to acknowledge private ownership
of those things of which individuals take possession, and which have
not already been designated to someone in the original pact.
Pufendorf’s theory of property is important for International Relations because it serves considerably to restrict the grounds for colonial expansionism. His views on what he calls ‘eminent domain’ and
‘occupancy as a whole’ or ‘universal dominion’ are of particular significance.35 Unlike Grotius, who distinguished between property ownership and jurisdiction, Pufendorf believed that waste lands, while not
being the private property of any individual, were nevertheless collectively owned by the people as a whole. This he called eminent domain.
It is quite different from an individual’s title to property, in that it establishes the dominion of the whole group over all things in a particular
territory. Whereas the private ownership of the property by an individual may be transferred to a foreigner, ‘universal dominion is preserved
only in the state’.36 Here the state is clearly distinct from the person of
the monarch, and those rights that are devolved to individuals within
the universal domain are decided by the popular will. The community, or state, as a whole has rights over property that no one outside it
has, nor any individual distinct from his capacity as a member of that
community. Eminent domain is the power that the whole community
has over the property of its citizens, and constrains the use of private
property within bounds consistent with the common good. Even the
lands and other property of the church fall within this domain and in
32 See Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, p. 61; Arneil, ‘John Locke, Natural Law and Colonialism’, p. 598; and Buckle, Natural Law, pp. 42–43.
33 Pufendorf, Law of Nature, Book Four, Chapter iv, Section 4.
34 Pufendorf, Law of Nature, Book Four, Chapter iv, Section 9.
35 Pufendorf, Law of Nature, Book Four, Chapter vi, Section 4.
36 Pufendorf, Law of Nature, Book Four, Chapter iv, Section 4.
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Property and propriety in international relations
cases of extreme necessity can be confiscated without compensation or
restitution.37
No signs of seizure nor cultivation are required for occupancy as a
whole, nor, contrary to Grotius, need there be a clear intention to divide
the land among individuals. Any land that appears to be unoccupied
and without a private owner ‘should not at once be regarded as unoccupied and free to be taken by any man as his own, but it will be understood to belong to the whole people’.38 This, then, is a direct denial of
the principle of terra nullius. Community rights and eminent domain are
not restricted to states, but apply to societies as such. What this means
is that even if one takes the American Indians to be living in a state
of nature, as Grotius and Locke did, the Indians still exercise property
rights of ‘occupancy as a whole’ and determine its use and distribution
by title of eminent dominion.
Pufendorf’s theory is nevertheless flawed. In legitimating community
property rights, private property and the establishment of a plurality of
states he fails adequately to explain how, if property, or at least its initial
distribution, requires agreement, can anything less than the whole world
community authorize it. Tacit consent can hardly be invoked to cover the
whole population of the world, in complete ignorance of particular acts
of appropriation in far-flung parts of the globe. If, as Pufendorf believed,
all the world was given by God for the use of every individual in common, on whose authority can small groups permanently appropriate
portions, especially of immovables like land, for their exclusive common use? If this stage is not completely legitimated the further stages of
the creation of the state with universal dominion and eminent domain,
that serves to secure private property, cannot be justified.
John Locke – born in the same year as Pufendorf (1632) – offered a
solution to the dilemma of how the whole world, given to mankind
in common, can be owned by individual property rights without the
consent of the whole. His solution legitimated the appropriation of
foreign lands that had not yet come under cultivation, such as those
of the American Indians. Locke’s theory of property incorporates the
New World into his philosophical perspective, offering a justification
for the appropriation of foreign lands based upon individual property
rights.
37
38
Pufendorf, Elements, I, DEF V, 5.
Pufendorf, Law of Nature, Book Four, Chapter vi, Section 4.
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Locke follows Hobbes and Pufendorf, rather than Grotius, in identifying the law of nature with the law of nations.39 Locke believed that
the human condition was naturally social, and that God gave the earth
to men in common. Agreement, or consent, was not however necessary to create private property. If it were, Locke argued, private property would be contrary to God’s intention. Private property existed in
the state of nature from the outset in that every person had a property in himself over which no one, because of the principle of natural
equality, could exercise dominion without consent. God wills that we
sustain and protect this property in ourselves by cultivating and appropriating the things of nature.40 The use of the gifts of nature requires
that we first take possession of those things. We do so by means of an
instrument inherent in the person, labour. It is labour, and not consent,
which creates property in things: ‘The labour that was mine, removing
them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my Property in
them.’41
The state of nature, although primitive, is populated by people who
have a sense of justice and injustice. Each has executive power in enforcing the moral code of the law of nature. God has granted us life, a property in the person, and we have an obligation to preserve it, and as far
as we can, to preserve the life of others. Preservation of property in the
person is enhanced by the efficient use of the resources of the Earth. We
are also, therefore, under an obligation to God to make the land and all
that lives and grows on it as productive as possible.
Locke begins to establish this moral obligation to labour in the First
Treatise. There the Biblical basis of his argument is much more evident.
Before the Flood, God gave man a mere stewardship of the land, but no
right of dominion over the birds and animals. It was Noah and his sons
who were first granted ‘Liberty to use the Living Creatures for Food’.42
What God granted was propriety in the living creatures, a liberty to
use them, but not private ownership of them. Locke is here, of course,
refuting Filmer’s claim that Adam and Noah had ownership rights over
the world granted to them by God in bestowing upon them patriarchial
authority. His point, on the evidence of I. Genesis 28, is that men in
general were granted dominion in common over other creatures. It is this
use right that the American Indians exercise, and which Locke explicitly
39
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988) II, p. 276 §14.
40 Locke, Two Treatises, II, §26 and §86.
41 Locke, Two Treatises, II, §28.
42 Locke, Two Treatises, I §38.
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Property and propriety in international relations
relates to the sons of Adam and Noah.43 Thus: ‘The Fruit or Venison,
which nourishes the wild Indian, and who knows no Inclosure, and is
still a Tenant in common, must be his, and so his, i.e. a part of him, that
another can no longer have any right to it, before it can do him any good
for the support of his Life.’44 It is important, however, to see how subtle
is the shift from ownership of things, to ownership of land in Locke’s
theory. The labour expended by hunter-gathers, deep-sea fishermen,
bakers or craftsmen entitles them in the state of nature to what they
have killed, gathered or made. When it comes to land, however, there is
a change of emphasis. In the First Treatise Locke excludes certain types
of ‘labour’ from affording a property title. Referring to the Bible, Locke
recalls the curse placed upon Adam requiring men to labour because of
their impoverished and destitute condition.45 The earth requires long
and sustained labour in order to yield its fruits and make it productive.
Mere occupancy or appropriation, that is taking possession, does not
qualify.
Ownership and labour is now clearly associated with cultivation.
Locke contends that: ‘As much Land as a man Tills, Plants, Improves,
Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his Property.’46 The
crucial point is this: Locke excludes such activities as roaming over the
uncultivated land, hunting and gathering or grazing one’s sheep on it,
from securing a title to property. What is of more significance is that not
only does labour provide a title for the ownership of property in the
state of nature, but Locke also wanted to establish the moral obligation
to engage in labour. It is not enough to mix one’s labour in the land,
say by enclosing it and planting trees, but we are obliged to develop it
to its greatest productive capacity as industrious and rational creatures.
God did, after all, give men the world ‘for their benefit. And the greatest
Conveniences of Life they were capable to draw from it’ (Second Treatise, Section 309).47 By implication, the American Indians, in failing to
cultivate the land to its full productive capacity, were rather less than
industrious and rational and had no grounds for preventing those who
are fulfilling God’s destiny for men. Locke’s view of the Indians was
that they were wretched creatures, barely achieving subsistence levels,
43
44 Locke, Two Treatises, II, §306.
Locke, Two Treatises, II, §310–311.
Locke, Two Treatises, I, §144–145.
46 Locke, Two Treatises, II, §32. Cf. Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke’s Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), pp. 164–170.
47 Cf. Lebovics, ‘The Uses of America’, p. 577.
45
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and whose kings were worse off than day labourers. They were ignorant
and barely able to raise themselves above the level of the brutes. In his
journal entry for 1677 he says that their ‘minds are as ill clad as their
bodies’.48 One of the purposes of government is to ensure the productive use of land. Indeed, Locke was later to suggest that the British Government should promote colonization by facilitating the emigration of
those who are currently a burden on society to colonies where, because
of underpopulation and underproduction, they are a net beneficiary for
the resources of the Kingdom of England.
Locke did not believe, however, that appropriated land should be
allowed to lie waste.49 It is not without significance, then, that the American Indians are constantly invoked as examples of people currently
living in a state of nature, and subject to the principle of spoilage in
the accumulation of property, slightly modified in some instances by a
primitive form of money.
England’s war against the Dutch was becoming increasingly more
difficult to finance with the Great Plague of 1665 and the Fire of London
of 1666. For some political commentators colonialism was seen to be the
way out of financial difficulties, while for the majority it appeared to
exacerbate them. Plantations in particular were seen to be a drain on
the realm of England. The accumulation of vast tracts of land if uncultivated was an offence against the law of nature. In this respect Locke
shared the sentiments of many supporters and administers of colonialism who were concerned that the accumulation of land be limited to
that which had sufficient men to cultivate it. More efficient government
in Virginia, for example, and a larger population would make the land
more productive and also benefit England, making it an asset rather
than a liability. In fact, many landowners in Virginia were in violation
of the law of nature because they occupied vast tracts of land, much of
which lay uncultivated, and which was technically ‘waste’. Locke suggested that such land should be transferred into the hands of the king
for redistribution.50
Locke does not allow unlimited accumulation of property in the state
of nature. Individuals can appropriate without consent only so much
as they can use. The principle of spoilage limits accumulation. It would
48 Cited in Richard H. Cox, Locke on Peace and War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), pp.
98–99.
49 Locke, Two Treatises, II, §37 and §42.
50 Richard Ashcraft, ‘Political Theory and Political Reform: John Locke’s Essay on Virginia’
The Western Political Quarterly 22 (1969), pp. 747–9.
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Property and propriety in international relations
be a sin to take goods out of the common sphere and allow them to
perish.51 The principle applies to both the produce of the earth and to the
accumulation of land. It is with the invention of money, by agreement to
endow with exchange value that which is intrinsically valueless, that the
unlimited accumulation of wealth is facilitated. In other words, whereas
property does not rest upon consent, the ‘disproportionate and unequal
Possession of the Earth’ does.52
The obligations to God of self-preservation and of cultivating the earth
in order to make it more productive and conducive to self-preservation
are better discharged within a political society. The inconveniences of
the state of nature, regulated by a law that is not written down, wilful
and innocent misinterpretation of the law with no common superior to
arbitrate, and no power to enforce it, make it imperative by agreement
to set up political society and government.
The implication of Locke’s discussions of the American Indians is that
they fall short of adequately discharging their obligations to God. They
still live in a state of nature and they fail to add to the common stock
of mankind by improving the productivity of the land. In so doing they
have no claim on vast territories in the Americas that ‘lie waste’. By this
Locke means more than land that is simply left barren. Land that was not
efficiently utilized, and whose produce was allowed to rot, regardless
of its being enclosed, ‘was still to be looked on as Waste, and might be
the Possession of any other’.53
The lands of the more civilized peoples of the world are protected,
first by governments instituted for that purpose and which regulate
use, and by agreements among states that explicitly or tacitly renounce
claims to the lands of the others. It is by mutual consent that states
give up the common natural right which they originally had and
establish territorial boundaries in the division of the Earth into ‘distinct Parts and parcels’. Those primitive societies that have not taken
their place among the civilized society of states are therefore not protected against peoples who settle, mix their labour and make the
land their own, because that land is still the common possession of
mankind.
Locke’s intention to legitimize colonialism, while establishing the
principle of European territorial integrity is clear from the following
passage:
51
53
Locke, Two Treatises, II, §31.
Locke, Two Treatises, II, §38.
52
Locke, Two Treatises, II, §50.
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there are still great Tracts of Ground to be found, which (the Inhabitants
thereof not having joyned with the rest of Mankind, in the consent
of the use of their common Money) lie waste, and are more than the
People, who dwell on it, do, or can make use of, and so still lie in
common. Tho’ this can scarce happen amongst that part of Mankind,
that have consented to the Use of Money.54
Locke, then, is a defender of colonial expansionism and justifies it with
a theory of property that requires mixing one’s labour, or that of one’s
employees, to create a title to specific tracts of land, or produce, that
are otherwise considered vacant and open to all mankind in common.
However, his theory would not legitimate colonialism if the inhabitants of occupied territories with a claim to the land were subdued by
unjustifiable force. The use of force without right cannot legitimate conquest. Agreements reached under duress are void, and no obligation is
incurred. This position is very different from that of Hobbes, who might
pronounce the unnecessary use of force dishonorable, but would have
no grounds in international relations upon which to pronounce force
unjust.
Whereas Grotius made a distinction between property ownership and
jurisdiction, where the latter extended to people who inhabit a certain
territory, but not the property they occupy, and Pufendorf emphasized
that societies exercise eminent domain even over territories with no evident sign of occupancy, Locke realized that such arguments as those of
Grotius and Pufendorf undermine claims to European colonial expansionism, and deny the Mother country political authority in those lands.
The direct impetus for Locke’s attempt to close this loophole may have
been William Penn’s political experiment in Pennsylvania. Penn was
granted a royal charter in 1681 to found his colony and almost immediately began to formulate views at variance with the Whigs with whom he
had formerly been associated, including Locke himself. Penn acknowledged the Indians as possessors of rights over the land, and instructed
his agents to negotiate with them for the purchase of their property.55
54
Locke, Two Treatises, II, §45.
America was not seen by the classic law of nations theorists, nor in fact by Locke, to
be homogenous. Even Vattel, who is always invoked as the theorist who justified colonization, was discerning in what he justified. In his view the Spanish conquest of South
America was unlawful, whereas parts of North America could be legitimately possessed,
on condition that the colonizers confine themselves within ‘just bounds’. (Vattel, Law of
Nations, Book One, Chapter 7, ‘Of the Cultivation of the Soil’, Section 81). Whereas Vattel
provides the basis for the position taken in Australia, he does nevertheless indicate that it
is to be commended that Penn and his colony of Quakers purchased their land from the
Indians and thus acknowleged their ownership.
55
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Property and propriety in international relations
Locke, as we saw, not only denied the American Indians ownership
of ‘waste land’, but also of land that was insufficiently cultivated, or
on which the produce was under utilized. Locke emphatically rejects
Pufendorf’s theory of eminent domain in maintaining that only when a
tract of land has been cultivated and therefore appropriated can governments exercise authority over it.56 American chiefs or kings, then, had
no jurisdiction over the waste and insufficiently cultivated lands of their
country and Europeans need not recognize their authority because they
had no rights over such property, except those of use that they share
with every other person of humanity.
This is not the place to discuss in detail the centrality of property to
just war theory, and how just war allows legitimate seizure of property.
It suffices to say that resistance by the American Indians to the appropriation of land to which they had no legitimate claim, because they
failed to cultivate it productively, constituted a just cause of war. For
Locke Americans are deemed to have no right to defend their traditional ways of life against European encroachment, after all, their way
of life is inherently inferior to that of Europeans, and deficient in discharging their obligations to God. We have a natural right to punish
Indians and to gather together our kith and kin to gain reparations from
the Indians for injuries caused.57 Locke simply takes for granted the
injustice of native resistance to the appropriation of waste lands, and
the justice of developers to counter such aggression.58
Vattel, writing over ninety years later, reflected the extent to which
the State had now become central to international relations. Contrary to
Locke, he thought that seizing territories from the civilized nations of
Central and South America of dubious legality and praised the English
Puritans of New England and Quakers of Pennsylvania for their moderation in purchasing lands from the American savages.59 This was
an acknowledgment of the property rights of American Indians that
Locke was reluctant to allow. Vattel’s justification of the appropriation
of foreign unpossessed lands was based not on individual right, but
upon the argument that it was contrary to nature to allow land to go
uncultivated that was needed to sustain the world’s vastly increased
population. Without agricultural communities the world could not sustain its population and therefore agricultural communities have a right
56
58
57 Locke, Two Treatises, §9 and §130.
Locke, Two Treatises, II, §121.
Wayne Glausser, ‘Three Approaches to Locke and the Slave Trade’ Journal of the History
of Ideas 51 (1990), p. 209.
59 Vattel, Law of Nations, §81 and §209.
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to occupy and work land that was not effectively being exploited by
others.60
Terra nullius and sovereignty
The doctrine of terra nullius, then, was extremely important in the colonization process. It was related to what Carole Pateman calls ‘the settler
contract’, a variant of the social contract in so far as it relied upon many
of the features of a state of nature central to that doctrine.61 The denial
of sovereignty to indigenous peoples did not depend upon first establishing terra nullius. One of the most famous denials, that of Locke, did
depend upon the idea of terra nullius. As we saw, Locke not only denied
the American Indians ownership of ‘waste land’, but also of land that
was insufficiently cultivated, or on which the produce was underutilized.
Even when it was acknowledged that native peoples exercised ownership rights, the colonizing country retained the rights of eminent
domain, and denied sovereignty to native peoples. Social Contract theory, in its classic form, was central to theories of sovereignty. The complexity of the contract varies. For Hobbes it is one stage, for Pufendorf
three. Whether the theory was absolutist or limited, they both constituted in Pufendorf’s view instances of supreme sovereignty. In other
words, shared sovereignty was inconceivable. A nation within a nation
was undesirable and constituted in Pufendorf’s view an unstable monstrosity.
The aboriginal peoples who roamed but did not occupy or possess
territories were deemed not to have made such contracts and therefore
did not possess sovereignty. Given that sovereignty became the membership card for entry into the international club, this constituted permanent exclusion for minority nations. The legality of such exclusion
was put to the test soon after the establishment of the League of Nations.
The Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy attempted to gain recognition of
their independence, and to resolve their ongoing dispute with Canada.
Between 1922 and 1924 they petitioned the League of Nations to accept
60
Thomas Flanagan briefly discusses Vattel’s position in ‘The Agricultural Argument
and Original Appropriation: Indian Lands and Political Philosophy’ Canadian Journal of
Political Science XXII (1989).
61 I am indebted to discussions with Carole Pateman for distinguishing between the settler
contract and the social contract. She is currently working on a book with Charles W. Mills
extending her treatment of the Sexual Contract to the idea of the ‘Racial Contract’. The
settler contract is part of this project.
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Property and propriety in international relations
them as a member and to intervene to prevent further encroachment by
the Canadian government on their independence. They argued that the
six nations had long been a highly organized self-governing people,
whose confederacy of self-governing states had been acknowledged
in treaties, and through diplomatic activity with the Dutch, French,
Americans and British since at least 1613. The Canadian Government
responded to the petition by claiming that there was no provision in
the Covenant of the League for discussion of the internal matters of a
sovereign state in its dealings with individuals who owe the state allegiance. In other words, the answer presumed what was in dispute. The
League did not accept the petition.62
Conclusion
I have shown how colonization was integrally related to the development of theories of property that legitimated occupation and possession
of foreign lands. This entailed the formulation of the doctrine of terra
nullius which acknowledged occupation and possession only in terms
of specific kinds of labour, namely cultivation. In practice, it was much
less costly in terms of money and lives to enter into transactional relations with the Indians that acknowledged their prior ownership, and for
the Puritans it was morally more justifiable. The doctrine nevertheless
persisted in the colonization of Australia. Whether indigenous peoples
were deemed to own the land over which they ‘roamed’, or whether
they merely had a use right in common, they were not deemed to have
entered into a social contract among themselves, and therefore they were
not deemed to have instituted sovereign political societies (there were,
however, exceptions in South America that were acknowledged even
by Vattel). The legacy has been the permanent exclusion from the international realm of minority nations within nations, on the grounds that
they do not constitute sovereign political communities.
62
See Robert Lee Nichols, ‘Realizing the Social Contract: The Case of Colonialism and
Indigenous Peoples’ Contemporary Political Theory 4 (2005), pp. 42–43.
177
8
Classical smoke, classical mirror:
Kant and Mill in liberal international
relations theory1
Beate Jahn
The Democratic Peace thesis constitutes the most influential use of a classical author – Immanuel Kant – in the contemporary discipline of International Relations. Its central claim that democracies don’t fight each
other is hailed as coming ‘as close as anything we have to an empirical
law in international relations’.2 Innumerable publications from proponents and critics alike fill the discipline’s journals; it has given rise to
what one might rightly call a whole industry of quantitative and qualitative studies testing and refining, challenging and refuting its central
categories and claims.3
Moreover, while academic theories are often hotly debated within
their disciplines, they rarely play much of a role outside this narrow
circle. This, however, is not true for the Democratic Peace thesis, which
has risen to extraordinary influence in the justification of Western or
liberal foreign policies in the last decades. But even here its importance
does not end. The idea that liberal or democratic states are more peaceful
than other states has pervaded the public political discourse in the West
to such a degree that it can be presented and reproduced as a self-evident
truth in the media.4
1
A different version of this chapter has first been published as Beate Jahn, ‘Kant, Mill, and
Illiberal Legacies in International Affairs’ in International Organization 59 (2005), 177–207.
2 Jack S. Levy, ‘Domestic Politics and War’ in Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb
(eds). The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), p. 88.
3 For a collection of articles on the Democratic Peace thesis, see Michael E. Brown, Sean
M. Lynn-Jones and Steven E. Miller (eds.), Debating the Democratic Peace (Cambridge MA:
MIT Press, 1996); and Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey (eds.), Democracy, Liberalism, and
War (Boulder CO, Lynne Rienner, 2001).
4 Michael Doyle, ‘Liberalism and World Politics’ American Political Science Review 80 (1986),
p. 1151, and Ways of War and Peace (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 205; ‘Bush, Blair
Address Prospects for Peace’ Los Angeles Times (12 November 2004).
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Classical smoke, classical mirror
In the original formulation and argumentation of the Democractic
Peace thesis, Kant’s ‘Perpetual Peace’ played a crucial role as offering
‘the best guidance’ for an explanation of the statistical evidence of a liberal peace.5 And even much of the later literature in this field – whether
or not it explicitly engages with Kant’s argument – routinely cites his
name.6 Hence, Kant’s arguments in ‘Perpetual Peace’ play a crucial role
in the explanation of a contemporary theory as well as, indirectly, in the
justification of liberal foreign policies and the inspiration of contemporary public political discourses.
This prominent use of a classical author requires reflection on the
limits and possibilities of their appropriation in contemporary International Relations (IR). There are two obvious disjunctures between
classical and contemporary theory. First, the qualitative relevance of the
historical differences between the contemporary world and that which
Kant, or other classical authors, reflected on has to be established. Second, classical authors wrote before the establishment of IR as a separate
discipline; hence their reflection on international politics forms part of
a more holistic conception of human social and political life. Contemporary use of classical authors thus has to pay particular attention to
the relationship between the domestic and the international sketched in
their work.
In the first part of this chapter I will show that Democratic Peace
theorists read Kant without reflecting on the implications of the different historical and intellectual context and I will provide an alternative
reading which is sensitive to these differences. Kant identified sources
5 Michael Doyle, ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs’ in Brown et al. (eds.), Democratic Peace, p. 21. The article was first published in two parts in Philosophy and Public Affairs
12 (1983), 205–235, 323–353.
6 See, for example, Bruce Russett, ‘The Fact of the Democratic Peace’ in Brown et al.
(eds.), Democratic Peace, pp. 58–81; John M. Owen, ‘How Liberalism Produces Democratic
Peace’, in Brown et al. (eds.), Democratic Peace, pp. 116–154; Christopher Layne, ‘Kant or
Cant: The Myth of Democratic Peace’, in Brown et al. (eds.), Democratic Peace, pp. 157–
201; David E. Spiro, ‘The Liberal Peace – And Yet it Squirms’, in Brown et al. (eds.),
Democratic Peace, pp. 202–238; Ido Oren, ‘The Subjectivity of the “Democratic” Peace:
Changing U.S. Perceptions of Imperial Germany’, in Brown et al. (eds.), Democratic Peace,
pp. 263–300; Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, ‘Introduction: The International Relations
of Democracy, Liberalism, and War’, in Barkawi and Laffey (eds.), Democracy, pp. 1–23;
David Blaney, ‘Realist Spaces/Liberal Bellicosities: Reading the Democratic Peace as
World Democratic Theory’, in Barkawi and Laffey (eds.), Democracy, pp. 25–44; Timothy R. W. Kubik ‘Military Professionalism and the Democratic Peace: How German Is It?’,
in Barkawi and Laffey (eds.), Democracy, pp. 87–106; Sven Chojnacki, ‘Demokratien und
Krieg. Das Konfliktverhalten demokratischer Staaten im Internationalen System 1946–
2001’ in Christine Schweitzer, Björn Aust and Peter Schlotter (eds.), Demokratien im Krieg
(Baden-Baden, Nomos, 2004), pp. 72–106.
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Classical Theory in International Relations
of international conflict in his time on the domestic, international and
transnational levels which he addressed respectively in the three definitive articles. The domestic source of conflict to which the republican
constitution was meant to provide a solution was the nature of the absolutist state which is not comparable to contemporary liberal capitalist
states. The international and transnational sources of conflict in Kant’s
time – the security dilemma and the imposition of unequal economic
relations on non-European states – however, are perfectly comparable
with contemporary international politics. And yet, in its neglect of these
historical continuities and discontinuities, the Democratic Peace thesis
prioritizes the republican constitution for today’s world and radically
misinterprets Kant’s international and transnational sources of conflict.
Hence, the ethico-political implications of the Democratic Peace thesis, namely the principled justification of intervention, stands in direct
opposition to Kant’s argument.
This insensitivity to the historical context, moreover, prevents contemporary authors from recognizing a much more appropriate classical predecessor for the Democratic Peace thesis, as I will show in the
second section. This author is John Stuart Mill. The parallels between
contemporary and Mill’s arguments demonstrate that an unreflected
implication of the former lies in the justification of imperialist policies
explicitly spelt out by the latter. Nonetheless, as I will show in the third
part of this chapter, Mill’s analysis of modern civilization and representative government in a liberal capitalist state undermines the grounds
on which these states are accorded more rights than others – then and
now – and the contradictions found between Mill’s political and his
international theory are equally present at the heart of the Democratic
Peace thesis. In short, where the non-interventionist Kant is cited in
support of interventions, the interventionist Mill is generally seen as a
non-interventionist.
In conclusion, I will argue that the ahistorical and acontextual
approach to classical authors results, on the one hand, in the reification of contemporary ideological approaches to international relations
and, on the other, in an abandonment of the critical analytical potential which an historically and contextually sensitive reading of classical
authors can provide. Specifically, the ahistorical reading of Kant functions as a smoke screen which hides his own as well as Mill’s potential as
a mirror for contemporary liberal theory and foreign policy. The price
for this unreflected use of classical authors in the discipline lies ultimately in the abandonment of the very raison d’être of a social science
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Classical smoke, classical mirror
which does not lie in the unreflected amplification of the Zeitgeist but in
its critical examination.
History and the perpetual peace
The Democratic Peace thesis is so widely known in International Relations that I will only briefly summarize its main claims.7 It identifies
the republics of Kant’s First Definitive Article with contemporary liberal states. This identification is based on the comparability of the form
of government – a representative constitution – on which the relatively
peaceful nature of liberal states is based.8 Accordingly, the source of
international conflict is seen to lie in the non-representative constitutions
of non-liberal states.9 Consequently, Kant’s Federation of Free states in
the Second Definitive Article is identified with a separate liberal peace
in the contemporary world – an exclusive club of liberal states.10 And,
finally, Kant’s law of hospitality is identified with transnational economic and other interaction in the contemporary world providing the
material basis for increased cooperation while simultaneously undermining non-liberal constitutions.11
The aim of a liberal foreign policy, hence, lies in the systematic promotion of ‘liberal principles abroad’, that is, in changing the cultural,
economic and political constitution of non-liberal states.12 This promotion of liberal principles requires a clear distinction between liberal and
non-liberal states; there can be no alliance with the latter.13 The preferred
means to this end are economic – sanctions or restricted interaction with
non-liberal states and extended aid and trade with liberal or transitional
states.14 Historically, resistance of non-liberal states to such interference
has predominantly led to military interventions which in turn often
proved counterproductive. Hence, Doyle advocates the extension of the
right of military non-intervention to non-liberal governments.15 This
recommendation, however, is not based on the assumption that military interventions constitute a departure from liberal principles; rather
they are fundamentally rooted in them. Doyle, therefore, advocates nonmilitary means consistently for reasons of prudence rather than as a
7 My summary rests on Michael Doyle’s most influential statement of the Democratic
Peace thesis in ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and International Affairs’. For a more detailed
discussion of its claims, see Beate Jahn, ‘Kant, Mill, and Illiberal Legacies in International
Affairs’ International Organization 59 (2005), 177–207.
8 Doyle, ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and International Affairs’ pp. 5f.
9 Ibid., pp. 31f.
10 Ibid., p. 26.
11 Ibid., p. 26.
12 Ibid., p. 49.
13 Ibid., p. 50.
14 Ibid., pp. 48, 50ff.
15 Ibid., pp. 37, 48ff.
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matter of principle.16 The Democratic Peace thesis, thus, while offering
a normative constraint against the use of force between liberal states,
does not provide such constraint for the relations between liberal and
non-liberal states. And this, of course, implies that consent of the target
population – while generally expected but not always forthcoming – is
not necessary.
The first defining feature of these policy recommendations, which
aim at the spread of democracy and market economy around the world,
is the propagation of particularist rather than universal international
law.17 International organization, the Federation of Free States, is not
open to non-liberal states. Rights of sovereignty and non-intervention
are only conferred on liberal states. A second defining feature of this
reading of Kant is the primacy accorded to the domestic sources of
international conflict. Just as the source of peacefulness is seen in the
domestic representative constitution, the source of aggression is seen in
the non-representative constitutions of other states. Consequently, the
pursuit of perpetual peace entirely hinges on the transformation of all
non-liberal states into liberal states. In line with this logic, the Second
and Third Definitive articles are understood as providing the means –
international and transnational – to achieve the end of changing the
constitution of non-liberal states which is provided in the First Definitive
article.
The Democratic Peace thesis, I will suggest first, misconceives the
relationship between theory and history in Kant’s work and, consequently, the nature of moral laws. Subsequently, I will provide an interpretation of ‘Perpetual Peace’ based on Kant’s historical analyses and
demonstrate that contemporary liberal thought, far from just misinterpreting Kant, develops policy recommendations diametrically opposed
to those of Kant. In particular, it propagates policies which Kant identified as the source of imperialism in his time and it reifies the security
dilemma between liberal and non-liberal states, thus reproducing the
very sources of international conflict Kant set out to solve. Moreover, it
prioritizes the domestic constitution expecting peace to follow without
regard to the mutually constitutive nature of domestic, international and
transnational sources of conflict identified by Kant – thus jeopardizing
the liberal achievements in the domestic sphere through the pursuit of
illiberal policies in the international.
16
Ibid., pp. 41f.
See Chapter 4 by Antonio Franceschet in this volume for a detailed discussion of the
exclusion of non-liberal states from international law.
17
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Classical smoke, classical mirror
Kant argues that nature and human nature play themselves out in
history, so that a survey of this history is necessary in order to ascertain potential goals of human development. Accordingly, he derives
the values of individual freedom and equality on which the ideal of
the republican constitution is based from a philosophy of history. This
philosophy of history is systematically worked out in his Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Purpose on whose basic assumptions the
First Definitive Article relies.18 However, ‘reason is not yet sufficiently
enlightened to survey the entire series of predetermining causes, and
such vision would be necessary for one to be able to foresee with certainty the happy or unhappy effects which follow human actions by the
mechanism of nature (though we know enough to have hope that they
will accord with our wishes)’.19
Essentially, Kant recognizes here the limitations of human interpretations of history. Hence, they are speculative, and do not allow us to
extract moral principles from empirical knowledge – though they can
establish the possibility of such moral principles. Once established, it
is therefore reason and not nature (history) which establishes the rules
of moral conduct and ‘suffices for attaining the ultimate end’.20 And
the basic principle which reason establishes for moral conduct is the
universality entailed in the categorical imperative.21 Moral laws are by
definition universal laws and moral conduct requires the observance of
these laws for their own sake ‘and without regard to hope of a similar
response from others’.22 Applied to the political sphere, Kant says that
this ‘should be understood as the obligation of those in power not to
limit or to extend anyone’s right through sympathy or disfavor’.23
18
Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ in Hans
Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 41–
53, and ‘Perpetual Peace’, pp. 11–15. Kant argues that the history of humankind – from
barbarians to contemporaneous Europeans – can be interpreted as a gradual development
of political organization towards the realization of individual freedom. In principle, this
philosophy of history is very similar not only to Mill’s, which I will set out below, but
to those underlying Enlightenment thought in general. See Beate Jahn, ‘IR and the State
of Nature: The Cultural Origins of a Ruling Ideology’ Review of International Studies 25
(1999), 411–434, and The Cultural Construction of International Relations: the Invention of
the State of Nature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 118ff; as well as Ronald L. Meek,
Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Uday
Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire. A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 88ff. Since Kant does not rely on this
philosophy of history as an authoritative basis for his moral and political thought, its
highly questionable contents do not have to concern us here.
19 Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 36.
20 Ibid., p. 36.
21 Ibid., p. 42.
22 Ibid., pp. 41, 42, 43.
23 Ibid., p. 44.
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The requirement of universality essentially functions as a safeguard
against the potential misinterpretation of history (nature), so that Kant
does not resolve or transcend the dialectic between nature (history) and
reason (morality).24 While they are not mutually exclusive in theoretical
terms, subjectively, for real existing men and women, ‘this conflict will
always remain. Indeed, it should remain, because it serves as a whetstone of virtue, whose true courage . . . consist[s] . . . in detecting and
conquering the crafty and far more dangerously deceitful and treasonable principle of evil in ourselves’.25 Moral laws, thus, always apply to
ourselves rather than to others. It is this reflexivity which makes Kant a
critical philosopher.26
Quite strikingly, the Democratic Peace thesis violates every single
one of these principles of moral laws. Where Kant argues that we must
observe moral laws for their own sake and apply them to ourselves,
contemporary liberals disqualify non-liberals from choosing their own
laws. Where Kant argues that we must observe these laws without
regard to a similar response from others, in contemporary thought liberalism becomes a precondition for equal rights. Where Kant argues
that rights must not be extended on the grounds of sympathy or limited on the grounds of disfavour, contemporary liberals extend rights
on the grounds of sympathy to other liberal states and limit them on the
grounds of disfavour for non-liberal states. In short, where Kant requires
the universality of law, contemporary liberals justify particularist law.
The reason for these contradictions lies in a misunderstanding of
the dialectic between nature (history) and reason (theory) in Kant. The
Democratic Peace thesis resolves this dialectic in favour of history by
empirically identifying contemporary liberal states as embodying the
values of freedom and equality. It thus reifies a particular reading of
history from which it derives its ideals rather than treating them as
regulative. Hence, the ideal is embodied in a particular part of that
history which in turn underlies the particularist nature of the laws it
justifies. Moreover, a historically sensitive reading of Kant, as I will
show presently, undermines the possibility of equating his republican
constitutions with contemporary liberal states.
24
Jens Bartelson, ‘The Trial of Judgment: A Note on Kant and the Paradoxes of Internationalism’ International Studies Quarterly 39 (1995), p. 276f.
25 Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 45.
26 See Georg Cavallar, ‘Kantian Perspectives on Democratic Peace: Alternatives to Doyle’
Review of International Studies 27 (2001), p. 248; and John MacMillan, ‘A Kantian Protest
Against the Peculiar Discourse of Inter-Liberal State Peace’ Millennium 24 (1995), p. 553.
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Classical smoke, classical mirror
Since Kant’s republican constitution – or more generally liberal
ideals – are not unambiguously identifiable in history, they cannot provide the starting point for an attempt to solve the problem of war.
Hence the order of Kant’s argument in ‘Perpetual Peace’: he starts with
an analysis of the wars of his time, proceeds to formulate preliminary
and definitive articles which would make these wars impossible, and
finally ensures their compatibility with the ideal in the two appendices.27
He identifies three historically specific elements contributing to wars –
located respectively on the domestic, the international and the transnational level. His solutions, the three Definitive Articles, are therefore
derived from, and substantively linked to, these concrete historical analyses.
Kant clearly characterizes the nature of wars in his time. Rulers are
‘insatiable of war’; wars are pursued for the glory of the state, defined
as ‘continual aggrandizement’; the state is seen as the property of
rulers which can be ‘inherited, exchanged, purchased, or donated’, even
‘espoused’; and wars are financed by debt, crippling the development
of the domestic economy – in short, Kant refers to wars between absolutist states in Europe.28 Absolutist states, as Kant rightly points out, are
seen as the property of the rulers, and wars between absolutist states are
generally fought for territorial gains which, in turn, benefit the rulers as
proprietors of the state, and certainly not the population.29
This very specific historical situation underlies Kant’s central argument in the First Definitive Article: that the civil constitution of every
state should be republican. Democratic Peace approaches pick up this
ideal of the republican state and demonstrate that contemporary liberal
democratic states fulfil Kant’s criteria of a republican constitution.30 This
equation of contemporary liberal states with Kant’s republics has been
challenged on empirical grounds. Critics have pointed out that in modern liberal states sections of the population do benefit from wars, that
not all sections of society vote, that liberal states rarely, if at all, hold
referenda on questions of war and peace and that liberal populations
can be shown to have been in favour of war.31
27
28 Ibid., pp. 3–6.
Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, pp. 35–53.
See Benno Teschke’s analysis of wars between absolutist states and the defining role of
all the characteristics of war mentioned by Kant in The Myth of 1648. Class, Geopolitics and
the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 181ff.
30 See Doyle, ‘Kant’, pp. 5f; Russett, ‘The Fact of the Democratic Peace’; Owen, ‘How
Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace’.
31 See Ernst-Otto Czempiel, ‘Kants Theorem und die zeitgenössische Theorie der Internationalen Beziehungen’ in Matthias Lutz-Bachmann and James Bohman (eds.), Frieden durch
29
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These empirical challenges are not just accidental. They reflect the
systematic differences between absolutist and liberal capitalist states.
For here the government is not the ‘proprietor’ of the state; instead private actors may indeed gain from wars, and they are represented in
government; hence there is no need for referenda on war and peace,
and accordingly liberal populations have often supported wars. Hence,
the republican constitution is not a solution to war if the interests represented through it may benefit from war. The First Definitive Article is
therefore not automatically relevant for the contemporary world. While
it may plausibly be argued that there is an institutional ‘match’ between
Kant’s republics and contemporary liberal democratic states, this ahistorical institutional comparison misses the core of Kant’s argument –
peaceful policies will be represented through such institutions only if
and when the citizens do not gain from war – and it obscures the presence of specifically liberal interests in war.
In the Second Definitive Article, Kant identifies the security dilemma
at the international level as contributing to wars: ‘Peoples, as states, like
individuals, may be judged to injure one another merely by their coexistence in the state of nature’ and he proposes the Federation of Free
States as a solution.32 Liberals understand this federation as an exclusive club of liberal states, or a separate liberal peace, poised against
aggressive non-liberal states. This interpretation, again, has been challenged widely. Logically, such a reading contradicts the argument in the
First Definitive Article. If citizens tend to avoid war because of its costs,
they have to avoid all (costly) wars, not just those against other liberal
states.33
Historically, Kant established guidelines for behaviour in a diverse
international system – prior to worldwide liberalism and peace – and
accorded non-liberal Prussia with full rights. He states clearly that the
Recht: Kants Friedensidee und das Problem einer neuen Weltordnung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1996), pp. 300–323; Cavallar, ‘Kantian Perspectives’, p. 237f; MacMillan, ‘A Kantian
Protest’, p. 556; Scott Gates, Torbjørn L. Knutsen and Jonathan W. Moses, ‘Democracy
and Peace: A More Sceptical View’ Journal of Peace Research 33 (1996), p. 2; Antonio
Franceschet, ‘Popular Sovereignty or Cosmopolitan Democracy? Liberalism, Kant and
International Reform’ European Journal of International Relations 6 (2000), pp. 284f; Kubik,
‘Military Professionalism’; Tarak Barkawi, ‘War Inside the Free World’ in Barkawi and
Laffey (eds.), Democracy, pp. 107–128; and Mark Rupert, ‘Democracy, Peace: What’s Not
to Love?’ in Barkawi and Laffey (eds.), Democracy, pp. 153–172.
32 Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 16.
33 See Gates et al., ‘Democracy and Peace’, p. 4; Cavallar, ‘Kantian Perspectives’, pp. 233f;
Layne, ‘Kant or Cant’; Henry S. Farber and Joanne Gowa, ‘Polities and Peace’ in Brown
et al. (eds.), Democratic Peace, pp. 239–262.
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Classical smoke, classical mirror
Federation should gradually encompass all states and aims only at ‘the
maintenance and security of the freedom of the state itself’ (not its
citizens).34 While Kant clearly expected a ‘powerful and enlightened’
republic to assist in setting up this Federation of Free States, the latter is
open to all sovereign states, not just to republican or liberal states, and it
is designed as a collective security arrangement dealing with aggression
rather than regime type.35
In this case, because of the prior equation of liberal states with peaceful foreign policies, the ahistorical reading misses the generality of the
security dilemma. Ironically, the separate liberal peace does nothing else
but to rearrange the parties to this dilemma – which is now played out
between liberal and non-liberal states and may even provide peculiarly
liberal grounds for aggression against non-liberal states, resulting in
more rather than fewer wars.36 Yet, the Second Definitive Article understood as a response to a general security dilemma is eminently relevant
for the contemporary diverse states system.
In the Third Definitive Article Kant turns to transnational sources of
war and injustice, that is, to the imperialism of his day. Liberal theorists
use this article to underline the pacifying potential of transnational,
particularly economic, interaction. And on this basis, they propagate
interference in non-liberal states through private actors and by economic
means.37
And yet, while Kant undoubtedly believed in the pacifying potential of transnational interaction, he clearly identifies the interests of the
‘civilized and especially the commercial states’ of his time (Britain and
the Netherlands) as the source of imperialism.38 This imperialism was
based on the assumed right to trade, imposed on others; it constituted,
according to Kant, ‘an injustice carried to terrifying lengths’39 and thus a
transnational barrier to peace. Consequently, the Third Definitive Article
demands that ‘The Law of World Citizenship Shall Be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality’ which requires only that a refusal to
34
Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 18.
See MacMillan, ‘A Kantian Protest’, pp. 557, 559; Cavallar, ‘Kantian Perspectives’
pp. 244f; Andrew Hurrell, ‘Kant and the Kantian Paradigm in International Relations’
Review of International Studies 16 (1990), p. 193.
36 See Hurrell, ‘Kantian Paradigm’, p. 193; Raymond Cohen, ‘Pacific Unions: A Reappraisal of the Theory that “Democracies Do Not Go to War with Each Other”’ Review
of International Studies 20 (1994), 207–223; MacMillan, ‘A Kantian Protest’, p. 551; Cavallar, ‘Kantian Perspectives’, p. 244; Franceschet, ‘Popular Sovereignty’, p. 287; Raymond
Duvall and Jutta Weldes, ‘The International Relations of Democracy, Liberalism, and War:
Directions for Future Research’ in Barkawi and Laffey (eds.), Democracy, pp. 195–208.
37 See Doyle, ‘Kant’, p. 50.
38 Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, pp. 21–23.
39 Ibid., p. 21.
35
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interact must not lead to the death of the applicant.40 Hence, Kant does
not establish a right to trade but rather limits this very right. Accordingly,
China and Japan were not just entirely within their rights but also very
wise when they refused the Europeans entry.41 Trade and other forms
of transnational interaction can be a means to a moral end only if they
are entered into voluntarily by all parties.
The ahistorical reading of liberals picks up on the positive potential of
transnational interaction and overlooks the historically specific analysis
of imperialism. This results in an interpretation which is diametrically
opposed to Kant’s Article which identifies the right to trade as a contribution to injustice and wars. This blindness to the historical analysis of imperialism, moreover, obscures its continuing relevance in the
contemporary world. For the perpetrators Kant mentions, Britain and
the Netherlands, were the most advanced liberal capitalist states at the
time – not the absolutist states of the First Definitive Article.
That is, private interests within liberal capitalist states continue
to pursue the opening up of markets abroad, and they continue to
enlist their governments’ support, through multilateral and bilateral
arrangements – conditional aid, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and
World Trade Organization (WTO). While the latter agreements are formally ‘voluntary’, in the light of the desperate economic dependence of
many Third World states, they are to all intents and purposes ‘imposed’.
Moreover, the beneficiaries of these agreements – sometimes intentionally so, often unintentionally – turn out to be the rich countries. The
Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, it has
been argued, turned the WTO into a ‘royalty collection agency’ for the
rich countries. The Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) connected to
IMF loans have proven singularly disastrous for the poor countries but
provide huge interest payments to the rich. In both cases, the ‘voluntary’
signatures of poor states do not signify consent to the details of the agreement, but need. Obviously, trade – with liberal or non-liberal states –
is not a moral obligation, yet conditional aid, just as IMF and WTO policies, aims at changing the cultural, economic and political constitution
of a target state under conditions which render its formal consent almost
meaningless.
In short, all these policies use the economic power differentials in
order to impose a particular order on weaker states. The liberal preference for economic means of changing the cultural, economic and
40
Ibid., p. 20 (emphasis added).
188
41
Ibid., pp. 22f.
Classical smoke, classical mirror
political constitution of non-liberal states, thus falls squarely into the
category of activities which Kant intended to rule out as a source of
injustice and war. If historical imperialism had to rely more on military
means, this is arguably due to the fact that it had to destroy the independent economic basis of non-European societies before it could establish
the very dependency on which contemporary ‘informal’ means rely.
This discussion also suggests that the liberal insistence on a moral
distinction between state and private actors lacks a social foundation
in liberal capitalist states. Private interests – the East India Company,
the Dutch East India Company – often lay at the heart of imperialism,
and these were simultaneously represented in the government of liberal states. The same holds for contemporary liberal states so that it
is unclear why transnational interaction should be understood to be
more beneficial or less interventionist than interaction between states.
In short, Kant’s Third Definitive Article is eminently relevant for the
contemporary world.
Finally, the Democratic Peace reading of Kant gives primacy to the
domestic constitution. Yet, the three definitive articles cannot be ranked
in order of presentation.42 Instead, each of the three levels – domestic,
international and transnational – provides sources of international conflict, and thus requires a solution in its own right which Kant provides
in the three definitive articles. Moreover, progress towards perpetual
peace is only possible if the sources of conflict on all three levels are
tackled simultaneously. Wars between liberal and non-liberal states, or
a war-prone international environment in general, indicate for Kant not
just a lack of progress on the international level, but an environment
in which a ‘fully developed republican constitution is unattainable’.43
Historically, Kant’s insistence on the mutually constitutive nature of all
three definitive articles is borne out by the frequent limitation of individual rights in the name of national security – recently, liberal rights
are limited in the name of the ‘war on terror’, just as previously in the
name of the Cold War.44
42
See MacMillan, ‘A Kantian Protest’, p. 555; Cavallar, ‘Kantian Perspectives’, p. 247.
See MacMillan, ‘A Kantian Protest’, pp. 558, 553; Cavallar, ‘Kantian Perspectives’,
pp. 235, 238, 243; Franceschet, ‘Popular Sovereignty’, p. 286; Michael Mann, ‘Democracy
and Ethnic War’ in Barkawi and Laffey (eds.), Democracy, pp. 67–86; Rupert, ‘Democracy,
Peace’.
44 That liberal rights are frequently limited in the name of national security is widely
acknowledged yet not consistently theorized in contemporary liberal thought. See Doyle,
‘Kant’, p. 41.
43
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In summary, then, consistent with the dialectic between history and
theory, each of Kant’s articles is based upon an analysis of the domestic,
international and transnational causes of historically specific wars. Yet,
the ahistorical reading of liberals reifies and prioritizes the republican
or liberal constitution – irrespective of its questionable historical application in the contemporary world. Furthermore, instead of addressing
the general security dilemma through the Federation of Free States, liberals propagate a separate liberal peace, thus reconfiguring the security
dilemma as one between liberal and non-liberal states. Finally, instead
of recognizing the crucial role of private interests and transnational
interactions in establishing injustice and, historically, imperialism and
war, liberals propagate precisely these means. This ahistorical reading
of Kant does not just ‘inhibit criticism of liberal states themselves’ by
removing their particular contributions to international conflict from
the analysis;45 furthermore, it actively promotes the private interests
and transnational activities lying at the heart of imperialism, supported
by the possibility of state intervention based on the denial of rights of
non-intervention to non-liberal states on moral grounds.
This interpretation does not just violate the spirit of ‘Perpetual Peace’
but also its letter. First, the justification of intervention is contradicted by
the Fifth Preliminary Article which states unequivocally that ‘no state
shall by force interfere with the constitution or government of another
state’.46 Moreover, this principle of non-intervention applies ‘regardless
of circumstances’47 and is, thus, explicitly considered a ‘perfect duty’
by Kant. This reading is further strengthened by the centrality of the
categorical imperative establishing the necessary universality of law.48
International right must be based on the principle of equality and cannot
confer rights of intervention on liberal states while denying them to nonliberal states.49
Secondly, Kant clearly expected republican constitutions to arise out
of an internal political process rather than to be established through outside interference. However, Kant was explicit that constitutional reform
is an imperfect duty, allowing for subjective latitude according to the
45
See MacMillan, ‘A Kantian Protest’, p. 551; Cavallar, ‘Kantian Perspectives’, p. 244;
Franceschet, ‘Popular Sovereignty’, p. 287; Duvall and Weldes, ‘International Relations of
Democracy’.
46 See Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 7; and Hurrell, ‘Kantian Paradigm’, p. 200.
47 Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, pp. 7, 8.
48 See MacMillan, ‘A Kantian Protest’, p. 554; Cavallar, ‘Kantian Perspectives’, p. 244; and
Hurrell, ‘Kantian Paradigm’, p. 199.
49 Cavallar, ‘Kantian Perspectives’, p. 241.
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circumstances, and thus subordinate to the perfect duty, which has to
be executed at once, of a state to ‘preserve its own existence’ as well
as to the perfect duty to refrain from intervention; hence, constitutional
reform is neither more basic than the principle of non-intervention nor
a precondition for international rights and obligations but, if anything,
subordinate to them.50
Consequently, and thirdly, the use of force for the purpose of spreading liberalism would not only violate the principle of non-intervention
but also the principle that republican constitutions must rest on consent.
Moreover, a justification of force for the purpose of spreading liberalism, or republican constitutions, directly contradicts the perfect duty
of a state to defend itself. Practically, such a reading would imply that
liberal states have a right to use force against non-liberal states who, in
turn, have a duty to defend themselves – amounting to a vicious circle
of wars which would fit rather awkwardly into Kant’s goal of perpetual
peace.
In conclusion, the ahistorical reading of Kant overlooks the reduced
historical relevance of the republican constitution in contemporary liberal capitalist states just as it overlooks the historical continuity and
relevance of the general security dilemma and transnational sources of
international injustice and war. Moreover, lacking attention to the ‘nondisciplinary’ thought of Kant leads to a misconception of the relationship between the domestic, international and transnational spheres. For
Kant, these spheres are mutually constitutive of each other and of peace –
or war – yet the contemporary reading accords primacy to the domestic sphere and relegates Kant’s comments on the international and
transnational sphere merely to tools for achieving domestic changes.
Hence, the Democratic Peace thesis is essentially based on the one
and only article in Kant’s ‘Perpetual Peace’ – the First Definitive article requiring republican constitutions – which for reasons of historical
change does not straightforwardly apply in the contemporary world.
It thus stands in stark opposition to the letter and spirit of ‘Perpetual
Peace’.
John Stuart Mill and liberalism
The same ahistorical approach to classical authors which mistakenly
traces the trajectory of the Democratic Peace thesis back to Kant is, I will
50
See Cavallar, ‘Kantian Perspectives’, p. 246; and MacMillan, ‘A Kantian Protest’, p. 558.
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argue now, also responsible for overlooking a much more fitting predecessor. John Stuart Mill’s defence of imperialism, I will now suggest,
provides a perfect match for contemporary liberal thought. Like Kant,
Mill derived the liberal ideals of equality and freedom from a philosophy of history. But unlike Kant, Mill was an empiricist; he therefore
allowed this history to provide the basis of his political and international theory.51 A brief look at the contents of this philosophy of history
should serve to clarify this point.52
Mill identified four stages of development in history. Of these,
modern civilization is the highest and ‘distinguishes a wealthy and
powerful nation from savages or barbarians’.53 It is characterized by
commerce, manufacture and agriculture, cooperation and social intercourse, law, justice and the protection of people and property; and it
exists in modern Europe, and especially in Great Britain.54 Furthermore,
the mode of government we find in Britain, representative government,
is the ‘ideal type of a perfect government’ because it best allows for the
development of individual liberty.55
Mill then proceeded to sketch three earlier stages of development in
the history of humankind for each of which a different form of government is best suited for progressing to the next stage. There is, first,
the stage of savagery, characterized by personal independence, by the
absence of a developed social life, and a lack of discipline either for unexciting work or for submission to laws.56 Savages must learn to obey, and
this is achieved through slavery and despotism as the appropriate form
of government.57 This second stage of development, slavery, requires a
government ‘which possesses force, but seldom uses it’ in order to raise
the people ‘from a government of will to one of law’.58 Subsequently we
find the third stage of civilizational development, barbarism, which is
characterized, above all, by ‘mental’ shortcomings such as an inveterate
spirit of locality, passivity, ignorance, rudeness, attachment to tradition
51
John Stuart Mill, ‘Coleridge’ in Alan Ryan (ed.), John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham,
Utilitarianism and Other Essays (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 188.
52 For a more detailed discussion of Mill’s political and international theory, see Beate
Jahn, ‘Barbarian Thoughts: Imperialism in the Philosophy of John Stuart Mill’ Review of
International Studies 31 (2005), 599–618.
53 John Stuart Mill, ‘Civilization’ in John M. Robson (ed.), The Collected Works of John Stuart
Mill (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1977), vol. XVIII, p. 119.
54 Ibid., pp. 120f.
55 Ibid., p. 122; and ‘Considerations on Representative Government’ in John Gray (ed.),
On Liberty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 256.
56 Mill, ‘Representative Government’, pp. 232, 260, and ‘Civilization’, p. 120.
57 Mill, ‘Representative Government’, pp. 232f.
58 Ibid., pp. 233f.
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and general ‘positive defects of national character’, making representative government impossible.59
Mill did not believe that progression from one stage to the next was an
automatic process: stagnation and even regression are the order of the
day for ‘large portions of mankind’.60 Historically, two different roads
to civilizational development can be identified. The first is the exception, namely government through an indigenous leader of extraordinary
genius; the second is the rule, namely government through a culturally
superior power carrying the people ‘rapidly through several stages of
progress, and clearing away obstacles to improvement which might
have lasted indefinitely if the subject population had been left unassisted to its native tendencies and chances’.61
Just like Democratic Peace theorists, Mill identified the highest stage
of development empirically with European, and especially British, culture and political organization. This identification necessarily entails the
separation of humanity into a civilized and an uncivilized part which
provides the basis for two different principles governing international
relations.
These ‘true principles of international morality’ are based on the distinction between culturally superior and inferior peoples.62 ‘To suppose
that the same international customs, and the same rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilized nation and another,
and between civilized nations and barbarians, is a grave error, and one
which no statesman can fall into’.63 Mill gives two main reasons for this
distinction.
‘In the first place, the rules of ordinary international morality imply
reciprocity. But barbarians will not reciprocate. They cannot be
depended on for observing any rules. . . . In the next place, nations
which are still barbarous have not got beyond the period during which
it is likely to be for their benefit that they should be conquered and held
in subjection by foreigners’.64
Relations among civilized nations should be governed by the principle
of equality. Mill supported the principle of free trade. He also suggested
that international law and an International Tribunal are ‘now one of
59
60 Ibid., pp. 224, 241.
61 Ibid., pp. 264, 231, 234f.
Ibid., pp. 261–264, 212.
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 195.
John Stuart Mill, ‘A Few Words on Non-Intervention’ in Robson (ed.), Collected Works,
vol. XXI, p. 118.
64 Ibid., p. 118.
62
63
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the most prominent wants of civilized society’.65 ‘Among civilized peoples, members of an equal community of nations, like Christian Europe’
aggressive war, conquest and annexation are out of the question; what
needs to be decided in this relationship between civilized nations is
the question of interference.66 In general, Mill argued for a principle of
non-intervention because ‘a government which needs foreign support
to enforce the obedience of its own citizens, is one which ought not to
exist’.67 Similarly, a people whose desire for, and capability of achieving,
freedom against its own government is not strong enough, will not be
able to retain the freedom given to it by foreign intervention.68 The same
principle applies to the white settler colonies.69 While Mill preferred a
continued international integration through institutions like the Commonwealth he clearly stated that the settler colonies are entitled to the
full rights of sovereignty and non-intervention.70
In contrast, relations between civilized and barbarian peoples should
take the form of a hierarchy. If the culturally inferior population is in
the majority, as in India, ‘the conquerors and the conquered cannot . . .
live together under the same free institutions’ because the absorption of
a culturally superior people into an inferior civilizational stage would
be an evil. The conquered have to be governed by despotism which
‘is the ideal rule of a free people over a barbarous or semi-barbarous
one’.71
And yet, even in Mill’s time, military intervention and colonial rule
were not the driving force of imperialism. Rather, as Mill clearly states,
‘it has been the destiny of the East India Company to suggest the
true theory of the government of a semi-barbarous dependency by
a civilized country’.72 That is, the private interests of the East India
65
66
Mill, ‘Representative Government’, p. 441.
67 Ibid., p. 121.
Mill, ‘Non-Intervention’, p. 120.
Ibid., p. 122. It is this problem of intervention between sovereign European states to
which discussions of John Stuart Mill in International Relations are generally restricted. See
Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), pp. 251f;
Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1979), especially Part II, Chs. 2 and 3; R. J. Vincent, Nonintervention and International
Order (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 54–56; Michael Walzer, Just and
Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1992), pp. 87–96; Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-states:
Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990); Chris Brown, Terry Nardin and Nicholas Rengger (eds.), International Relations
in Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). For a recent detailed
discussion of the development of Mill’s position on non-intervention between European
states and its exceptions see Georgios Varouxakis, ‘John Stuart Mill on Intervention and
Non-Intervention’ Millennium 26 (1997), 57–76.
69 Mill, ‘Representative Government’, p. 449.
70 Ibid., p. 451.
71 Ibid., p. 454.
72 Ibid., pp. 466, 396–398, 406f; and Autobiography, p. 182.
68
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Company and their transnational interaction with India led, over time,
to the establishment of colonial rule. Even in its nineteenth-century heyday, imperialism was pursued ‘by informal means where possible and
formal means where necessary’, as Gallagher and Robinson famously
pointed out.73 And the same dynamics are aptly described by Doyle
for the contemporary world in which private property and free enterprise abroad, when it meets with local resistance, calls for protection by
the state.74 Transnational interactions, especially of an economic nature,
are of primary importance in both cases and only followed by military
intervention or direct colonial rule when necessary.
It is clear, then, that John Stuart Mill did not just utter A Few Words
on Non-Intervention pertaining to sovereign European states, as his commentators in International Relations suggest. Rather, he provided an
overall theory of international relations. What governs the selective
application of the right to sovereignty is the stage of civilizational development set out in his philosophy of history. The attempt, therefore, in
International Relations to separate A Few Words on Non-Intervention from
Mill’s ‘eurocentrism’ which Brown, Nardin and Rengger relativize by
pointing out that it only expressed the common prejudice of his time75
overlooks that precisely this ‘prejudice’ lies at the heart of Mill’s philosophy of history and provides the principle on which the whole of Mill’s
theory of International Relations rests.
Moreover, this selective reading also obscures that Mill’s arguments
for not extending rights of sovereignty and non-intervention to noncivilized peoples are perfectly mirrored in contemporary thought.
Firstly, non-liberal states are defined by their refusal to comply with
international law – they do not reciprocate – and, thus, have to be denied
the right to sovereignty and non-intervention.76 Secondly, intervention
is an appropriate means to speed up the development towards liberalism in the interests of the target population as well as of humanity
at large because the former will benefit from equality and freedom
guaranteed by liberal institutions while the latter will be safer once
the non-liberal sources of aggression are removed. Thirdly, transnational interaction is the preferred means of international communication and followed or accompanied by military means only if and when
necessary.
73 J. Gallagher and R. Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’ Economic History Review
VI (1953), p. 3.
74 Doyle, ‘Kant’, pp. 38, 40.
75 Brown et al. (eds.), International Relations, p. 465.
76 See Mill, ‘Non-Intervention’, p. 118; Doyle, ‘Kant’, p. 31f.
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Despite these parallels, there are also some differences between Mill
and contemporary liberals. Most obviously, Mill considered formal
colonial rule the ideal government of barbarians, while this is certainly
not the view of contemporary liberals.77 However, both historical evidence and Kant’s argument for the republican constitution demonstrate
that the institutional form which a hierarchical international order takes
is not decisive. In terms of justification, Mill and contemporary liberals
deny equal rights to non-liberal or non-civilized states on exactly the
same grounds: they are defined as aggressive and will benefit from the
accelerated development of liberalism or civilization. The realization
of such a hierarchical order, on the other hand, depends on the means
available and here, as liberals readily point out, the contemporary interdependent world offers a greater and more efficient range of informal
means than were available in Mill’s time.
Yet, are Mill’s ‘civilizations’ comparable to the contemporary liberal
emphasis on ‘regime type’? Yes, for Mill identified ‘civilization’ with
representative government theoretically and practically. And while the
culturalist version of the Democratic Peace thesis mirrors Mill’s argument regarding the mutually constitutive nature of government and
cultural development explicitly,78 implicitly we find such a connection
underlies most liberal thought.
In sum, then, Mill and contemporary liberal thought start from the
empirical identification of liberal ideals in liberal states, leading to
the distinction between liberal and non-liberal, or civilized and noncivilized, peoples. In both cases, liberal or civilized states are defined
as peaceful, and non-liberal or uncivilized states are seen as the source
of international conflict and aggression. This distinction requires the
application of particularist rather than universal rights of sovereignty
and non-intervention, justifying the ‘implementation of a foreign
77
Formal colonial rule is generally not advocated even in the recent discussions on American Empire. See Michael Cox, ‘The Empire’s Back in Town: or America’s Imperial Temptation – Again’ Millennium 32 (2003), 1–27; and Andrew J. Bacevich (ed.) The Imperial Tense.
Prospects and Problems of American Empire (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003). These debates on
American Empire, however, may well be seen as rooted in liberal thought. After all, the
defence of unipolarity or primacy advocated by ‘neoconservatives’ does not constitute
a radical alternative to the cooperative security approach of the ‘liberal internationalists’ and neither do the foreign policies based on them; rather, as Posen and Ross have
shown, both remain ‘strongly committed to liberal principles’. See Barry R. Posen and
Andrew L. Ross, ‘Competing Visions for US Grand Strategy’ International Security 21
(1996/97), pp. 5, 34.
78 See Bruce Russett, ‘Why Democratic Peace?’ in Brown et al. (eds.), Democratic Peace,
pp. 82–115.
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policy of intervention’ which ‘constitutes the fundamental nature of
imperialism’.79
Hence, if contemporary liberal thought has a classical tradition, it
leads back to John Stuart Mill rather than to Immanuel Kant, who may
be regarded as ‘the last of the Continental republicans’ rather than the
first liberal.80 Mill, however, provides a perfect match for contemporary
liberal thought – and this not despite, but because of, the fact that he
justified imperialism.81
It is, hence, precisely the historical continuity between Mill’s society and contemporary liberal states – in their constitutional set up as
well as in their economic order – which provides the basis for the close
‘match’ between Mill’s argument and that of the Democratic Peace thesis – despite the difference of a world of empires and of sovereign states
in terms of their appearance. While this historically sensitive reading
of Mill thus uncovers that the Democratic Peace thesis, albeit not intentionally, may contain elements of the justification of imperialism, there is
more to be gained from Mill than this. I will argue in the next section that
close attention to the relationship between the domestic and the international in Mill can help us test the claims on which the Democratic Peace
thesis rests.
Mill’s political theory
As we have seen above, the Democratic Peace thesis as well as Mill’s
international theory rest on the fundamental claim that liberal societies
are superior to others – they support the development of individual
liberty and they are relatively peaceful and law-abiding members of the
international sphere. But unlike contemporary liberals, Mill provides an
analysis of modern civilization in his political theory which can serve
as a starting point for a critical assessment of this claim.
Mill’s domestic political theory reveals a curious and alarming inversion of the claims he made in his philosophy of history and his international theory. The very civilization which represented the highest stage
79 Eddy M. Souffrant, Formal Transgression: John Stuart Mill’s Philosophy of International
Affairs (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), p. 136.
80 Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, The Republican Legacy in International Thought (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 250.
81 Eileen Sullivan, ‘Liberalism and Imperialism: J. S. Mill’s Defense of the British Empire’
Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (1983), p. 599. For a detailed discussion of the claim that
contemporary Democratic Peace theory, and liberal thought more generally, implies the
justification of imperialism, see Jahn, ‘Kant, Mill’.
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of the development of individual liberty in the latter is here depicted as a
form of society ‘which in its uncorrected influence . . . has . . . a tendency
to destroy’ the highest goods, namely individual liberty.82 Modern civilization is characterized by a loss of ‘individual energy and courage’,
pride and self-reliance, ‘slavery’ to artificial wants, ‘the dull unexciting
monotony’ of life, absence of individuality, ‘great inequalities in wealth
and social rank’; the wants of ‘the great mass of the people of civilized
countries . . . are scarcely better provided for than those of the savage,
while they are bound by a thousand fetters in lieu of the freedom and
excitement which are his compensations’.83
Mill insists that all the inventions of which civilization is so proud
have not ‘lightened the day’s toil of any human being’.84 Civilization,
in his analysis, has neither initiated material progress for the benefit of
human beings, nor achieved the development of individual liberty. Mill
comes to the conclusion that in the highest form of modern civilization,
Britain, ‘society is itself the tyrant – society collectively over the separate
individuals who compose it – its means of tyrannising are not restricted
to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries’.85
While this analysis of modern civilization clearly removes the basis of
Mill’s claim that modern civilization uniquely and successfully realizes
the ideals of individual freedom and equality, it also provides a fundamental challenge for contemporary liberal thought. For Mill demonstrates that constitutional liberalism does not as such guarantee individual freedom and equality – on the contrary, it jeopardizes them. Hence,
unless it can be shown that the particularly liberal forms of ‘unfreedom’
which Mill identifies as integral tendencies of modern civilization have
been overcome in contemporary liberal states, there is no ground for
according these states more rights than others.
Yet, Mill certainly believed that modern civilization was superior to
other stages of development and that higher goods ‘may yet coexist with
civilization’.86 And this hope motivated Mill to work out remedies for
these ‘vices and miseries of civilization’.87 Since Mill’s remedies have a
82
83 Mill, ‘Coleridge’, p. 182.
Mill, ‘Civilization’, p. 135.
John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998), p. 129.
85 See John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p. 6, and ‘Coleridge’,
p. 182.
86 Mill, ‘Civilization’, p. 135.
87 Ibid., p. 119. Mill develops the theoretical argument for the integral tendencies of civilization to suppress individuality mainly in ‘Civilization’ while On Liberty is devoted to
propagating the countermeasures society should adopt.
84
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parallel in the means which Democratic Peace theorists employ for the
spread of liberalism internationally, their discussion will serve to test the
claim that they can overcome the shortcomings of modern civilization
or spread liberalism.
In the domestic sphere, Mill argues for the protection of the private
sphere from the pressures of public opinion; the freedom of thought
and discussion; the development of individual genius and mental
superiority; the promotion of free trade; support for different forms of
education, including elite education; and weighted suffrage.88 In addition, in order to diversify and enrich the narrow and limited tendencies of modern civilization, he prescribes the study of the ‘opinions of
mankind in all ages and nations’, the study of the noble manifestations of the cultures of ‘Athens, Sparta, Rome; nay, even barbarians, as
the Germans, or still more unmitigated savages, the wild Indians, and
again the Chinese, the Egyptians, the Arabs’.89 Furthermore, in order
to counteract the unlimited increase of wealth and population resulting
in the destruction of the earth’s ‘pleasantness’ for the mere purpose of
supporting a larger ‘but not a better or happier population’, he recommends the abandonment of economic growth in favour of the stationary
state.90
Thus, Mill’s remedy for the ‘vices and miseries of civilization’ is the
introduction of as much plurality as possible in society, which can only
be ensured if no community ‘has a right to force another to be civilised’.91
Not even in the name of the necessary defence against barbarism can this
right be established since it would mean the degeneration of civilization
to such an extent that it were better to be ‘destroyed and regenerated
(like the Western Empire) by energetic barbarians’.92
Mill supports policies such as weighted suffrage and elite education
which themselves violate the liberal ideals of freedom and equality. This
contradiction has historically and theoretically been part and parcel of
liberal thought and practice. Whereas all human beings were supposed
to be ‘born equal, free, and rational’ this birthright, from Locke onwards,
has never been enough; liberal ‘political inclusion is contingent upon a
qualified capacity to reason’.93
88 See Mill, On Liberty, pp. 14, 17ff, 53ff, 88, 98; and ‘Representative Government’, pp.
335–338.
89 John Stuart Mill, ‘Bentham’ in Ryan (ed.) Utilitarianism, p. 148, and ‘Coleridge’, p. 200.
90 Mill, Political Economy, pp. 126, 129.
91 Mill, On Liberty, p. 86.
92 Ibid., p. 86.
93 Mehta, Liberalism, pp. 49, 60 (emphasis added).
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Hence, the use of illiberal methods must be seen as a central feature of liberal political reason distinguishing between those who can
be governed through the promotion of liberty and those who cannot. Traditionally, these distinctions have most commonly been made
along gendered and developmental lines, excluding women, children,
the mentally handicapped, slaves, workers etc. in the domestic sphere,
and non-European cultures in the international, from rights of freedom
and equality.94 In the domestic sphere, Mill excluded workers from suffrage on the grounds that their lack of education amounted to a lack of
the requisite reason, while internationally non-European cultures were
excluded on the same grounds.95
These remedies which undermine the liberal ideals themselves have
a parallel in contemporary liberal thought. For, as we have seen, it is
not actual consent of real existing people which establishes legitimacy.
While preferring informal methods for the aim of changing the constitution of non-liberal states, Democratic Peace theorists do not rule out
the use of military force in principle and they propagate unequal rights
of sovereignty and non-intervention. Thus, in case of resistance by the
target population – or parts thereof – to the change of their cultural,
economic and political constitution, we have a perfect parallel to Mill’s
justification of imperialism in which despotic government – here military means – is necessary to prepare the population for the next stage of
civilization.96 And this implies that the rationality with which all human
beings are born does not constitute sufficient grounds for equal rights
of freedom. Spreading liberal values by illiberal means betrays these
values; the means do not serve the ends.
Finally, we can test the logical consistency of Mill’s theory by paying
attention to the relationship between the domestic and the international
in his thought. In the domestic sphere, Mill promotes the stationary
state while fighting it in the name of progress in the international; in the
domestic sphere, he denies the right to civilize others while supporting
the civilizing mission as a moral duty in the international; in the domestic
sphere he promotes cultural plurality while demanding assimilation in
the international. Confronted with a lack of individuality in modern
94
Barry Hindess, ‘Liberalism – What’s in a Name?’ in Wendy Larner and William Walters
(eds.), Global Governmentality (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 23–39.
95 Mill, ‘Representative Government’, pp. 335–338. See Mehta, Liberalism, for a discussion
of the role of education in raising these groups to the required level of rationality.
96 Applied to other cases of exclusion from equal rights, the logic of this argument implies
that women or, indeed, non-European peoples have only developed the requisite reason
for the rights they now enjoy through the forceful denial of these rights in the past.
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Classical smoke, classical mirror
civilization, Mill imports the characteristics of the international sphere –
cultural diversity, coexistence and stationary conditions as a solution;
confronted with those same characteristics in the international sphere he
exports the characteristics of the domestic – conformism/assimilation,
hierarchy, progress.
These contradictions might not present a major problem if the domestic and international spheres can be neatly separated. This, however,
is not the case. Mill himself defines civilization as a negation of barbarism, and vice versa. And he imports the cultural plurality of the
international sphere in order to rescue the domestic from the pitfalls
of cultural assimilation and stagnation. This remedy, however, will be
lost in the case of a successful civilizing mission in the international
sphere. And, hence, the primacy of the domestic becomes untenable,
for the international environment constitutes an integral part of the conditions of domestic development and vice versa. And this conclusion
holds equally for Democratic Peace theory, which prioritizes the domestic constitution and expects peace to follow – without reflecting on the
detrimental effects of conflictual international relations on the development of domestic liberalism.
In sum, a historically sensitive reading of Mill not only reveals the
parallels with contemporary liberal thought; it also undermines every
single one of the claims we find in the Democratic Peace thesis. In his
political theory, Mill demonstrates that modern civilization and representative government do not as such support the development of
individual liberty and equality. Further, Mill shows that transnational
interaction undertaken by the East India Company, for instance, has historically been a crucial element of the constitution of imperialism rather
than a basis for international justice, cooperation and peace. Further, his
work demonstrates that illiberal means – legal inequality – contradict
the fundamental principles on which liberal ideals rest in the first place.
And, finally, the fundamental contradictions between his international
and his domestic political theory in the light of the mutually constitutive nature of these two spheres suggest that neither is tenable without
a radical revision of the other, or both.
Conclusion
Democratic Peace authors are motivated to read classical authors for
exactly the right reasons – namely in order to illuminate contemporary problems. And yet, they squander the critical potential of the
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classics for an analysis of the contemporary world by disregarding the
very differences between the classics and our world from which this
potential arises. And these differences lie in historical distance and nondisciplinary thought. By disregarding the nature of the societies represented through republican constitutions as well as the mutually constitutive nature of domestic, international and transnational sources of
peace and war, Democratic Peace theorists use Kant solely in support
of contemporary liberal ideologies – and thus fall into the trap identified by Rengger: ‘if we focus solely (or even largely) on the problems
of the moment we are likely to become prisoners of the assumptions of
the moment, some of which may well have created the problems in the
first place’.97 And the assumptions contributing to the problems of the
moment are the specifically liberal reasons to go to war: the aim of changing the constitution of non-liberal states because they are perceived as
sources of conflict; the attempt to impose transnational economic interaction – for economic and political reasons – without the consent of
non-liberal states; the exclusion of non-liberal states from equal access
to rights and institutions. In this way, the ahistorical reading of classical
authors appears to produce ‘timeless truths’ which amplify the Zeitgeist
rather than analyze it.98
This ahistorical and disciplinary approach to classical authors is also
responsible for the neglect of John Stuart Mill. A historically sensitive
reading of Mill would have immensely benefited Democratic Peace theory for the reasons pointed out by Stanley Hoffmann almost fifty years
ago: ‘philosophers of history have a disarming way of making explicit
and even central, assumptions about man, society, and history which
are often repressed but nevertheless operating in all social scientists’
schemes’.99 Attention to the historical comparability of Mill’s society
with contemporary liberal ones as well as to the relationship between
the domestic and international spheres in his work could have provided
what Max Weber identified as the ultimate task of the social sciences:
namely to assist the scientist ‘in becoming aware of the ultimate standards of value which he does not make explicit to himself or, which he
97
Nicholas Rengger, ‘Political Theory and International Relations: Promised Land or Exit
from Eden?’ International Affairs 76 (2000), p. 770.
98 Doyle, War and Peace, p. 9.
99 Stanley Hoffmann, ‘International Relations: The Long Road to Theory’ World Politics
11 (1959), p. 355.
202
Classical smoke, classical mirror
must presuppose in order to be logical’.100 That is, a historically and
contextually sensitive reading of Mill would have uncovered the justification of imperialism as an ultimate standard of value in the Democratic
Peace thesis – one that it does not make explicit to itself – as well as fundamental contradictions between domestic and international political
means and goals which defy logic and explain the failures of liberal
foreign policies then and now.
Hence, it is the ahistorical reading of Kant which allows his contemporary use – within and outside the academic discipline of International
Relations – for the justification of interventionist policies in direct contradiction to his principled objection to intervention as a means for furthering peace. And it is the ahistorical reading of Mill which establishes his
reputation as a non-interventionist irrespective of his principled support
of intervention in pursuit of a peaceful development of international
affairs. For this game of smoke and mirror the discipline of International Relations pays a high price. Behind the smoke are hidden exactly
those aspects of classical texts which could provide a critical assessment
of contemporary assumptions while the mirrors only provide support
for the latter.
100
Max Weber, ‘“Objectivity” in Social Science and Social Policy’ in Edward A. Shils and
Henry A. Finch (eds.), The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: Free Press, 1949),
pp. 81, 54.
203
Part III
Lineages
9
The ‘other’ in classical political
theory: re-contextualizing the
cosmopolitan/communitarian debate
Robert Shilliam
Introduction1
The current debate over the ethics of international relations focuses upon
the following issue: can and should political obligation be extended to
citizens in other communities?2 Within this debate, a ‘cosmopolitan’
position, referring back to Immanuel Kant’s notion of the pre-social
universal self, holds that a global principle of justice, backed up by an
institutionalized system of democratic global governance, is both necessary and desirable in an increasingly interdependent world. Against
this, a ‘communitarian position’, often in some way referring back to
Georg Hegel’s notion of the socially-constituted self, points out that not
only is there no such institutional capacity in world politics to organize global justice, but furthermore, there can be no a priori principle
of justice because political rights and duties are always embedded in
a community-dependent value system.3 Essentially, then, two classical
1 This chapter benefited from instructive feedback at this book’s panel session at the
ISA conference 2005. I must especially thank Beate Jahn and Naeem Inayatullah for their
constructive and powerful criticisms. These have compelled me to develop the argument
to a position that I would not have reached on my own.
2 Famously, M. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations
(Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1980); and Charles R. Beitz, Political Theory and International
Relations (Princeton NJ. Princeton University Press, 1979). For overviews of the debate
see M. Cochran, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism in a Post-Cold War World’,
in J. MacMillan and A. Linklater (eds.), Boundaries in Question – New Directions in International Relations (London: Pinter Publishers, 1995), pp. 40–53; C. Brown, ‘Review Article:
Theories of International Justice’, British Journal of Politics 27 (1997), 273–297; and Nicholas
Rengger, ‘Political Theory and International Relations: Promised Land or Exit from Eden?’
International Affairs 76 (2000), 755–770.
3 For the Cosmopolitan position see, for example, Daniele Archibugi, ‘Models of International Organization in Perpetual Peace Projects’, Review of International Studies 18 (1992),
295–317; David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); and Andrew Linklater, The Transformation
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authors, Kant and Hegel, have consistently been mobilized as authorities through which to frame the cosmopolitan/communitarian debate
in the following terms: either there ought to be a universal justice system,
or we should accept what is, namely, an array of self-referential value
systems.
Some have questioned the framing of the debate around an ethical
dichotomy of either pursuing what ‘ought to be’ or accepting what ‘is’.4
And such concerns have increasingly become expressed (although by no
means exclusively) through a broadly poststructuralist understanding
of the relationship between identity and difference. Here, the cosmopolitan/communitarian dichotomy is understood in terms of the philosophical discourse of the ‘modern’ or ‘Western’ subject. Granted an authoritative sovereign voice through modern/Western philosophy this subject
constantly works to re-produce and occupy a secure, pre-social, centre
of being. To retain the authority gained from an objective sense of self,
this individualized subject must constantly be reproduced by means of
a discourse that separates morality from politics, security from danger,
sovereignty from anarchy, the domestic from the international, identity
from difference and, ultimately, the ‘self’ from the ‘other’. In short, for the
poststructuralist position, the disciplining mechanism of the sovereign
nature of modern political identity is what frames the ethical debate
in international relations in terms of either universal right or particular
value system.5
of Political Community: Ethical Foundations of the Post-Westphalian Era (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1998). The Communitarian position is usually taken with some qualification. See
Stanley Hoffmann, Duties Beyond Borders: On the Limits and Possibilities of Ethical International Politics (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1981); D. Miller, ‘Bounded Citizenship’
in K. Hutchings and R. Dannreuther, Cosmopolitan Citizenship (London: Macmillan, 1999),
pp. 60–80; and C. Brown, ‘Universal Human Rights: a Critique’ in T. Dunne and N. J.
Wheeler (eds.), Human Rights in Global Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), pp. 103–127. For examples of the mobilization of Kant and Hegel as classical authorities in the debate see Chris Brown, International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches
(London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992); Linklater, Transformation of Political Community,
pp. 48–55; and D. Heater, World Citizenship: Cosmopolitan Thinking and its Opponents
(London: Continuum, 2002), especially pp. 53–54.
4 For example, Andrew Hurrell, ‘Kant and the Kantian Paradigm in International Relations’, Review of International Studies 16 (1990), 183–205; and especially K. Hutchings, ‘The
Possibility of Judgment: Moralizing and Theorizing in International Relations’, Review of
International Studies 18 (1992), 51–62.
5 See in general D. Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics
of Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992); R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside:
International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
On the cosmopolitan/communitarian debate specifically see E. Frazer and N. Lacey, The
208
Shafiul
Alam Prince,
IR59, University
Dhaka.
The ‘other’
in classical
political of
theory
But perhaps the most powerful criticism of those who internalize this
sovereign self in their approach to the ethics of international relations
emanates from a post-colonial inspired body of literature.6 In very general terms, this literature places the origins of the modern dichotomy
of self/other as an effect, in the first instance, of the need to legitimize the European conquest of the Americas. Colonization required
the distancing of the Amerindian, as a social being, from the European
in both time and space. The construction of the European ‘self’ was
achieved by situating the Amerindian ‘other’ within a pre-social ‘state
of nature’. The ‘other’, having being cast out of the ethical universe
populated by the European ‘self’, was then reconciled through narratives that took the European ‘self’ to be the Telos of human history, and
thus the future civilized image of the backward ‘other’. By cleaving a
co-constitutive relationship into ‘self’ and ‘other’, and then subsuming
the identity of the ‘other’ under that of the ‘self’, the very possibility
of developing an ethics of international, or inter-cultural, difference is
denied.
Approaching the problem of difference from this perspective one
would have to say that the cosmopolitan/communitarian debate utilizes an essentially colonial separation of ‘self’ and ‘other’, and as such
possesses a woefully inadequate framework through which to interrogate the ethics of international relations. And in this chapter I take
such a position with all due seriousness. Nevertheless, I contend that
the poststructural and especially postcolonial inspired critique of the
modern/Western sovereign self has difficulty in making sense of the
context and content of Kant and Hegel’s writings on international relations. In short, I charge that neither the above mainstream nor critical
literatures can adequately contextualize the founding ‘debate’ between
Kant and Hegel that is used, today, as an authority with which to
frame the dominant investigation of ethics in the International Relations
discipline (IR).
Politics of Community – a Feminist Critique of the Liberal-Communitarian Debate (London:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993); K. Hutchings, Kant, Critique and Politics (London: Routledge, 1995); and R. B. J. Walker, ‘Citizenship After the Modern Subject’ in Hutchings and
Dannreuther, Cosmopolitan Citizenship, pp. 171–200.
6 See especially W. E. Connolly, Identity/Difference – Democratic Negotiations of Political
Paradox (London: Cornell University Press, 1992); Beate Jahn, The Cultural Construction of
International Relations: the Invention of the State of Nature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000); and
Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference
(London: Routledge, 2004).
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In what follows I sympathetically mobilize the language of the
postcolonial critique to inform a re-contextualization of this classical
‘debate’, but I do so with the purpose of opening up a neglected aspect
(and legacy of) the development of ‘European’ or ‘Western’ thought on
the constitution and rights of the modern sovereign self. I argue that
a) the ‘other’ to which both Kant and Hegel addressed their writings
on international relations was a novel political subject produced within
Europe; and b) the process of ‘othering’ in Kant and Hegel cannot be
understood as a disciplining effect of modern sovereign identity but as a
peripheral and defensive response to this identity from within Europe. In
this context, the ‘other’ perceived by both Kant and Hegel is, paradoxically, the sovereign political subject encoded in the revolutionary French
Constitution. And the process of ‘othering’ is a disciplining aspect of
what might be called a ‘consciousness of backwardness’.
The purpose of the chapter is to support, against the mainstream
cosmopolitan/communitarian debate, the critical project of orienting
ethical debates in international relations towards the problem of difference, but, at the same time, to push the problematization of ‘difference’
further. I seek to make the case that ‘othering’ cannot be understood
solely as a disciplining effect of the discourse of the modern sovereign
subject, whether internalized by either the powerful or the subordinated. Specifically, I aim to dissolve the security of the discursive European/Western/modern self in order to show that the commonly perceived classical tradition of ‘liberal’ thought is itself constructed just as
much, if not more, by critical intellectual responses from non-liberal
societies. The ultimate point is to show that ethics from the standpoint
of the ‘periphery’ or the ‘backward’ constitute the subject matter of our
classical legacy in normative IR theory far more intimately than is usually supposed.
Before continuing, it might be useful to explain what I mean by a
‘consciousness of backwardness’. As a general rule of contextualizing
classical political thought, I take the intellectual stratum to hold a liminal position within the ruling strata. The intellectual stratum enjoys an
authoritative position by virtue of mentally policing the coherence of
political authority. Yet this is no slavish task, for at the same time as they
pursue this general purpose, the intellectual stratum also pursues the
rights of their own freedom to think against noble, monarchical and/or
hierocratic influences and interests. In this respect, the prescriptions that
some intellectuals promote with regard to ensuring the coherence of the
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The ‘other’ in classical political theory
body politic as a whole may well threaten specific elements within the
ruling strata.
An intellectual becomes aware of a specific sense of comparative
backwardness through geo-political impingement whether by direct
military means, and/or by indirect means. These indirect means might,
for example, pertain to the content of a foreign policy that disturbs the
legitimacy of the existing domestic form of political authority, especially with regard to the promotion of an alternative set of political
rights and duties (for example, the impact of the promotion of free trade
on a corporate, hierarchically organized system of social reproduction).
Consciousness of comparative backwardness compels the intellectual to
take seriously the problematic of international ‘difference’ to the extent
that this difference impacts upon and potentially or actually subverts
existing social structures of political authority. This impact is felt by
the intellectual stratum not only with regard to the general tasks of reproducing a coherent body politic, but also with regard to the tasks of
pursuing the specific interests of knowledge production against other
interests in the ruling strata. The point is that a consciousness of backwardness implicates itself in intellectual thought not only in directly
political prescriptions, but also by pressing the need for a reordering or
reassessment of philosophical and ethical arguments over the particular
and universal attributes of the human condition.
While there is no room here to engage in the substantive relationship
between Revolutionary France and Kant and Hegel’s Prussia-Germany
(let alone the rest of the world), it is necessary to at least point out
briefly why the Revolution was perceived by many European contemporaries as an alien, indecipherable eruption of both Reason and Terror
into the ‘civilized’ world.7 Essentially, a political constitution had been
enacted that almost overnight (legally) swept away the corporate and
personalized rights and duties of absolutist France, and re-encoded
the political subject in terms of ‘natural rights’: a pre-social free and
equal individual. Not even the influential American Declaration had
dared to proclaim such a radical break with tradition. The Declaration, after all, looked back to English Common Law, haphazardly
evolved over centuries through the system of ‘precedent’, to prove that
7 Most famously, Edmund Burke in Selected Writings: Four Letters on the Proposals for Peace
with the Regicide Directory of France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875). See additionally, M. P.
Thompson, ‘Ideas of Europe During the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars’ Journal
of the History of Ideas 55 (1994), 37–58.
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individual freedom was ‘self evident’. However, this self-evidential
nature of Anglo-American tradition did not exist in the context of the
French Revolutionaries: rather, natural ‘man’ had to be made manifest
through a political artifice.8 In short, this direct encoding of the political subject as a pre-social individual was a radical departure from the
practices of both ancien régime Europe and even capitalist Britain.
Taking Kant and Hegel in turn I will now proceed by summarizing
the existing IR debate on their ethical stance towards international relations, and then show how this stance was foundationally structured by
a consciousness of backwardness towards revolutionary France.
Kant’s universal self
Not withstanding Charles Beitz’s influential treatment of Rawls’ principles of distributive justice9 , the touchstone for the cosmopolitan position
in IR is overwhelmingly Kant’s Perpetual Peace, and specifically Michael
Doyle’s influential interpretation.10 The debate over Kant’s legacy has
focused on the empirical veracity of Doyle’s reading of Kant’s tract that
posits an inevitable universalization of the peaceful liberal state in world
affairs. However a growing body of critics charge Doyle et al. with separating Kant’s historical-empirical claims from the philosophical schema
in which they gain a different meaning. For example, by ignoring Kant’s
categorical imperative to do unto others as you would do unto yourself,
advocates of the Democratic Peace Thesis privilege liberal states over
non-liberal states and implicitly justify imperialist policies that would
be anathema to Kant’s moral sensibilities.11 In this respect, the debate
over Perpetual Peace has focused upon how the tripartite ethical relationship Kant constructed between the individual, the state (system)
and humanity should be interpreted.
Here I re-contextualize Kant in the following way. Prior to the Revolution, Kant’s political philosophy derived from a universal history that
8 On these points see J. Habermas, Theory and Practice (London: Heinemann, 1974), pp. 84–
102; and F. Furet, The French Revolution, 1770–1814 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 73–76.
9 Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations.
10 Michael Doyle, ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs’ Philosophy and Public Affairs
12 (1983), 205–235, 323–353.
11 For example, M. Franke, ‘Immanuel Kant and the (Im)possibility of International Relations Theory’ Alternatives 20 (1995), 279–322; John MacMillan, ‘A Kantian Protest Against
the Peculiar Discourse of Inter-Liberal State Peace’ Millennium 24 (1995), 549–562; Georg
Cavallar, ‘Kantian Perspectives on Democratic Peace: Alternatives to Doyle’ Review of
International Studies 27 (2001), 229–248; and Beate Jahn, ‘Kant, Mill, and Illiberal Legacies
in International Affairs’ International Organization 59 (2005), 177–207.
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The ‘other’ in classical political theory
sought to regulate behaviour in the experiential world by the tenets of
the sovereign individual’s Reason so that a reform of absolutist power
relations could be pursued. But as a reformist political philosophy, Kant
held to the impossibility of manifesting the sovereign individual of Reason within an absolutist, personalized and corporatized experiential
realm. Thus, between Reason and experience there existed an unbridgeable divide. The Revolution radically threatened this political philosophy by effectively manifesting the rights of the sovereign individual
in a political constitution. With his project of reform now painted in a
comparatively backward light, Kant consistently shifted his tripartite
ethical relationship between individual, state(s) and humanity in order
to subsume the political ‘other’ of the French Revolution under the philosophical ‘self’ of the German Enlightenment. Kant’s discussion on the
ethics of the liberal subject, therefore, was a discussion disciplined by a
consciousness of backwardness.
Kant’s political philosophy before the
French Revolution
At its core, the German Enlightenment – Aufklärung - was a philosophical and usually practical project aimed at avoiding the growth
of centralized despotism while promoting inter-dependency – an harmonious relative autonomy of various corporate bodies within the
Reich.12 Domestically, the immediate task of Aufklärung, by the later
half of the eighteenth century, was to secure for the intellectual stratum a secure corporate autonomy from which to promote Reason as a
counterweight to the potentially despotic interests of the noble court.13
Internationally, the enlightenment philosophers (the Aufklärer) sought to
built an alternative philosophy to those perceived fraternizers of Bourbon despotism, the French philosophes.14 In this respect the Aufklärer
increasingly turned towards Britain for philosophical inspiration; after
all, Britain had helped Prussia in the recent Seven Years War (1756–63)
against the French. The Aufklärer eagerly accepted Montesquieu’s claim
that the origins of the Anglo spirit were to be found in the Forests of
12 On this link see P. H. Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), p. 4.
13 N. Elias, The Civilizing Process Vol. 1: The History of Manners (Oxford: Blackwell,
1994), p. 20.
14 C. E. McClelland, The German Historians and England: a Study in Nineteenth Century Views
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 13, 21.
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Germany, as well as his assessment of Britain as a reformist monarchical
state.15
Therefore, British philosophers, especially David Hume, were
received enthusiastically by the Aufklärer, including Kant, as fellow intellectuals in the battle for Enlightenment. Foundational, in this respect,
was Kant’s acceptance of Hume’s sceptical claim to a discontinuity
between reason and experience. Although I cannot go into detail here,
it is important to at least note that Hume’s scepticism was part of
an English philosophical tradition developed to interrogate the rights
of the socially unencumbered individual found in ‘common law’ and
made necessary by enclosure and the rise to supremacy of private property. Hume posited an individualized pre-social subject, universal in
time and space, that could count on no guidance to his actions from
the world at large save the utilitarian principles of his own internal
sense perception: the embrace of pleasure and avoidance of pain.16 Kant
agreed with Hume that it was impossible to ‘know’ the phenomenal
world – the objects of experience in and of themselves. But he further
claimed that it was eminently possible to produce secure knowledge if
one accepted the claim that experience was made sensible through universally held mental categories. In short, Kant agreed that the reasoning
of Hume’s pre-social, sovereign individual was a universal attribute
of humanity, and autonomous from particular experience – a ‘Pure’
Reason.
A few years before Kant’s whole-hearted turn to Hume he had courted
Rousseau; and Rousseau had taught him that Reason was not simply
a metaphysical riddle, but a moral guide with which humanity should
actively shape its world.17 In this sense, Rousseau confirmed to Kant
his duty to use the universality and autonomy of Pure Reason to take
an active and reformist stance towards despotism in the world.18 The
15
See N. Vazsonyi, ‘Montesquieu, Friedrich Carl von Moser, and the “National Spirit
Debate” in Germany’ German Studies Review 22 (1999), 225–246; and Reill, German Enlightenment, p. 4.
16 D. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). See also C. J. Berry,
‘Hume on Rationality in History and Social Life’, History and Theory 21 (1982), 238–241.
17 Hans S. Reiss, ‘Introduction’ in Hans S. Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 4; and F. C. Beiser, ‘Kant’s Intellectual Development:
1746–1781’ in P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), pp. 43–44. See also, Immanuel Kant, ‘Conjectures on the Beginning
of Human History’ in Kant: Political Writings, p. 227.
18 On Kant and Rousseau see S. Shell, ‘Rousseau, Kant, and the Beginning of History’,
in C. Orwin and N. Tarcov (eds.), The Legacy of Rousseau (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1997), pp. 45–64.
214
The ‘other’ in classical political theory
overarching guide to action, in this respect, was Kant’s categorical
imperative, a ‘Practical’ Reason: ‘act that the maxim of your will could
always hold at the same time as a principle establishing universal law’19 .
So even if Pure Reason could not be directly mapped onto the world of
experience inhabited by humanity, human agency should aim to work
as if this was possible.20
To this effect, Kant’s ‘universal history’ acted as the virtual bridge
between reason and experience, as a regulative narrative. Specifically, to
conjecture on human development was to prescribe the course of actions
that would allow humanity to approximate Pure Reason in the experiential realm.21 The means of this enlightened development, Kant claimed,
was the ‘unsocial sociability’ of men: it was only through social interaction that man’s talents could be cultivated towards their ends, even if
such activity was, pathologically, self-serving. Through this sociability
humanity would condense into a set of civic states, wherein a balance
between political mastery and autonomy would be achieved. Furthermore, this balance would lead the way towards a peaceful federation
solving the most generally disruptive problem of war. In fact, prior to the
French Revolution, Kant believed that the problem of establishing a civic
constitution should be subordinated to that of building law-governed
relations with other political communities.22
In a sense, of course, Kant’s utilization of the sovereign self of Reason
was dangerously radical in his German context. After all, breaking with
the Natural Law of Grotius, Pufendorf and Wolff, Kant posited Pure
Reason as the grounds for action rather than providence or nature.23
But practically, Kant promoted such sovereign individuality only with
regard to the distinct corporate body of the intellectual stratum. For
example, he famously asserted that one should have freedom to think
in a ‘public’ capacity as a learned man addressing a reading public, but
not when acting in a ‘private’ capacity as a direct functionary of the
19
I. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), p. 30.
See famously, the ‘Appendix to Transcendental Dialectic’ in I. Kant, Critique of Pure
Reason (London: Macmillan, 1950).
21 The main texts (pre-revolution) are I. Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ in Kant: Political Writings, pp. 41–53; and ‘Conjectures on the Beginning
of Human History’, pp. 221–234.
22 Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History’, p. 47.
23 See F. C. Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: the Genesis of Modern German
Political Thought, 1790–1800 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 31; and
R. Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius
to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 114–115.
20
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state – as a tax collector, military officer or even as a man of the clergy.24
Therefore, the sphere of public debate was actually, for Kant, specifically
the corporate arena of the intellectual stratum – an arena inside of which
intellectuals could and should exercise their specific rights and duties
to debate, relatively autonomously, and as free thinkers, reform of the
absolutist state.
Indeed, even Kant’s pre-Revolution comments on war were mobilized
towards the possibilities of corporate reform. For example, he believed
that the threat of war brought together a closer association of corporate
groups within the commonwealth under the banner of promoting the
wellbeing of all. The marshal spirit, unlike the selfish and cowardly commercial spirit, forced Reason to act upon the natural world rather than
allowing the capriciousness of human nature to act upon Reason.25 And
in Kant’s corporate context this was not untrue: Frederick the Great’s
enlightened absolutism granted all corporate groups from peasants to
nobility various rights and duties through their contributions to his war
machine.
Thus, before the French Revolution, Kant’s universal history provided
guidelines for humanity to approximate the autonomy and universal applicability of pure Reason in the phenomenal realm and slowly
progress away from despotism. Practically, this progress would contribute to a harmonious order of relatively autonomous yet interdependent corporate bodies within which the intellectual stratum itself
could be guaranteed freedom of thought as a corporate body. In this
task, Kant could imagine Frederick the Great’s enlightened absolutism
as a vanguard movement against despots, a movement guided by the
Aufklärer. Having placed such a weighty burden on the shoulders of his
political philosophy, Kant asked if there was any phenomenal sign to
indicate that his narrative of universal history was worth pursuing. His
answer, in 1784, was tentative but affirmative, pointing to the freedom
of religious thought in his home state of Prussia, as well as the increased
interdependency that trade and commerce produced between nations.26
His answer by 1798, as I shall now discuss, was to be very different.
24 I. Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment?”’ in Kant: Political
Writings, pp. 55–56.
25 On these points see Kant ‘Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History’, p. 232;
and I. Kant, Critique of Judgment (Cambridge: Hackett, 1987), pp. 122–123. The Critique
of Judgment was published during the first year of the Revolution. It should therefore be
taken as a pre-revolutionary text in Kant’s oeuvre.
26 Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History’, p. 50.
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The ‘other’ in classical political theory
Kant’s political philosophy after the Revolution
Not only did the announcement of the Rights of Man appear to herald, for the Aufklärer, the destruction of old French despotism but the
Revolution now allowed for a comparison of two paths to liberty:
the piecemeal monarchical reform of the Anglo-Germanic ‘Volk’ versus
the clearly delineated and rationally codified obelisk of the French constitution. However, come the Terror and the invasion of the Rhineland,
fear of French despotism resurfaced and, moreover, intensified. In fact,
the first Revolutionary Wars then proceeded to transform the Aufklärer’s
admiration of the British spirit into infatuation, for Albion was now
portrayed as the re-balancer of the scales of European geo-politics.
And at the same time, the new Rights of Man were pushed into an illfitting absolutist category of ‘mechanical’ rule, a category opposed to the
organically evolving Anglo-Germanic folk.27 Moreover, the Revolution
impacted upon the Aufklärer in Prussia in the wake of the death in 1786
of Frederick the Great, the ‘philosopher king’. The successor, Frederick
William II, preferred the instruction of Rosicrucian Christianity to philosophy. In this respect the return of religion within Prussia, as the
preferred regulator of politics, threatened to undermine the Aufklärer’s
project of corporate reform through the guidance of Reason.
In short, the Aufklärer came to be uncomfortably caught between a
de-enlightenment in Prussia, and a revolution of Reason in France. And
the Revolution was therefore internalized by the intellectual stratum in
an intensely contradictory fashion: it was, at the same time, potential
friend, enlightened superior and definite enemy: friend, because the
French bourgeoisie had apparently launched a revolution of Reason
sweeping away Bourbon despotism and the ill-deserved supremacy of
the nobility; superior, because in so doing, the Revolution had opened
up a comparative vista on British freedom and thus problematized the
efficacy of monarchical ‘reform’ as a path towards enlightenment; and
enemy, because at the same time the Revolution’s regicidal excesses and
mobilization of the lower ranks undermined, in most German monarchs,
the desire to allow the continuance of corporate reform.
Kant, likewise, internalized the meaning of the Revolution. And this
propelled him to find a way to frame the Revolution that would relegitimate his existing project of corporate reform, and thus save what
was left of German Enlightenment. But to do this Kant had to engage
directly with this new manifestation of Reason in the experiential realm.
27
See McClelland, German Historians and England, pp. 30–33, 36–7, 44.
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For the Declaration of Rights and the following Constitution challenged
the very heart of his political philosophy – a regulative universal history
that heretofore had formed the only, and virtual, bridge between Reason
and experience. In effect, Kant was compelled to modify his universal
history by a growing consciousness of backwardness: the ‘other’ of the
French Revolution had to be tamed in order to save the ‘self’ of German
corporate reform.
The start of this modification is found in Kant’s response, in 1793, to
Edmund Burke’s conservative attempt to de-legitimize rationalism and
regicide by calling for a return to tradition.28 Kant claimed that the regulative principle of social conduct should be derived, even in revolutionary times, from Pure Reason rather than church or tradition. To defend
this position, Kant proceeded to enquire into the degree to which Practical Reason could still, in revolutionary times, inform ethical conduct.
To answer this question, Kant took three perspectives: the individual,
the state and humanity in general.29 In his discussion of the individual,
Kant essentially summarized his existing Critique of Practical Reason;
and in his discussion on humanity, he recounted his existing narrative
of a universal history. But it is Kant’s investigation of the morality of the
political realm – the state – that is most interesting.
In fact, unlike in his pre-Revolution writings, Kant now invoked the
civil constitution itself as a regulative tool; after all, the political rights
that the constitution encoded – freedom, equality and independence –
were all qualities of Pure Reason. Kant, therefore, used the design of the
Revolutionary constitution to directly criticize the ‘post-enlightenment’
Prussian Rosicrucian order. Nevertheless, he immediately proceeded to
forbid any revolution or resistance against the existing supreme political
power as a means to realize the principles of the constitution, for such an
act would undermine a core universal tenet of Practical Reason that for
each subject to have formal equality and freedom required coercion to
be exercised only by the ruler. Rebellion would only encourage the King
to fear that the path of Reason led to anarchic licence. Instead, freedom
of the pen (of the Aufklärer) remained the prime safeguard of the rights
of the people.30
Yet it was not so much talk of a constitution that eventually led Kant
into direct confrontation with his Christian king. It was, instead, an essay
28
Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism, p. 50. The text is I. Kant, ‘On the
Common Saying: “This May be True in Theory, But it Does Not Apply in Practice”’ in
Kant: Political Writings, pp. 61–92.
29 Kant, ibid., pp. 62–63.
30 Ibid., pp. 84–85.
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The ‘other’ in classical political theory
that had, ironically, been requested by some of the French Deputies –
Religion within the Limits of Reason. Upon its publication, Johann Christof
Wöllner, closest personal advisor to Frederick William II, wrote to Kant
expressing dissatisfaction and disappointment. Rosicrucianism now
directly threatened to place secular Reason under the moral authority of religion, and faced with such a mortal threat to Aufklärung, Kant
had no recourse but to bow to the censor. The whole episode worked
to intensify Kant’s consciousness of backwardness, almost to the point
of anxiety.31 For in effect, all he could now offer fellow Aufklärer was
a passive hope that the German philosopher king might one day be
reincarnated.
But in the aftermath of this controversy, during 1795, Frederick
William II signed the Treaty of Basle with France, ensuring Prussian
neutrality in the Revolutionary Wars until 1806. And here, Kant saw a
glimmer of hope to push for a reform out of Rosicrucian backwardness.
For meanwhile, the Prussian war machine had been transformed from
a conduit of Reason to a crusader of religious superstition. Therefore,
with peace, Kant was presented with a slim opportunity to re-make the
case for an enlightened rather than despotic geo-politics. This plea, of
course, was On Perpetual Peace. In this text, Kant’s ethical discussion of
the state took the form of an investigation of a federation of such civic
states. Again, he pleaded the case for the corporate right of luminaries
to ‘publicly’ discourse on the maxims of warfare and peacemaking:32
the philosopher would help guide the King through international relations so that actions in the political realm might accord to Practical
Reason; and the regulative narrative of his universal history justified
this strategy.33 Nevertheless, with Perpetual Peace, the civil constitution
had gained in importance as a regulative tool. Its political tenets of
freedom, equality and independence were not only a guide for societal relations; they now formed the guide for inter-societal relations
too.
But even though the Perpetual Peace is Kant’s most famous statement
on his political philosophy (at least in IR), there is another text that
exposes the final resolution that his consciousness of backwardness gave
to the tripartite ethical relationship between individual, political realm
31
G. P. Gooch, Germany and the French Revolution (London: Frank Cass, 1965), p. 267.
I. Kant, ‘On Perpetual Peace’, in Kant: Political Writings, pp. 93, 115.
On Kant’s plea for political action to accord to Practical Reason see the two appendices,
ibid., pp. 116–130. On Kant’s justification of Perpetual Peace through his universal history
see the First Supplement, ibid., pp. 108–114.
32
33
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and humanity. For in November 1797, Frederick William II died, and
his successor Frederick William III, while no great philosopher king,
nevertheless proceeded to dismantle the overarching influence of Rosicrucian Christianity. Kant’s nemesis, Wöllner, was dismissed and his
various commissions closed. Kant immediately proceeded to press the
advantage of a possible return to enlightenment, and in 1798 published
Contest of the Faculties.34
The Contest included a statement on the relationship between the
philosophical and theological faculties, and, most importantly for our
purposes, a re-visitation of his narrative of universal history. Back in
1784, Kant had assured the reader that his universal history was not
simply a fantasy narrative by tentatively pointing to Prussia’s freedom of religious thought and the increased interdependency that trade
and commerce produced between nations. But in order to make his
regulative history compelling for the readers of revolutionary times,
Kant had to replace the sign that pointed towards the application
of Pure Reason in the experiential world: Revolution as a process itself
(and not just its constitutional result) became the new sign of human
progress.
But even so, Kant warned that the revolutionary sign was in no way to
be confused with the phenomenal transformation of political authority
itself. Rather it was to be found in the attitude of the onlookers: disinterested sympathy from non-French onlookers proved the progression of the moral capacity of the human race.35 To Kant, such disinterested onlookers were ‘primitive philosophical historians’ who could
detach reason from experience. In short, the Revolution proved that
there was developing a human faculty through which political action
could be judged by the criteria of Kant’s regulative universal history.
And in this way, Kant managed to separate and isolate the unprecedented experiential developments brought about by the Revolutionary ‘other’, for example, Terror, Jacobinism, etc., from the ‘real’ pertinence of the Revolution for human progress – its demonstration of the
potentiality for individuals to act according to a regulative universal
history.
Let us now recapitulate the argument in order to fully draw out Kant’s
treatment of the relation between the German ‘self’ and French ‘other’.
In Kant’s political philosophy before the Revolution, the progress of
34 Manfred Kuehn, Kant: a Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
p. 404.
35 I. Kant, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ in Kant: Political Writings, pp. 182–183.
220
The ‘other’ in classical political theory
humanity through reason was a guide, not an unfolding fact. It was
this regulative nature of the narrative that formed the only (virtual)
bridge between reason and experience along which the ethical relation
between individual, political community and humanity could be organized. Here, humanity’s general proclivity towards unsocial sociability
was the tool of progress, and a vague growth of commercial interdependency the sign. However, after 1789, Kant mobilized the revolutionary
constitution to be the tool of progress, first in its ‘domestic’ role, and then
in its geo-political role. But by 1798, Kant presented revolution itself, as
a process, to be the sign of progress. Thus, in his post-Revolutionary
writings, Kant’s Practical Reason cumulatively relied upon the experiential organization of, and experiential processes of transformation of,
political authority. But crucially, at the same time, Kant had to somehow
maintain that the machinations of the political realm remained a fiction
of a regulative universal history, and not a reality to be directly copied
‘on earth’. This was necessary in order to uphold the core philosophical foundation of his corporate Enlightenment project – the separation
between reason and experience. The final moment of this incorporation
came in Contest of the Faculties when Kant made the sign of progress
the revolutionary process itself, but at the same time derived the meaning of that process not from its substantive transformations of political
authority, but from the sympathy of its onlookers.
This is how Kant’s consciousness of backwardness attempted to contain the threat that the French Revolution had created in manifesting the
rights of the sovereign individual within the experiential world. Ultimately, the more he was compelled to make elements from an experiential world of ‘difference’ pivotal to his political philosophy of Enlightenment, the more that ‘difference’ was flattened by his consciousness
of backwardness. In order to save the reform project of the German
intellectual stratum, Kant had to reconcile the enigmatic effects of the
Revolution on political identity to an existing sense of ‘self’.36 In these
ways, Kant separated the effects of the Revolution (Terror, Jacobinism, etc.) from its meaning, and then subsumed this meaning under
his narrative of universal history. The ‘other’ – French sovereign individualism – had been disciplined by the ‘self’ – German enlightened
corporatism.
36
Kant’s growing concern for the backwardness of the German ‘spirit’ within this world of
difference is evidenced in his turn-of-the-century anthropology of national characteristics;
I. Kant, Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974),
p. 180.
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The question for the Democratic Peace debate, then, is this: through
which eyes are we looking at international relations if we approach the
ethical relationship between individual, state (system) and humanity
through Perpetual Peace? From the above contextualization, it would
seem that Perpetual Peace was an ethical engagement with international
relations taken from the standpoint of an intellectual inhabiting a comparatively ‘backward’, ‘peripheral’ and non-modern political community.
In contrast to Kant, Hegel believed that an ethical engagement with
the new revolutionary world could not be developed by reference to a
non-experiential sense of Reason, but to a ‘real world’ engagement with
the effects of the French Revolution.37 But as we shall now see, albeit
in a different way, Hegel also worked to subsume the ‘other’ encoded
in the French Constitution under the ‘backward’ German philosophical
‘self’.
Hegel’s constitutive self
Hegel’s famous critique of Kant has often been mobilized in the cosmopolitan/communitarian debate to question the cosmopolitan idea
of universal rights based on a pre-social sovereign individual.38 Hegel’s
alternative ‘constitutive’ approach, it is said, posits the development and
negotiation of rights through interactions between individuals within
really existing societies.39 In this schema, rights are not decided by virtue
of their a priori value; rather, they are dynamically created through frictional – although institutionalized – processes of recognition.40 Most
37
See for example G. W. F. Hegel, ‘On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, on its
Place in Practical Philosophy, and its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Right’ in L. Dickey
and H. B. Nisbet, Hegel: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),
pp. 112–114, 123; G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977), pp. 1–45; and G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right ed. Allen G. Wood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 25–72.
38 See D. Morrice, ‘The Liberal-Communitarian Debate in Contemporary Political Philosophy and its Significance to International Relations’ Review of International Studies 26
(2000), p. 234; and Brown, International Relations Theory, p. 65.
39 On the constitutive approach to rights see famously A. Honneth, The Struggle for
Recognition: the Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995) in Political Theory; and M. Frost, Ethics in International Relations: a Constitutive Theory (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996) in IR theory.
40 For example, H. Brod, Hegel’s Philosophy of Politics – Idealism, Identity, and Modernity
(Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1992); J. N. Shklar, Freedom and Independence: a Study of the
Political Ideas of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1976); and S. B. Smith, Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism: Rights in Context (London: University
of Chicago Press, 1989).
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The ‘other’ in classical political theory
importantly for IR is the extension of this idea of constitutive right to the
arena of international law and rights-based relations between states.41
Commentators point out that Hegel seemed to attribute a certain ethical nature to war in terms of the (unintentional) impetus it gives to the
world-historical progress of individual freedom.42 But Chris Brown has
made the core point: if one is to accept Hegel’s argument that war is
the ‘world’s court of judgment’, making international relations a constitutive – and thus ethical – arena of social relations, then this requires
a metaphysical belief in Geist (spirit). For it is the ‘world spirit’ that
for Hegel drives forward the progress of humanity through mechanisms that might not be immediately recognizable as ‘progressive’.43
If we are to approach Hegel from a ‘secular’ position, then can we really
use Hegel’s constitutive approach to inform an ethics of international
relations?
In what follows, I argue that Hegel sought to make sense of a world
of ‘difference’ within which Germany occupied a backward position
vis-à-vis revolutionary France. The Terror of the Revolution, which Hegel
attributed to the limitless sovereign rights of the individual (encoded
in the French Constitution) threatened to destroy the German enlightenment project by forcefully introducing (by way of the Napoleonic
army and the civil code) the socio-political infrastructure for Terror into
Germany. To address this threat, Hegel promoted a specifically German
revolution of Philosophy with which to escape from backwardness. By
using the Philosopher’s special attribute, the internal cultivation of selfawareness (Bildung), this revolution would overcome the destructive
egoism of limitless individual rights, thus progressing the social basis
of individual freedom to a higher level. Geist was the necessary ‘institution’ through which German Philosophy could reach across political
boundaries and graft elements of the French subject onto the German
body politic. And through this transnational process, Hegel’s political
philosophy posited an ethics of universal rapprochement. This, however, obscured his proposition about the foundational importance of
41
For example, E. Ringmar, ‘The Relevance of International Law: a Hegelian Interpretation of a Peculiar Seventeenth-Century Preoccupation’ Review of International Studies 21
(1995), 87–103.
42 For example, David Boucher, Political Theories of International Relations: From Thucydides
to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 331–345; H. Jaeger, ‘Hegel’s
Reluctant Realism and the Transnationalisation of Civil Society’ in Review of International
Studies 28 (2002), 497–517; T. Brooks, ‘Hegel’s Theory of International Politics; a Reply
to Jaeger’ Review of International Studies 30 (2004), 149–152; and S. Walt, ‘Hegel on War:
Another Look’ History of Political Thought 10 (1989), 113–124.
43 Brown, International Relations Theory, pp. 67–70.
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‘difference’ for the cultivation of an ethical modern life, and in so doing
progressively subsumed the ‘other’ of the French Revolution of Politics
under the ‘self’ of the German Revolution of Philosophy.
Hegel’s embrace of ‘difference’
Hegel’s political philosophy was, in the first instance, informed by the
traditional project of Aufklärung outlined above, namely, taming the
despotic absolutist state (inside and outside Germany), and engineering the organic balance of an array of relatively autonomous corporate
bodies.44 Yet, the French Revolution was the first and greatest challenge
to Hegel’s political philosophy.45
Initially, the French Declaration and Constitution appeared to Hegel
as the manifestation of Reason on earth and the inauguration of a new
age and set of conditions through which to realize freedom and autonomy for mankind. But at the same time he noticed that something in
the encoding of the ‘natural’ rights of pre-social man worked to corrupt
these promises and instead foster an arbitrary and particularistic execution of egoistic will. Through the Constitution, individualized political
freedom had turned into factionalism, and factionalism into the Terror
of unrestrained sovereign wills.46 Moreover, by the turn of the century,
Napoleon’s military advances into Germany highlighted to Hegel the
impotence of the Reich’s defensive capacity: an ill-fitting set of corporate bodies faced a unified citizen’s army from across the Rhine.47 In
essence, the moment of geo-political contest with France had exposed,
for Hegel, not only the technical fragility of the emperorship within
the Reich; but more so it had exampled this form of political unity to
be utterly inadequate with regard to the geo-political challenges of the
new revolutionary era.48
44 On Hegel’s initial influences see H. S. Harris, Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight
1770–1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 3–6,17, 20–21; and T. Pinkard, Hegel: a
Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 9, 15–16.
45 The case is made by a number of commentators. See, famously, J. Ritter, ‘Hegel and the
French Revolution’ in Essays on the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge MA, MIT Press 1982),
pp. 35–89.
46 On Hegel’s intimate following of the Jacobin Republic, see J. Schmidt, ‘Cabbage Heads
and Gulps of Water – Hegel on the Terror’ Political Theory 26 (1998), 4–32. For later commentaries see Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 355–363; and G. W. F. Hegel, ‘Lectures on
the Philosophy of History – Part 4: The Germanic World’ in L. Dickey and H. B. Nisbet,
Hegel: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 217–219.
47 G. W. F. Hegel, ‘The German Constitution’ in Hegel: Political Writings, pp. 6–101
48 Ibid., pp. 7, 40, 62, 87, 92.
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The ‘other’ in classical political theory
Thus, as it had been for Kant, the Revolution was for Hegel an ally
in the enlightened fight against aristocratic despotism, and at the same
time, its Terror threatened to destroy enlightened reform and the interests of the German intellectual stratum altogether. Yet if, in this respect,
Hegel shared with Kant a consciousness of backwardness, Hegel, in
the company of the Romantics, made a virtue of the fact that France
and Germany were different. Moreover, unlike the Romantics, Hegel
also accepted the validity of the ‘modern’ life of the pre-social individual that the Revolution had presented. Indeed, Hegel started to accept
the need to somehow solve the problem of German backwardness, and
the specific threat it posed to the German project of Enlightenment,
by incorporating the positive aspects of the French constitution into
German society. In this respect, Hegel, unlike Kant, not only embraced
‘difference’, but at the same time sought to resolve the antagonism that
difference produced between the German ‘self’ and the French ‘other’ by
recognizing co-constitution with this ‘other’ to be a necessary element
in the progression of the identity of the ‘self’.
In order for this process of mediation to disarm the Terror of the
sovereign individual, a sense of ethical life was required that, Hegel
believed, could only be found in Germany, specifically within its traditional social bonds of a paternal religion. He considered this original
Christianity as a ‘civic theology’, an internalized communal love emanating from the people themselves.49 Via a set of mediating institutions,
the egoistic freedom of the French individual could be ‘grafted on’ to
this existing ethical life. Furthermore, Hegel claimed that the social force
that would power this process of mediation was to be found in Philosophy itself.50 For Philosophy allowed for a cultivation of self-awareness
(Bildung), especially regarding the social conditions of one’s individuality, and therefore provided the opportunity to inject an ethical content
into the amoral form of modern life. Having developed this idea over a
number of years, Hegel showed, in the Philosophy of Right, how Bildung
operated through a set of socio-political institutions that progressively
49
On this point see especially, Pinkard, Hegel, pp. 61–68; and L. Dickey, Hegel: Religion,
Economics, and the Politics of Spirit 1770–1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987), pp. 278–281. See also G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History:
Introduction: Reason in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
50 This was part of a wider German neo-Humanist project to substitute philosophical
revolution for political revolution. See in general S. Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution
(London: Verso, 2003); Habermas, Theory and Practice; and H. Mah, ‘The French Revolution
and the Problem of German Modernity: Hegel, Heine, and Marx’ New German Critique 50
(1990), 3–20.
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mediated particular interests for the universal good – the family, the
corporations in civil society and an impartial bureaucracy. This process
would combine corporate German social bonds with French pre-social
individual rights, and cultivate an Ethical State fit for modernity. For
this State would allow the articulation of an identity that was individually free but also aware of, and respectful to, the social relations that
allowed for this freedom.51
In effect, then, Hegel was attempting to outline an historical movement conducive to importing the French ‘other’ (the sovereign individual) into the German ‘self’ (a corporate and personalized body politic)
so as to preserve the good of individual freedom while removing its egoistic bad. This movement was understood as Aufhebung – a dialectical
development that at the same time raised, preserved and nullified social
identity: Hegel wished to preserve the old – the ethical life of the traditional German corporate community – by raising it in the process of grafting on the pre-social individualism of the modern French subject; this
process, he hoped, would nullify the old and produce a new German
identity that would be equipped to resolve the core problem of modern life emanating from the French Revolution, namely, the pre-social
and amoral licence that came with the individualization of rights and
duties.52
Thus, unlike Kant’s, Hegel’s political philosophy provided an opportunity to build an ethical stance towards international relations sensitive
to ‘difference’. But as we shall now see, the felt need for Germany to
escape its backward condition vis-à-vis revolutionary France also propelled Hegel to collapse the condition of ‘difference’ within a universal
world history.
Hegel’s denial of ‘difference’
Let us, at this point, return to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and specifically
the notion of the Ethical State as the highest moment of the mediation of
particular interests through universal institutions. In fact, this moment
was expressed through (but not reified into) the person of the sovereign;
Hegel in this way anthropomorphized the state into an individual.53
Thus, the degree to which particular interests had found constitutional
resolution formed the national being’s ‘spirit’, and this was expressed in
51
52
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, p. 95.
On this point see also Pinkard, Hegel, p. 196.
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, pp. 51–53; Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 359 §321.
53
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The ‘other’ in classical political theory
a singularity, the sovereign.54 The question is, what kind of international
domain did this spiritual ‘individual’ inhabit?
Hegel’s answer is contradictory. By the logic of one aspect of his argument, the international domain was indeed akin to a ‘state of nature’.
Ethical life, after all, was produced in the process of mediation which
itself presupposed a higher, more universalistic, institution. But there
existed, materially, no institution higher than the executive and legislature within the state through which a process of Aufhebung could
mediate the particularistic collection of national spirits.55 Yet Hegel at
the same time claimed that war itself was an ethical moment, and, moreover, the ultimate process that tested the ethical adequacy of any national
spirit. In other words, even if not ‘empirically’ observable, the international domain had to possess some form of universalistic institution
through which the particularities of national spirits could be mediated
into a higher ethical life.56
Hegel proposed that the geo-political contest played itself out as the
expression of an unobservable ‘institution’, none other than Geist – the
world spirit.57 Geist manifested itself most forcefully in war, because war
tested the resolve and integrity of each individual national ‘spirit’ with
regard to its specific resolution of particular rights with universal duty.58
So even if all states, just as individuals in civil society, had to recognize
each other’s independence formally, it was the ethical content of the state
that decided which ‘individual’ would concretely be judged through
war as truly independent and thus free.59 In short, whichever state possessed the higher spirit was world-historical: and this ‘individual’ would
set the historical standard by which others were externally pressured to
transform internally, else wither and die. Through the working out of
this geo-political inter-subjectivity, the kernel of a new stage of development in world spirit would be placed in a ‘young’ state, and as the current world-historical state decayed, world spirit would move to inhabit
this new national spirit. This, incidentally, is why Hegel criticized Kant’s
purely formalistic prescription of ‘Perpetual Peace’: in effect, it could not
54 Ibid., p. 367 §331; Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, pp.
51–65.
55 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 275 §258.
56 Ibid., pp. 359–363 §321–326.
57 See famously, Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, especially
‘General Concept’, pp. 26–32; and ‘The Course of World History’, pp. 124–131.
58 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, pp. 361–365 §324–328. Thomas Mertens lists a number of
‘Just War’ criteria evident in Hegel’s discussion on war; see ‘Hegel’s Homage to Kant’s
Perpetual Peace: an Analysis of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right §321–340’ Review of Politics
57 (1995), 680–691.
59 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, pp. 366–367 §330–331.
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conceptualize ethical systems as constitutive of the interaction produced
by ‘difference’.60 Alternatively, in Hegel’s political philosophy, international relations quite literally formed the ‘world’s court of judgment’,
and hence an ethical domain rather than a state of nature.
Yet for Hegel, the core of this ethical nature of Geist was that, just
as particular individuals in civil society found their universality in the
state, so did particular states find their universality in world spirit.61 And
just as within the state, particularistic individuals found rapprochement
through a higher mediation, so too did particular states find rapprochement through war and the world spirit. This meant that Geist, as a movement of mediation, progressively sublated particular national interests
into a human ethical whole. To be clear, Geist, for Hegel, did not result
in an institutional rapprochement of geo-politics into a ‘world state’;
rather, the rapprochement that Geist pursued was one of socio-political
forms: through the process of mediation, both domestically and geopolitically, humanity was historically progressing towards the expression of one form of political subject – the free, equal and self-conscious
individual.
Let us recapitulate the argument so far. In order to escape backwardness and resist the destruction of the German enlightenment project
by the French Terror (and its Napoleonic incarnations), Hegel had presented a German revolution of Philosophy as an alternative to the French
constitutional version. This German revolution was charged with beating the French Revolution at its own game, so to speak. For to salvage
the German intellectual stratum’s project of free thought, Hegel required
the German revolution not only to institutionalize individual rights in
Germany, but, at the same time, to overcome the self-destructive nature
of sovereign individualism. Therefore, Hegel had to convince his audience that it was both possible and desirable for the Philosophy faculty
to mobilize, for Germany, a historical ‘leaping over’ of the French constitutional ‘stage’ through the special energy of Bildung. This, however,
required an institution within the geo-political arena that did not simply allow for a clash of civilizations, but for a philosophically driven
moment of mediation beyond the borders of a backward political community. In this respect, the ‘dialectical’ world-historical movement that
Hegel termed Geist was necessary if Hegel’s revolution of Philosophy
was to hold integrity, for only through Geist could Bildung drive a
60
61
Ibid., p. 371 §340; Hegel, ‘On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law’, pp. 140–141.
Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 324 §362.
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The ‘other’ in classical political theory
world-historical rapprochement of discrete subjectivities. As we shall
now see, this requirement, borne of a consciousness of comparative
backwardness, worked to close down the challenge of ‘difference’ in
international relations that Hegel’s political philosophy had originally
been so sensitive to.
To this effect, let us examine Hegel’s narrative of world history. The
first thing to note is that Hegel had to foreground the ‘internal’ moment
of cultivating self-awareness (Bildung) within the process of Aufhebung.
For although Hegel, contrary to popular opinion, did not conflate this
‘idealist’ moment with the overriding force of historical development
per se, it was the overriding force for the German present with regard
to the tasks of escaping backwardness. However, this privileging of
a specifically German condition in world history had to somehow be
justified: after all, it was hardly backward Germany that had recently
appeared as the leading ‘spirit’ of the age.
Hegel solved this problem by focusing on his critique of the historical
causes of the Terror. In his opinion, the French Constitution manifested
a purely ‘outward’ individual freedom – an encoding of the negative
rights of the individual within a political constitution – while ignoring its ‘inner’ content – the development of self-awareness of the social
constitution of this freedom (Bildung). Because of this lack, the spiritual
soil of France was too poor to facilitate the growth of an Ethical State.
But, Hegel pointed out, Luther’s Reformation had already produced a
rich inner freedom, even if the German polity was woefully lacking in
its outward manifestation.62 By this reasoning, the French Revolution
had now passed on the external component of individual freedom – the
Constitution – to the German world via the world-historical individual,
Napoleon, and his civil code. Germany could therefore indeed conceive
of itself as world-historical in solving the problem of the self-destructive
nature of the sovereign individual by actualizing its freedom both ‘internally’ and ‘externally’.63
But to make this claim of a prior actualization of ‘inner’ reason in Germany stick, Hegel had to make two historical-sociological
propositions. Firstly, he proposed that art, science, religion – in short, all
those facets of human life that cultivated inner freedom – were in fact
62
See for example, Hegel, ‘Lectures on the Philosophy of History: Part 4’, pp. 210,212;
and Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 379 §358.
63 On Hegel’s treatment of the Reformation see L. W. Beck, ‘The Reformation, the Revolution, and the Restoration in Hegel’s Political Philosophy’ Journal of the History of Philosophy
14 (1976), 51–61.
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Classical Theory in International Relations
moved by an evolutionary logic; while politics, the medium of external
freedom was open to rupture.64 Secondly, he ascribed this inner evolution
to the ‘Germanic’ people in general – meaning, in fact, most European
polities.65 Thus Hegel was invoking the world of European Christianity
as the milieu of modern world development, while at the same time noting that a fracture within this world had appeared: Catholicism had led
to the political rupture of the French Revolution, while Protestantism
had led to the internal revolution.66 Crucially, in setting up the problem
of the contemporaneous transition of world spirit in this way, Hegel
implicitly allowed the specificity of the French Revolution as a political rupture to be superseded by a general evolution. And through this
argument, Hegel at once separated the ‘other’ of the French Revolution
from German history and then subsumed its historical effect under a
universal trajectory of world development defined by the ‘self’ of the
German revolution of Philosophy.
In sum, as a site that possessed no political institution to mediate
particular interests, the international domain, for Hegel, was akin to
a ‘state of nature’ – a world of pre-social individualized states. Yet at
the same time, as a site of inter-subjective mediation (between these
national ‘spirits’) and ultimately as a site that hosted a process of rapprochement between political forms, the international domain was an
expansion of the domestic ethical domain. Thus, borne of a recognition
of the co-constitution of ‘self’ and ‘other’ in modern world history, but
a recognition driven by the attempt to escape a backward and subordinate position within this co-constitution, Hegel’s political philosophy at
once opened up and shut down a vista on the problem of ‘difference’ in
international relations. One might say that rather than being a religious
relic, teleology of the liberal individual or the manifestation of human
consciousness in general, Geist was a necessary manifestation of Hegel’s
consciousness of backwardness.
Conclusion
It is usually assumed that the contemporary cosmopolitan/
communitarian debate derives from an unproblematically ‘Western’ or
‘modern’ intellectual debate on the possibilities of universalizing the
64
65
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, p. 120.
See, for example, Hegel’s topography in ‘The German Constitution’, pp. 62–63; see also
the editors note in Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 379f2 §358.
66 Hegel, ‘Lectures on the Philosophy of History: Part 4’, p. 220.
230
The ‘other’ in classical political theory
liberal condition. But this singularity does not hold, at least according
to the re-contextualization presented above. Rather, the (commonly perceived) classical origin of this debate spoke to the concerns of a ‘peripheral’ intellectual stratum; it interrogated the ethics of international relations through the problem of ‘difference’, and from the perspective of
a comparatively backward partner in the relationship that constructed
difference; and it agonized over the ethical challenges of engaging with a
potentially progressive, yet at the same time threatening, ‘foreign’ form
of political subjectivity.
Moreover, the re-contextualization presented above also questions
the poststructural, especially postcolonial inspired, critique of the cosmopolitan/communitarian debate. For both Kant’s and Hegel’s ultimate elision of ‘difference’, the intellectual processes of ‘othering’ and
‘universalizing’, was a disciplining effect of a consciousness of backwardness, and one that was not internally derived from (critically or otherwise), but a response to, what was contemporaneously seen as the imperialistic expansion of the ‘modern’ sovereign subject. This sovereign
subject was itself taken to be the ‘other’, at least, from the standpoint of
intellectuals who sought reform of a non-modern ‘self’.
To be clear, while I have here placed the French Revolution in the
foreground, this is in no way meant as an attempt to marginalize the
colonial moment from European history. Rather, my intention has been
to problematize the issue of ‘difference’ further. It is, of course, true that
most postcolonial inspired literature takes the European ‘self’ as a fiction, an effect of colonial mentality. And positing the sovereign subject
of ‘Europe’ usually proceeds as a heuristic strategy through which to
show the co-constitution of European ‘self’ and colonial ‘other’. Nevertheless, there is a point where this fiction becomes an unspoken takenfor-granted, a starting point, whereas this European ‘self’ should be
problematized as itself historically saturated with ‘difference’.
This line of thought presents two challenges for normative IR theory. Firstly, and specifically regarding the mainstream cosmopolitan/communitarian debate, neither Kant nor Hegel provide an intellectual retreat from the problem of ‘difference’. Both developed their
ethical standpoints on international relations through a consciousness
of backwardness that was itself a direct engagement with inter-societal
‘difference’. And secondly, regarding the more general project of critically interrogating the production of identity, the discipline of modern sovereign subjectivity by no means exhausts an understanding
of the self/other problematic. For the commonly accepted modern or
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Classical Theory in International Relations
‘Western’ canon of political thought through which we make sense
of, and over which we contest, the making of modern subjectivity, is
itself significantly constituted by the concerns of intellectuals situated
in a ‘peripheral’ and comparatively ‘backward’ society. It might well be
the case that even before we intellectually travel to the non-European
world, we are already gazing at international relations through ‘peripheral’ eyes. If the ‘other’ to the liberal project is already constitutive of
the liberal tradition itself, then both the mainstream of the normative
debate in IR and its critics must think more deeply about how, precisely,
‘difference’ might be recognized.
232
10
Images of Grotius
Edward Keene
The literature on the history of ideas about international politics is overwhelmingly devoted to a small group of ‘great thinkers’: Thucydides,
Augustine, Machiavelli, Grotius, Hobbes, Rousseau, Burke, Kant, Hegel,
Marx and Nietzsche.1 Even as their works have been reinterpreted in
novel ways, these thinkers have retained their position at the centre
of historical scholarship, often at the expense of others. Thucydides,
for example, no longer enjoys an unquestioned title to be the original
author of the theory of the balance of power, but he is still the subject of a flourishing ‘cottage industry’ in International Relations theory
that must be the envy of other ancient historians, such as Herodotus.2
Machiavelli’s satanic reputation as the master of Realpolitik may have
acquired a more benign aspect as we become more familiar with his
republican sympathies, but his ability to overshadow early-modern
reason of state theorists such as Francesco Guicciardini has not been
1 There are, of course, some notable exceptions. A few outstanding ones are Carsten
Holbraad, The Concert of Europe: a Study in German and British International Theory, 1815–
1914 (London: Longman, 1970); James Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels: the Church and
the Non-Christian World, 1250–1550 (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979);
Azar Gat, The Origins of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to Clausewitz (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989); and David Long and Peter Wilson (eds.), Thinkers of the Twenty
Years’ Crisis: Inter-war Idealism Reassessed (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Torbjφrn Knutsen, A History of International Relations Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1992) is an unusually wide-ranging textbook.
2 The idea of a ‘cottage industry’ on Thucydides is taken from David Welch, ‘Why International Relations Theorists Should Stop Reading Thucydides’, Review of International Studies
29 (2003), p. 307. The literature on Thucydides is too voluminous to quote here (Welch’s
article offers a useful overview). I do not cite any works on Herodotus for a somewhat
different reason: I am unaware of any study of Herodotus’s place in the history of international political thought, whether an article or a monograph. Considering that Herodotus
wrote much more extensively on Greek-Persian relations than did Thucydides, this is a
surprising omission, but one that reinforces our sense of the tight grip that the canon
exerts on the field.
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lessened by the considerable reappraisal of ‘Machiavellism’ that has
taken place from, say, Friedrich Meinecke to R. B. J. Walker.3 Kant’s
thought about international relations has undergone any number of new
formulations in recent years, but he is still generally acknowledged as
one of the pivotal thinkers about international politics in the modern
period, while other equally worthy thinkers from his period – Denis
Diderot and Johann Gottfried Herder, for instance – languish in relative
obscurity.4
In these and other examples that might be drawn from the canon,
critically-minded scholars have left the dramatis personae of the history
of international thought largely unchanged, while substantially rewriting the play within which they appear. Hugo Grotius is no exception
to this general trend. Over the last couple of decades, thanks in large
part to the scholarship of Richard Tuck, a new interpretation of Grotius
has acquired something approaching the status of a textbook orthodoxy.5 The new reading, however, has not for one moment threatened
to displace Grotius from the central position he occupies in the his3 Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: the Doctrine of Raison d’État and its Place in Modern
History, trans. Douglas Scott (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1984); and R. B. J. Walker,
Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State: the Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics, 1250–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992) includes an excellent study of Guicciardini’s thought. On this topic, see also Kenneth
Schellhase, Tactitus in Renaissance Political Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1976).
4 See Andrew Hurrell, ‘Kant and the Kantian Paradigm in International Relations’, Review
of International Studies 16 (1990), 183–205 for a good overview, and Antonio Franceschet,
Kant and Liberal Internationalism: Sovereignty, Justice, and Global Reform (Houndmills,
Palgrave, 2002) for a more recent study. Again, I can find little to cite on Diderot or
Herder within the literature on the history of international political thought. For relevant
scholarship, one often needs to go beyond the standard international relations journals:
for a good example, see Sankar Muthu, ‘Enlightenment anti-imperialism’, Social Research
66 (1999), 959–1007.
5 The main works are Richard Tuck, ‘The “Modern” Theory of Natural Law’ in Anthony
Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-modern Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 99–119; Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and The Rights of War and Peace: Political
Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999). For a good commentary which relates Tuck’s interpretation to contemporary international relations theory, see Benedict Kingsbury, ‘Grotius, Law, and Moral Scepticism:
Theory and Practice in the Thought of Hedley Bull’ in Ian Clark and Iver Neumann (eds.),
Classical Theories of International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 42–70. For
the adoption of Tuck’s reading of Grotius in a leading textbook, see Chris Brown, Terry
Nardin and Nicholas Rengger (eds.), International Relations in Political Thought: Texts from
the Ancient Greeks to the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
pp. 313–314, although it should be noted that their analysis is not entirely in line with
Tuck’s reading, especially as presented in Rights of War and Peace.
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Images of Grotius
tory of international political and legal thought; indeed, it may even
be expected to lead to the inauguration of a new ‘cottage industry’ in
Grotius among International Relations theorists in its own turn. The
danger is that scholars will simply latch onto the new interpretation,
without thinking properly about the reasons why Grotius enjoys such
prominence in the history of ideas about international relations, and
without paying sufficient attention to the ‘lesser’ thinkers who live in
his shadow.6
This is especially worrying in view of new approaches to the history
of ideas, of which Tuck himself is a prominent exponent, that lay particular emphasis on reading ‘minor texts’ closely in order to understand
how ideological conventions are constructed, and so to acquire a better
understanding of the significance not only of the intellectual moves carried out by ‘major texts’, but also to understand the relationship between
the theory and practice of politics.7 In part, the point here is that the most
celebrated ‘great thinkers’ in the history of political thought are often
ones who introduced novel ways of thinking about a particular problem, but their innovations can only be appreciated once one has a thorough grasp of the more conventional ways of thinking that they were
challenging. Appreciating what the ideological conventions of political
thought were in a particular period is thus a crucial part of the study of
the history of ideas, and is essential before the ideas of major thinkers
can be understood. To the extent that the study of the history of international political thought has concentrated on a select group of great
thinkers in isolation, this understanding of the ideological conventions
of international politics is sadly lacking.
Another important issue is highlighted by Brian Schmidt’s penetrating analysis of the disciplinary roots of twentieth-century ideas
about international anarchy in late nineteenth-century political science.8
6 My analysis of Grotius’s thought in Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and
Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) may well appear
to be guilty of this kind of error. My purpose in that book, however, was not so much to
try to set up a new kind of ‘Grotian tradition’, but rather to show the ideological purposes
which Grotius’ account of the law of nations was made to serve in subsequent international
legal justifications of the practices of colonialism and imperialism, and which have been
masked by the subsequent reinterpretation of Grotius in International Relations theory as
the ‘father’ of modern legal thinking in the society of states. In this respect, the analysis in
that book is broadly consistent with the argument made here.
7 See James Tully, ‘The Pen is a Mighty Sword: Quentin Skinner’s Analysis of Politics’,
in James (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1989), especially pp. 8–16.
8 Brian Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: a Disciplinary History of International
Relations (Boulder Westview Press, 1998).
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Schmidt shows that we should not treat the ‘great minds’ or ‘great traditions’ of thought as an unimpeachable source of profound insights into
the perennial questions of international affairs, subject only to the need
to find the correct interpretive lens with which to view them; rather,
we should ask how the academic disciplines of international law and,
later, international relations constructed and used particular images of
these thinkers for certain purposes. Why were these thinkers chosen
as representative of the much larger and more diverse body of work
which constitutes international political and legal thought? Why have
certain interpretations of their ideas acquired the exceptional power that
they possess? As the academic disciplines of International Relations and
international law have developed, so they have constructed stories of
their own intellectual foundations, which need to be interrogated to
uncover how they work to support certain ways of thinking about the
subject and to marginalize others.
My purpose here is to locate the context within which Grotius’ work
may be understood; to shed some light on the various ‘minor’ late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century thinkers who live in his shadow;
and to explain how a distorted idea of the ‘Grotian tradition’ has come
to occupy such a central position within International Relations theory
today. I will begin with a summary of two current views of Grotius, and
then try to trace the origins of the widely-held belief that he is the ‘father
of modern international law’. Having done that, I will briefly describe
three quite distinct literatures on international politics and international
law that commanded influence during or shortly after Grotius’ lifetime.
A crucial point here is that one of these literatures – which mainly consisted of commentaries on the negotation and provisions of treaties –
has been largely forgotten as a result of the fixation with ‘Grotian’ international lawyers and theorists of reason of state. Bringing this neglected
literature back into focus is essential if we are to understand how the
image of Grotius with which we are most familiar today was first
constructed.
Two views of Grotius’ importance
According to the traditional story, which still has plenty of adherents
among experts on international politics and international law,9 Grotius
9 See, for example, Robert Jackson, The Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of
States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 379–380, or Cornelius F. Murphy, ‘The
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Images of Grotius
deserves the title of ‘father of modern international law’ because he
was the first to appreciate the extent of the changes taking place in the
international order of the seventeenth century, thanks to the breakup of
Christendom and the emergence of independent sovereign states, crystallized by one of the principal events of Grotius’ later years: the Thirty
Years War. Grotius’ famously ‘eclectic’ combination of naturalist and
positivist (or ‘volitional’) jurisprudence provided a sufficiently broad
template within which the competing claims of the old and new legal
orders could be woven into a more or less coherent whole, albeit one
with enduring ambivalences and internal contradictions. Subsequent
scholars, such as Emmerich de Vattel, could then use the opening Grotius
had created, while sloughing off the medieval residue that still coloured
his thought, to produce more comprehensively modern accounts of the
sources and content of international law in the context of a society of
states.
So the conventional story goes. Tuck’s account, by contrast, appeals
to what he claims is an even older view of Grotius’ importance in the
history of ideas, which depicts him as one of the main authors of a new
theory of natural law designed to accommodate sceptical or Tacitean
objections against the traditional scholastic assertion of a universally
binding code. According to Tuck, Grotius ‘was generally reckoned by
writers at the end of the seventeenth century to have created a new
science of morality by inventing a new way of talking about international relations’.10 His principal innovation in this respect was to ground
his conception of natural law not upon revelation or shared religious
belief, but upon nothing more than the idea of a natural impulse for
self-preservation, itself an integral part of sceptical thought. Thus, as
Tuck puts it, ‘sceptical ideas could be restated in the language of natural rights and duties’.11 The content of natural law might be different
from that suggested by more traditional scholastic theories, but Grotius’
move was essential to the survival of naturalist jurisprudence itself as a
vehicle for conceptualizing social and legal order.
Grotius might therefore still be seen as the father of something – in this
case, a new ‘modern’ kind of naturalist moral science – but the intellectual context in which he is located is now differently conceived. The old
Grotian Vision of World Order’ American Journal of International Law 76 (1982), 477–498.
Much the same point of view on Grotius is also in evidence in A. Claire Cutler, ‘The
“Grotian Tradition” in International Relations’ Review of International Studies 17 (1991)
41–65, see especially, pp. 44–49.
10 Tuck, Rights of War and Peace, p. 78.
11 Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p. 347.
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view saw him as responding to the practical crisis of the Thirty Years
War by advancing broadly humanitarian ideals that ignored the sceptical objections of reason of state theorists, towards whom, as Hirsch
Lauterpacht put it, Grotius maintained a dignified silence throughout
De Jure Belli ac Pacis.12 Tuck’s narrative, on the other hand, begins with
the intellectual clash between scholastic natural law and Tacitist ideas
about reason of state in early modern thought; and presents Grotius
not as someone who ignored the latter, but as a unifier of these diverse
strands who paved the way for Hobbes’ yet more strongly articulated
version of the new natural law theory. The conventional story treats
Grotius more narrowly as a purely legal thinker, placing him in a tradition that begins with Vitoria and Suarez, and goes on to include
Pufendorf and eventually Vattel; Hobbes is emphatically not included
in this account of the ‘Grotian tradition’, but belongs in a quite distinct
‘Machiavellian’ or realist one.13 Tuck’s interpretation, despite retaining
the sense of a connection between Grotius and lawyers like Vitoria,
Suarez, Vasquez, Pufendorf and Vattel, also stresses the links between
Grotius and more obviously ethical or political philosophers: not only
Hobbes, but Rousseau and Kant as well.
My purpose here is not to synthesize these competing interpretations,
nor to arbitrate between them, but rather to examine the reasons why the
belief that Grotius was the ‘father of modern international law’ came to
exercise such a strong grip on the history of ideas about international politics and international law in the first place. If we grant, for the moment,
Tuck’s contention that Grotius’ contribution was ‘generally reckoned
by writers at the end of the seventeenth century’ in terms of his development of a new moral science that was proof against scepticism, an
extraordinary transformation had taken place by the mid-nineteenth
century, when the view that Grotius’ works should be understood as an
eclectic but forward-looking response to the crisis of medieval Christendom and the emergence of the sovereign state was so widely accepted
among international lawyers (and by then they were often the only ones
to attach importance to Grotius’ work), that there are few if any traces
12 Hirsch Lauterpacht, ‘The Grotian Tradition in International Law’ British Year Book of
International Law 23 (1946), 1–53. More recently, A. Claire Cutler agrees that Grotius ‘rejects
the doctrine of the “reason of state”’: ‘The “Grotian Tradition”’, p. 47. The view of Grotius
as a humanitarian idealist is also a long-standing one: see, for example, Arthur Nussbaum,
A Concise History of the Law of Nations (New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 101.
13 See, for example, Hedley Bull, ‘Martin Wight and the Theory of International Relations’
in Martin Wight, International Theory: the Three Traditions (New York: Holmes and Meier,
1992), pp. ix–xxiii.
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Images of Grotius
of the alternative interpretation espoused by Tuck to be found during
that period.
In comparison with the impressive detail in which his broader interpretive thesis on natural law theory is couched, Tuck only comments
very briefly on the reasons for this dramatic change in Grotius’ image,
and what he has to say on the point is not entirely clear. In Philosophy
and Government, he points to Kant as the key person who drove the
late seventeenth-century reading of Grotius out of the history of moral
philosophy, substituting a new narrative within which, by a happy but
hardly surprising coincidence, the Kantian statement of the categorical imperative emerged as the pivotal moment in the development of a
modern science of morality. In The Rights of War and Peace, by contrast,
Kant has been included within the new naturalistic moral science created
by Grotius and (especially) Hobbes, and the notion that he was primarily responsible for overturning this interpretation within the history of
ideas is presumably in question, although Tuck does not explicitly deal
with the issue here.14
In any event, whether or not Kant was responsible for expelling
Grotius from the pantheon of great moral philosophers, Tuck’s new
reading still poses the question of why international legal thought on
Grotius developed as it did, and that is a topic on which Tuck remains
virtually silent.15 He might have rescued Grotius for historians of moral
philosophy, but this raises more questions than it answers for historians
of international political and legal thought. If Grotius’ contemporaries
thought of him primarily as a ‘moral scientist’, whence did the belief
that he was the ‘father of modern international law’ originate? How did
Grotius become so inextricably involved with something so apparently
divorced from his main intellectual concerns as the Peace of Westphalia?
How did he become the animating personality behind an entire tradition of thought about the conditions for maintaining legal order in a
society of independent sovereign states?
This enquiry speaks to the concern raised in the opening paragraph:
the tendency for debate about the history of international political
thought to revolve around a relatively small group of great thinkers,
with everything turning on our interpretation or reinterpretation of
14
Tuck, Rights of War and Peace, especially pp. 11–15, 207–25 and 228–31.
His only gesture in this direction is to castigate, in rather a vague manner, the ‘generation
of scholars . . . funded by the Carnegie Endowment from the time of the First World War
onwards, working under the influence of James Brown Scott’: Tuck, Rights of War and
Peace, p. 11.
15
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Classical Theory in International Relations
their ideas and the connections or disagreements between them. It is
not entirely facetious to say that much of what passes for the history
of ideas in International Relations theory today amounts to little more
than a discussion about the correct formation in which the ‘First XI’
should line up: is Grotius to play alongside Hobbes, or should they
be placed on opposite wings? Tuck’s reading is hugely welcome for
having exposed previously neglected themes in Grotius’ thought, and
for compelling theorists of international politics or international law to
reconsider their conventional wisdoms about the relationships between
Grotius and Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau and Kant. But it does not
help us to understand where those conventional wisdoms came from,
or where their power lies.
The development of the traditional image
of Grotius
The conventional picture of Grotian eclecticism in international law
would have been inconceivable without the broader proposition that
European legal thought as a whole can be defined in terms of the
dichotomy between naturalism and positivism. It is meaningless to
speak of a ‘middle way’, after all, without first identifying two
extremes on either side of it, and Grotius’ method only seems eclectic because it cannot be subsumed under either one of these poles.16
Of course, the distinction between natural and positive law speaks to
a long-standing philosophical debate in Western legal thought, but,
in the form it assumes in modern textbooks on international law, the
divide is usually understood in a chronological way, and this is highly
significant.
Natural law is presented as the signature of medieval scholarship on
the law of nations, animated by the belief that there is a single, universal, eternal and divinely-ordained code that governs, or ought to
govern, the conduct of all peoples in the world. It is admitted that this
point of view may have made sense in a world where the Pope and the
Emperor had plausible claims to universal lordship, but the collapse of
the confessional and political unity of Christendom during the wars of
the religion, and the rise of absolutist monarchs proclaiming their independent sovereignty over their own dynastic territories, destroyed the
16
On this point, see David Kennedy, ‘Primitive Legal Scholarship’ Harvard International
Law Journal 27 (1986), 1–98.
240
Images of Grotius
capacity of natural law to be an effective foundation for the jus gentium.
It was replaced by positive law, which provided a consent-based theory
of the sources of international obligations that was better suited to the
voluntaristic climate of the society of states. Thus, as T. J. Lawrence put
it, ‘Modern International Law, of which Grotius must be considered the
father, was in its origin an attempt to find a working substitute for the
exploded theory of universal supremacy’.17
In other words, the distinction between naturalism and positivism
that colours the international legal interpretation of Grotius is interwoven with an historical theory of the origins of the modern international
society and legal order. This theory attaches colossal importance to the
Peace of Westphalia of 1648 as the dividing moment between the two
periods, on the grounds that, to quote Lawrence again,
The progress of the new principles was clearly shown by the Peace of
Westphalia. It was the first of a series of great international instruments
which have regulated the state system of Europe down to our own time.
It recognised the independence of each separate state, even within the
boundaries of the Empire. The principles of the territorial character of
sovereignty and the equality of states before the law were involved in
the arrangements that it made. . . . Since 1648 International Law has
had no rival system to contend with. . . . In spite of modifications and
additions, it stands today the same in all essentials as Grotius left it in
1625.18
Here, then, we find that ‘well-known combination’ of the Grotian law
of nations and the Westphalian international system.19 But not for the
first time. By the late nineteenth century, the idea was already so deeply
ingrained in the minds of international lawyers that Lawrence’s version
of it is but one among several, in most of which the claim is seen as so
commonplace and so well-established that it is seldom presented with
any further justificatory argument.20
17 T. J. Lawrence, ‘The Work of Grotius as a Reformer of International Law’, in Essays on
some Disputed Questions in Modern International Law (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell and Co.,
1884), p. 187. For a more recent statement, along similar lines, see Cutler, ‘The “Grotian
Tradition”’, p. 49.
18 Lawrence, ‘The Work of Grotius’, pp. 189–190.
19 C. G. Roelofsen, ‘Grotius and the “Grotian Heritage” in International Law and International Relations: the Quarcentenary and its Aftermath (circa. 1980–90)’, Grotiana 11 (1990),
p. 8.
20 For a couple of other prominent late nineteenth-century examples, see Travers Twiss,
The Law of Nations Considered as Independent Political Communities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1861), pp. iii–iv, and Thomas Alfred Walker, The Science of International Law
(London: C. J. Clay & Sons, 1893), p. 91. Nevertheless, Lawrence’s interpretation was
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Indeed, international lawyers had already been making essentially
the same point for at least fifty or sixty years. In the early 1840s, for
instance, Henry Wheaton had described Westphalia as marking ‘the
epoch of the firm establishment of permanent legations, by which the
pacific relations of the European states have been since maintained; and
which . . . contributed to give a more practical character to the new
science created by Grotius and improved by his successors’.21 Another
prominent international lawyer of the early nineteenth century, William
Manning, similarly argued that Grotius ‘had the happiness of being
exactly adapted to the times in which he lived, for had he lived much
earlier he would have found Europe unfitted for the reception of his
doctrines; and his times required a mind like that of Grotius, the new
relations of the European powers needing reference to settled principles
for their guidance’.22
There is a certain synchronicity between the publication of De Jure Belli
ac Pacis (in 1625) and the signing of the Peace of Westphalia (in 1648), but
it is hardly obvious that the two events should be linked together as the
founding of the modern era in international law. Grotius himself was,
of course, profoundly affected by the Thirty Years War, but it is surely
more plausible to suggest that a subject closer to his mind, even when
he wrote De Jure Belli ac Pacis, would still have been the Dutch revolt
against Philip II of Spain and their struggle against the Portuguese,
with which his earlier works on the law of nations had principally
dealt, anticipating prominent themes in his later masterpiece as they
did so.23 The Dutch war with Spain ended in 1648 with another Treaty,
signed in January rather than October (when the Peace of Westphalia
proper was finally agreed), but one hears relatively little about it in
an influential one for twentieth-century international theory, especially in its impact on
Wight’s thinking. I have discussed this elsewhere, both in Beyond the Anarchical Society,
and, more fully, in ‘The Reception of Hugo Grotius in International Relations Theory’,
Grotiana 20/21 (1999/2000), 137–60.
21 Henry Wheaton, History of the Law of Nations in Europe and America, from the Earliest
Times to the Treaty of Washington, 1842 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1973), pp. 71–72.
Although I make the point only tentatively in this context, it is at least worth noting that
in this earlier account we begin to find traces of Grotius’ importance framed in terms of
his contribution to the development of international law as a science. I will return to this
in a moment.
22 William Manning, Commentaries on the Law of Nations (London: Sweet, 1839), p. 21.
23 Hugo Grotius, ‘Commentarius in Theses XI’: an Early Treatise on Sovereignty, the Just War
and the Legitimacy of the Dutch Revolt, trans. Peter Borschberg (Berne: Peter Lang, 1994);
and Grotius, De Jure Praedae Commentarius, trans. Gwladys Williams (Buffalo: William S.
Hein, 1995).
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Images of Grotius
conventional legal histories on Grotius’ work, and certainly less than
one hears about the other Westphalian treaties between France, Sweden
and the Emperor.24
Similarly, why should so much importance be vested in the Peace
of Westphalia as such a pivotal legal instrument? The Peace did not
proclaim the Augsburgian principle of cuius regio eius religio, which is
often supposed to lie at the heart of the modern practice of toleration
in the society of states; the bulk of its text was taken up with accommodations for the various parties who had been engaged in the war,
often with little demonstrable significance for the further development
of modern international relations; and, Lawrence’s claims on its behalf
notwithstanding, the Westphalian recognition of the principle of ‘territorial sovereignty’ was specific to the internal constitution of the Holy
Roman Empire, defining a limited set of privileges held by the German
states that fell well short of outright independence from imperial authority.25 In a host of ways, Westphalia is an odd choice of starting-point from
which to date the origins of the modern era, and that applies a fortiori to
the Grotian-Westphalian conjunction.
How, then, have we come by the ideas that the Peace of Westphalia
was not only the origin of the modern international society, but also
that it served as the practical realization of Grotius’ theoretical scheme
of the law of nations? To answer this question, we need to take a quick
look at three distinct literatures on international law and politics that
emerged in the two centuries after Grotius’ death. As I suggested in
the introduction, by shining a spotlight on Grotius, historians of ideas
have left many of these other authors in shadow. What follows, then, is
an exercise in trying to recover a proper sense of the various ways in
which people thought and wrote about international politics and international law in the hundred or hundred and fifty years after Grotius’
death, during which time the conventional image of him as the father
of an international legal theory suited to the ‘Westphalian system’ very
gradually began to take shape.
24
A notable exception is Wheaton, History of the Law of Nations, p. 70.
An entertaining broadside against the absurdity of the orthodox view on the importance of Westphalia can be found in Stephen Krasner, ‘Westphalia and all that’, in Judith
Goldstein and Robert Keohane (eds.), Ideas and Foreign Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 235–264. An earlier source, containing an excellent discussion of
Westphalia’s implications for the imperial constitution is Johann Stephan Pütter, An Historical Development of the Present Political Constitution of the Germanic Empire, trans. Josiah
Dornford, 3 vols. (London: 1790).
25
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Forms of early modern international
political thought
First, as most historians and International Relations theorists are well
aware, there was a great deal of work that explicitly sought to develop
Grotius’ own system of the law of nations, whether by refining his conception of natural law, developing his theory of the role played by state
volition, or building on his own eclectic method to produce an updated
version of the content of contemporary natural and volitional legal rules.
The classic references here are, in turn, Samuel Pufendorf, Cornelis
Bynkershoek, and Christian Wolff and Emmerich de Vattel. Discussions
of these authors as the successors to Grotius can be found in almost any
textbook on international law, and in many on international political
thought as well. These authors tended to be rather abstract philosophers
of the law of nations. Although some, notably Pufendorf, did engage in
empirically detailed historical studies of quasi-international legal systems such as the imperial constitution, in the theoretical juristic works
for which they are most famed they typically engaged in only marginal
analyses of treaties as a source of law. Little in their work, in other
words, explains the Grotius-Westphalia connection which is so central
to modern international law.26 Their subsequent development of some
Grotian ideas was crucial to the elaboration of the positivist-naturalist
dichotomy as an organizing device for the history of international legal
thought, but that alone is insufficient to grasp the origins of the conventional image of Grotius.
Quite distinct from this, however, was a more strategically-inclined,
and far less legalistic, literature on the balance of power, worked out
by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century commentators like Slingsby
Bethel, John Campbell, James Howell, Francois-Paul de Lisola and Henri
de Rohan.27 The last of these was one of the real celebrities of the
genre, having acted as the leader of the Huguenot faction during the
26
For a good recent survey, see Tuck, Rights of War and Peace (which, incidentally, illustrates
the lack of direct attention that these scholars paid to the content of European treaties,
including the Peace of Westphalia).
27 For a survey of thought on this topic from the relevant period, see Michael Sheehan, Balance of Power: History and Theory (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 29–52. See also
Keene, International Political Thought: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2005), Chapter 4. In my view, one of the most interesting texts here, which has moments
where it anticipates current International Relations theory to a remarkable degree, is John
Campbell, The Present State of Europe, Explaining the Interests, Connections, Political and Commercial Views of its Several Powers, 3rd edn, (London: Longman, 1752). Other references are
James Howell, Lustra Ludovici, or the Life of the Late Victorious King of France, Lewis the XIII
(and of his Cardinal de Richelieu) (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1646); François Paul de
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Images of Grotius
religious wars in France, before writing a classic treatise on reason
of state: The Interest of the Princes and States of Christendom.28 Rohan
eschewed the time-honoured philosophical methods of enquiry into the
law of nations, whether rationalist or theological. Understanding the
interests of the state, he argued, was not something that could be done
through abstract speculation about the eternal, divinely-sanctioned laws
of nature, nor even through the historical study of examples of statesmanship from the past: ‘one cannot establish an immutable rule for the
government of states, because revolutions in world affairs change the
fundamental maxims of policy’.29 According to Rohan, the only way
to survive was to pay constant attention to one’s immediate political
environment, and above all keep track of the activities and interests of
other powers (puissances).
Thus, for example, he suggested that all rulers should keep a close
eye on the two mighty states of Spain and France, which dominated
Christendom ‘like two poles’.30 Rohan concluded that the true interest of France lay in thwarting Spanish ambitions. If France could match
Spanish military power in this way, not only would it serve its own interests, but it stood to win the gratitude of all the other princes and states of
Christendom by preserving a balance (contrepoids) that was essential to
the continuing survival of the lesser powers.31 Gradually, in the works
of other authors, this was developed into a general thesis that European
princes should unite to resist projects of ‘universal monarchy’ in order to
preserve their individual ‘liberties’.32 Grotius, like other jurisprudential
scholars, seldom figured in this literature as an important influence.
At the same time, and even more important for our purposes here,
there was a third literature, written by international lawyers but not so
much concerned with the doctrinal discussions of Pufendorf et al., nor
with pragmatic advice about how to preserve the balance of power à la
Rohan, as with the need to provide for practising diplomats a sketch
of the current state of play in agreements among European rulers.
The main work of these authors was to produce compendia of major
treaties, often with detailed commentaries on the negotiations leading
up to them and an analysis of their implications for what rulers could
Lisola, The Buckler of State and Justice (London: James Fisher, 1667); and Slingsby Bethel,
The Interest of Princes and States (London: John Wickins, 1680).
28 Henri de Rohan, De l’intérêt des princes et des états de la chrétienté, ed. Christian Lazzeri
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995).
29 Rohan, De l’intérêt, p. 159.
30 Ibid., p. 161.
31 Ibid., pp. 171 and 173.
32 Lisola, Buckler of State, is an excellent example.
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or could not legally do. Amidst all the attention that has been paid
to celebrities like Grotius, this literature has been almost completely
neglected by both International Relations theorists and international
lawyers, which is shameful in view of its considerable importance for
modern international legal thought. Probably the most respected work
at the time was Jean Dumont’s Corps universel diplomatique du droit des
gens.33 Other noteworthy texts are Frederic Leonard’s Recueil des traitez
de paix, and Jean-Yves de Saint-Prest’s Histoire des traités de paix et autres
négotiations.34 Interestingly, in view of the importance that Westphalia
has since acquired, although all recognized the Peace as important, only
a few treated it as a really distinctive breaking point in the history of the
European legal order.35
Initially, while one or two of these texts paid tribute to Grotius, they
were quite explicit about the fact that they were engaged in a substantially different kind of enquiry, one that was more empirically-based
than his abstract reflections.36 Later in the eighteenth century, however,
the pretensions of treaty-historians grew to the point where they proffered their work as an alternative to the general systems of the natural
lawyers. They began to argue that, ‘by comparing the treaties that the
powers of Europe have made with one another, we discover certain
principles, that have been almost universally adopted by all the powers that have made treaties on the same subject’.37 And, as they made
this larger thesis, they increasingly began to invoke Grotius’ name as an
authoritative source for their approach, claiming him ‘as the father of
this science’.38
During the eighteenth century, and especially under the pressure of
the French Revolution, the once-distinct lines between these literatures
33
Published in Amsterdam (for Brunel) in1726.
Published in Paris, 1693 and Amsterdam (for Bernard) in 1725, respectively.
35 See ‘S.W.’, A General Collection of Treatys, Declarations of War, Manifestos and other Publick
Papers, Relating to Peace and War among the Potentates of Europe, from 1648 to the Present
Time, 4 vols. (London: Andrew Bell, 1710–1732), and Fr. Bougeant, Histoire des guerres et
des négociations qui precederent le traité de Westphalie, 6 vols. (Paris: P. J. Mariette, 1751).
36 Dumont, Corps universel, vol. I, pp. i–iv.
37 G. F. von Martens, Summary of the Law of Nations, Founded on the Treaties and Customs of
the Modern Nations of Europe, with a list of the Principal Treaties Concluded since the year 1748
down to the Present Time, Indicating the Works in which they are to be found, trans. William
Cobbett (Philadelphia: Thomas Bradford, 1795), pp. 3–4.
38 Ibid., p. 8. A similar point can be found in Robert Plumer Ward, An Enquiry into the
Foundation and History of the Law of Nations in Europe, 2 vols. (London: Butterworth, 1795),
especially the final two chapters. (But note also that, even at this late stage, little explicit
reference is made to the Peace of Westphalia as the founding instrument of the European
order.)
34
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Images of Grotius
became blurred.39 Bull partially captured this development in his observation that, in Grotius’ time, theories on the law of nations and the
balance of power had originally been
held by different groups of persons and in their respective contexts
were largely antithetical. But in the eighteenth century the two streams
converged, as in the writings of Vattel international law came to take
account of the balance of power, and in the writings of [Edmund]
Burke and later [Friedrich von] Gentz the political maxim enjoining
the preservation of a balance of power came to be defined in a more
legalistic way.40
What this misses, however, is the importance of the third literature based
on the legal analysis of European treaties. This, rather than Vattel’s doctrine on natural law and the law of nations, formed the real bridge
across which the counter-revolutionary theorists like Gentz pursued
their effort to define the balance of power system in more legalistic terms.
The doctrine that emerged treated European public order as founded on
a series of treaties between dynastic rulers, and pointed to the balance
of power as its defining institution.
A key work here was Cristophe-Guillaume Koch’s Short History of
Peace Treaties, which made extensive, one might even say liberal, use of
the provisions in the Peace of Westphalia on the ‘territorial sovereignty’
of the constituents of the Holy Roman Empire to argue that the balance of
power and the liberties of sovereign princes had been legally established
as the basis of the European political system.41 This line of argument
was then picked up by the extraordinarily influential historians at the
University of Göttingen, most notably A. H. L. Heeren, to produce a
general account of how the modern states-system had developed out of
the ruins of medieval Christendom. Understandably, given his desire
to impugn the Napoleonic imperial system as a tyrannical abuse of
the traditional rights of other European states (including, of course, his
own), Heeren laid overwhelming emphasis on the principles of ‘internal
39
I have also discussed this development in Beyond the Anarchical Society, especially
Chapter 1.
40 Hedley Bull, ‘Society and Anarchy in International Relations’, in Herbert Butterfield
and Martin Wight (eds.), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays on the Theory of International
Politics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966), p. 39, and see also his similar, but even
more general comment in The Anarchical Society: a Study of Order in World Politics (London:
Macmillan, 1977), p. 33.
41 Cristophe Guillaume Koch and Maximilian Frederic Schoell, Histoire abrégé des traités
de paix, entre les puissances de l’Europe, depuis la paix de Westphalie, revised edition (Paris:
Gide, 1817).
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freedom’ and dynastic monarchy as the established and lawful pillars
of order in modern Europe.42
After 1815, then, when international lawyers began to write new textbooks on the post-revolutionary law of nations, what they had to go
on was a pre- or counter-revolutionary literature that seemed to be
built on two prominent claims: Martens’ statement that Grotius was
the ‘father’ of the modern science of studying international law through
the historical analysis of treaties; and Heeren’s proposition that the fundamental principles of the modern European system, especially relating to the equality and independence of territorially sovereign states,
had been established by the Peace of Westphalia. Rather than abandon one or the other of these cherished doctrines, they reconciled them
through the now-familiar thesis that Grotius’ theory had anticipated
Westphalian practice. Grotius’ theory of the law of nations was, it was
now argued, based on the doctrine of the equality, independence and
territorial sovereignty of states: precisely the principles, in other words,
that their histories told them had been enshrined in 1648.43
This doctrine rested on rather flimsy evidence, and several lawyers
noted that much of Grotius’ actual discussion of summum imperium and
so forth did not really correspond to their version of him. They dealt
with the problem, however, in a way that reinforced their claims about
the structure of the modern international system: Grotius’ theory, they
argued, was imperfect because he had not yet fully liberated himself
from the shackles of medieval theory and practice. He still hankered
after the religious and political unity of Christendom, and his grasp of
the new dynamics of the states-system was understandably defective,
since the system had not yet been fully established.44 At a stroke, the
awkward details of Grotius’ actual writings could not only be explained
away, but could actually be used as further evidence to colour in the
differences between the medieval and modern patterns of international
political and legal order.
The result was an interpretation of Grotius as the ‘father’ of a science of international law predicated on the method of treaty analysis,
and as the purveyor of the substantive doctrine that the legal order
42
A. H. L. Heeren, A Manual of the History of the Political System of Europe and its Colonies,
trans. from fifth German edition, 2 vols. (Oxford: D. A. Talboys, 1834). On the influence
of the ‘Göttingen school’ see Herbert Butterfield, Man on his Past (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1955), and Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of History, ed. Adam Watson
(London: Eyre Methuen, 1981).
43 See, for example, Twiss, Law of Nations, p. v.
44 A good early example is Manning, Commentaries, pp. 21ff.
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Images of Grotius
was founded on the principle of the equality and independence of territorially sovereign states, subsequently to be realized by the Peace of
Westphalia. This interpretation flowed from the counter-revolutionary
historical and legal scholarship of the early nineteenth century; it gradually made its way into the textbooks between 1815 and the 1840s; and
by the 1860s it had, to all intents and purposes, achieved the status of an
axiom. The masterstroke was that any potential difficulties that might
have arisen from the fact that the conventional interpretation bore scant
resemblance to Grotius’ actual description of the law of nations was
not just defused, but was turned into a positive blessing for orthodox
thinkers by being used to illustrate the backwardness, incoherence and
idealism of medieval scholarship, in contrast to the systematic and practical rigour of the moderns.45 ‘Eclecticism’ became the last piece in the
jigsaw of the conventional legal wisdom, placing Grotius neatly at the
Westphalian turning-point when the modern age was presumed to be
beginning.
Imagining Grotius today
The textbook legal interpretation of Grotius that I have just outlined is,
of course, still alive and well today.46 The problem we face in unpacking
how International Relations theorists currently think about Grotius is
more complicated than can be understood simply in terms of the version
of his work presented by nineteenth-century international lawyers. It is
not an exaggeration to say that most students of International Relations,
even experts on the history of thought about International Relations,
are unfamiliar with the legal textbooks in which the conventional wisdom on Grotius was developed.47 Nowadays, Grotius’ work is seldom
45
I should acknowledge that there were a few exceptional international legal scholars who
pointed out the inaccuracies of this interpretation. Henry Sumner Maine, International Law:
The Whewell Lectures of 1887 (London: John Murray, 1915) is tantalizing, but tends to skirt
the central point a bit; P. J. Baker, ‘The Doctrine of Legal Equality of States’, British Year
Book of International Law 4 (1923–24), p. 7 is spot on, but also serves to reveal the enduring
dominance of the conventional wisdom. To the best of my knowledge, the point that the
Peace of Westphalia also did not fit its appointed role was not seriously developed by any
nineteenth-century international lawyers, but that is a sweeping claim, and I could easily
be wrong.
46 Bull’s work is replete with examples: see The Anarchical Society, pp. 27–38, and ‘The
importance of Grotius in the Study of International Relations’ in Hedley Bull, Benedict
Kingsbury and Adam Roberts (eds.). Hugo Grotius and International Relations (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 65–93, especially pp. 75–78, 79, 87 and 89–91.
47 Historical surveys of International Relations theory after Grotius usually draw their
material instead from the canons of social and political theory: see, for instance, Kenneth
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Classical Theory in International Relations
studied in conjunction with the works of scholars like Martens or Koch,
but rather is placed alongside the treatises of thinkers who are presumed
to be of equivalent stature, like Machiavelli, Hobbes and Kant. Grotius
has become, in other words, a political philosopher of international society rather than a jurisprudential theorist of the law of nations.
This change has largely happened through the efforts of members
of the so-called ‘Grotian tradition’ in International Relations theory,
notably the ‘English School’ of Martin Wight and Hedley Bull. I have
discussed how they constructed their interpretation of Grotius elsewhere,48 and will not repeat that analysis at length here. The key move
was Wight’s decision to frame a new category of ‘international theory’
that combined legal and political thought in one historical scheme.49
Legal traditions, like Grotianism, thus mingled with, and gradually
acquired the characteristics of, political traditions of thought. This was
carried even further by Bull, who, unlike Wight, almost completely
erased the original legal context of the Grotian tradition and much more
unequivocally located Grotius within the context of international political thought.50
One effect of this slippage within the English school’s image of Grotius
is the reinforcement of the rather questionable interpretation of his
account of the law of nations as an anticipation of the Westphalian system. Indeed, in some respects the more narrowly legalistic interpretation
of Grotius has gained some authority because it may be used as an apparently more authentic reading, in comparison with the stretch involved
in Bull’s equation of Grotianism with Wightian ‘rationalism’.51 As even
more far-fetched invocations of Grotius’ name appear in international
political thought, so the English school’s version comes to acquire a
seeming authenticity in its own turn.52 A further effect has been that the
intellectual origins of the classic legal interpretation of Grotius have been
Thompson, Fathers of International Thought: the Legacy of Political Theory (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1994), and Torbjφrn Knutsen, A History of International
Relations Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992).
48 Beyond the Anarchical Society, Chapter 1; and ‘The Reception of Hugo Grotius’.
49 Wight, International Theory.
50 As well as Bull, ‘Martin Wight and the Theory of International Relations’, see my
analysis of debates about Grotianism within the English School: ‘The Development of the
Concept of International Society: an Essay on Political Argument in International Relations
Theory’, in Michi Ebata and Beverly Neufeld (eds.), Confronting the Political in International
Relations (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 34–37.
51 See, for example, Cutler, ‘The “Grotian tradition”’.
52 See, for example, Martha Finnemore’s criticisms of the description of regime theory as
‘Grotian’ in National Interests in International Society (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press,
1996), p. 19n. As Finnemore notes, Wight’s and Bull’s interpretations of Grotius (she seems
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Images of Grotius
concealed, or at least obscured, since few theorists of International Relations look beyond Wight or Bull in trying to understand how Grotius
should be understood. Wight and Bull are therefore often seen as having
created this interpretation of the Grotian tradition rather than, as was
really the case, merely having given the traditional story one or two
novel twists.
Conclusion
We have seen how Grotius first became identified as the ‘father’ of
something that its exponents called the ‘science’ of ‘modern international law’. We have seen how this science came to be associated with
the ‘Westphalian’ rejection of universal monarchy and an endorsement
of the balance of power. And we have seen how these origins of the
‘Grotian tradition’ have been cloaked by a relocation of that tradition
in the context of political philosophies of International Relations rather
than jurisprudential debates about the law of nations. All of this explains
why the real origins of the idea of a Grotian tradition in international
law have become obscure. It also indicates the range of early modern
international political thought that has been masked by the excessive
attention that International Relations theorists have paid to Grotius. To
the extent that Tuck’s new interpretation returns Grotius to a tradition of
enquiry grounded in moral philosophy, this may perhaps even liberate
historians of international political thought to escape from the fixation
with Grotius, and begin instead to adopt a more open-minded approach
to the early modern period.
This would be valuable because the conventional image of Grotius
reinforces one particular way of thinking about international relations
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It highlights the emergence
of the ‘Westphalian system’ in western Europe, and treats both the theory and practice of early modern international politics as a gradual
leading-up to the establishment of this modern states-system. Alternative dimensions of international political thought and practice, such as
republicanism or imperialism,53 are thus overlooked. Moreover, whole
to see no significant difference between them) are ‘more faithful’ to Grotius than regime
theory. True enough, but it should not lead to the conclusion that their interpretations are
unimpeachable.
53 On the former, see Nicholas Onuf, The Republican Legacy in International Political Thought
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); on the latter, see Keene, Beyond the
Anarchical Society.
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literatures, most importantly the treaty collections of Dumont and others, have been systematically neglected, in favour of a concentration on
a small group of thinkers who are seen as having anticipated the subsequent development of a system of sovereign states. We might use these
historical examples drawn from the early modern period to illustrate
other forms of international interaction than anarchic inter-state relations, and thus give ourselves a better sense of the peculiarity of certain
aspects of our world. By interpreting the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the conventional terms of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
international legal thought, however, we merely give the latter a timeless quality that makes them seem like unalterable fixtures. When we
fail to locate the conventional image of Grotius in terms of its own ideological origins, we allow it to be part of an ideological conception of
world politics that persists today.
252
11
The Hobbesian theory of
international relations:
three traditions
Michael C. Williams
Describing International Relations (IR) as a realm of ‘Hobbesian anarchy’ remains one of the most popular shorthand descriptions of the
nature of world politics. To invoke Hobbes is to call forth the image
of a world of conflict and perpetual danger, a ‘Realist’ vision of international politics as a ‘state of nature’ defined by continual insecurity,
competition and potential or actual conflict. As is often the case with
the use of classical political thinkers in IR, these references tend to be
cursory, with declarations of world politics as a condition of ‘Hobbesian anarchy’ or a ‘Hobbesian state of war’ serving more as rhetorical or
metaphorical markers than as full analytic accounts of either Hobbes’
vision of international politics or its historical validity and contemporary relevance. This chapter has two goals. First, I provide a reading of
Hobbes’ vision of international relations that highlights its relationship
to his political thinking as a whole, and especially to his concern with
the relationship between knowledge and practice. I argue that Hobbes
was concerned with what we would today perhaps call the social construction of politics, and that his work can be read as an attempt both to
explicate the foundations of politics and an attempt to reconstruct politics in the light of them. Hobbes’ vision of international politics can only
be properly reconstructed and understood in the light of his concerns
with the nature of political order as a whole and with the constitution
of domestic political orders.
In the second section of the chapter, I briefly examine the implications of this understanding for different appreciations and appropriations of Hobbes’ legacy in IR today. The understanding of Hobbes’
view of international politics I develop here challenges fundamentally
those positions which view him as a rationalist theorist of international
anarchy, as well as presenting challenges to the much more subtle and
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sophisticated view developed within the English School of international
society. At the same time, it also allows for a broader reassessment of
his legacy in IR. Uncovering this legacy requires stepping outside the
confines of contemporary IR theory, to examine (albeit only briefly and
suggestively in this context) perhaps the most striking engagement with
Hobbes’ thinking in the twentieth century: the revival of Hobbes in
Weimar Germany. Examining the debates over Hobbes that took place
in this period – particularly between Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss –
provides essential elements in understanding the intellectual context
within which Hans Morgenthau developed the theory of political realism that was to have such a profound impact on the development of
IR. Perhaps even more intriguingly, these debates also provide insights
into the origins of contemporary American neoconservatism.
Foundations
As has often been noted, Hobbes’ specific reflections on international
politics are rare, and nowhere does he develop systematically his views
on the subject. As a consequence, it is necessary to try to reconstruct his
vision of international relations from his broader understanding of the
foundations of politics. At the heart of this position is an analysis of the
relationship between knowledge and politics.1 As numerous philosophical treatments have argued at length, the central intellectual context in
which Hobbes’ thought must be located is the ‘crise pyrhonnienne’ of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 Knowledge of the truth about
empirical and moral questions, he argued, is purely knowledge of things
as they appear to us as conditioned by our individual appetites and aversions. As Richard Tuck has noted, in this regard Hobbes’ ‘crucial idea . . .
was simply to treat what is perceived by man – the images and so on
which are immediately apparent to an internal observer – as bearing no
1 This section draws upon the analysis in Michael C. Williams, The Realist Tradition and
the Limits of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
2 See Richard Tuck, ‘Optics and Sceptics: the Philosophical Foundations of Hobbes’s Political Thought’ in Edmund Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Richard Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989); Richard Flathman, Thomas Hobbes: Scepticism, Individuality and
Chastened Politics (London: Sage, 1993); and also Richard Popkin, A History of Scepticism:
from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). However, as
Quentin Skinner has argued, it is important not to overstate the sceptical dimension of
Hobbes’ thinking, since Hobbes retains a strong commitment to the role of reason, however powerful scepticism and rhetoric may be. Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, Vol.3:
Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 79 and 88.
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The Hobbesian theory of international relations
relationship of verisimilitude to the external world. Man is effectively a
prisoner within the cell of his own mind, and has no idea what in reality
lies outside his prison walls . . .’3 Empirical knowledge is always hypothetical and conjectural; there is no way to get behind the appearances
to the thing itself.4 Rational knowledge, by contrast, is like a language: it
consists of a set of formal definitions and relational rules. For Hobbes,
truth is not an objective characteristic of things, but rather resides in a set
of accepted and logically related frameworks of definitions and referents. Or, to put this another way, in Hobbes’ philosophical nominalism
truth is a function of logic and language, not of the relation between
language and some extralinguistic ‘reality’.5
This view extends to the question of moral knowledge as well.6
That which we view as good, or beneficial, is not so in itself, but is
so only because it appears to us as such. And since these perceptions
are inescapably conditioned by the different appetites and aversions of
each individual, there is no natural harmony or order amongst them.
In Leviathan, for example, he puts the point this way: ‘whatsoever is
the object of any man’s appetite or desire that is it which he for his
part calleth good; and the object of his hate and aversion, evil; and of
his contempt, vile and inconsiderable. For these words of good, evil, and
contemptibel are ever used with relation to the person that useth them,
there being nothing simply and absolutely so, nor any common rule of
good and evil to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves . . .’7
In De Cive, he phrases the issue more simply still, holding that: ‘Wherever good and evil are measured by the mere diversity of present desires,
and hence by a corresponding diversity of yardsticks, those who act in
this way will find themselves still in a state of war’.8
This helps explain the extraordinary stress which Hobbes places on
the definitions and relations of words throughout his political philosophy, a stress clearly linked to his thinking on the question of moral and
practical judgment and action. Words and concepts are not pale reflections of an ‘objective’ reality – they are fundamental constituents of the
3
Tuck, Hobbes, p. 40.
As Jan Blits has argued, the generalized fear that Hobbes sees as the prime motivation
for action is not reducible solely to a fear of the potential actions of others. It is constituted
by a more fundamental fear of the unknown – and in some basic ways unknowable –
nature of reality as a whole. Jan Blits, ‘Hobbesian Fear’ Political Theory 17 (1989), p. 425.
5 I am thankful to Ross Rudolph for stressing the importance of this point to me.
6 See particularly, Quentin Skinner, ‘Hobbes on Rhetoric and the Construction of Morality’
Visions of Politics, Vol.3, pp. 87–141.
7 Hobbes, Leviathan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), p. 28.
8 Quoted in Skinner, Visions of Politics, Vol.3, p. 20.
4
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reality of the agents that use them to make sense of their worlds. In this
sense, the social world is fundamentally constructed out of the beliefs
that individuals have about themselves and their world. As Andrej
Rapaczynski has insightfully noted, for Hobbes: ‘Acting on those beliefs
that they actually have about themselves, men, being authors of their
own actions, create the truth of their own beliefs . . . Political science is,
more than any other, concerned with postulates and definitions, because
what men postulate with respect to the relations of power among themselves they very often ipso facto bring about’.9 Or, as Hobbes tersely
expressed it: ‘the Actions of men proceed from their Opinions’.10
This view of Hobbes’ state of nature differs considerably from those
who portray it as the outcome of materially self-interested rational actors
competing for the same scarce goods within a condition of epistemic
agreement. In the view that emerges from an engagement with Hobbes’
philosophical nominalism, by contrast, the state of nature derives from
precisely the lack of any such commonality. In the state of nature, individuals construct their own realities, their own understandings of what
is good and bad, desirable and undesirable, threatening and unthreatening, and act on the basis of these beliefs. Lacking agreement on what
the world is, as well as over what it ought to be, the state of nature is
anarchic in a sense far deeper than that captured by the ‘security dilemmas’, or ‘coordination problems’ or logics of ‘relative gains’ so beloved
by rationalist thinkers.
What is more, beliefs themselves can represent important elements
of conflict. Insult, for example, is not a threat to an individual’s material wellbeing, but as an assault upon a person’s idea of ‘honour’; and
insults may well provoke reactions in which the dread of dishonour outweighs fears of death or physical harm. This is an essential aspect of the
pride and ‘vainglory’ that loom so large in Hobbes’ thinking. Precisely
because they are beliefs these commitments are not susceptible to rational
discussion or determination, and they may have little or no relation to
material interests. Indeed they frequently overwhelm material interests,
and are at the heart of the dynamics of fear, distrust and animosity.11 The
modern jibe that it is difficult to convince people to go to war to protect
9 Andrezj Rapaczynski, Nature and Politics: Liberalism in the Philosophy of Hobbes, Locke and
Rousseau (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 109.
10 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 233. See also the excellent discussion of ‘Hobbes’s Irrational Man’
that is Chapter 3 of Steven Holmes’ Passions and Constraint (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1995).
11 Holmes, Passions and Constraint, p. 84.
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a market is one that Hobbes was more than familiar with. His worry, by
contrast, was that the centrality of belief and the remarkable power of
rhetoric to mobilize action made it much easier to convince people to
kill and die for considerably less tangible goals – be they creed, religion
or honour; in short, for beliefs.12
In the state of nature, even the fear of death which Hobbes considers universal is unable to create order. For even if all agreed on the
desirability of physical self-preservation above all else (which, as will
be discussed in a moment, Hobbes doubts), this would not mean that
all could agree on what the threats to that preservation were, on how to
react to them, or how best to secure themselves against them. Conflict
is not simply intrinsic to humanity’s potential for aggression, nor can it
be attributed to (or resolved by) straightforward utilitarian calculations
of competing and conflicting interests. The state of nature is defined not
just by a lack of trust, but much more fundamentally by a condition of
epistemological indeterminacy which renders even the universal fear of
death at best a partial remedy, and the existence of conflict and mistrust
endemic.
A central goal of Hobbes’ state of nature is to demonstrate to individuals (in a context dominated by the Thirty Years War and the English Civil
War) the importance of the relationship between knowledge claims,
political authority and social peace. A return to the state of nature is a
metaphor (and a warning) illuminating the dynamics of social conflict
arising from the absence of both cultural consensus and a sovereign
authority to fix meanings, determine contested facts and the like. By
demonstrating the foundations of the state of war that is the state of
nature, Hobbes seeks to convince individuals of the need for a sovereign
authority, and of their need to obey it. Moreover, he seeks to provide
a rational foundation for political authority that would supplant the
now unstable and unsustainable beliefs of traditional political authorities. In the escape from the state of nature that Hobbes proposes, the
individual does not simply alienate the ‘right to all things’ to a political authority. More fundamentally, what is granted to that authority
is the right to decide upon irresolvably contested truths: to provide the
authoritative criteria of what is, and thus to remove people from the state
of epistemic and ethical indeterminacy that is the basis of the state of
nature.
12
Ibid., p. 81. For a contemporary exploration of this theme, see Judith Butler, Excitable
Speech (London: Routledge, 1996).
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Hobbes uses his scepticism both to show the necessity of his solution
and to destroy (what he views as dogmatic) counter-claims to political
authority based upon unsupportable (individual) claims to truth. In
arguing against individual claims against the authority of the sovereign
in De Cive, Hobbes puts it in the following way: ‘the knowledge of good and
evil belongs to each single man. In the state of nature indeed, where every
man lives by equal right, and has not by any mutual pacts submitted to
the command of others, we have granted this to be true; nay, [proved
it] . . . [But in the civil state it is false. For it was shown . . .] that the civil
laws were the rules of good and evil, just and unjust, honest and dishonest;
that therefore what the legislator commands, must be held for good, and
what he forbids for evil’.13 Earlier in the same work he had phrased the
argument even more unequivocally, noting that since ‘the opinions of
men differ concerning meum and tuum, just and unjust, profitable and
unprofitable, good and evil, honest and dishonest, and the like; which every
man esteems according to his own judgement: it belongs to the same
chief power to make some common rules for all men, and to declare
them publicly, by which every man may know what may be called his,
what another’s, what just, what unjust, what honest, what dishonest,
what good, what evil; that is summarily, what is to be done, what to be
avoided in our common course of life’. It follows that for Hobbes: ‘All
judgment therefore, in a city, belongs to him who hath the swords; that
is, to him who hath the supreme authority’.14
For Hobbes, epistemic claims and political claims are clearly connected. A fundamental reason why the Sovereign must be unchallengeable in definitional matters is that to rebel against this authority is to
return to the subjectively relative claim to know and the conflict which,
for Hobbes, this inevitably entails. This is why the Sovereign ultimately
must control language (definitions of what is), and explains his repeated
stress on the importance of education (and sovereign control over its
institutions) rather than straightforward coercion as the essential element in a successful Sovereign’s rule.15 For Hobbes, mistaken claims
about the foundations of knowledge were a source of mistaken political beliefs and were thus at the heart of the conflict he saw around
13
Hobbes, De Cive, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), p. 244.
Hobbes, De Cive; see also Leviathan p. 28, and the rendition in Tuck, Hobbes, p. 65. As
Skinner has noted, for Hobbes if we wish to fix ‘our moral language unambiguously onto
the world, we can only hope to do so by fiat. His conclusion is sceptical, and does little to
uphold the dignity of moral philosophy. For all that, however, he may be right’; Visions of
Politics, Vol. 3., p. 141.
15 Hobbes, De Cive, pp. 262–263.
14
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The Hobbesian theory of international relations
him. Interpretive dissent leads potentially to political dissention and to
conflict. In the words of Hobbes’ patron, the Earl of Newcastle, ‘controversy Is a Civill Warr with the Pen which pulls out the sorde soon
afterwards’.16
In his endeavour to avert this situation, Hobbes does not rely primarily upon the coercive capacities of the sovereign. More fundamentally, he
undertakes what David Johnston has described as a ‘politics of cultural
transformation’: an attempt to reconfigure political order by demonstrating to individuals the nature and limits of their knowledge, and
convincing them of the political consequences of these limits.17 At the
heart of this project lies his attempts to limit the claims of knowledge
through the promulgation of an ontological materialism, and the assertion of a materialist understanding of the self and self-interest. Limiting
knowledge to the material world marginalizes beliefs in non-visible or
immaterial realms and powers – whether these be knowledge of God’s
will or claims about its power. As such, materialism is an essential element in his attempt to marginalize destructive influence of beliefs in
‘some power, or agent invisible’. In the same way, the fear of pain, and
particularly of death, on which he bases so many of his claims and pins
so many of his hopes will not operate if individuals believe in an afterlife
which transcends and justifies any form of suffering (or the infliction of
suffering) in this world.
By limiting knowledge claims (as opposed to private belief or faith) to
the material realm, a public arena of discussion concerning truth could
be secured.18 Even more importantly, in this way a degree of liberty and
security from the ‘enthusiasm’ of others could be achieved.19 Hobbes’
limitation of the grounds of knowledge is spurred by, if not reducible to,
16 Quoted in Steven Shapin and Simon Shaeffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle
and the Experimental Life (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 290.
17 David Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural
Transformation (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). See also the insightful
treatment in Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes’s Theory of International Relations’ in Aspects of
Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), pp. 454–455.
18 For treatments of this broad movement, see Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth:
Civility and Science in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994);
G. Oesterich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982); James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993). As Holmes has insightfully argued, successfully banishing religious strife from politics was also an important means of strengthening the state,
and this contribution to state power was part of its attraction. See also Cornelia Navari,
‘Knowledge, the State and the State of Nature’ in Michael Donelan (ed.), The Reason of
State (London: Allen and Unwin, 1978).
19 In Blits’ formulation: ‘In order to establish and maintain civil society, men’s common
fear of a sovereign must be made to overpower their mutual fear of one another . . . yet
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Classical Theory in International Relations
a concern with religious toleration and a desire to remove the destructive
conflict engendered by irresolvable questions of religious truth from the
political realm.20 The reduction of knowledge of the world – including
the self – to materiality does not reflect an unexamined epistemic commitment, a naive vision of scientific practice21 or the influence of nascent
forms of capitalist ideology.22 A material understanding of the self (and
self-understanding) would make possible a new set of political practices
based on the (now rationally, not naturally) universal fear of pain and
death which provided a basis for a legitimate theory of sovereignty (the
social contract) and obedience to the sovereign and the laws of nature.
The transformation of theory was intimately linked to an attempt to
transform practices.
While Hobbes has often been portrayed as basing his political vision
on the assumption of materially self-interested actors, and while this
has often been taken as one of the core defining assumptions of Realist
thinking, the reality is quite different: Hobbes actually seeks the creation
of such actors, hoping to limit the basic irrationality of human action
through the adoption of practices of material self-interest. The kind of
individuals that Hobbes seeks to promote (one might even say create) are
those who have literally learnt to think of themselves and their worlds
in terms of objective material calculation, and who thus provide the
foundation upon which a stable politics can be built. The epistemic
materialism that he advocates is thus not an abstract methodological
assumption, as ‘ontological materialism’ has come to be understood in
even if men fear the sovereign more than they fear one another, they will not enjoy lasting
peace unless in the first place they fear “powers visible”, that is, death at the hands of other
men, more than they fear “powers invisible”, that is, hellfire or damnation’; ‘Hobbesian
Fear’, p. 427.
20 The role of the ‘Independency crisis’ concerning the relations between church and state
in Hobbes thought has been highlighted by Tuck, Hobbes.
21 Indeed even Hobbes’ specifically scientific claims – such as his (materialist) denial of the
possibility of a total vacuum which marked his long controversy with Robert Boyle – were
informed by his concerns with the politics of knowledge. See the fascinating treatment in
Leviathan and the Air-Pump.
22 Perhaps most significantly, it was linked to new understandings of ‘property’ as a
‘juridical concept of self-ownership’ whose main agenda was “moral, political and military, not economic”. It is not concerned with the alienation of labour power but with
political power (the power of self-defence). The individual as well as the state are concerned with preservation not consumption’; Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, p. 82.
On this theme see also J. G. A. Pocock The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1985), Chapters 3, 6 and 11, especially; and Albert O. Hirschman, The
Passions and the Interests (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); and in International Relations, Kurt Burch, ‘Property’ and the Making of the International System (Boulder
CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999).
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The Hobbesian theory of international relations
International Relations: it is a political commitment, a central element
in his attempt to establish new intellectual and practical foundations for
authority in a culture wracked by violence and conflict.
As Malcolm importantly notes, this was not a purely ‘domestic’
agenda; it had an important international dimension since it provided
a counter to the supranational claims of the Catholic church (that
‘Confederacy of Deceivers’) to the temporal authority of sovereigns that
Hobbes viewed as a key source of ‘rebellions within states, and wars
between them’.23 As a principle linking domestic and international
orders, Hobbes’ theory of sovereignty delimits the realm of political
disputation and conflict, creates a sphere of politics in principle separate from religion, and allows for religious faith largely unconstrained
by politics. In this way, it would provide the foundation for a stable
sovereign authority, and a relatively stable system of sovereigns, based
upon the rational self-interest that Hobbes identifies as the ‘Laws of
Nature’.
To this end, Hobbes undertakes the tricky task of mobilizing the
most basic, powerful and yet unstable element of his vision of human
motivation: fear. Rational (Hobbesian) citizens will accept the rule of the
Sovereign in part out of fear of its power. They may also accept it as an
outcome of ratiocination. But, finally and significantly, they will accept
this rule because of the powerful link which Hobbes draws between the
two: because they understand the foundations of the Sovereign authority and learn to fear both its power and the disastrous consequences of
its dissolution: a return to the warlike state of nature. The extraordinarily powerful, evocative and metaphorical language of Leviathan reflects
Hobbes’ recognition that the construction of his rational political order
required an affective element if it was to be effective.24 Logic alone was
insufficient to this task. Nor were the coercive powers of the Sovereign
alone sufficient to construct and maintain such a political order. No government is powerful enough to regulate totally the lives of recalcitrant
citizens, or continually to compel them to obey.25 Only if the people
23
‘Hobbes’s Theory of International Relations’, p. 453.
Evidenced as far back as Hobbes’ translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian
War. On this see again Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan, and Quentin Skinner, Reason and
Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and
Visions of Politics, Vol. 3., pp. 1–141 especially.
25 Drawing again on the analysis of religious affiliation in Behemoth, Holmes has insightfully noted that ‘Hobbes stresses the self-defeating character of attempts to change people’s
minds by brutal means: “Suppression of doctrine does but unite and exasperate, that is,
increase both the malice and power of them that have already believed them.” This is a
24
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understand why the polity must be ordered as it must, and only if they
continue to view the sovereign as a legitimate authority and trust in its
judgment, can a political order be secure. Leviathan is an attempt to create precisely this understanding, acceptance and support, and through
it to legitimize and strengthen the political order of the state.
Fear and reason, logic and affect, are thus linked in Hobbes’ attempt
to foster an ‘enlightened’26 citizenry and political leadership. However,
Hobbes does not seek constantly to invoke fear as a means of limitation.
Though he recognizes the political utility of fear, his political sensibilities are far too subtle to rest with the idea that fear – the most basic
and potentially destablizing of passions – provides a simple or straightforward resolution to the difficulties of constructing and maintaining a
political order.27 Rather than valorizing fear as the basis of a rigid absolutism, or denying it in the name of a politics of transparency, he seeks
to manage a politics of fear in order to construct a political order which
can minimize its necessity and to create a recognizably liberal political
society in which fear plays a minor but positive role in a politics of selfand sovereign-limitation.
Hobbesian international political theory
Examining the foundations of Hobbes’ thinking shows that ‘natural’
human aggressiveness, vanity and the like are not the sole or fundamental bases for his analysis of the state of nature. Nor does that foundation
lie in the assumption that utilitarian individuals are equally rational in
competitive pursuit of the same things, or that they are objectively determined by the (scientifically discernible) structure within which they find
themselves. Rather, the dilemma is that human beings have no natural
stunning admission from a champion of unlimited sovereign power. Indeed, it sounds
more like Locke than Hobbes’. Passions and Constraint, p. 93; the quote is from Hobbes,
Behemoth or the Long Parliament (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), p. 62.
26 Blits, ‘Hobbesian Fear’, pp. 426–429.
27 In an insightful reading, David Campbell has stressed this aspect of Hobbes’ thinking,
using it primarily to stress the negative disciplining role of otherness in Hobbes. I here
largely pursue the alternative reading that Campbell notes as possible: discipline is not
an end in itself for Hobbes – it is limitation in the name of a strategy of autonomy and
pluralism, and an attempt to construct a liberal politics on the basis of the recognition
that epistemic pluralism (as embodied in this scepticism) cannot be straightforwardly
translated into political pluralism. In this regard, Hobbes can be seen as a profound if
somewhat discomfiting exponent of what Judith Shklar called the ‘liberalism of fear’.
See David Campbell, Writing Security, 2nd edition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1998), pp. 53–60, and fn. 19; and Shklar, ‘The Liberalism of Fear’ in Stanley Hoffmann
(ed.), Political Thought and Political Thinkers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
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The Hobbesian theory of international relations
way of agreeing upon what things are – what the reality of the world is –
in either an empirical or a straightforwardly moral sense. Perceptions
of what is good as well as bad, potentially beneficial as well as threatening, are at the most basic level inescapably relative. This is the source
of Hobbes’ portrayal of the state of nature. It is not simply authority or
coordination which is lacking. For Hobbes it is truth in the conventional
sense which is absent.
Through a combination of shared beliefs and the political power they
make possible, particular political orders represent specific resolutions
to this situation. The sovereign is not just a structure for the coordination of individual interests. It is also (and much more fundamentally) the agency which provides stability in conditions of epistemic
disagreement, underpins social structures of epistemic concord, provides authoritative (and enforceable) interpretations and decisions in
contested cases, and creates conditions of predictability that minimize
fear and allow rational cooperation. Seen in this light, the role and capacity of sovereigns to solve these dilemmas domestically creates – by virtue
of their necessarily authoritative role internally – a condition in which
political orders are necessarily limited and relations between sovereigns
‘anarchic’.
But Hobbes is not content merely to demonstrate these underpinnings
of political authority. He does not view all resolutions to this situation as
equally viable or desirable. Indeed in the context of the chaotic and conflictual breakdown of previous forms of order – and the understandings
of the self, society and sovereignty upon which they were based – he
feels it imperative that the foundations of sovereignty and its requirements be reconstructed. To this end, he articulates a politics of limits: a
vision based upon a reasoned understanding of the limits of reason, a
materialist ontology and understanding of the self and self-interest, and
a finely balanced practice of sovereign authority drawing upon rational
understanding, fear of the sovereign and fear of its dissolution.
A corollary to this individual recognition of limits is that the rational (Hobbesian) sovereign will recognize the practical, if not juridical,
limits upon its authority and will moderate its actions accordingly.28
28
As he put it in an early and recently authenticated discourse: ‘For it is a great misfortune
to a people, to come under the government of such a one, as knows not how to govern
himself’. ‘Discourse Upon the Beginnings of Tacitus’ in Hobbes, Three Discourses, edited
by Noel B. Reynolds and Arlene W. Saxonhouse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996), p. 57. See also Malcolm’s incisive treatment of these issues in ‘Hobbbes’s Theory of
International Relations’, pp. 446–48.
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This puts considerable practical limits upon the sovereign for Hobbes,
and given its implications for state action it is important to understand
fully the rather complex argument he makes in this regard. Hobbesian
individuals never give up their right to judge situations for themselves
in the sense that if they believe their self-preservation to be threatened
they retain (via the right of nature) the right of rebellion against the
sovereign. If an individual judges her life to be in danger (and in this
realm the individual’s judgment remains supreme), or has committed
an act which is a capital crime, then even if she is juridically wrong
she has by nature the right to defend herself. Equally, should a group
come to feel that the sovereign is not protecting their lives adequately,
or should they come to judge that the sovereign constitutes a threat to
their lives, they have the right to band together in mutual defence. As
Hobbes puts it: ‘But in case a great many men together have already
resisted the sovereign power unjustly, or committed some capital crime
for which every one of them expecteth death, whether have they not the
liberty to join together, and assist, and defend one another? Certainly
they have; for they but defend their lives, which the guilty man may as
well do as the innocent.’29
Ultimately, by this logic, if this group should become strong enough
that it threatens the ability of the sovereign to guarantee the security
of other subjects, or they feel that to obey the rebels is necessary to
their survival (in their judgment), then these individuals are at liberty
to do so. In this way, Hobbes tries to show how on the very basis of
the principles of its foundation and within its own logic, civil order
can break down and (civil) war emerge. The fragility of this order, and
the disastrous consequences of its breakdown become a lesson to both
citizens and the sovereign to understand the practical/prudential limits
upon their claims and activities. Rational beings should not challenge the
sovereign, Hobbes believes, but this does not mean they will not, and
the ‘Negligent government of Princes’, he argues in characteristically
dire terms at the conclusion to Part II of Leviathan, is naturally attended
by ‘Rebellion; and Rebellion, with Slaughter.’30
The sovereign should assiduously avoid policies which make rebellion likely. It must educate subjects so that they understand and accept
the principles of sovereign authority, and it must maintain sufficient
coercive power to ‘convince’ them if they do not. But even in this latter
case, Hobbes accentuates the importance of acceptance and legitimacy,
29
Hobbes Leviathan, p. 143.
264
30
Ibid., p. 243.
The Hobbesian theory of international relations
for the coercive capacities of the Sovereign themselves depend upon it.
If the people rebel, the Sovereign must, Hobbes argues, have recourse
to arms to enforce civil order. But the possession of this coercive power
and the ability to wield it is dependent upon the prior and continuing
legitimacy of the Sovereign’s authority in the eyes of those who will act
on its behalf. The problem, as he pointedly asks in Behemoth, is that ‘if
men know not their duty, what is there that can force them to obey the
laws? An army you will say. But what shall force the army?’31 Without
the social legitimacy which makes it possible, the Sovereign’s coercive
power is likely to prove chimerical. While the Sovereign thus has in principle the right to act in any way it chooses, Hobbes argues that a correct
understanding of politics will lead not only to obedient citizens, but
to prudential self-limitation of activity by a rational sovereign. Since,
as he states clearly, again in Behemoth, that ‘the power of the mighty
hath no foundation but in the opinion and belief of the people’,32 the
sovereign will avoid actions which too obviously threaten the interests
of the citizens for fear that it will lose their acceptance of its authority
and foment dissension and rebellion.33 This places considerable limits
(again rationally, not juridically) on state action both domestically and
internationally.
In Hobbes’ view, Sovereigns cannot act toward each other as individuals might because as a corporate body the Sovereign must consider the
relationship between its external relations and relations with its own citizens. The Sovereign, recognizing the foundations of its authority, must
be careful not to lose the trust of the citizens, or to tip the balance of
fear to such an extent that the citizens come to see obedience to the state
as a greater threat to their survival than disobedience. Even though the
Sovereign has the right to treat its citizens in virtually any way it sees
fit, Hobbes believes that it should not, and he believes he has given convincing reasons why it should not. These considerations put limitations
on the external actions of the sovereign beyond those of simple caution or restricted material ‘capabilities’. Hobbes’ analysis is not simply
that an adventurous foreign policy is imprudent. Rather the question of
knowledge and social consent is once again key here. Since aggression
is not innate but arises in part from uncertainty, Hobbes’ Leviathans are
not necessarily aggressive towards one another. More importantly, since
31
Hobbes, Behemoth, p. 59. Again, my thanks to Ross Rudolph for alerting me to this
passage.
32 Ibid., p. 16. Holmes makes this revealing quote the centrepiece of his treatment.
33 On this theme, see especially Flathman, Thomas Hobbes, pp. 121–125.
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they must ultimately convince the citizens to obey their judgments of
threats (and thus convince citizens themselves to go to war or support
preparations for it) the prudent sovereign will be cautious in engaging
in the practice, for fear of losing the trust of the citizens in its judgment
(just as it should not oppress the citizens unnecessarily for the same
reason) and by so doing push them to dissension or rebellion.34
Since the Sovereign’s authority rests not just on coercive power or
the ability to manipulate utilities, but also depends upon its ability to
retain legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens, the Sovereign should always
weigh the implications of its actions on the lives and opinions of its citizens, and keep these issues clearly in mind. In its external relations, the
same logic applies. The Sovereign should not unnecessarily do things
which would push the citizens too hard, threaten them or their livelihoods too much, or cause them to question their belief and trust in the
judgment and actions of the Sovereign. Indeed in external relations this
logic may be even more imperative. For since the Sovereign may be
asking (and potentially compelling) the citizens to put their lives at risk
in war (and thus potentially allowing them to rebel on the grounds of
self-preservation which is their right by nature) it can only do so if the
vast majority of the population continues to trust in its adjudication of
the situation (threat) and the necessity of risking their lives. It is in war
that the continuance of the sovereign’s rule is potentially most in jeopardy, not just from the power of other sovereigns, but from domestic
dissention. Hobbes, of course, believes that the Sovereign is justified
in forcing citizens to go to war, but he nonetheless feels it would be
unwise and unreasonable to force them to do so too often or in situations where the judgments of threat decided upon by the Sovereign are
shaky enough and risky enough potentially to erode its legitimacy in
the eyes of the citizens.
Scepticism about the limits of human knowledge leads Hobbes to
great caution in human affairs, especially regarding the relationship of
theory to practice. He warns that to act as if we can know (predict)
and control the future is to court disaster. Knowing the limitations of
human knowledge, and the inability to know God’s will or other visions
of ultimate human fulfilment, Hobbes believes that rational sovereigns
will not act in an unnecessarily aggressive manner. His vision of foreign
34
In relation to taxation, and especially the Monarch’s demands for ‘Ship Money’ for the
building of a larger navy, which Hobbes helped collect despite the objections of many
citizens, see Johan Somerville, Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), p. 18.
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The Hobbesian theory of international relations
policy is cautious and essentially pacific, a position which, as Flathman
has illustrated drawing upon a passage from the Elements of Law, is conditioned by – or perhaps founded in – his scepticism: ‘Hobbes is far from
a supporter of bellicose or expansionist policies. Because no preparation
can assure victory, “such commonwealths, or such monarchs, as affect
war for itself . . . out of ambition, or of vain-glory, or that make account
to avenge every little injury, or disgrace done by their neighbours, if
they not ruin themselves, their fortune must be better than they have
reason to expect”.’35
The hubris engendered by religious dogma, political fanaticism,
pride, vanity or (social scientific?) claims to political wisdom will most
likely lead to disaster. This fits clearly with both Hobbes’ strictures on the
claims to religious knowledge and his attacks on militaristic or destructive ideologies of honour.36 Scepticism leads to a suspicion of, and attack
against, dogmatism and (in Hobbes’ sense) irrationalism. A transformation of epistemic practice was seen as a means of transforming social and
political and ethical practices both with and between sovereigns.
In principle, sovereigns exist in the same situation of sceptical indeterminacy toward one another as individuals in the state of nature. But
there are crucial differences between states and individuals which render this a much different situation. The first of these concerns the different physical capabilities of states and individuals. In Leviathan, Hobbes
argues that: ‘Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body,
and mind; as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another; yet when all is
reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon to himself any benefit, to which
another may not pretend as well as he.’37 There is no natural hierarchy
in the state of nature upon which order can be based. Characteristics
advantageous in the struggle are diversely distributed: some are strong,
others quick, still others clever. Moreover, this relative equality of capacities is tied to the existence of these individuals as solitary individuals.
Even the strongest must sometimes sleep, and all are subject to disease,
age and ultimately death, circumstances which make any continuing
exercise of domination impossible.
35
Flathman, Thomas Hobbes, p. 110.
See especially Keith Thomas, ‘The Social Origins of Hobbes’s Political Thought’ in K. C.
Brown (ed.), Hobbes Studies (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 96–98
especially.
37 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 74.
36
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Between Hobbesian sovereigns, however, the most destructive and
fearful aspects of the state of nature have been ameliorated, lessening
the radical insecurity and conflict which dominates the state of nature.
The Leviathan never sleeps and (except in specific circumstances) it
never dies. Ever-alert and immortal, it transcends the limitations which
simple individuals encounter in their attempts to survive in the state of
nature. As a corporate body, its strength is the strength of all its members.
The result is that the radical equality which defines the state of nature
composed of individuals is not present in the relations between states;
they are qualitatively different orders. And since states are not subject
to the same conditions as individuals – equality, sleep, mortality – they
can transcend some of the more anarchic qualities of the state of nature
and create, via the Laws of Nature, more stable forms of co-existence
among themselves.38
Yet it is important to note that, from a Hobbesian perspective, the
fact that states are corporate bodies is not in itself enough to secure
an acceptable international order. Just as individuals in the state of
nature must come to understand themselves and their world in a rational manner in order to live by the cooperative dictates of the ‘laws of
nature’, so states would also need to adopt rational (i.e. Hobbes’) maxims of internal organization and external behaviour for the international
realm to be any more than a contingent and fragile form of order or
domination. Hobbes’ argument is not that such an order is natural, or
that its norms would simply evolve through time. On the contrary, he
feels that political orders must be willed and constructed in accordance
with the dictates of rationality and with a clear view of its limitations.
Other forms of international order certainly can exist – medieval Christendom being perhaps the prime example. But in light of his concern
with the violence that attended the breakdown of that order, Hobbes
would likely have regarded such orders as unacceptably fragile and
prone to conflicts as ‘irrational’ as the principles upon which they were
founded.
These considerations point to the ways in which Hobbes’ commitment to the absolute nature of sovereignty is by no means incompatible with international order and with shared understanding between
rationally constituted sovereignties.39 Based upon the same principles,
38
As discussed momentarily this theme has been most fully explored by the English
School.
39 Again, see the excellent treatment in Malcolm, ‘Hobbes’s Theory of International Relations’, pp. 451–55; and the discussion of Hobbes’ views on trade in David Boucher, Political
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The Hobbesian theory of international relations
Hobbesian states will share the same understanding of political order,
the same commitment to a politics of limits and the same constraints
on their actions. Moreover, the materialist and empiricist practices that
are essential in the constitution of a rational Hobbesian order could provide a common framework of understanding between sovereigns. The
materialist and empiricist practices of knowledge that Hobbes advocates would, if adopted, allow for mutual knowledge and calculation
and a partial overcoming of the basic sceptical situation within which
different sovereignties encounter each other.
These mediating practices of material interest lack the order provided
by the authoritative decision-making, cultural legitimation and coercive
capacities that characterize the state. But the international realm is not
a state of nature. Materialist and rationalist practices allow the shared
construction of concepts of interest, power and action, and provide the
basis for common calculation and adjustment even when sovereigns
are at odds with each other. In short, a materialist balance of power
could become a mediating structure of practice between sovereigns.
Finally, and admitted more speculatively, it is possible to conceive how
the principles of legitimacy upon which the practice of sovereignty is
based – that is, legitimate action in the eyes of citizens – might become
transnationalized to a point at which juridically absolute sovereigns
would nonetheless be practically constrained by their limits. The issues
this raises are highly complex, for Hobbes would undoubtedly continue
to insist on the absolute necessity of the sovereign as a locus of decision
in an inherently indeterminate world. But be this as it may, absolute
sovereignty and cosmopolitan constraints are not necessarily opposed
in Hobbes’ vision of the practice of sovereignty, however much they may
seem precluded by his definition of it.
The Hobbesian legacy in international theory
Beyond doubt the most common and influential use of Hobbes in IR
is that which sees him as a theorist of international anarchy. Treating
states as the equivalent of Hobbesian individuals (who are themselves
reduced to rational pursuers of material interests, fearful egoists or calculators of relative gains), Hobbes’ treatment of state of nature as a ‘war
of each against all’ is treated as a compelling metaphor, or perhaps even
Theories of International Relations: From Thucydides to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998), pp. 160–161.
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a model, capturing and conveying the logic of an anarchic international
system. In fact, it is precisely this image that made his thinking such
a popular touchstone within many neorealist declarations about international politics – with the image of individuals simply elevated to the
world of states.
As the foregoing analysis has sought to demonstrate, however, despite
its popularity this image does little justice to Hobbes’ thinking or to
understanding a ‘Hobbesian’ vision of international relations.40 Far from
seeking to develop either a straightforward rational-choice theory of
social life (and an analogous account of international relations), or a
theory modelled on some vision of modern science, Hobbes begins
from a profound scepticism toward both. His vision of politics (and
the ‘science’ of it) is, as Richard Flathman has vigorously argued, a
highly ‘chastened’ one, both in its epistemological claims and its practical recommendations. While some scholars continue to call for a discipline constructed along the lines of positivist science, this is not a stance
which Hobbes would have supported, nor can it be sustained by a reference to the ‘Hobbesian’ analysis of international relations. Indeed as
Flathman notes, to the extent that Hobbes’ ideas in this realm were ‘In
important respects anticipating views now prominent in the philosophy of science, it is not an account that is likely to warm the hearts
of the apostles of science – whether natural or the so-called science of
politics’.41
Similarly, the interpretation of Hobbesian individuals in the rationalist view, and the transposition of this vision into a model of state
action, is fundamentally misleading. Whereas rationalist positions take
for granted a world of rational-actors calculating in the context of material gains, Hobbes did not assume the existence of such actors; to a significant degree he sought to create them. William Connolly has nicely
summarized the point made earlier
Hobbes is often held to believe that most human beings are selfinterested most of the time and that a sovereign power must be devised
that is able to contend with these self-interested beings. But this interpretation exaggerates and misleads. It exaggerates by treating human
beings who are to become both self-interested and principled as if they
were secure agents of self-interest prior to the education they receive
in civil society, and it misleads by pretending that the self-interested
40
For an analysis of other shortcomings in attempting to read Hobbes in this way see Don
Herzog, Happy Slaves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), Chapter 3 especially.
41 Flathman, Thomas Hobbes, p. 29; see also p. 49.
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The Hobbesian theory of international relations
individual is the problem when it comes closer to being the solution
Hobbes offers for the problem he identifies.42
The main competitor to the rationalist-realist view of Hobbes has come
from theorists of international society. This position begins from a basic
paradox in the rationalist view: why, if Hobbes felt the solution to anarchy in the state of nature lay in the creation of the Leviathan, did he
not extend the logic of this solution to the international level? In short,
if Hobbesian individuals were able to contract in the state of nature,
why are not Hobbesian states capable of doing so in the international
anarchy? In the words of John Vincent, ‘it is even reasonable to ask why,
if Hobbes’ view of international politics was really as the Realists take
it to be, he did not seek to bring the international anarchy to an end in
the same way as Leviathan ordered relations among individuals?’43
Rather than building its analysis upon the supposed affinities between
the state of nature and an international state of war, the case for viewing Hobbes as a theorist of ‘international society’ emerges in part from
an attempt to resolve the question of why Hobbes fails to make the
apparently obvious logical extension of the contract from the relations
between individuals to those between states. The answer, according to
these members of the English School, lies in Hobbes’ stress on the relative equality which characterizes individuals in the state of nature and
thus differentiates these relations from those of states.
The key to Hobbesian international theory, in this perspective,
becomes a support for a stress upon rules and norms and rationallyderived understandings of mutual interest in the constitution of ‘international society’. As Bull notes, the Hobbesian ‘laws of nature’ provide
a common, if imperfect, foundation for the coordination of inter-state
relations. Rational self-interest provides a common foundation for the
coordination of action, the conduct of behaviour and the creation of
relatively stable international orders. In Bull’s view, ‘imperfect though
they are, these laws of nature, ‘the articles of peace’ as Hobbes calls
them, are the lifeline to which sovereign states in the international anarchy must cling if they are to survive’.44 Although the embodiment of
42 William Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 26–
27. Indeed in its concern with language, and with the relationship between knowledge,
belief and action, Hobbes’ thinking resonates much more clearly with the concerns of
contemporary constructivism than with rationalist approaches.
43 John Vincent, ‘The Hobbesian Tradition in Twentieth Century International Thought’
Millennium 10 (1981), p. 85.
44 Hedley Bull ‘Hobbes and the International Anarchy’ Social Research 48 (1977), p. 728.
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these precepts in practice is difficult and contingent, and certainly different from the realm of domestic politics, these laws of nature form
a common foundation of political order at both levels. As Bull argues:
‘The articles of peace contain within them most of the basic rules of coexistence on which states have relied in the international anarchy from
Hobbes’s time and before it to our own’.45 And as he concludes, a clear
understanding of Hobbes’ ideas yields results almost directly contrary
to the Realist interpretation, forcing us to recognize ‘how deeply pacific
Hobbes’s approach to international relations was, at least in the values
from which it sprang. There is no sense in Hobbes of the glorification
of war, nor of relish for the game of power politics as an end in itself,
nor of willingness to abdicate judgment in favour of the doctrine that
anything in the international anarchy is permissible’.46
There is little doubt, as Malcolm has argued, that this position provides a more adequate appraisal of Hobbes’ views than those which
reduce his vision of IR to an anarchic state of nature. A stress on the
laws of nature, on reciprocal limits and on shared notions and norms
of sovereignty as basis for international order capture many aspects of
his thinking. However, there are also serious challenges presented to
the English School by a closer examination of Hobbes’ thinking. Taking seriously Hobbes’ focus on the construction of agency, for example,
raises issues that until fairly recently the English School has generally
ignored.47 For Hobbes, rationally calculating states were not natural.
While it is intriguing to speculate about whether he might have viewed
them as capable of learning to be so (and certainly he felt that fear and
insecurity could act as spurs in this direction) he was also convinced
that this vision of politics was a result of knowledge and will – a conscious choice and effort on the behalf of individuals that then needed
to become the basis for political understanding and action in both the
state and society. Grasping this element of the Hobbesian legacy would
contribute to pushing theories of international society further along the
road to engagements with issues of culture and identity, and of critical
judgments about the status of norms (and the role of fear) than its traditional formulations have tended to allow, while Hobbes’ fundamental
45
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 729. Here again, however, the dividing line between the contrasting schools of
analysis becomes somewhat blurred, for Smith argues that ‘realists’ have also developed
this theme; see Michael J. Smith, Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1986), pp. 13–14.
47 For a move in the latter direction, see Timothy Dunne, Inventing International Society
(London: Macmillan, 1998).
46
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The Hobbesian theory of international relations
stress on the importance of decision as a condition of domestic order certainly calls into question the ease with which his thinking fits English
School attempts to think about the possible emergence of transnational
orders.48
Yet perhaps the most challenging aspect of stressing the role of the
social construction of action and decision in Hobbes’ thinking lies in
its connections to the origins of post-war classical Realism, and to contemporary neoconservatism. The most direct means of examining this
dimension of the Hobbesian legacy is to turn to what John McCormick
has termed the ‘revival of Hobbes in Weimar and National Socialist
Germany’49 , and the pivotal role that Hobbes played in the thinking
of a number of influential figures but particularly, in this context, Carl
Schmitt and Leo Strauss.
Significantly, both Schmitt and Strauss understood that Hobbes’ theory of ‘human nature’ as ‘evil’ was far from a reduction of human beings
to material interests or simple aggression, or even calculating insecurity.
The Hobbesian understanding of evil, they recognized, was founded in
his broad epistemic claims and philosophic appraisal of the conditions of
human knowledge and action.50 But for both Schmitt and Strauss (albeit
in different ways) Hobbes’ appeal to instrumental-material calculation
as the form of discipline most likely to allow individuals to restrain their
actions and develop common modes of conduct reflects a fundamental
instability in his vision of political order, and state survival in the international order. The difficulty, in the eyes of both Weimar thinkers, is that
the more successful Hobbes’ reconstruction of subjectivity and action is,
the less individuals will see the need for such discipline, and the less they
will understand the fundamental role of the state in the production of
social order and its necessary capacity for decision. In Schmitt’s view,
for example, Hobbes fails in his attempt to secure the state, because his
48
For a criticism of the English School’s notions of norms and values that stresses its
often uncritical nature, see Nicholas Rengger, International Relations, Political Theory, and
the Problem of Order (London: Routledge 2002).
49 John P. McCormick, ‘Fear, Technology and the State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and the
Revival of Hobbes in Weimar and National Socialist Germany’ Political Theory 22 (1994),
619–652.
50 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996),
p. 61. Or as he also phrases it, any ‘genuine political theory’ must presuppose humanity
as ‘evil’, not as perfectible or angelic. Strauss’ most extended, if early, appraisal of Hobbes
is his Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1952). The relationship between Schmitt and Strauss is discussed in Heinrich Meier,
Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1985).
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balanced creation of self-interested actors removes the fear necessary to
get individuals to obey decisions that are not in their interest. Equally
importantly, it makes it impossible for the state to mobilize individuals
to put their own lives in mortal danger (pre-eminently in case of war)
in defence of the state.
This, for Schmitt, is the ultimate failure of the Hobbesian Leviathan.
Beginning from a clear understanding of what Schmitt famously termed
‘the political’, Hobbes ultimately contributed to the development of
a modern liberalism and rationalism that systematically misunderstood it. While politics remained in its essence defined by Hobbesian
sovereignty – by the capacity to make authoritative decisions, and to
have them accepted by the society – this insight had been lost, covered
over by liberal conceptions of self-interest in which the state was reduced
to pluralistic mechanism at the mercy of individual interest groups that
would either attempt to capture it for their own ends, or refuse to obey
and defend it if it was not in their interest to do so. In a way, Hobbes
had been all too successful in seeing rational self-interest as a potential
aid to the solution, but paradoxically the state was now weakened in
the face of adversaries both inside and outside, and its capacity to play
the vital role that Hobbes reserved to it was – as to Schmitt (and Strauss)
conditions in Weimar Germany amply illustrated – reduced almost to
nothing.
In response, Schmitt argued for the need to recover the Hobbesian
essence of sovereignty as decision. The basis of this, he argued, again
like Hobbes, was fear. Recognition of the foundation of politics in the
fear of death, and of primary obedience to the sovereign as a result of
its ability to secure the individual needed to be recovered. The essential
means that Schmitt invokes for doing so is a renewed stress on the fear
of the Enemy as a means of cementing solidarity between Friends and
securing the authority of the state. By heightening fear, defining politics
as the distinction between friend and enemy, and using fear to mobilize
the society – in part through myth, an aestheticization of violence and a
glorification of war – Schmitt sought to restore the Hobbesian Leviathan
to its rightful and necessary place in the constitution of political order.
A radical, perhaps the most radical, understanding of international
politics as constituted by a fundamental antagonism between Friend
and Enemy was, at least on some readings, the ultimate result of this
ambition.
This reading of the Hobbesian legacy is thus at the centre of Schmitt’s
radical form of Realpolitik, and the most complex philosophic lineage in
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The Hobbesian theory of international relations
IR theory. It also set the context for the development of Morgenthau’s
thinking. Morgenthau’s famous critique of liberalism clearly bears the
mark of his engagement with Schmitt, and the debt that both owe to a
sophisticated engagement with Hobbes. As Morgenthau once argued,
‘There is a profound and neglected truth hidden in Hobbes’ extreme
dictum that the state creates morality as well as law and that there is
neither morality nor law outside the state’.51 Yet, as William Scheuerman
has pointed out in an important treatment, Morgenthau’s thinking can
be read as an ongoing dialogue and critical engagement with Schmitt,
seeking to oppose the radical (and, in Morgenthau’s view, reactionary
and destructive) conclusions to which it could lead.52
The critique of liberalism that emerged from the Weimar engagement with Hobbes is equally essential in coming to terms with one
of the most controversial forms of thinking about international politics
today, that of neoconservatism. While neoconservatism has a number of
diverse sources, one of its most important inspirations lies in the political thought of Leo Strauss.53 Although Strauss did not ultimately accept
Schmitt’s attempt to resolve these dilemmas, his Weimar critique of liberalism (and Hobbes) shares many of the points articulated by Schmitt,
and constitutes an important theoretical basis of contemporary neoconservatism’s claim that modern liberalism confronts a crisis that it cannot
resolve, and that it cannot provide a basis for either domestic or foreign
policy.
The connections between Strauss and neoconservatism are more complex than can be entered into here.54 However, they suggest that opening up these oft-ignored dimensions of the ‘Hobbesian’ tradition in
IR demonstrates the depth, complexity and continuing relevance of
51 In Defense of the National Interest (New York: Knopf, 1951), p. 34. As Malcolm, ‘Hobbes’s
Theory of International Relations’, pp. 437–438, has importantly pointed out, taken on its
own there is a vital flaw in this formulation. Hobbes does not deny the existence of rational
moral principles (the Laws of Nature) arising from the goal of self-preservation, and
reducing Hobbes’ theory to an existential fear undercuts his crucial stress on rationality
and the role that self-interest could play as a check on state power. It is, however, by no
means clear that Morgenthau was as obtuse on this question as Malcolm implies.
52 William Scheuerman, Carl Schmitt: The End of Law (New York: Lexington, 1999), Chapter
11. I have explored some of these themes in ‘Why Ideas Matter in International Relations:
Hans Morgenthau, Collective Identity, and the Moral Construction of Power Politics’
International Organization 58 (2004), pp 633–665.
53 For an exploration see Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right (London:
Macmillan, 1998). On Schmitt, Strauss and Hobbes see again the excellent treatment in
McCormick ‘Fear, Technology and the State’.
54 See Earl Shorris, ‘Ignoble Liars: Leo Strauss, George Bush and the Philosophy of Mass
Deception’ Harpers Magazine (June 2004).
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Hobbes’ thinking today. Whether in terms of the nature and adequacy
of rationalist and materialist approaches to state action, of the lineages
and consequences of constructivism, of the nature and limits of political community or of engagements with ‘the political’ and the role of
myth and culture in constituting the relationship between society, the
state, foreign policy and the international realm, an engagement with
the traditions of Hobbesian thinking in IR hold considerable resources
for contemporary inspiration well beyond a simple concern with a
more adequate appraisal of the intellectual history of International
Relations.
276
12
Re-appropriating Clausewitz: the
neglected dimensions of
counter-strategic thought
Julian Reid
The art of war deals with living and with moral forces.1
Carl von Clausewitz’s On War is widely regarded as the most influential text for the traditions of military-strategic thought and practice
that have attended the development of modern State power. Colin Gray
declares it the only truly classical theory of war written in the modern
era.2 Clausewitz’s statement that war is to be understood as ‘nothing but
the continuation of policy with other means’ remains the most influential definition of the concept not only for military-strategic thought but
for the major traditions of thinking about international politics in which
the study of war continues to be a central preoccupation.3 While the
ontological veracity of the definition of war as a continuation of politics
is increasingly debated, theorists of war still tend overwhelmingly to
assume Clausewitz’s dictum as a recommendation for the management
of its instrumentality.4 Ensuring the subordination of war to the political ends of sovereignty remains the central tenet of neo-Clausewitzian
military-strategic thought.5
Yet Clausewitz’s thought has played as important a formative
role in the development of a tradition of thinking about war for
which sovereignty is political anathema. That tradition is what I call
1 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (London: Everyman’s Library, 1993), p. 97.
2 Colin Gray, Modern Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 113–119.
3 Clausewitz, On War, p. 77. For an excellent recent account of the importance of Clausewitz’s dictum for understandings of war in military-strategic thinking see Anthony Burke,
‘Iraq: Strategy’s Burnt Offering’ Global Change, Peace & Security 17 (2005), 191–210.
4 See Martin van Creveld’s critique of the relevance of Clausewitz to problems of war in
the contemporary era in The Transformation of War (New York: Free Press, 1991).
5 Beatrice Heuser, Reading Clausewitz (London: Pimlico, 2002), pp. 179–194; Gray, Modern
Strategy, pp. 56–68.
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Classical Theory in International Relations
counter-strategic thought. Counter-strategic thought is a tradition of
thinking concerned with intensifying critical understandings of the
depths and modalities of relations between war and modern formations
of power. The concept of war figures within this tradition not firstly
as an instrumental tool of political sovereignty or simply as a spatiotemporally discrete activity engaged in by sovereign bodies. War, here,
is reconceived primarily as an immanent force invested within forms of
modern political order that exceed the boundaries of traditional models
of State power. Concomitantly, this tradition reconceives war in essence
not simply as a means to be employed in defence of sovereignty, but
as a condition of possibility for the development of new forms of political subjectivity that exceed the disciplinary and control capacities of
sovereign power. As such, it is as much concerned with recovering
the practice of war from its colonization by the State and the militarystrategic discourses and institutions on which State power is founded
as it is with demonstrating the hitherto veiled roles that war plays in the
development of modern societies and in the shaping of modern forms of
subjectivity. It incorporates a complex genealogy of thinkers, involving
Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard, and Antonio Negri, but its first architect is
Clausewitz. Each of the other authors within this tradition, where they
have been concerned with thinking through the problem of war and its
relations to sovereign power and political order, have been inspired in
one way or another by him.
The counter-strategic tradition for which Clausewitz is a crucial
thinker is important in particular for its contributions to the broad revision and critique of social-strategic thought that has occurred since 1968.
One of the least recognized but nevertheless central elements of this revision has been a reconceptualization of war as a generative principle for
the formation of social relations in the composition of modern political
orders. The concept of war is integral to the counter-strategic tradition
in ways that are as essential as, but by no means exclusive of, the ways
in which the concept of labour helped constitute counter-capital traditions of social struggle pre-1968. This reconceptualization of war as a
generative principle of social relations has been achieved via an ongoing interrogation of the limits as well as the political and social potential
of Clausewitz’s On War. Rather as Marx began by grappling with the
works of Smith and Ricardo, so today’s counter-strategists have begun
by reading and critiquing Clausewitz. In the works of Foucault, Deleuze
and Guattari, Virilio, and Negri especially, can be found a substantial
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Re-appropriating Clausewitz
engagement with Clausewitz which has never been given satisfactory
attention in the secondary literatures on Clausewitz, and only passing
reference in theoretical works on the broader philosophical and political problems posed by the concept of war to date. The main task of
this chapter, then, is to address that lacuna. I am going to focus, for the
sake of brevity and clarity, on the specific engagements with Clausewitz to be located in the works of Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari
respectively. Constituting a debate within itself, the conversation that
runs through the thought on the nature of war and its relation to political power between these two counter-strategists is useful to focus on
for the extent to which it demonstrates the seminal roles of Clausewitz
for the theorizations of problems of counter-strategy that each of them
offers.
Pure war vs real war
For counter-strategic thought the importance of Clausewitz lies in his
fourfold definition of war. Firstly he defines war as ‘an act of force’ to
which ‘there is no logical limit’.6 Secondly as a ‘conflict of living forces’.7
Thirdly as ‘commerce’.8 And fourthly as ‘nothing but the continuation
of policy with other means’.9 None of these definitions of war developed by Clausewitz can be understood exclusive of the others. Rather,
he urges us to grasp how each of these definitions of war operates within
a holistic system in which each definition places specific compromises
upon the other. Interpreters of Clausewitz who attempt to reify one or
other of these different definitions for the purpose of critique fail to comprehend the intricacy of his thought.10 Likewise, critics who attempt to
explain Clausewitz’s differing definitions of war as a vacillation produced by the contradictions in the lines of influence exerted upon him
by different philosophical thinkers fail to appreciate the distinctiveness
and complexity of his account of war. When W. B. Gallie, Raymond Aron
or Azar Gat, for instance, dispute the merits of the Hegelian versus the
Kantian Clausewitz they obscure the irreducibility of his ideas to philosophical currents.11 In contrast, within the counter-strategic tradition
6
7 Ibid., p. 174.
8 Ibid., p. 173.
9 Ibid., p. 77.
Clausewitz, On War, p. 85.
As, for example, in van Creveld, Transformation of War, pp. 148–149.
11 W. B. Gallie, Philosophers of Peace and War: Kant, Clausewitz, Marx, Engels, and Tolstoy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Raymond Aron, Clausewitz: Philosopher
of War (London: Routledge, 1976); Azar Gat, The Origins of Military Thought: From the
Enlightenment to Clausewitz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
10
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we find Clausewitz’s conception of war being engaged with precisely
at the expense of both Hegel and Kant. Clausewitz, rather than being
either Hegelian or Kantian, is the first figure within a tradition that is
both expressly anti-Hegelian and anti-Kantian in its pertaining to wage
war upon the limitations for political being established by those philosophers of duty.
Discussions of Clausewitz’s definition of war too often privilege his
dictum that war is ‘nothing but the continuation of policy with other
means’. Those interpretations of him emanating from the domains of
military-strategic thought are especially inclined to start from this perspective. The dictum is read either as an ontological statement or as a
recommendation to policy-makers for the instrumentalization of war
to the political ends of sovereign power. Yet Clausewitz’s discussion of
‘what war is’ takes place at a level of abstraction and in a vein of theoretical sublimity that defies such interpretations. In posing the question
of what war is, Clausewitz is asking the fundamental question of ontology. The question of ‘what is war’ is the question for Clausewitz of the
essence of things. In being so, the question of war cannot, for Clausewitz,
be limited to or start from the problem of war as it is understood and
dealt with from the instrumental perspective of the State. The question
of what war becomes in a world of States is a problem that can only be
understood and dealt with when one takes into account what war is in
a world without States.
Clausewitz argues that in abstraction ‘war is an act of force’ to which
‘there is no logical limit’.12 In its purest form, war is a force he defines
as a movement ‘toward extremes’.13 This ‘abstract’ or ‘pure’ concept of
war exists in complex antagonism with the forms that war assumes in
the ‘real world’. In being a movement toward extremes, pure war tends
to be subject to political modification in the real world. As he argues,
in the field of abstract thought the inquiring mind can never rest until
it reaches the extreme, for here it is dealing with an extreme: a clash
of forces freely operating and obedient to no law but their own. From
a pure concept of war you might try to deduce absolute terms for the
objective you should aim at and for the means of achieving it; but
if you did so the continuous interaction would land you in extremes
that represented nothing but a play of the imagination issuing from
an almost invisible sequence of logical subtleties. If we were to think
purely in absolute terms, we could avoid every difficulty by a stroke
12
Clausewitz, On War, p. 85.
280
13
Ibid., p. 84.
Re-appropriating Clausewitz
of the pen and proclaim with inflexible logic that, since the extreme
must always be the goal, the greatest effort must always be exerted.
Any such pronouncements would be an abstraction and would leave
the real world quite unaffected.14
In reality the movement toward the extreme that defines war in its purity
is always mitigated, for Clausewitz, by the existence of other living
forces. In the real world war is not ‘the action of a living force upon a
lifeless mass (total non-resistance would be no war at all) but always
the collision of two living forces’.15 While war in its purest conception
is an act of force that searches for its most extreme expression as life,
in the real world this search is thwarted by the existence of other living forces with which it enters into interaction. Instead of allowing for
the realization of this innate tendency toward the extreme, real war is
defined by a condition of interaction that imposes limits on the pure act
of force. War becomes not a singular act of force but, instead, a force
relation conditioned by an interaction with other life forms that establishes the limits within which war itself can be expressed as life. Pure
war, defined as a movement toward the extreme, is conceptually comparable to the ‘movement of infinity’ which Søren Kierkegaard’s ‘knight
of faith’ attempts and which expresses his ‘power to concentrate the
whole content of life and the whole significance of reality in one single
wish’.16 The movement of pure war emits of a passion which is immune
to the resistance of the wills of others because it is driven by a search
for expression bereft of relation to others. ‘It is only the lower natures
which find in other people the law for their action.’17
It is this basic distinction that Clausewitz draws, between the pure
form of war understood as a movement toward the extreme expression of living forces and real war understood as a force relation conditioned by limitation imposed in relation with others that I want to
focus on in looking at the influence Clausewitz exerts on the counterstrategic thought of Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari. For there we
find an account of this basic distinction of Clausewitz’s between pure
war and real war as well as the logic of their relation in application
to the problem of power within modern societies that is distinct from
any other interpretation of Clausewitz’s work. In the work of Foucault
and Deleuze and Guattari we discover the development of an account
14
16
15 Ibid., p. 86.
Ibid., pp. 86–87.
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and the Sickness unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie
(New York: Anchor Books, 1954), p. 53.
17 Ibid., p. 55.
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of modern society as a complex field of force relations in which war
is generative of life. In turn we discover an account of the sovereign
power of the State as that which seeks to modify this generative force
through the imposition of its political objects upon the movements of
war as life. For sure, this is a radically different conception of war from
that found in most other existing theoretical works about war. Yet it
is, without doubt, an enduringly Clausewitzian one. Through Clausewitz, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari reconceive war not simply as
a spatio-temporally discrete practice of States or State-like actors but as
an immanent force investing each and every social relation. Understood
in such a manner, war does not simply serve a function for the State. It
threatens, with the prospect of its rupture, to destabilize the organization of relations in which power itself is invested. The founding goal of
counter-strategic thought becomes, then, that of disinterring this pure
power of war from its capture within the strategized relations of State
power.
Foucault’s Clausewitz: war, society and
force relations
It is in The History of Sexuality that Foucault most significantly develops
his thesis as to the relations between war and modern social relations.
Modern Western societies are composed, Foucault argues, of a ‘moving
substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly
engender states of power’.18 This substrate of force relations can be said
to exist ‘not out of a speculative choice or theoretical preference, but
because in fact it is one of the essential traits of Western societies that
the force relationships which for a long time had found expression in
war, in every form of warfare, gradually became invested in the order of
power’.19 Modern societies, while bearing witness to an increasing civil
peace, are made possible, Foucault argues, by an investment of forces
deriving from war.
This observation, the argument that the forms of society ordinarily
identified with peace and civility are, upon closer inspection, riven by
war is a standard feature of leftist political thought. One need only
think of Marx’s argument that modern societies are defined by a ‘more
18
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley
(London: Penguin, 1990), p. 93.
19 Ibid., p. 102.
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Re-appropriating Clausewitz
or less veiled civil war’20 or of Gramsci’s account of the wars of position
and movement that structure the relations between civil society and the
State.21 What distinguishes Foucault’s position, a position that plays a
large role in the constitution of the counter-strategic tradition as a whole,
is the expressly Clausewitzian nature of its conception of the typology
of that war. While many argue that the entire tradition of leftist thought
owes too much to Clausewitz, such arguments rest, like those interpretations of a military-strategic persuasion, on a very narrow understanding
of Clausewitzian thought, more often than not on a simplistic reduction
of it to the dictum.22 One of the many contributions of Foucault as well
as Deleuze and Guattari to the transformation of leftist political thought
has been their development of a Clausewitzian account of the typology
of war that underlies the organization of power relations within modern
societies in ways that exceed and challenge such orthodoxies.
Here we are mainly concerned with the ways in which leftism has traditionally operated upon a dialectical understanding of the ‘civil war’
that takes place at the heart of modern societies. Ordinarily war is conceived within this tradition as a form of relation that defines the division
of society into two distinct camps. War also figures within this tradition as a principle of opposition that describes the mode of antagonism
assumed between those two camps upon recognition of the existence
of this relation. War distinguishes, in turn, a form of decision that is
taken and a temporal process that is entered into upon the establishment of the political irreconcilability of the motives and wills of the
two camps involved. The form of war involved here within this dialectical tradition is that of a parameter of interaction between two sets
of forces that are sent into collision by the raising of the awareness of
their irreconcilability and the experience of the decision that follows.
These forces are then presupposed as entering into the parameter of
war in the full possession of an array of strategies and tactics designed
as instruments for the fulfilment of their contradictory political wills.
The basic principle of being able to define ‘the left’ in diametrical opposition to ‘the right’ is reliant upon precisely such an imaginary. Marx’s
idea of a ‘civil war’ raging at the heart of modern societies composed
20 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1 (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 412; Karl Marx and Frederick
Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 66.
21 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1996), pp. 229–235.
22 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony & Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical
Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), pp. 69–70.
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of two more or less discrete competing classes of social forces is the
ultimate expression of this dialectical conception of war.23 Understood
in such light, the history of modern societies describes a development
of alternating periods of relative dominations and liberations in which
the political wills involved are variably repressed, incited, released and
realized.
Against this dialectical conception of war as a principle of intelligibility for historically founded divisions that structure antagonisms within
society, Foucault develops a neo-Clausewitzian account of war as an
active force that disrupts existing divisions, constituting social relations
anew and allowing for the composition of new forms of political subjectivity. He utilizes Clausewitz to redefine a leftist conception of war as
an active force of creation rather than a historically sedimented form of
antagonism. Dialectical models, where they seek to reduce our understanding of the role of war in the constitution of modern societies to that
of a formalized structure of antagonism, play into the hands of State
power. On the other hand it is the generative potentiality of war, its
essential dynamism and instability that offers the possibility of forms of
society that exceed the disciplinary and control capacities of sovereign
powers. The problem that war poses, for Foucault, then, is less that
of exposing hidden wars or reactivating forgotten or historically sedimented lines of social division than it is of seeking out future war,
pursuing war as a condition of possibility for new forms of subjectivity.
This Foucauldian interpretation seeks to utilize Clausewitz both to reinterpret the role of war in the organization of power in modern societies
as well as to disturb that organization by accentuating the movement of
the force of war toward its extreme.
In order to understand how Foucault develops such a Clausewitzian
conception of war it is necessary to contextualize its development within
Foucault’s broader theory of power. In his later works Foucault is concerned with challenging traditional accounts of power that construe
their definitions around the exercise of the right to kill. Such ‘juridical’
models of power Foucault challenges with his conception of a ‘strategic model’. According to Foucault’s strategic model, power is identified with the making and shaping of life rather than the right to take
it.24 Power according to this strategic model does not reside in specific subjects as a latent capacity to be exercised at will over others
but is, instead, a force that functions in relations that makes subjects.
23
Marx, Capital, p. 412.
284
24
Foucault, History of Sexuality, pp. 135–159.
Re-appropriating Clausewitz
Traditional models of power presume the formation of subjects to be
extraneous to the coming into being of power relations. Foucault’s strategic model, in contrast, construes power ‘not on the basis of the primitive
term of the relation but starting from the relation itself, inasmuch as
the relation is what determines the elements on which it bears; instead
of asking ideal subjects what part of themselves or what powers of
theirs they have surrendered, allowing themselves to be subjectified,
one needs to inquire how relations of subjectivation can manufacture
subjects’.25
As Foucault describes in greater detail in his recently translated Society
Must Be Defended, more traditional accounts of power tend to construe
modern social order as a resolution of the problem of war through which
preformed subjects confer sovereignty upon a transcendent State; the
‘right of making warre’ being chief among those powers surrendered to
the State.26 Other dissident accounts of modern society, from the advent
of early modern revolutionary tracts on politics onwards, construe social
order simply as a continuation of specific wars in which the terms of a
historical defeat by one social group over another are inscribed and
preserved in the uneven distributions of power that prevail.27 In brief,
contract versus conquest theories of the State. Foucault’s account is distinctive insofar as he conceives a more complex process through which
war is neither removed from society in order to provide greater security
to preformed subjects nor simply disguised in the form of unjust social
contracts between historically sedimented groups of subjects. Along
with other counter-strategic thinkers, Foucault conceives modern societies forming not out of a resolution of the problem of war, nor as a
continuation of specific historically defined wars, but as a product of
a refinement of the role of war in the constitution of relations. Rather
than simply removing war from relations or disguising them within
relations, modern societies operate dynamically through the inculcation and dissemination of the force of war throughout relations. Here
Foucault’s work dovetails with other counter-strategic thinkers who
25
Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’ in Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth,
ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Allen Lane, 1997), p. 59. This text was a summary of a course
of lectures Foucault gave at the Collège de France in 1975–1976. The lectures are now published in full as Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey (London:
Allen Lane, 2003). However the translation of the shorter course summary is in specific
instances more erudite which is why I choose to quote from it here rather than the fuller
lectures.
26 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 234.
27 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, pp. 87–111.
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Classical Theory in International Relations
similarly understand modernity as a process made possible by the
release of immanent forces of life over and against the newly transcendental power of the State.28 The transition to modern societies is affected
not simply by the concentration of war-making powers within the State
apparatus, for Foucault, but by what he describes as the ‘investment’ of
‘force relations’ deriving from war within the order of political power.29
Arguing so, Foucault challenges not only the idea that modern societies are peaceful in the simplistic terms in which peace is construed
as antithetical to war in both realist and liberal theories of international
relations, but also those critical traditions in which war is understood
simply as a principle of intelligibility for historically founded divisions
within society. For Foucault, in contrast, the distinctiveness of modern
societies is born not from the ways they preserve certain historically
constituted divisions and generate social antagonisms in accordance
with those divisions, but from the fact that war plays an active role
within their political orders. Neither socially homogeneous nor dialectically polarized, modern societies develop according to a Foucauldian
analysis through the generation of a series of differential divisions, of
increasingly complex lines of antagonism. A certain force of war functions actively within all social relations, allowing for the decentring of
new forms of subjectivity that lay claim to their own particular conditions of possibility. The subject that emerges among these force relations,
that is subjectified in accordance with their generative force, is a polemical subject; forever fighting to survive, waging a war in pursuit of the
truth that he or she is. As he describes,
It is the fact of being on one side – the decentered position – that makes
it possible to interpret the truth, to denounce the illusions and errors
that are being used – by your adversaries – to make you believe we
are living in a world in which order and peace have been restored.
The more I decenter myself, the better I can see the truth; the more I
accentuate the relationship of force, and the harder I fight, the more
effectively I can deploy the truth ahead of me and use it to fight, survive
and win.30
A war continues to rage at the heart of modern societies, then, for Foucault. Not a war that simply preserves inequalities established in the
past, at the origin of the birth of society. Rather, a war that intervenes
28
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,
2000); Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York:
Zone Books, 2001).
29 Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 102.
30 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p. 53.
286
Re-appropriating Clausewitz
in the constitution of the present, subdividing existing social relations,
creating new lines of activity that incite the formation of different forms
of political subjectivity that in turn reinvent their relation with the past;
a force of war activating mobility within power relations rather than
the reactivation of a form of war the lines of division of which were
long ago decided upon. Here, then, Foucault is deploying Clausewitz’s
conception of war as an ‘act of force’ against the more traditional leftist
conception of war as a dialectical form. We are to conceive the role of
war, if we follow Foucault, as an operator rather than a parameter. War
is less the product of a historical decision than it is an active, divisive and
productive capacity moving within social relations, conditioning their
mutability. Echoing Clausewitz, Foucault offers us a conception of war
as ‘a pulsation of violence, variable in strength and therefore variable in
the speed with which it explodes and discharges its energy’.31
Reconceptualizing war thus allows for a significantly different understanding of the subject of social relations. More traditional leftisms conceive of war as an outcome of politically defined oppositions that constitute the subjects of conflict. Constitution within any such dialectically
defined opposition requires each opponent as Gramsci describes, ‘to
seek to be itself totally and throw into the struggle all the political and
moral “resources” it possesses, since only in that way can it achieve a
genuine dialectical “transcendence” of its opponent’.32 Clausewitz himself recognizes the logical link between such a dialectical conception of
war and the tendency toward the extreme. In being an act of force with
no logical limit war dictates the maxim ‘if you want to overcome your
enemy you must match your effort against his power of resistance’.33
Such a dialectical conception of war must necessarily lead to a strategy
of extremes.
Yet what is of crucial importance for Clausewitz is that in dialectical
conditions of contradictory opposition this logic always breaks down.
The dialectical conception of war presupposes two parties whose political subjectivities assume the form of a contradictory relation. ‘Force to
counter opposing force’ as Clausewitz describes.34 Each experiences, as
a condition of their war relation, a force of decision that produces a tendency toward the extreme where the extreme is defined as the ‘rendering powerless of the enemy’.35 Yet, the movement toward the extreme
of one dictates, because of the specific condition of contradiction, the
31
33
Clausewitz, On War, p. 98.
Clausewitz, On War, p. 86.
32
34
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 109.
35 Ibid.
Ibid., p. 83.
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annihilation of the other. ‘If one side uses force without compunction,
undeterred by the bloodshed it involves, while the other side refrains,
the first will gain the upper hand. That side will force the other to follow suit; each will drive its opponent toward extremes.’36 The upshot of
this inference is that this condition of contradiction compels, Clausewitz
argues, a movement away from the extreme. The fact of being constituted within a relation of war in which such a strategy of the extreme is
a mutually shared principle dictates to each party concerned a methodological caution. The result is that dialectical war is never witness to the
realization of a maximum display of force but always involves weakened
expressions of the wills that comprise such force relations. Constituted
in biopolar contradiction, the subject is incapable ever of, as Gramsci
would say, ‘seeking to be itself totally’. It is, instead, forced by dint of
war into a degenerative movement of compromise by which it becomes
less like itself, only more similar to the other.
The brunt of Clausewitz’s argument, then, is that the dialectical conception of war never produces dialectical results. The logic of the dialectic is such that it compels the parties that constitute such a war relation to
enter into a process of barter. This is precisely why Clausewitz chooses
to further define war as ‘commerce’.37 Once war is recognized as an act
of exchange its logical tendency toward an expression of the extreme
is thwarted. The very nature of war as an act of exchange prevents the
full concentration and expression of force as ‘anything omitted out of
weakness by one side becomes a real, objective reason for the other to
reduce its efforts, and the tendency toward the extremes is reduced by
this interaction’.38 Rather than forging the full expression of a contradictory opposition in production of transcendence, dialectical war imposes
a perpetual condition of limitation amid the reduction of possibilities.
The parties that constitute such a war relation are, in this condition, overwhelmed by the ‘political object of war’.39 The political object reduces
the condition of war to one of increasingly negligible barter. ‘The smaller
the penalty you demand from your opponent, the less you can expect
him to try and deny it to you; the smaller the effort he makes, the less
you need make yourself. Moreover, the more modest your own political
aim, the less importance you attach to it and the less reluctantly you will
abandon it if you must.’ The logic of war relations is one of a movement
towards indifference rather than the forms of transcendence afforded
by the tendency of pure war toward the extreme.
36
Ibid., p. 84.
288
37
Ibid., p. 173.
38
Ibid., p. 89.
39
Ibid., p. 90.
Re-appropriating Clausewitz
For Foucault it is precisely this Clausewitzian logic of war that
explains the strategy of modern sovereignty and the ways in which
social relations form in the production of modern political orders under
the duress of the power of the modern State. This logic of war is not
a feature only of international relations between States. It is a feature
of the force relations that compose societies within States. In Society
Must Be Defended, Foucault depicts ‘a battlefront running through the
whole of society, continuously and permanently . . . a battlefront that
puts us all on one side or the other . . . (where) there is no such thing
as a neutral subject. We are all inevitably someone’s adversary’.40 Yet,
the structural conditions for this war are substantially different from
those portrayed by more orthodox leftisms. While traditional leftisms
ordinarily construe dialectical war in terms that are determined by the
existence of inequalities ineradicable by anything other than war itself,
Foucault depicts a society permeated by a war determined principally
by the existence of equality. This war, he argues is ‘a war born of equality
and takes place in the element of that equality’. This war is the effect not
of inequality or difference, but ‘the immediate effect of nondifferences,
or at least of insufficient differences’.41 ‘If there were a difference, there
would be no war. Differences lead to peace.’42
What, then, is that form of equality which, for Foucault, defines a war
relation? Again, Foucault takes his leave from Clausewitz. War in its
essence is defined as an act of force without limit. Yet in a relational
context where force meets with counter-opposing force this tendency of
the extreme is displaced, Clausewitz argues, by a movement towards
indifference conditioned by the experience of fear. Each, in spite of their
tendency toward the extreme, fears the consequence of being unable to
realize that movement towards the extreme. If we suppose war to take
place in a dialectical context in which the act of force is never pure but a
collision with other living forces, so the subject of the act must calculate
upon the mutually opposing movements of other forces. What if the
resisting movements of those forces exceed one’s own? The experience of
this fear and the forms of calculative caution that then ensue determines,
Clausewitz argues, an essential equality within the war relation which
in turn initiates the circumscriptive movement toward indifference that
displaces the pure tendency toward the extreme.
War becomes descriptive, then, from this Clausewitzian perspective, of specific types of force relation in which equality of fear is the
40
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p. 51.
41
Ibid., p. 90.
42
Ibid., p. 91.
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Classical Theory in International Relations
determinate condition. Without that shared condition of fear, war would
realize its essence as an act of force tending toward the extreme. This
mitigation of the war relation by the experience of fear is crucial for
Foucault insofar as it establishes a condition upon which war becomes
amenable to the sustenance of life. War relations, when understood in
this light are defined not simply by the risk of death but more crucially
by a preference for the preservation of life. Each party to a war relation
shares this basic experience of equality before the risk of death and a
concomitant interest in the sustenance of life. This equality before death
and shared commitment to life renders war into a productive kind of
force. The shared risk of death in which the possibility of death is determined by the potential of a movement toward the extreme produces
another, different form of movement: a movement toward circumscription and modification.43 War relations in which the potential of the tendency toward the extreme carries with it the risk of death are in turn
productive of new forms of life defined by their negligible differences.
This Clausewitzian logic is precisely what allows Foucault to argue that
it is the investment of force relations deriving from war within political
order that make the modern power of the State productive rather than
disabling of life. The form of logic that Clausewitz describes in definition
of the war relation is what Foucault otherwise describes in definition of
strategic power relations. As Foucault argued, ‘relations of power are
strategic relations. Every time one side does something, the other one
responds by deploying a conduct, a behaviour that counter-invests it,
tries to escape it, diverts it, turns the attack against itself, etc. Thus nothing is ever stable in these relations of power.’44 This ‘strategic model’ of
power, while made possible by the investment of force relations deriving from war, is distinct from other models of power in that it is ‘bent on
generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than
being dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.’45 Modern forms of power are ‘strategic’ by definition of the
ways in which they incorporate and function through force relations
derived, in Clausewitzian terms, from war. Yet these are forms of war
relations that are, as Foucault argues in extraction of Clausewitz’s principle of modification, amenable to the (de)generation of circumscribed
life forms.
43
44
Clausewitz, On War, p. 84.
Michel Foucault, ‘Talk Show’ in Michel Foucault, Foucault Live: Collected Interviews 1961–
1984, ed. Sylvain Lotringer (New York: Semiotext, 1996), p. 144.
45 Foucault, History of Sexuality, pp. 102, 136.
290
Re-appropriating Clausewitz
The war that permeates modern societies is, then, from this neoClausewitzian perspective of Foucault’s a productive war. Constituted
in essence by the tendency toward the extreme, but mitigated by the
experience of fear, this form of war does not foster great inequalities,
vast cleavages or significant differences between the forms of life that
emerge from it. Rather what takes place in the birth of modern societies
is the subordination of the pure essence of war to the political object of
a sovereign power concerned with the governance of difference itself;
a subordination which serves to reduce differences, imposing limits on
the forms of life that war produces. War becomes, in turn, a machine for
the circumscription of life. The problem of war is, seen in this light, not
so much its being active in the constitution of the force relations that
compose modern societies. The problem lies in war’s capture; its surrender to the instrumental requirements of State power. For Foucault,
then, Clausewitz’s further definition of war as ‘nothing but the continuation of policy with other means’ describes the strategy of modern State
power. On this point Foucault could agree with any number of neoClausewitzian military-strategic theorists. Yet in detailing the processes
by which war becomes the continuation of politics Foucault considerably dislocates prevailing conceptions of war and politics in ways that
compromise those more traditional interpretations of Clausewitz. The
form of war that enters into subordination to politics describes that
primitive entity that Clausewitz pinpoints as ‘an act of force with no
logical limit’.46 The subordination of war to politics leads to a modification that in turn compromises the potentialities of the forms of
war realizable under conditions of modern State power. What emerges
from this manoeuvre is a strategy of power that functions by securing,
governing and optimizing the forms of life that war realizes. Strategy
becomes the process of ensuring the continued subordination of war to
politics.
Deleuze and Guattari’s Clausewitz: the nomadic
movement of war
If it is Foucault who utilizes Clausewitz to reinterpret the relation
between war and modern societies it is Deleuze and Guattari who
employ him to respond to the problem of how to (dis)engage that
relation politically. There is a sense that in his account of modern
46
Clausewitz, On War, p. 85.
291
Classical Theory in International Relations
societies Foucault over-emphasizes the ease with which power strategises the pure force of war within power relations. Foucault’s engagement with Clausewitz is in this vein a somewhat tragic reading in which
war is never able to realize the pure force that defines it in abstraction
because it is ‘in the real world’ destined to be captured and compromised within a network of relations designed to mitigate its tendency
toward the extreme. Yet, in reading Clausewitz there is a crucial ambiguity and tension in his depiction of the relation between pure war
and the form it assumes under the duress of State power. As he states,
war ‘is an act of policy’, because ‘were it a complete, untrammelled,
absolute manifestation of violence (as the pure concept would require),
war would of its own independent will usurp the place of policy the
moment policy had brought it into being; it would then drive policy out
of office and rule by the laws of its own nature, very much like a mine
that can explode only in the manner or direction predetermined by the
setting’.47
This is not, as is often confusedly supposed, an argument for an ontological understanding of war as a continuation of policy. The rendering
of war as an act that fulfils policy is a contingent political requirement
for the defence of State power. Were war to realize its ‘absolute manifestation’ it would ‘drive policy out of office’ he argues. The sustenance of State power relies, in this sense, on its ability as Clausewitz
describes, to ‘trammel’ war: like a fisherman who employs a trammel
net to trap his prey without slaughtering it; to enmesh it, hinder its
movement, contain its freedom, subjecting it to the political purposes
of sovereignty. Foucault pursues the same conception of the investment
of war within political order affording ‘networks of power relations’
that form ‘dense webs’ of social relations traversing and manufacturing individual subjects as an affect of power.48 Yet in Deleuze and
Guattari’s conceptualization of the war/power relation we find a significantly different account of the potentialities of war in its subjection
to the State. Deleuze and Guattari, like Clausewitz, depict a State power
that captures, enmeshes and ‘throws its net’ over war.49 However this
relation of capture is never assured. ‘The man of war, in his exteriority,
is always protesting the alliances and pacts’ achieved by sovereignty,
as well as severing its bonds. War is, for Deleuze and Guattari, ‘equally
an unbinder and a betrayer: twice the traitor’ as much as it is a force
47
48 Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 96.
Ibid., p. 98.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, trans.
Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1999), pp. 424–425.
49
292
Re-appropriating Clausewitz
for the equalization of power relations.50 There is then, in Deleuze and
Guattari’s account of power a much more Clausewitzian insistence on
the indeterminacy of war’s capture by the State. For Foucault, we can
say, the utility of Clausewitz lies in his codification of the strategy of
power that informs the growth and development of the modern State.
For Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, Clausewitz provides not
only an outline of the strategy of modern State power but a means with
which to theorize its destruction. That is to say Deleuze and Guattari
follow Clausewitz in his leading us toward the idea of the disinterment
of war from its subordination to political sovereignty and the reassertion
of its tendency toward the extreme.
If, in its subjection to sovereignty, war becomes a continuation of
politics, then the aim of countering State power must involve the disinterment of war from that state of subordination. Indeed, in spite of his
tragic rendering of the circumscription of war by State power Clausewitz himself is clear on this necessity of pursuing the absolute ideal of
war when he argues in book eight that:
The origin and the form taken by a war are not the result of any ultimate
resolution of the vast array of circumstances involved, but only of those
features that happen to be dominant. It follows that war is dependent
on the interplay of possibilities and probabilities, of good and bad luck,
conditions in which strictly logical reasoning often plays no part at all
and is always apt to be a most unsuitable and awkward intellectual
tool. It follows, too, that war can be a matter of degree. Theory must
concede all this; but it has the duty to give priority to the absolute form
of war and to make that form a general point of reference, so that he
who wants to learn from theory becomes accustomed to keeping that
point in view constantly, to measuring all his hopes and fears by it, and
to approximating it when he can or when he must.51
Contrary to those interpretations of Clausewitz, Michael Howard’s for
example, which theorizes his development of the concept of absolute
war as an extension of a theory of wars conducted by and for the State,
Deleuze and Guattari account for it as an assertion of the irreducibility
of war to State power.52 Ultimately, Clausewitz’s concept of absolute
war makes sense for Deleuze and Guattari as a war not for the State, but
a war ‘directed against the State and against the worldwide axiomatic
expressed by States’.53 The extremity of absolute war is not that of a
50
52
53
51 Clausewitz, On War, p. 702.
Ibid.
Michael Howard, Clausewitz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 47–58.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 422.
293
Classical Theory in International Relations
concentrated military violence as Peter Paret interprets it, but another
kind of violence, the violence of a movement against the State.54 That
is to say, not a militarized violence committed against a specific State,
its governmental institutions, leaders or representatives; rather, the violence of a movement that breaks from the distribution and strategization
of forces that compose existing social relations.
Foucault follows Clausewitz’s logic of war to render an account of
the development of modern social relations that involves the gradual
circumscription of life potentialities. The investment of war within modern social relations incites processes of life’s degeneration in which the
existence of differences are gradually countermanded by powers that
seek firstly the management of difference, and secondly their eradication, for the purpose of securing peaceful civil societies. The limitation
of life possibilities are, then, the defining feature of this form of power
and society born of the investment of war. Deleuze and Guattari, on the
other hand, pitch their faith in the incapacities of the State to suborn war.
Whereas in Foucault’s reading of Clausewitz real war always prevails
over pure war, Deleuze and Guattari insist on the failures of the State
to capture the pure force of war in the social relations it manufactures.
The State, according to Deleuze and Guattari’s reading, is formed on the
basis of an ‘appropriation’ of the war machine which nevertheless fails
to realize the ‘essence’ of war provoking the escape of that pure force
and its redirection against sovereignty.
The concept of the warrior has, then, for Deleuze and Guattari, significant symbolic value. Whereas for Foucault war relations are always
degenerative power relations in which the life of the subject is gradually being closed down, Deleuze and Guattari provide a conception
of modern societies in which the potential to wage war, to accentuate
movements within the fields of force relations that compose power, to
seek out new forms of truth, establish new forms of social practice and
political subjectivity, are vital and expansive tasks. This ability to wage
war, to locate and explore its pure force, is not a question of privilege.
In theory, anyone can be a Clausewitzian warrior in the ‘strange war’
that Deleuze and Guattari urge upon the State. The late modern era,
involving as it has the decline in the power of nation-states, the collapse
of dialectically organized social struggles, the proliferation of offensives
against socially encoded power arrangements, the diversity of forms of
subjectivity, suggest the flowing forth of that pure force of war from out
54
Peter Paret, ‘The Genesis of On War’ in Clausewitz, On War, pp. 3–28.
294
Re-appropriating Clausewitz
of its capture by the State. And Clausewitz, that paragon of the militarystrategic tradition that has informed the development of State power, is
heralded the architect of its destruction.
Conclusion
Clausewitz’s On War is a sublime text. It has proven, unquestionably,
the most influential text in the consecration and development of the
military-strategic power of the modern State. It has likewise been influential in the development of orthodox Marxist-Leninist theories of revolution and insurgency. This much is well known. The purpose of this
chapter has been to detail its influence upon a tradition of counterstrategic thought that seeks to critique and undermine both the power
of the State as well as to redevelop those traditions of leftist thinking
in which the principle of opposition to State power was born. This
counter-strategic tradition, represented here in the works of Foucault
and Deleuze and Guattari, adapts Clausewitz’s logic of real war in order
to provide a radical account of the strategy of power that informs the
development of social relations under the duress of the modern State.
In this vein Clausewitz’s portrait of the dynamics of real war in which
relations reduce to contradiction and opposition is productive of a limitation of life potentialities was fundamental. The counter-strategic tradition exposes the ways in which this conception of war as a dialectical
form only serves to reproduce the methods by which the State governs
the force of war, bringing its movements within its control, and countermanding it to its own degenerative purposes. In turn, this counterstrategic tradition develops Clausewitz’s concept of a force of pure war
as a new principle of opposition to the dialectical forms of contradiction
that inform more orthodox leftisms. Clausewitzian war, in this tradition,
is reconceived neither as the continuation of policy by other means nor
as the mere inversion of that formula, but as an active force of subversion by which the substance of the relation between war and politics is
reconfigured.
295
Index
absolute monarchy 101
and contract theory 103, 110
Frederick the Great 216
Rousseau’s distrust of 117
see also sovereign authority
absolute war, concept of 293–294
absolutist states 11
wars for territorial gain 185
Acosta, José de 128
aid, conditional 188
Alcibiades 38, 46
American Declaration of Independence
(1776) 156, 211
and right to property 156
American Indians
attempts to explain 124–125
compared with ‘Ancients’ 128, 130
compared with Scottish Highlanders
147
as living in state of nature 171–172, 173,
175, 209
as ‘other’ 209
rights of 162, 164, 165, 174, 175
Scottish Enlightenment view of 123
Smith’s account of 146
anarchy
Hobbesian 253, 269
international 52, 64, 65
Anglo-Dutch war (1665-7) 172
Antiquity
comparison of Amerindians with 128,
130
see also Athens
antithesis
and scepticism 29
in Thucydides’ treatment of Pericles 28,
30–35
Thucydides’ use of 28–30
296
Athens
corrosive effect of Pericles’ policy on
norms of civic life 33–35
disregard for international norms 45
norms of democratic citizenship 32–33
in peacetime 42
plague 35–38, 41
scepticism in cultural life 29
siege of 33, 35, 36–38
under ‘thirty tyrants’ 32
Australia, application of terra nullius
doctrine 157, 174, 177
Bacon, Francis 135
balance of power
early modern literature on 244–245
materialist 269
barbarism, as Mill’s third stage of
development 192
Barbeyrac, Jean 100
Basle, Treaty of 219
Baudrillard, Jean 278
Bayle, Pierre 127
beliefs
and conflict (Hobbes) 256–257
see also Catholicism; Christianity;
religion
Bethel, Slingsby 244
Bible
and obligation to cultivate land
171
and ownership rights 170
Boyle, Robert 260
Bull, Hedley 250, 271
Burke, Edmund 218, 247
Burlamaqui, Jean-Jacques 101
Bush, George W., US President 56
Bynkershoek, Cornelis 244
Index
Campbell, John 244
Canada, and Six Nations Iroquois
Confederacy 176
Capps, Patrick, on legal coercion 90
Carolina, colony of 161
Carr, E. H. 2, 98
Catholicism, in England 159, 261
Cavendish, Lord 161
Charles II, King 159, 160
Cheyfit, Eric 123, 154
China 188
Christendom, medieval 268
collapse of political unity of 237, 238, 240
Christianity
and Biblical obligations 170, 171
and German ‘spirit’ 225, 229
Rosicrucian (in Prussia) 217, 219,
220
and single creation idea 128
see also Catholicism; religion
citizens
Athens 32–33
and support for wars 185
trust of 265–266
civil wars
effect of stasis on moral norms 39
Hobbes’ discussion of 4, 5
‘civilizations’ (Mill) 196–197
faults of 197–198, 201
classical authors
and authorial intention 16
continuity and discontinuity with 4–6
holistic (interdisciplinary) approach 7
intellectual contexts 7–11
interpretations of 12–13
lineages 12–17
political contexts 11–12
use of in International Relations 1–3,
178–181
and use of presentism 3, 6, 15
see also individual authors
Clausewitz, Carl von 23
and concept of absolute war
293–294
and counter-strategic tradition
278–279
definitions of war 279
as interpreted by Foucault 282–291
On War 277, 278, 295
and pure war 280, 281
war as ‘act of force’ (with no limit) 287
war as collision of living forces 281
war as ‘commerce’ 288
war as ‘ . . . continuation of policy with
other means’ 277, 280
Clement VI, Pope 161
Cleon, Athenian demagogue 31
assault on Pylos 44
coercion (force)
antithetical to lawful state 112
and authorization of liberal
enforcement 86–93
dependent on general will for legality 90
intervention as 87–88
limits to 88–89
by sovereign authority 259, 264–265,
274
unjustified in Locke’s colonial
expansionism 174
‘cognitive travel’ 124, 125, 154
collective security, theory of 66
colonialism 11, 21, 161, 174
and construction of ‘self’ and ‘other’
209
Mill’s view of 12, 194, 196
and political authority of Mother
country 174
and rights to property 157, 167, 168
as source of revenues 172
see also imperialism
commercial society
balance within 148
and creation of relative wealth 151
insulated from other ‘nations’ (Smith)
144, 155
moral shortcomings of 146
need for reform 151
and poverty 154
communitarian/cosmopolitan debate
207–209
confederation
as basis for Rousseau’s social contract
110–113, 119
dependent on domestic social contract
118
only possible by ‘revolution’ (Rousseau)
118
Rousseau’s use of Saint-Pierre’s term
104–106
Saint-Pierre’s model 109
and sovereignty 115
confederation of states
as duty of all states 66
and modern liberal states 181
‘natural’ (teleological) track to 68–69
as proposed by Kant 56, 61, 62, 75,
91–92
to include non-republics 58, 62–63, 73,
84–85
see also Federation of Free States
297
Index
conflict
and beliefs 256–257
Kant’s sources of 179
see also war
conjectural history (Smith) 134–137,
139–141
as moral science 142–143
and vision of future 154
‘consciousness of backwardness’ 210–211,
229
Kant’s 218, 221, 231
consent
and conformity with morality 89
in liberal states 54, 61, 81
constitutions
French Revolutionary 210, 218, 224,
229
lawful vs legal 66
and moral principles 218–219
see also republican constitutions
contexts see intellectual contexts; political
contexts
contextualism 15
contingency, historical 5
‘contract of submission’ (Rousseau) 102,
110
contract theory
and absolute monarchy 103, 110
see also ‘original contract’ (Kant); social
contract
contractual relations, between states
(Kant) 60, 181
Corcyra, alliance with Athens 42
Corcyraean civil war (stasis), Thucydides’
account of 39, 40–41
cosmopolitan/communitarian debate
207–209
counter-strategic thought 278–279
and Clausewitz’s definition of war 279,
281, 283
and modern societies 285
Cox, Robert 15
death, universal fear of (Hobbes) 257, 259,
260
Declaration of Independence see American
Declaration of Independence
definitive articles (Kant) 61, 69, 81,
84
First (republican constitutions) 181,
185
Second (Federation of Free States) 181,
182, 186–187
Third (transnational interactions) 182,
187–189
298
Deleuze, Gilles (and Felix Guattari) 23,
278
interpretation of Clausewitz 291–295
Delos, Delian League 31
Democratic Peace
and ahistorical reading of Mill 191–197,
202–203
history and 181–191, 202
and homogenization of domestic
political systems 58, 73
influence of 178
and justification for intervention
179–180, 182, 203
Kant and 1, 11, 18, 52, 72, 181–191,
222
liberal normative theory and 71
Mill and 180–181, 197, 200–201
and misinterpretation of Kant’s ‘free
states’ 62, 80, 84–85
reinterpretation of Kant 56
risks of restriction to liberal
democracies 71
use of classical authors 201
violation of Kant’s moral laws 184
see also ‘separate peace’
despotism, and potential for reform 64,
216
dialectical tradition, war in 283–284, 287,
288
Diderot, Denis 234
difference
and European self 231
Hegel and 224–230
and identity 208–209
see also ‘Other’; self
Diodotus 42, 47
discipline, in Hobbes 262, 273
dissent, dangers of 259
diversity, human 135
and progress 137, 143
division of labour 141
problems of 150–151
Doyle, Michael
and interpretation of ‘free states’ 62,
80
and intervention 181
reading of Kant 53, 54–58, 80, 212
Dumont, Jean, Corps universel
diplomatique . . . 246
Dutch East India Company 161, 189
East India Company 189, 194, 201
eirene (peace, formal treaties) 41
English Civil War 257
English Common Law 211, 214
Index
English School
and ‘Grotian tradition’ 1, 250
and Hobbes 271, 272
Enlightenment
and problem of general and particular
143
science 134–136
see also German Enlightenment; Scottish
Enlightenment
equality
between states 78–79, 83–84, 110–111,
193
of individuals 103, 110, 267
and relations of war (Foucault) 289
Essex, Arthur Capel, Earl of 159
Europe
constructed as ‘self’ 209, 210, 231
historical continuity in 4
‘Kantian’ world view 2, 9
property laws 157
states and colonies 160, 173
Exclusion Crisis (1679–81) 159
factionalism
and individual political freedom 224
as threat to human development
148–149
fear
of death and pain (Hobbes) 257, 259,
260
Hobbes’ use of 255, 259, 261–262,
274
and relations of war 289–290
Federation of Free States (Kant’s Second
Definitive Article) 181, 182, 186–187
see also confederation
Ferguson, Adam 124
Filmer, Robert, Patriarcha 158, 170
force see coercion
Forsythe, David, reading of Kant 53
Foucault, Michel 23, 278
and dialectical model of war 283–284
History of Sexuality 282
interpretation of Clausewitz 282–291
and interpretation of war 284
and modern sovereignty 289
and role of war in modern societies
285–287, 291, 294
Society Must Be Defended 285, 289
and tendency of war to extreme 287–288
theory of power 284
France
modern natural law theory in 100
Revolutionary 211–212
see also French Revolution
Frederick the Great, enlightened
absolutism of 216, 217
Frederick William II of Prussia 217, 219,
220
Frederick William III of Prussia 220
‘free states’, modern interpretation of
Kant’s 62, 80, 84–85
free trade 193
freedom
civil 116
‘inner’ and ‘outward’ (Hegel) 229–230
moral 116–117
natural 116
see also rights
French Revolution 22
Constitution 210, 218, 224, 229
impact on European thought 211–212
and Kant’s regulative universal history
220
as ‘other’ 220–221, 225
Rights of Man 217, 224
and sovereign political subject 210, 211,
223
Terror 217, 220, 221, 223,
224
Fukuyama, Francis 53, 56
Geist (spirit), Hegel’s concept of 223,
227–229
general will (Rousseau) 110, 111–113
Gentili, Alberico, and appropriation of
vacant lands 163, 164
Gentz, Friedrich von 11, 247
German Enlightenment (Aufklärung)
213–214
and French Revolution 217, 221, 223,
228
and return of religion in Prussia 217
German Revolution of Philosophy (Hegel)
223, 228
Germany
and ‘difference’ (Hegel) 223, 225
influence of Hobbes (Weimar) 23, 254,
273–275
Napoleonic invasion of Rhineland 217,
224
religious spirit (Hegel) 225, 229
Weimar critique of liberalism 275
see also Prussia
globalization 3
and state sovereignty 67–68
Glorious Revolution (1688) 158
gnomê (foresight) 44
Göttingen, University of 247
Gramsci, Antonio 1, 283
299
Index
Great Britain
Anglo-Dutch war (1665–7) 172
English philosophical tradition 214
German Enlightenment view of 213,
217
as highest stage of development (Mill)
192
and origins of Anglo spirit 213, 217
and trading interests 187
see also English Civil War; English
Common Law; English School
Grotius, Hugo 22, 234
De jure belli ac pacis 238, 242
eclecticism of 237, 238, 240, 249
and English School 1, 250
influence of 244–249
invoked as authority 246
Kant’s criticism of 70, 77, 215, 239
linked with Peace of Westphalia 239,
242–243, 244, 248
Mare Liberum 161
and natural law 237
and naturalist moral science 237–239
nineteenth-century interpretation of
248–249
reputation as father of international law
236–237, 238, 248–249, 251
and settlers’ rights 164
theory of property 165–166, 167, 174
Guattari, Felix (and Deleuze) 23, 278
interpretation of Clausewitz 291–295
Guicciardini, Francesco 233
Hague Conventions 77
Heeren, A. H. L., on states system 247
Hegel, G. W. F. 153
and Aufhebung process 226, 227, 229
and concept of Geist 223, 227–229
and difference 224–230
and French Revolution 22, 224–226
and international relations 227–229
and interpretation of Clausewitz 279
narrative of world history 229–230
and notion of Ethical State 226,
227–228
Philosophy of Right 225, 226
and Postmodernism 1
and self-awareness 223, 225
socially-constituted self 207, 222–224
view of state 226–228
Herder, Johann Gottfried 234
Hermocrates 45, 46–49
Herodotus 233
hesychia (quiet, tranquillity), as antithesis
of kinesis 41
300
historical change 1, 15
adaptation of Kant’s preliminary
articles to 70, 72
historical continuity 3
assumption of 13–14
and discontinuity 4–6
and importance of discontinuities 6
historical forces, Thucydides and 46
history
and Democratic Peace 181–191, 202
of International Relations 96–98, 119,
233–236
universal (Kant) 215–216, 218,
220
see also conjectural history
Hobbes, Thomas
Behemoth 265
and civil wars 4, 5
colonial interests 161
De Cive 255, 258
Elements of Law 267
and Grotius 238, 240
influence in Weimar Germany 23, 254,
273–275
international political theory 253, 254,
262–269
‘laws of nature’ 260, 261, 268,
271
legacy of 253, 276
Leviathan 255, 261, 267
and moral knowledge 255
principles of international order
268–269
rationally calculating states 272
and Realism 1, 7, 253, 254, 260,
272
rights of colonists 164
scepticism 266–267, 270
self-preservation 167
and sovereign authority 258–260,
263–265
and state of nature 256–257, 262–263,
267–268
theory of human nature 7, 8, 273
on use of force in colonial expansion
174
use of language 255–256
hospitality, Kant’s law of 181, 187
Howell, John 244
human development
Mill’s stages of 192–193
problems of overlapping spatial and
temporal boundaries 147–148
Smith’s four-stage theory of 125, 126,
137–139
Index
human nature
dependence on moral norms 38–41
Hobbes’ theory of 7, 8, 273
impetus to progress 136–137, 143
universal principles of 136
humanitarian intervention 86
Hume, David 136
influence on Kant 214
hunters and gatherers
leisure affluence of 153
vacancy of uncultivated land 166
idealist-realist dichotomy, reading of
Rousseau 97
identity, and difference 208–209
imperialism 187, 189, 190
modern American 196
see also colonialism
India, British colonial rule 194
indigenous peoples
denial of sovereignty to 157,
176–177
and property rights 157
rights of 165, 167
see also American Indians; ‘savagery’;
‘state of nature’
individual rights
exclusions 200
and liberal states 80–81, 89, 218
individuals
compared with states (Hobbes) 267–268,
271
free and equal (Rousseau) 110
and limits on sovereign authority 264
as self-interested actors (Hobbes)
260–261, 270–271, 274
infancy, comparison of savagery with 140,
147
instrumentalism 101
intellectual contexts 7–11, 17–20
intellectuals
and concept of ‘consciousness of
backwardness’ 210–211
and rights to debate 215
International Court of Justice, Nicaragua
case 90–91
international law
application to non-liberal states 74, 78
and authorization of liberal
enforcement 86–93
classical 74, 77–79
early modern 244
early modern treaty analysis 245–248
Grotius’ reputation 236–237, 238,
248–249, 251
Kant and 59, 63, 70, 77–79, 94
Mill and 193
and unilateral judgments backed by
force 91
see also legalism
International Monetary Fund (IMF) 188
International Political Economy 21
International Political Theory 15–17
international relations
as Hobbesian anarchy 253, 269
Hobbes’ principles of 268–269
and property rights 156, 160, 168
see also confederation; states
International Relations (IR)
cosmopolitan/communitarian debate
207–209
early modern political thought 244–249
history of 96–98, 119, 233–236
limitations on 23–24
relationship to Political Theory 13, 96
theoretical debates 2
timelessness of issues 7, 9
uses of classical authors 1–3, 178–181
intervention
humanitarian 86
Kant’s limited justification for 87–88,
179–180
political (visible hand) 148, 151
and promotion of liberal principles 181,
191, 195
in pursuit of economic interests 189,
195
see also non-intervention
Israel 56
James II, King 158, 159
Japan 188
just war, notion of 88
and property rights 163, 175
Kagan, Robert 2
Kant, Immanuel 2, 19, 178, 234
analysis of war 179, 185, 216
Categorical Imperative 212, 215
The Contest of the Faculties 220, 221
Critique of Pure Reason 218
and Democratic Peace 1, 11, 18, 52, 72,
181–191, 222
effect of French Revolution on 22,
212–222
and evolution of international system
67–72
and German Enlightenment 213–214
historical analyses 182–184
Idea for a Universal History 63, 183
301
Index
Kant, Immanuel (cont.)
inclusion of non-liberal republics in
federation 58, 62–63, 73, 84–85
and individual rights 80
influence of Hobbes on 9
influence of Hume on 214
and interpretation of Clausewitz
279
interpretations of 54–58, 190–191
and legalism 18
and Liberalism 1, 7, 53, 190–191
limited justification for intervention
87–88, 179–180
‘Metaphysics of Morals’ 63, 65
and ‘original contract’ as external
standard 81, 89
‘Perpetual Peace’ 20, 52, 72, 179, 182,
185, 219–220
and Practical Reason 215, 218, 221
Preliminary Articles for perpetual peace
59, 65, 69–71, 190
and Pure Reason 214, 215, 220
relationship between liberal and
non-liberal states 58–67
Religion within the Limits of Reason 219
republican constitutions 8, 11, 58, 61,
81
‘sorry comforters’ 70, 77–79
tripartite ethical relationship 212, 213,
219
and ‘universal history’ 215–216, 218,
220
and universal self 207, 212–213
universalism of moral laws 183–184
see also Definitive Articles
Kierkegaard, Sφren 281
kinesis (motion, instability)
as antithesis of hesychia 41
in (civil) war 40
knowledge
empirical and rational 255
limits on (Hobbes) 258–260
modern disciplinary divisions 7, 9
moral 255
and politics (Hobbes) 254
Koch, Cristophe-Guillaume, Short History
of Peace Treaties 247, 250
labour
division of 141, 150–151
and entitlement to property 157, 160,
170
Lafitau, Father Joseph François
Customs of the American Indians 126,
127–134
302
and location of Amerindians in single
creation 128–130
scientific nature of study 126, 127,
130–131, 132, 133
land
collective ownership of waste 167,
168
common 166
community rights to 168–169
cultivation of 163, 166
and labour 157, 160
obligation to cultivate 163, 170,
171–172
occupation and possession of 163,
165
see also property
language
and definitions 255–256, 258
origins 140
las Casas, Bartolomé de 132
law
within states 88, 89
see also international law; legalism;
natural law; property laws
Lawrence, T. J. 241
‘laws of nature’ (Hobbes) 260, 261, 268,
271
leaders, moral character of 45
League of Nations 56, 158
and concept of sovereignty 176
leftism
and dialectical model of war
283–284
and social divisions 283
see also Marxism
legalism 18
and exclusion of non-liberal states
82–83, 87, 195
global 76
used against weak states 85
leisure, in primitive (savage) societies
152–153
Leonard, Frederic, Recueil des traitez de
paix 246
Levellers 159
Levy, Jack 53
liberal states 55, 80–82, 196–197
assumed superiority of 75, 81, 86, 182,
184, 193
assumption of conflict with non-liberal
states 54, 187, 189
authorization of enforcement 86–93
and consent 54, 61, 81
equated with Kant’s republican
constitution 185
Index
equated with Mill’s ‘civilisations’
196–197
imperfect 55, 64, 81, 197–198
and individual rights 80–81, 89, 197
Mill’s illiberal remedies for ‘vices and
miseries’ of 198–200
moral obligations to non-liberal states
60
and promotion of liberal principles 181,
191
relationship with non-liberal states
58–67, 83–84, 186–187, 193
‘separate peace’ between 54, 56, 186,
190
and threat to peace 75
and transnational capitalist interests
188–189
see also non-liberal states; republican
constitutions
liberalism
and ahistorical interpretation of Kant
190–191
and classical international law 77
contingent on reason 199–200
Hobbes and 274, 275
Mill and 191–197
Morgenthau’s critique of 275
norms of 71
origins of 1
see also Democratic Peace
lineages 12–17, 21–24
Lisola, François-Paul de 244
Locke, John
chapter on property in Second Treatise
158–161
colonial interests 161
influences on 159
obligation to cultivate land 171–172
and occupancy of land 163
and ownership of land 171
and theory of property 20, 169–175
Two Treatises of Government 156
on use of force in colonial expansion
174
view of American Indians 171–172, 173,
175
logic, and affect 261
Ludwig of Bavaria 161
Machiavelli, Niccolo 2, 233
and Realism 1
Manning, William 242
Marsilius of Padua 161
Martens, G. F. von 248, 250
Marx, Karl 1
Marxism
and class war 282, 283
classical texts 1
see also leftism
Meinecke, Friedrich 234
Melos, battle of 30
dialogue at 30, 42
Middle East, requirements for peace in 56
military-strategic thought
Clausewitz and 277
see also counter-strategic thought
Mill, John Stuart 21, 195
A Few Words on Non-Intervention 195
colonialism 12, 194, 196
contradictions in 200–201
and Democratic Peace 180–181, 197,
200–201
domestic political theory 197–201
illiberal remedies for ills of liberal states
198–200
and liberalism 191–197
stages of historical development
192–193
modernity 286
Montesquieu, Charles, Baron de 100, 101,
135, 136
and origins of Anglo spirit 213
moral character
individual 46
of leaders 45
moral freedom 116–117
moral norms
effect of plague (in Athens) on 36–37
humanity’s dependence on 38–41
and realism 46–49
Thucydides and 28
war and kinesis of 41–46
moral principles
of civil constitution (Kant) 218–219
and conflicting legal opinions 90
distinct from legality 89
in inter-state relations 60, 66, 68,
94
in Saint-Pierre 107–108
universalism of (Kant) 183–184
moral science
conjectural history as 142–143
naturalist 237–239
Scottish Enlightenment 136–137
morality
and politics 101, 107, 108
reason as guide to 214
More, Thomas, Utopia 163
Morgenthau, Hans 23, 254, 275
Mytilenians, Athenian policy towards 42
303
Index
Native Americans see American Indians
natural law
Grotius and 237, 240–241
Kant’s rejection of 215
and positivism 240–241
Rousseau’s criticism of 99–101, 102
Negri, Antonio 278
neoconservatism, use of Hobbes 273, 275
Netanyahu, Benjamin 56
Netherlands
revolt against Philip II of Spain 242
States General 63
and trading interests 161, 165, 187,
189
war with England 172
Nicaragua, case before ICJ 90–91
Nicias 44, 47
Peace of 41
Nietzsche, Friedrich 278
and Postmodernism 1
non-intervention, principle of 54, 65–66,
190
Mill’s principle of 194, 195, 199
in UN Charter 79
see also intervention
non-liberal states
application of international law to 74,
78, 190
compared with liberal states 80–82,
196–197
and consent 61
enforcement of rules against 86
exclusion from legalism 82–83, 87, 195
included in Kant’s confederation 58,
62–63, 73, 84–85
presumed to be unjust 54, 88
reform of 55, 64, 182, 190
and self-exclusion 83, 87
norms
as condition for deliberative action 50
international 44, 45, 70
see also moral norms
Nuremburg, trial judgments 77
Oates, Titus 159
occupation, as condition of possession of
land 163, 165
‘original contract’ (Kant), as external
standard 81, 89
‘Other’
colonialism and 209
and ‘consciousness of backwardness’
210
French Revolution as 220–221, 225
see also difference; self
304
Palestine 56
peace
eirene 41
Hobbes’ articles of 271
as timeless issue in International
Relations 7
see also Democratic Peace; perpetual
peace; war
peace federation, Kant’s concept of 91–92
Penn, William 174
Pennsylvania, rights of American Indians
in 174, 175
Pericles
death (of plague) 35, 38
and kinesis of customary norms 41–46
and the power of chance 35–38
powers of persuasion 30–31
and subversion of moral norms 34,
43–44, 48
and threat to norms of civic ideals 33–35
Thucydides’ use of antithesis in
treatment of 28, 30–35
use of power 31
virtues of 30
perpetual peace
Kant’s preliminary articles for 59, 65,
69–71, 190
prospects for Kant’s 58–59, 182
and republican constitutions 67, 185
as unachievable ideal 91, 93
philosophers, and justification of political
practice 161
philosophy, and interdisciplinarity 8
political authority
and authority of sovereign 258–260
of colonial power 174
need for 101
rational foundation for (Hobbes) 257
see also sovereign authority
political contexts 11–12, 20–21
Political Economy, Adam Smith and 20
Political Theory 13
Popish Plot 159
Portugal, and East Indies 165
positivism, and natural law 240–241
Postmodernism 1, 3
poverty
in market economies 153
nature of, in primitive societies 153
relative 151, 153–154
Smith’s concern with 149, 151–152
power
application of 94
corruption by unilateral judgments 75,
85, 91
Index
Foucault’s theory of 284
in inter-state relations 69
of modern State 289, 291, 292–294, 295
and right (lawfulness) 79
strategic model of 290, 292
use of 31, 48, 75
see also balance of power; coercion;
political authority; sovereign
authority
preliminary articles, for perpetual peace
(Kant) 59, 65, 69–71, 190
presentism, in use of classical authors 3, 6,
15
‘problem-solving’ 15
progress
concept of human impetus to 136–137
revolution and 220
property
community rights to 168–169
and distribution 169
importance of 161–163
limits to accumulation of 172
Locke’s chapter on 158–161
Locke’s theory of 169–175
as moral quality 167, 168
Pericles’ exhortation to sacrifice 34–35
private (Rousseau) 103
use right over 167, 170
see also land
property laws
dependent on public claims 166
in European states 157, 160
property rights 156, 160, 260
and notion of just war 163, 175
Pufendorf’s view of 166–169
prudence, and realism 46–48
Prussia 186
and religion under Frederick William II
217, 219
see also Germany
Pufendorf, Samuel
and absolute monarchy 101
and development of Grotius 244
French translations of 100
Kant’s criticism of 70, 77, 215
and property rights 166–169, 174
and sovereignty 176
rationalism, Hobbes and 255, 257,
269–271, 275
Rawls, John 70, 71
Realism
and chance 35
Hobbes and 253, 254, 260, 272
and international norms 44
and moral norms 46–49
origins of 1
and prudence 46–48
Rousseau and 1, 96, 113–114, 119
timelessness in 10
and war 7
see also Hobbes; Rousseau
reason
and experiential world (Kant) 213, 215,
217, 220, 221
and fear 261–262
in German Enlightenment 213
Kant’s faith in 68, 183, 214
and liberalism 199–200
as moral guide 214
see also moral principles; rationalism
reason of state theory 238, 245
rebellion
forbidden by Kant 218
in Hobbes 264
Recht, principles of (Kant) 66
reciprocity
in Athenian democracy 33
in Kant 60
reform
international political 68
‘natural’ (teleological) track to 65, 68–69,
91
obligation to 85, 90, 190
potential for 64, 216
of states 55, 64, 182, 190
religion
separated from political sphere
(Hobbes) 259, 261
and war 256–257
see also belief; Christianity
religious toleration 260
Rengger, Nicholas 10, 15
republican constitutions
identification with modern liberal
states 181
imperfect 61, 64
Kant’s requirement for 8, 11, 58, 61,
81
as lawful 66
and perpetual peace 67, 185
rights and freedoms under 218
and rule of international law 64
see also liberal states
revolution, as process 220, 221
rights
community 168–169
dynamic creation of (Hegel) 222
of indigenous peoples 165, 167
settlers’ 164
305
Index
rights (cont.)
of states 54, 61, 194, 195
see also individual rights; property rights
Rohan, Henri de, and balance of power
theory 244
Rosicrucian Christianity, in Prussia 217,
219, 220
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 18–19
agreement with Saint-Pierre’s theory
108–109
and concept of general will
and concept of ‘savage’ 125
criticism of Saint-Pierre’s writings 106
Discours sur l’inégalité 102–103
Du contrat social 100, 110–112
Economie politique 103–104
Extrait 104, 105, 109, 111
The Geneva Manuscript 104, 105
historical context 99–106
influence of Saint-Pierre’s works on
104–106
Institutions politiques project 100, 101
Jugement 104, 105, 107, 109, 118
opposition to natural law theory
99–101
and Realism 1, 96, 113–114, 119
and Reason as moral guide 214
rejection of Saint-Pierre’s peace project
as impractical 117–118
review of Saint-Pierre’s peace project 97,
106–113
social contract 99, 110–113
sovereignty as moral freedom 114–117
rules, international 72
Russell, Lord William 159
Russett, Bruce 53, 56, 57
Rye House Plot 159
Sahlins, Marshall, and leisure affluence of
hunters and gatherers 153
Saint-Pierre, Abbé de
and concept of sovereignty as moral
freedom 114–115
Polysynodie 106
Rousseau’s review of 97
Rousseau’s study of 104–106
use of term ‘confederation’ 104–106
Saint-Prest, Jean-Yves de, Histoire des
traités de paix 246
‘savagery’
as earliest stage of development (Mill)
192
equated with infancy 140, 147
lacking qualities of humanity 149
Rousseau’s concept of 125
306
see also indigenous peoples; ‘state of
nature’
scepticism
and antithesis 29
Hobbes 266–267, 270
Thucydides 38, 49–50
Schmidt, Brian 235
Schmitt, Carl, and Hobbes 23, 254,
273–275
science
Enlightenment 134–136
Hobbes and 270
in Lafitau’s study 126, 127, 130–131, 132,
133
Scottish Enlightenment 20, 21
moral science 136–137
social science 143
social thinkers and Lafitau
133–134
use of science 134–136
view of Amerindians 124, 147
Scottish Highlanders, compared with
Amerindians 147
seas, freedom of 165
self
modern sovereign 210
pre-social universal (cosmopolitan) 207,
214
socially-constituted (communitarian)
207, 222–224
self-awareness (bildung) (Hegel) 223, 225,
229
self-interest
of individuals (Hobbes) 260–261,
270–271
in natural law theory 100
and rationalism 275
Saint-Pierre’s view of 108
‘separate peace’, between liberal states 54,
56, 64, 82, 186, 190
and notion of separate law 82–86
see also Democratic Peace
‘settler contract’ 176
settlers, legal relationship with aboriginals
164
Seven Years War 213
Shaftesbury,1st Earl of 159, 161
Sicily 45
Hermocrates’ attempt to unite 47–49
Sidney, Algernon 159
Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy 176
Skinner, Quentin 16–17
Slaughter, Anne-Marie
interpretation of Kant 75
and liberal enforcement 86
Index
on nature of liberal states 81
on sovereign equality 78–79,
83–84
slavery, as Mill’s second stage of
development 192
Smith, Adam 20
and Amerindians 134–145
and classical liberal school of economics
123
conjectural history 134–137, 139–141
‘Considerations Concerning the First
Formation of Languages’ 140
and four-stage theory of development
126, 137–139, 143–144
influence of Lafitau on 126, 130,
140
Lectures on Jurisprudence 149
use of term ‘nations’ 143
and visible hand (political intervention)
148, 151
The Wealth of Nations 141, 143,
149
sociability
asocial (unsocial) 64, 215, 221
and respect for property rights 166
social contract 99
and concept of confederation 105,
110–113, 119
settler contract as variant of 176
and theories of sovereignty 176
social relations, role of war in formation of
278, 282, 285–287
social science, Scottish Enlightenment
135–136
society
force relations within modern 282
in natural law theory 100
see also commercial society
Sørenson, Georg 53
‘sorry comforters’ (Kant’s) 70, 77–79
South America, colonization in 174, 175,
177
sovereign authority (Hobbes) 258–260,
263–265
coercive power of 259, 264–265, 274
foreign relations dependent on trust of
citizens 265–266
limits on 263–264
sovereignty (state)
and confederation 115
and doctrine of terra nullius 176–177
effect of globalization on 67–68
external 114
as moral freedom (Rousseau) 114–117
rights to 194, 195
Rousseau’s concept of 114, 119
and war 277–278
see also states, sovereign
space, and time 143, 144–145
Spain
conquest of Americas 162
expulsion of Moors 162
Sparta, invasion of Attica 37
specialization, corrupting effects of 149,
150
‘state of nature’ 52, 82
as basis for natural law 102
and doctrine of terra nullius 176
Hobbes’ 256–257, 262–263, 267–268
international domain as 227, 228, 253
and Locke’s law of property 170
primitive societies 152–153, 171–172,
173, 175, 209
states, sovereign 52, 65
claim to private judgment 76
and collective ownership of unused
lands 168, 173–174
compared with individuals (Hobbes)
267–268, 271
definition of ‘unjust enemy’ 65, 87,
92–93
emergence of 237, 238, 247
equality under UN Charter 78, 79
Hegel’s view of 226–228
and international law 59, 63
and protection of property 160
relations between 54, 61, 69
and right to go to war 77–78
rights of 54, 61
and self-conscious reform 64
and supra-national organization 67–68
and unilateral judgments 75, 85, 91
see also absolutist states; confederation
of states; sovereign authority;
sovereignty (state); Westphalia
stationary state, Mill’s preference for 199,
200
Stewart, Dugald 139
Stoics, Smith’s view of 145
Strauss, Leo 23, 254, 273, 274, 275
Suarez, Francisco de 238
subjectivity, in readings of Kant 56, 57,
70
symbolic theology, Lafitau’s 130, 132
Syracuse, defeat of Athens at 44
Tacitus 163
terra nullius, doctrine of 157, 163–176
and concept of community rights 169
and sovereignty 176–177
307
Index
Tesón, Fernando
and Democratic Peace 80–81
interpretation of Kant 75, 78, 82–83, 84,
93
on lawful coercion 90
and liberal enforcement 86
on nature of non-liberal states 88
Test Act (1673) 159
Third World, and conditional aid 188
Thirty Years War 237, 238, 242, 257
see also Westphalia
Thucydides 17, 18–19, 233
account of Corcyraean civil war (stasis)
39, 40–41
Archeology 46, 47
and historical forces 46
History of the Peloponnesian War 27
and moral norms 28
on Pericles 28, 30–35
and Realism 1
scepticism 38, 49–50
use of antithesis 28–30, 47
time
and human development theory 125,
143–144, 147–148
and space 143, 144–145
‘time-shifting’ 131, 134, 142
trade
and equality of states 110
free 193
Kant’s limits on 187
right to 187
and transnational relations of states 54,
181, 187–189
traditions, invented 10
treaties, early modern analyses of
245–248
trust-building 70
Tuck, Richard
Philosophy and Government 239
re-interpretation of Grotius 234,
237–240
The Rights of War and Peace 239
tychê (chance), power of 35–38, 44
unilateral judgments 75, 85, 91
United Nations 56, 158
Charter 77
legal shortcomings of Charter 78–79, 94
and sovereign equality 78, 79
United States of America
application of terra nullius doctrine 157
Declaration of Independence (1776) 156,
211
‘Hobbesian’ world view 2, 9
308
modern imperialism 196
and Nicaragua case before ICJ 90–91
see also American Indians; Virginia
‘unjust enemy’
defined 65, 87
legitimate defence against 92–93
Vattel, Emmerich de
and Grotius 237, 244, 247
Kant’s criticism of 70, 77
and obligation to cultivate land 163, 175
and terra nullius doctrine 157, 174
Venice, Rousseau’s observations on 99
Virginia
Declaration of Rights (1776) 156
settlement of 164, 172
Virilio, Paul 278
visible hand, political intervention 148, 151
Vitoria, Francisco de 132, 165, 238
Voltaire 100, 101
and Lafitau 130
Walker, R. B. J. 234
war
as ‘act of force’ (with no logical limit)
287, 289
as act of policy 292
and beliefs 256–257
between liberal and non-liberal states
189
Clausewitz’s definitions of 277, 279
as ‘commerce’ 288
concept of absolute war 293–294
dependent on trust of citizens 265–266
in dialectical models 283–284, 287, 288
effect on norms of rational action
(Thucydides) 40
and equal experience of fear 289–290
as generative principle in social
relations 278, 282, 285–287
Hegel’s view of 223, 227
Kant’s analysis of 185, 216
and kinesis (motion, instability) 40, 41
logic of relations of 288
norms of (Greek) 45
popular support for 185
pure vs real 279–282, 295
and Realism 7
as right of sovereign states 77–78
role in formation of modern societies
285–287
and state power (Deleuze and Guattari)
292–294, 295
subordinated to political ends 277, 288,
291
Index
tendency towards extreme 287–288, 289,
292, 293
as timeless issue in International
Relations 7
and trade 188
see also just war
warrior, concept of (Deleuze and Guattari)
294
Washington Consensus, Smith invoked by
151
Weber, Max 202
Westphalia, Peace of
contemporary view of 246
Grotius and 239, 242–243, 244, 248
significance of 22, 241–243, 251
Wheaton, Henry 242
Wight, Martin 11, 250
William III of Orange, King 158
Wolff, Christian 215, 244
Wöllner, Johann Christof 219, 220
Wollstonecraft, Mary 156
world republic, Kant’s concept of 91,
93
World Trade Organization (WTO) 188
xuneton (practical intelligence) 39
309
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
91 Barry Buzan and Ole Wœver
Regions and powers
The structure of international security
90 A. Claire Cutler
Private power and global authority
Transnational merchant law in the global political economy
89 Patrick M. Morgan
Deterrence now
88 Susan Sell
Private power, public law
The globalization of intellectual property rights
87 Nina Tannenwald
The nuclear taboo
The United States and the non-use of nuclear weapons since 1945
86 Linda Weiss (ed.)
States in the global economy
Bringing domestic institutions back in
85 Rodney Bruce Hall and Thomas J. Biersteker (eds.)
The emergence of private authority in global governance
84 Heather Rae
State identities and the homogenisation of peoples
83 Maja Zehfuss
Constructivism in international relations
The politics of reality
82 Paul K. Ruth and Todd Allee
The democratic peace and territorial conflict in the
twentieth century
81 Neta C. Crawford
Argument and change in world politics
Ethics, decolonization and humanitarian intervention
80 Douglas Lemke
Regions of war and peace
79 Richard Shapcott
Justice, community and dialogue in international relations
78 Phil Steinberg
The social construction of the ocean
77 Christine Sylvester
Feminist international relations
An unfinished journey
76 Kenneth A. Schultz
Democracy and coercive diplomacy
75 David Houghton
US foreign policy and the Iran hostage crisis
74 Cecilia Albin
Justice and fairness in international negotiation
73 Martin Shaw
Theory of the global state
Globality as an unfinished revolution
72 Frank C. Zagare and D. Marc Kilgour
Perfect deterrence
71 Robert O’Brien, Anne Marie Goetz, Jan Aart Scholte and Marc Williams
Contesting global governance
Multilateral economic institutions and global social movements
70 Roland Bleiker
Popular dissent, human agency and global politics
69 Bill McSweeney
Security, identity and interests
A sociology of international relations
68 Molly Cochran
Normative theory in international relations
A pragmatic approach
67 Alexander Wendt
Social theory of international politics
66 Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp and Kathryn Sikkink (eds.)
The power of human rights
International norms and domestic change
65 Daniel W. Drezner
The sanctions paradox
Economic statecraft and international relations
64 Viva Ona Bartkus
The dynamic of secession
63 John A. Vasquez
The power of power politics
From classical realism to neotraditionalism
62 Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett (eds.)
Security communities
61 Charles Jones
E. H. Carr and international relations
A duty to lie
60 Jeffrey W. Knopf
Domestic society and international cooperation
The impact of protest on US arms control policy
59 Nicholas Greenwood Onuf
The republican legacy in international thought
58 Daniel S. Geller and J. David Singer
Nations at war
A scientific study of international conflict
57 Randall D. Germain
The international organization of credit
States and global finance in the world economy
56 N. Piers Ludlow
Dealing with Britain
The Six and the first UK application to the EEC
55 Andreas Hasenclever, Peter Mayer and Volker Rittberger
Theories of international regimes
54 Miranda A. Schreurs and Elizabeth C. Economy (eds.)
The internationalization of environmental protection
53 James N. Rosenau
Along the domestic–foreign frontier
Exploring governance in a turbulent world
52 John M. Hobson
The wealth of states
A comparative sociology of international economic and
political change
51 Kalevi J. Holsti
The state, war, and the state of war
50 Christopher Clapham
Africa and the international system
The politics of state survival
49 Susan Strange
The retreat of the state
The diffusion of power in the world economy
48 William I. Robinson
Promoting polyarchy
Globalization, US intervention, and hegemony
47 Roger Spegele
Political realism in international theory
46 Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber (eds.)
State sovereignty as social construct
45 Mervyn Frost
Ethics in international relations
A constitutive theory
44 Mark W. Zacher with Brent A. Sutton
Governing global networks
International regimes for transportation and communications
43 Mark Neufeld
The restructuring of international relations theory
42 Thomas Risse-Kappen (ed.)
Bringing transnational relations back in
Non-state actors, domestic structures and international institutions
41 Hayward R. Alker
Rediscoveries and reformulations
Humanistic methodologies for international studies
40 Robert W. Cox with Timothy J. Sinclair
Approaches to world order
39 Jens Bartelson
A genealogy of sovereignty
38 Mark Rupert
Producing hegemony
The politics of mass production and American global power
37 Cynthia Weber
Simulating sovereignty
Intervention, the state and symbolic exchange
36 Gary Goertz
Contexts of international politics
35 James L. Richardson
Crisis diplomacy
The great powers since the mid-nineteenth century
34 Bradley S. Klein
Strategic studies and world order
The global politics of deterrence
33 T. V. Paul
Asymmetric conflicts: war initiation by weaker powers
32 Christine Sylvester
Feminist theory and international relations in a postmodern era
31 Peter J. Schraeder
US foreign policy toward Africa
Incrementalism, crisis and change
30 Graham Spinardi
From polaris to trident: the development of US fleet ballistic
missile technology
29 David A. Welch
Justice and the genesis of war
28 Russell J. Leng
Interstate crisis behavior, 1816–1980: realism versus reciprocity
27 John A. Vasquez
The war puzzle
26 Stephen Gill (ed.)
Gramsci, historical materialism and international relations
25 Mike Bowker and Robin Brown (eds.)
From cold war to collapse: theory and world politics in the 1980s
24 R. B. J. Walker
Inside/outside: international relations as political theory
23 Edward Reiss
The strategic defense initiative
22 Keith Krause
Arms and the state: patterns of military production and trade
21 Roger Buckley
US–Japan alliance diplomacy 1945–1990
20 James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel (eds.)
Governance without government: order and change in
world politics
19 Michael Nicholson
Rationality and the analysis of international conflict
18 John Stopford and Susan Strange
Rival states, rival firms
Competition for world market shares
17 Terry Nardin and David R. Mapel (eds.)
Traditions of international ethics
16 Charles F. Doran
Systems in crisis
New imperatives of high politics at century’s end
15 Deon Geldenhuys
Isolated states: a comparative analysis
14 Kalevi J. Holsti
Peace and war: armed conflicts and international order 1648–1989
13 Saki Dockrill
Britain’s policy for West German rearmament 1950–1955
12 Robert H. Jackson
Quasi-states: sovereignty, international relations and the
third world
11 James Barber and John Barratt
South Africa’s foreign policy
The search for status and security 1945–1988
10 James Mayall
Nationalism and international society
9 William Bloom
Personal identity, national identity and international relations
8 Zeev Maoz
National choices and international processes
7 Ian Clark
The hierarchy of states
Reform and resistance in the international order
6 Hidemi Suganami
The domestic analogy and world order proposals
5 Stephen Gill
American hegemony and the trilateral commission
4 Michael C. Pugh
The ANZUS crisis, nuclear visiting and deterrence
3 Michael Nicholson
Formal theories in international relations
2 Friedrich V. Kratochwil
Rules, norms, and decisions
On the conditions of practical and legal reasoning in international
relations and domestic affairs
1 Myles L. C. Robertson
Soviet policy towards Japan
An analysis of trends in the 1970s and 1980s