Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (Hackett Classics)

This is an unusual text, as it was written by a renowned philosopher over two hundred years ago. He expressed his thoughts during the age of the Enlightenment and Benevolent Absolutism punctuated by the brutal French Revolution. It seems a long time ago for someone to have pondered about, not just peace, but perpetual peace on the face of this earth. His principles were quite modern: There should be the abolishment of standing armies, a federation of nations should be established, the constitution of every nation should be republican and he required the conduct among nations to be civilized, hospitable and devoid of hostility. Republicanism is to be understood as meaning the separation of the legislative from the executive branches in contrast to his age where authoritarian rulers combined the two, a system he called despotism. He may have also been stimulated by the brand-new phenomena of the French and American constitutions.Yes, the modernity of his thoughts is astonishing, but even more so is the fact that two centuries later the establishment of a world federation and the permanent abolition of warfare are still being discussed only by isolated, out-of-the-way theoreticians. Two world wars and an entire century of unheard of violence across the globe have made no difference on the mind of humanity. We are still playing the ancient game of one-upmanship and international power-play. The world is clogged with armed forces and weapons of mass destruction, while the cure from all that violence has been known for ages. Reading about his thoughts makes one realize that man has not become any wiser during the past 200 years.

While I am certain that Mr. Kant has a number of redeeming qualities that explain his popularity in certain intellectual circles, I cannot find a single virtue to redeem his work. His grasp of even the merest components of the language is faulty from the outset; his sentences are littered with punctuation like so much flotsam and debris -- so much so that single sentences often are used whereas in ordinary writing a well-structured paragraph would serve better to accomplish the same purpose. To say he is overly wordy is to ignore the magnitude of his crimes against brevity.Mr. Kant also perpetuates some fool notion that the ends cannot justify the means when it comes to man's treatment of his fellow human being. The alternative, one supposes, is suffering of the highest magnitudes while everyone piddles about following Kant's nonsense of following a "good will" -- the specifics of which they are supposed to know intuitively, mind! There is even a short section in which he criticizes his detractors for their assumption that good deeds and happiness should ever converge - as though the goodness of deeds were not defined by the overall amount of happiness they create in the world!And, to make matters so much worse, Mr. Kant is a bore of the worst kind. So much of this would be forgivable with a spot of true wit here and there, but his sense of humour is, sadly, a complete void in the wasteland of his already unremarkable work.On the upside, the book is well bound, the typeface clearly legible, and the translation absolutely impeccable. In fact, it is the last of these that affords this book three stars, although ironically it represents quite literally the part over which Mr. Kant himself had the least control.I would hesitate to recommend this product when other amazingly well written works such as those by Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill are readily available. If anything, it might be purchased in order to show the success of those pieces.

awesome book

A nice, inexpensive edition of some of Kant's notable essays including his famous short essay An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? and To Perpetual Peace. The latter and the Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent are some of Kant's notable political writings. Generally more accessible than Kant's major critical works and sometimes written vividly, not a quality associated generally with Kant. The political writings feature Kant's emphasis on grounding in his moral philosophy and a contractual approach. To Perpetual Peace includes Kant's famous and to this point vindicated prediction that properly constituted Republics (though not direct democracies, which he sees as tending to despotism) are likely to form peaceful federal relationships with each other. All well worth reading, and also an interesting comparison with the work of John Rawls, much influenced by Kant's general approach. To Perpetual Peace is clearly the direct inspiration and model for Rawls' last book, The Law of Peoples.Also included are the essays Speculative Beginning of Human History and The End of All Things, which are interesting and sometimes obscure combinations of philosophical speculation and scriptural exegesis.Good footnotes and introductory essay.

After reading Rousseau's Social Contract I was looking forward to how Kant would embed Rousseau's use of will into his (Kant's) own practical reason. What I saw was a repeat of Hobbes' apology for the worst excesses of tyranny based upon the spurious foundation that the state of nature would be infinitely worse. Spurious because Rousseau had already argued the state of nature includes family, and family is not an Hobbesian state of nature. Spurious because Locke had already provided a far more reasoned examination of legislation and its roles.Kant's Perpetual Peace is terrible. Irrespective of its outrageous conclusion, it ignores all the better arguments that went before it, and indeed, makes one think "if practical reason is such to allow such immoral consequences as despots can conjure, protect me from practical reason".

Part of it obscure as Kant often is but major points clear and well thought out

good