25
NOTES:
1
In the interests of neutrality, I will be framing this dispute in this way, avoiding terms like „invasion“ on the
one hand and „mission” on the other.
2
See Kagan, pp.56-57 for a concise discussion of this worldview.
3
Kagan, p. 31.
4
See Kant’s PP p. 108, but also UH, pp. 44-45 (emphasis mine).
5
Bernard Yack insightfully makes this point in his „The Problem with Kantian Liberalism“, p. 226.
6
PP, p.112.
7
Kant, Universal History (UH), p. 47
8
Kant, PP, p. 105.
9
See his “What is Living and What is Dead in Kant’s Practical Philosophy”, p. 220.
10
There is actually quite an extensive literature documenting the increasing lack of war between democracies
over the past 150 years. See especially Clarence Streit’s 1938 Union Now: A Proposal for a Federal Union of
the Leading Democracies, as well as further studies by Babst,m Rummel and Doyle. Now that Germany is
firmly democratic as well, little seems to stand in the way of a genuinely Kantian EU!
11
Michael Doyle makes this point in his „Liberalism and International Relations“, p. 175. We are back to the
question of power, and the phenomenon that it is generally the weaker party who is likely to propose multilateral
rules in order reign in the stronger.
12
This norm is also not reconcilable with the Kantian worldview. Surely, regimes that are non-republican, non-
pacific and which violate the cosmopolitan rights of their citizens deserve to be resisted, if not overthrown!
13
Volker Gerhardt has made this point forcefully in recent writings on the Iraq war. See especially his “Die
Macht im Recht”, 2002.
14
Jean Hampton has made much of this point in her writings on Hobbes, contrasting „convention“ with the more
common description of a „contract“ as described by David Gauthier and others. I think the point is valid and
useful, as it underlines the arbitrariness of these arrangements, and their fluidity once interests of the parties
change. See Hampton, p. 71.
15
This is of course the famous “Rational Foole” problem outlined in Leviathan and commented on extensively in
the secondary literature on Hobbes. In my analysis, as described above, the problem is twofold: the Rational
penchant for defection and the Foolish insistence on motivations that transcend Hobbesian practical reason.
16
There has been a fairly significant literature in recent years questioning the (Hobbesian) notion of a utility-
maximizing “homo eoconomicus” as the basis of economic rational man, and exploring alternative, more
holistic concepts of practical rationality. See especially writings by Jean Hampton, Elizabeth Anderson, Martin
Hollis and my own Rational Games (2001: Greenwood Press).
17
There is, of course, also a lot in Kant and Hobbes which is objectionable or antiquated in the context of
modern ethics, politics and physics!
18
In particular, it differs from neo-Hegelian concepts of economic communities, from the neo-Marxist template
of Gramsci, and, most recently, from the „social capital“ interpretation of de Tocqueville and of Robert Putnam.
Neo-Aristotelian communities transcend the economic, the political, the ecclesiastical and the nostalgic.
Convention