Going to War Against a Hostile Neighbour. Kant on War and Peace

This essay advances the thesis that, unlike what the majority of Kant scholars believe, Kant has a just war theory. In Towards Perpetual Peace and in the section Völkerrecht in the Rechtslehre, Kant formulates the legitimate grounds for waging a war against an unjust enemy. Strikingly, in a rather provocative footnote in Towards Perpetual Peace Kant seems to allow for the legality of anticipatory defence against an enemy neighbour that refuses to enter into a lawful relation. In this essay, I connect an account of Kant’s philosophy of history as developed in his Idea for a Universal History, according to which antagonism is postulated as the basic driving force of human history, to his theory, set forth in Towards Perpetual Peace, that states must seek to enter into a lawful relation with each other and must thus strive for peace, i.e. a law- governed arrangement where disputes are resolved by rightful means rather than by brute force. People must give up their ‘lawless’ ‘mad freedom’ for ‘rational freedom’ (8:354). If then for example an enemy neighbour is unwilling to relinquish their ‘mad freedom’ and has adopted a maxim by which ‘a state of nature would be perpetuated’ (Doctrine of Right, §60), a neighbouring state has the legitimate right to hinder this ‘hindrance of freedom’ by waging a defensive war against it. War is justified insofar, and only insofar, as it is consistent with the principle of freedom. [English translation]