Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
- Mortimer Adler's
- Syntopicon
Essays
War
& Peace
THE twentieth century may go down in history as the century of war and peace --the
first in which world wars were fought, the first in which men established world peace, and
so, perhaps, the last in which peace among nations was merely an armed truce, a breathing
spell between wars. Even if world peace is not actually begun in our time, we may prove to
be the first generation of men on earth who, under the impact of world wars, have made a
firm attempt to draw a decisive conclusion from all the accumulated wisdom concerning war
and peace.
It may be thought that antiquity anticipates, and that at all times the tradition
contains, the fundamental notions which have recently gained so wide a currency. Socrates
and Epictetus, for example, speak of world citizenship. Marcus Aurelius and Zeno the Stoic
even more explicitly envision a world community. Alexander tries to conquer the world to
make it one; Virgil proclaims a peace which will be as universal as the Roman empire; and
Dante, recasting Virgil's vision, advocates the re-enactment of that empire and with it
monarchy--by which he means one government--to give all Christendom political as well as
spiritual unity.
To neglect these anticipations would be to overlook wisdom's perennial aspirations for
unity. But if, because of their significance for peace, they should not be neglected here,
neither should their importance be exaggerated. For one thing,
- man has always acted at variance with his wisdom, nullifying
the hope of peace by preparing always for the next war.
For another thing, it is doubtful that peace by conquest or by empire--the only
ways in which the past could conceive the world's coming to the unity of peace--would be a
peace perpetual as well as universal. The latter without the former is but a fraction of
the ideal.
Even when in modern times the ideal is at last stated in terms of peaceful methods for
achieving peace--by law, not by force; by consent, not by imposition--something less than
the whole world in its global reality is the object of consideration. William Penn and
Rousseau, for example, state the indispensable legal conditions for turning Europe from a
continent perpetually wracked by wars into a society able to perpetuate peace, but their
historical location causes them to limit their proposals to Europe.
Kant alone first makes the generalization which lies dormant in their reasoning, and which
almost begs to be inductively drawn from the conceptions of war and peace so plainly
stated by Hobbes and Locke. He conceives the possibility of a peace not only perpetual but
truly world-wide. Yet for all the rightness he perceives in what he calls "the
cosmopolitical ideal," it seems to remain for him an ideal--not attainable except by
approximation. Yet because it is right, he holds that it must be pursued even though it is
impossible. We are the first generation to argue for world peace as a conclusion on the
level of reality and to conclude that it is possible because it is necessary.
The argument is not yet won, nor the conclusion enacted, but henceforth the problem of war
and peace can hardly be discussed without stating the issue as a choice of world
government and peace, or of world anarchy and war. If it does no more than seriously face
that choice for the first time, the twentieth century makes a signal advance in
understanding one of the great ideas--an advance which can change the course of history
and the life of man more than the discovery of atomic fission, which is only an instrument
of war or a tool of peace. But just as the release of heat and energy from nuclear
combustion has its prototype in ordinary fire, which the ancients associate with the
beginning of civilization, so the insight which may exert a new civilising force has its
origin in the fundamental thinking man does about war and peace as soon as he begins to
think about society.
IN THE TRADITION OF the great books, war and peace are usually discussed in political
terms, or at least in terms of the relation of men to one another, individually or in
groups. But the psychologist, the moralist, and the theologian sometimes use the word
"peace" in another sense to signify the absence of conflict within the
individual or to signify an inner harmony--peace of mind on earth or the heavenly rest of
the blessed in the presence of God.
In their spiritual meanings, war and peace are considered in other chapters; e.g.,
interior conflict is a topic in the chapter on OPPOSITION and interior peace is discussed
in the chapter on HAPPINESS. We shall not treat these matters here except in their bearing
on the social or political discussion; nor shall we consider civil war except for the
light it throws on the nature of war and peace in general. The special problem of discord
and strife within a single community belongs to the chapter on REVOLUTION.
Certain attitudes toward war between states seem to recur in every century. In the face of
the ever-present fact of war, men deplore its folly or find some benefit to compensate for
its devastation. But throughout most of the tradition, those who see only suffering, no
less than those who celebrate the martial spirit, seem to accept the necessity of war.
Good or bad, or a mixture of the glorious and the horrible, war seems, to most of those
who write about it, an inevitable thing--as ineradicable as disease and death for the
living body, as inescapable as tragedy.
- Only in recent times has the inevitability of war been
questioned, and the possibility of lasting peace proposed.
The two books which look most steadily and searchingly on the face of war--Homer's
Iliad and Tolstoy's War and Peace--seem to behold it as a mixed thing.
Battle with sword and javelin on the plains of Troy or with musket and howitzer on the
Russian steppes lets loose a fury which sweeps human nature to extremes of nobility and
baseness, to actions of heroic strength and cringing weakness. To both Homer and Tolstoy,
war is the realm of force and chance, and though both see in it occasions for courage and
magnanimity and even for a kind of charity or at least compassion, the whole spectacle is
one of agony, pervaded by darkness and dismay, torn bodies and ruined minds.
"Grievous war" is Homer's repeated epithet. "Pale fear" and
"black death" are the colors of battle. They are everywhere that Ares reigns,
"Ares, blood stained bane of mortals," "stubborn god of war."
To the poet of any century, Homer or Tolstoy, Virgil or Shakespeare, war's human features
appear to be unchanged even if its mechanical dress and physical lineaments are
altered--its weapons and armor, its organization of men and materials, its scope of
operations in space and time. The historian who measures the contestants and keeps the
score of victories and defeats takes a different view. He dwells on all the differences
which mark progress in the art of war, or which enable wealthier and more advanced
societies to wage wars of greater magnitude. To Herodotus, no military undertaking ever
assumed the proportions of Xerxes' army on the march, raising a cloud of dust from horizon
to horizon. Yet Thucydides says that before the Peloponnesian War "there was nothing
on a great scale either in war or in other matters."
The historian is attentive not only to weights and numbers, to the changing accoutrement
of war and its mechanical elaboration, but also to inventions in the sphere of strategy
and tactics. The Alexandrian phalanx, the patience of Fabius, the forced marches of
Caesar, Hannibal's outflanking and enveloping movements at the battle of Cannae, the
deployment in depth of the Roman legions on the Rhine--these are but a few of the
inventions of military genius which, as Plutarch, Tacitus, and Gibbon recognize, have an
effect far beyond the advantage that novelty initially gives them. They become the
classical models of war's art and the principles of its science.
Tolstoy may scoff at the historians who stand in awe of military genius. He may be right
that Kutuzov's lack of plans rather than Napoleon's air of outwitting all contingencies is
the essence of great generalship. Nevertheless Tolstoy magnifies the campaign of 1812 as
beyond comparison the greatest mass movement of humanity, from west to east and then from
east to west, just as Herodotus apotheosizes the movement of the Persian horde from east
to west and Thueydides the rise of Athenian naval power.
Writing from the center of a whole continent in arms a century later, Freud in 1915 gives
his impression of what was yet to become the first world war. A war of such proportions
and ferocity was almost incredible before it happened. "Then the war in which we had
refused to believe broke out," and, Freud writes, "not only is it more
sanguinary and more destructive than any war of other days, because of the enormously
increased perfection of weapons of attack and defense; but it is at least as cruel, as
embittered, as implacable as any that preceded it . . . . It tramples in blind fury on all
that comes in its way, as though there were to be no future and no goodwill among men
after it has passed. It rends all bonds of fellowship between the contending peoples,
and threatens to leave such a legacy of embitterment as will make any renewal of such
bonds impossible for a long time to come."
THE ENEMIES OF WAR USE a variety of weapons in their attack. The Trojan Women of Euripides
cries out with the bitterness of Andromache and Hecuba against the misery of war's
innocent victims--the women and children who are left to mourn the vanquished or to become
the victors' spoils. Aristohanes turns laughter rather than pity and fear against the
waste of war. Such comedies as the Peace, the Acharnians, the Lysistrata
make light of the issues over which men fight, and give war the aspect of a wearisome
business, preposterous in its motives and hollow in its victories.
The genial satire of Rabelais exposes the impostures of war, but beneath the horseplay
which deflates by its exaggerations, there is the earnest, serious note of Grangousier's
resolution not to "undertake war until I have first tried all the ways and means of
peace." Swift's satire is not so amiable. In the eyes of the truly rational
Houyhnhnms, war appears to be as senseless and despicable as the Yahoos who wage it.
Gulliver tries to tell the Houyhnhnrn who is his master about the wars of Europe, their
causes and their cost. "I was going on to more particulars," he relates,
"when my master commanded me silence. He said whoever understood the nature of the
Yahoos might easily believe it possible for so vile an animal to be capable of every
action I had named, if their strength and cunning equalled their malice .... When a
creature pretending to reason could be capable of such enormities, he dreaded lest the
corruption of that faculty might be worse than brutality itself. He seemed therefore
confident that, instead of reason, we were only possessed of some quality fitted to
increase our natural vices."
According to Augustine, it is not man's nature but his sinfulness which degrades him below
the beasts "devoid of rational will," who "live more securely and peaceably
with their own kind than men . . . . For not even lions or dragons have ever waged with
their kind such wars as men have waged with one another." Calling it "the
greatest and most pompous of human actions," Montaigne asks whether war is not
"the testimony of our weakness and imperfection; for, in truth the science of undoing
and killing one another, and of ruining and destroying our own kind, has nothing in it so
tempting as to make it coveted by beasts who have it not."
But in his essay Of Ill Means Employed to a Good End, Montaigne also quotes
Juvenal's remark that "we suffer the ills of a long peace; luxury is more pernicious
than war." He seems to approve the Roman policy of maintaining wars "not only to
keep their own men in action, for fear lest idleness, the mother of corruption, should
bring upon them some worse inconvenience; but also to serve for a bloodletting to their
Republic, and a little to evaporate the too vehement heat of their youth." War as a
purgative is a familiar theme. Hobbes, like Malthus later, suggests that "when all
the world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is war; which
provideth for every man, by victory or death."
Many writers seem to be ambivalent about war. Plato, for example, seems to see both sides
of the question though he does not give them equal weight. In the Republic,
Socrates proclaims the discovery that war is "derived from causes which are also the
causes of almost all the evils in states, private as well as public." In the Laws,
the Athenian Stranger admits to Cleinias the Cretan that the laws of his city, devised
primarily with a view to war, can be justified insofar as they aim at courage; but he
reminds him later that insofar as such laws "regarded a part only, and not the whole
of virtue, I disapproved of them."
That he regards permanent peace as the ideal toward which the moral law commands us to
strive, does not prevent Kant from saying that
- "a prolonged peace favours the predominance of a mere
commercial spirit, and with it a debasing self-interest, cowardice, and effeminacy, and
tends to degrade the character of the nation."
Nor is war to be absolutely condemned. "Provided it is conducted with order
and a sacred respect for the rights of civilians," war itself, says Kant, "has
something sublime about it, and gives nations that carry it on in such a manner a stamp of
mind only the more sublime the more numerous the dangers to which they are exposed, and
which they are able to meet with fortitude." Yet even while thinking that war can be
a "spur for developing to the highest pitch all talents that minister to
culture," Kant reflects that the underlying purpose of war may be "to prepare
the way for a rule of law governing the freedom of states, and thus bring about their
unity in a system established on a moral basis."
Hegel alone is not ambivalent. Not only is war not "to be regarded as an absolute
evil," but it is, according to Hegel, a necessary corrective for the corrosive
influence of peace. "War is a state of affairs," he writes, "which deals in
earnest with the vanity of temporal goods and concerns--a vanity at other times the common
theme of edifying sermonizing .... War has the higher significance that by its agency, as
I have remarked elsewhere, 'the ethical health of peoples is preserved in their
indifference to the stabilization of finite institutions; just as the blowing of the winds
preserves the sea from foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm, so also the
corruption in nations would be the product of prolonged, let alone "perpetual,"
peace."'
Far from agreeing with those who advocate "perpetual peace . . . as an ideal towards
which humanity should strive," Hegel points out that "in peace civil life
continually expands; all its departments wall themselves in, and in the long run men
stagnate . . . . As a result of war, nations are strengthened, and people involved in
civil strife also acquire peace at home through making wars abroad."
To Prince Andrew in War and Peace who says that "the aim of war is murder;
the methods of war are spying, treachery, and their encouragement"; or to Freud who
says that
- "the warring state permits itself every such misdeed,
every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual man,"
Hegel has an answer. "States are not private persons," he says,
"but completely autonomous totalities in themselves, and so the relation between them
differs from a moral relation and a relation involving private rights .... The relation
between states is a relation between autonomous entities which make mutual stipulations,
but which at the same time are superior to these stipulations."
Self-interest, or "a will for its own welfare pure and simple," is, according to
Hegel, "the highest law governing the relation of one state to another."
Therefore, "when politics is alleged to clash with morals . . . the doctrine
propounded rests on superficial ideas about morality, the nature of the state, and the
state's relation to the moral point of view."
IN HEGEL'S VIEW, "wars occur when the necessity of the case requires." He is not
alone in thinking war inevitable, but others who think the same do not do so in the same
mood, or with the same opinion of the reason for its inevitability. "Drain the blood
from men's veins," declares Prince Andrew's father, "and put in water instead,
then there will be no more war!" It is an illusion, Freud thinks, to suppose that
civilization so transforms human nature as to lift it above the impulses of war.
- In war, he says, "our fellow-citizens have not sunk so
low as we feared, because they have never risen so high as we believed."
The sad fact, he concludes, is that "war is not to be abolished; so long as
the conditions of existence among the nations are so varied, and the repulsions between
peoples so intense, there will be, there must be, wars."
William James finds the human race as bellicose as its individual members are
instinctively pugnacious; and Alexander Hamilton says that if we "judge from the
history of mankind, we shall be compelled to conclude that the fiery and destructive
passions of war reign in the human breast with much more powerful sway than the mild and
beneficent sentiments of peace; and that to model our political systems upon speculations
of lasting tranquility, is to calculate on the weaker springs of human character."
To the extent that even those who deplore war despair of lasting peace, Machiavelli may
not be too cynical a realist when he advises the prince that he "ought to have no
other aim or thought, nor select anything else for his study, than war and its rules and
discipline .... When princes have thought more of ease than of arms, they have lost their
states." The prince "ought never, therefore, to have out of his thoughts this
subject of war, and in peace he should addict himself more to its exercise than in
war." The prince who delays in order to save himself from war makes a serious
mistake. War, Machiavelli tells him, "is not to be avoided, but is only deferred to
your disadvantage."
Like Machiavelli, Cleinias the Cretan in Plato's Laws justifies his city's
constant preoccupation with war or preparation for war.
The world is foolish, he thinks,
- "in not understanding that all men are always at war
with one another . ... For what men in general term peace [is] only a name; in reality
every city is in a natural state of war with every other, not indeed proclaimed by
heralds, but everlasting."
Both Plato and Aristotle seem to agree that war is somehow rooted in the nature of
things -- in the nature of men and the nature of cities. Yet both also look upon war as
transitory, even if recurrent. "No one can be a true statesman," the Athenian
Stranger tells Cleinias, "who looks only, or first of all, to external warfare; nor
will he ever be a sound legislator who orders peace for the sake of war, and not war for
the sake of peace." The whole of life, according to Aristotle, is "divided into
two parts, business and leisure, war and peace .... There must be war for the sake of
peace, business for the sake of leisure, things useful and necessary for the sake of
things honorable . . . . Men must be able to engage in business and go to war, but leisure
and peace are better; they must do what is necessary and indeed what is useful, but what
is honorable is better."
But how does war produce peace? One answer may be Tristram Shandy's, that "as war
begets poverty, poverty peace." Another may be Virgil's. In the opening book of his Aeneid,
Jove predicts the coming of a Caesar "destined to bound with ocean his domain, as
with the stars his glory." When at last Rome has conquered the world, the golden age
of peace--or at least the pax Romana--will supplant war's age of iron. "Then
war shall be laid aside, and the harsh world soften to peace . . . the accursed gates of
Battle shall be shut with iron bar and clenching bolt; and godless Frenzy shall sit within
upon the weapons of savagery."
In accordance with this heaven-laid destiny, Anchises bids his son Aeneas to make war for
the sake of peace. "Roman, be this thy care--these thine arts--to bear dominion over
the nations and to impose the law of peace, to spare the humbled and to war down the
proud!"
But some of the proud who are subjugated by Rome's legions take a different view
of the peace that is imposed by force of arms. Tacitus reports the speech of the British
chieftain Galgacus, in which he refers to those "terrible Romans, from whose
oppression escape is vainly sought by obedience and submission . . . To robbery,
slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they create a wilderness and call
it peace."
Augustine more soberly reflects on the inevitable frustration of the Roman kind of peace.
"The imperial city," he writes, "has endeavored to impose on subject
nations not only her yoke, but her language, as a bond of peace .... How many great wars,
how much slaughter and bloodshed, have provided this unity. And though these are past, the
end of these miseries has not yet come. For though there have never been wanting, nor are
yet wanting, hostile nations beyond the empire, against whom wars have been and are waged,
yet supposing there were no such nations, the very extent of the empire itself has
produced wars of a more obnoxious description--social and civil wars--and with these the
whole race has been agitated, either by the actual conflict or the fear of a renewed
outbreak."
DESPITE HIS PERCEPTION of war's failures, despite his enjoining the wise men, not merely
to wage, but "to lament the necessity of just wars," Augustine holds that it is
"with the desire for peace that wars are waged .... Every man seeks peace by waging
war, but no man seeks war by making peace. For even they who intentionally interrupt the
peace in which they are living have no hatred of peace, but only wish it changed into a
peace that suits them better... Even those whom they make war against they wish to make
their own, and impose on them the laws of their own peace."
Peace, according to Augustine, consists in harmony and concord. "Peace between man
and man is well-ordered concord. Domestic peace is the well-ordered concord between those
of the family who rule and those who obey. Civil peace is a similar concord among the
citizens .... The peace of all things is the tranquillity of order." Without
disagreeing essentially, Aquinas explains that peace involves more than concord.
"Wherever peace is," he says, "there is concord, but there is not peace
wherever there is concord, if we give peace its proper meaning." The peace between
men may consist in concord, "not indeed any kind of concord, but that which is
well-ordered, through one man agreeing with another in respect of something befitting to
them both. For if one man agree with another, not of his own accord, but through being
forced . . . such concord is not really peace."
- For men to be at peace with one another, Aquinas believes,
each must be at peace with himself, but "man's heart is not at peace, so long as he
has not what he wants, or if, having what he wants, there still remains something for him
to want."
This, according to Aquinas, explains why Augustine defined peace not simply as
concord, but as the tranquillity of order, for by "tranquillity" is meant all
the desires of each individual man "being set at rest together." It also
explains why "those who seek war and dissension, desire nothing but peace, which they
deem themselves not to have. For," Aquinas reminds us, "there is no peace when a
man enters into concord with another counter to what he would prefer. Consequently men
seek by means of war to break this concord, because it is a defective peace, in order that
they may obtain peace, where nothing is contrary to their will. Hence all wars are waged
that men may find a more perfect peace than that which they had heretofore."
The fundamental insight here seems to be that, though charity or love produces the unity
of peace, peace is also "the work of justice" -- indirectly, as Aquinas says,
"insofar as justice removes the obstacles to peace." Thucydides gives us an
historian's confirmation of the theologian's point. He tells us why he considers the long
truce or armistice--a period of no actual fighting--to be a part of the war. "Only a
mistaken judgment," he writes, "can object to including the interval of treaty
in the war. Looked at by the light of facts it cannot, it will be found, be rationally
considered a state of peace, where neither party either gave or got back all that they had
agreed upon."
To the same effect is the speech of Hermocrates the Syracusan, which Thucydides reports.
"That war is an evil is a proposition so familiar to everyone that it would be
tedious to develop it. No one," he declares, "is forced to engage in it by
ignorance, or kept out of it by fear, if he fancies there is anything to be gained by it .
. . I suppose that no one will dispute that we went to war at first, in order to serve our
several interests; that we are now, in view of the same interests, debating how we can
make peace; and that if we separate without having as we think our rights, we shall go to
war again."
THUCYDIDES' OBSERVATION THAT periods of armistice or truce are part of war, and the remark
of Cleinias in Plato's Laws that "every city is in a natural state of war
with every other," may anticipate Hobbes, but full clarity on the point is not
reached until Hobbes explicitly distinguishes between war as battle and the state of war
which always prevails between men or nations when they do not live together under a common
government.
"War consisteth not in battle only," Hobbes explains, "or in the act of
fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently
known; and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is
in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather lyeth not in a shower or two
of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together, so the nature of War
consisteth not in actual fighting but in the known disposition thereto, during
all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is Peace."
Hobbes does not exclude from the condition of peace differences between men or even
discord, but only fighting or the need to resort to fighting as a way of settling
differences or resolving conflicts. He is cognizant of the distinction which Machiavelli
paraphrases from Cicero. "There are two ways of contesting," Machiavelli writes,
"the one by law, the other by force; the first method is proper to men, the second to
beasts." Here Machiavelli adds the comment that "because the first is frequently
not sufficient, it is necessary to have recourse to the second." But Hobbes does not
think it is always necessary. At least there is a cure for "the war of every man
against every man."
- That cure is the formation of a commonwealth and the
institution of government with sufficient coercive force to maintain law and secure peace.
"Anarchy and the condition of war," according to Hobbes, are one and the
same, a condition in which each man, being a law unto himself and judge in his own case,
must of necessity resort to force if he would impose his will upon, or resist the will of,
another.
Since men are everywhere found in societies, living under law and government, it might
seem that the universal state of war to which Hobbes refers is now abolished.
Not so, according to Hobbes, for
- "though there had never been a time wherein particular
men were in a condition of war one against another; yet," in his opinion, "in
all times, kings and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in
continual jealousies, and in the state and posture of gladiators; having their weapons
pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns
upon the frontiers of their kingdoms, and continual spies upon their neighbors; which is a
posture of War."
This notion that sovereigns are always in a state of war with one another--because
being sovereigns they are autonomous, i.e., not subject to any superior government--seems
to be accepted by most of the great political writers who come after Hobbes. The point is
sometimes differently formulated, but the basic insight remains essentially the same.
Locke, for example, makes a threefold distinction between the state of nature, which is
anarchy or complete independence; the state of war, in which force without authority is
resorted to by men to settle their differences; and the state of civil society which
provides law and government for the arbitration of disputes.
- "Civil society," he writes, is "a state of
peace amongst those who are of it, from whom the state of war is excluded by the umpirage
which they have provided in their legislative for the ending all differences that may rise
amongst any of them."
Since Locke holds that "want of a common judge with authority puts all men in
a state of nature," it follows for him that, though the state of nature and the state
of war may not be identical, the state of nature, unlike that of civil society, inevitably
lapses into the state of war. If in a state of nature men fail to settle their differences
by reason, they enter into the state of war which is the realm of force "or a
declared design of force . . . where there is no common superior on earth to appeal to for
relief."
With these qualifications, Locke not only agrees with Hobbes that "all princes and
rulers of independent governments all through the world are in a state of nature,"
but also draws from this the same implication for war and peace. Since "the whole
community is one body in the state of nature in respect of .all other states or persons
out of its community," Locke argues that the government of each state must have
"the power of war and peace, leagues and alliances," in relation to everything
external to itself.
Montesquieu and Rousseau slightly alter Hobbes' point by attributing the origin of war
itself to the existence of separate societies. War, writes Rousseau, "is a relation,
not between man and man, but between State and State." Because they are "in a
state of nature among themselves," bodies politic experience, in his opinion,
"the inconveniences which had obliged individuals to forsake it . . . . Hence arose
national wars, battles; murders and reprisals, which shock nature and outrage
reason."
Hegel's ultimate reason for thinking that war is ineradicable seems to be not merely that
sovereign states are "in a state of nature in relation to each other," but that
they must always remain so. "There is no Praetor to judge between states," he
writes; "at best there may be an arbitrator or a mediator, and even he exercises his
functions contingently only, i.e., in dependence on the particular wills of the
disputants."
That is why Hegel dismisses Kant's idea "for securing 'perpetual peace' by a League
of Nations to adjust every dispute . . . . This idea," Hegel writes,
"presupposes an accord between states; this would rest on moral and religious or
other grounds and considerations, but in any case would always depend ultimately on a
particular sovereign will and for that reason would remain infected with
contingency." Hence, he concludes, "if states disagree and their particular
wills cannot be harmonized; the matter can only be settled by war."
KANT AGREES THAT, in the absence of what he calls a "cosmo-political
constitution" or world state, "war is inevitable." In their external
relations to one another, states, "like lawless savages, are naturally in a
non-juridical condition," and this, according to Kant, "is a state of war, in
which the right of the stronger prevails; and although it may not in fact be always found
as a state of actual war and incessant hostility . . . yet the condition is wrong in
itself in the highest degree, and the nations which form States contiguous to each other
are bound mutually to pass out of it."
How shall this be accomplished? Is Kant's idea the one Hegel attributes to him? Is the
"alliance of nations," of which he speaks, to be a "league of nations"
or does he have something more than that in mind when he says that "this mutual
connection by alliance" must "take the form of a Federation"?
On the one hand, he calls for "a universal Union of States analogous to that by which
a Nation becomes a State," and argues that "it is only thus that a real state of
Peace could be established." But on the other, he explains that he means "only a
voluntary combination of different States that would be dissoluble at any time, and not
such a union as is embodied in the United States of America, founded upon a political
constitution, and therefore indissoluble."
The arguments for the federal constitution of the United States help to make this issue
clear. The authors of the Constitution regard it as providing "a more perfect
union" than the Articles of Confederation under which the thirteen separate colonies
are banded together by little more than treaties or alliances. To the writers of The
Federalist, who advocate the adoption of a federal union to replace the loose
confederacy or league of states, there is no middle ground between the establishment of
peace through federal union and the continuation of the state of war between separate
states.
"A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations," Hamilton declares, "who
can seriously doubt that, if these States should either be wholly disunited, or only
united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would
have frequent and violent contests with each other .... To look for a continuation of
harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties in the same
neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of events, and to set at defiance
the accumulated experience of ages." In another paper, Hamilton admits that
"there is nothing absurd or impracticable in the idea of a league or alliance between
independent nations for certain defined purposes precisely stated in a
treaty," but he thinks that Europe has taught "an instructive but afflicting
lesson to mankind, how little dependence is to be placed on treaties which have no other
sanction than the obligations of good faith."
He returns therefore to attack the "visionary or designing men, who stand ready to
advocate the paradox of perpetual peace between the States, though dismembered and
alienated from each other." What reason have we to expect, he asks, "peace and
cordiality between the members of the present confederation, in a state of
separation"? It seems to him "an established truth that the several states, in
the case of disunion . . . would be subject to those vicissitudes of peace and war, of
friendship and enmity with each other, which have fallen to the lot of all neighboring
nations not united under one government."
The Federalists do not seriously recommend their prescription for peace as a plan for the
whole world. Yet they see the generalization that is implicit in all their reasoning.
"Happy would it be," Madison says, "if such a remedy for its infirmities
could be enjoyed by all free governments; if a project equally effectual could be
established for the universal peace of mankind!"
John Stuart Mill, writing somewhat later and in the light of the experience of American
federation as a peace plan, seems to be even less ready to propose world federal
government as the indispensable condition of world peace. He has no doubt that federal
union "puts an end to war and diplomatic quarrels." But he does not think that
abrogating the distinction between fellow countrymen and foreigners by making them all
fellow citizens of an encompassing state--an object which is "one of the worthiest to
which human endeavor can be directed"--can, "in the present state of
civilization, be promoted by keeping different nationalities of anything like equivalent
strength under the same government."
Not only does Kant definitely dismiss the notion of a world union formed along American
lines, but even that less perfect union of states which would have the form of a
"Permanent Congress of Nations," seems to him an impractical idea in the world
as it is at the end of the eighteenth century. "With the too great extension of such
a Union of States over vast regions," he writes, "and government of it, and
consequently the protection of its individual members, must at last become impossible; and
thus a multitude of such corporations would again bring round a state of war."
Nevertheless, Kant refuses to yield completely to this conclusion. "The morally
practical reason," he affirms, "utters within us its irrevocable Veto: 'There
shall be no War' . . . Hence the question no longer is as to whether Perpetual Peace is a
real thing or not a real thing, or as to whether we may not be deceiving ourselves when we
adopt the former alternative, but we must act on the supposition of its being real. We
must work for what may perhaps not be realized . . . and thus we may put an end to the
evil of wars, which have been the chief interest of the internal arrangements of all
States without exception."
And in his Idea of a Universal History on a Cosmo-Political Plan, Kant does more
than urge upon us our moral duty to work for perpetual peace as prerequisite to "the
highest political good." He engages in prophecy. He pictures the nations of the world
"after many devastations, overthrows, and even complete internal exhaustion of their
powers" as "driven forward to the goal which Reason might well have impressed
upon them, even without so much sad experience. This is none other than the advance out of
the lawless state of savages and the entering into a Federation of Nations . . . . However
visionary this idea may appear to be . . . it is nevertheless the inevitable issue of the
necessity in which men involve one another."
THE ARGUMENT FOR WORLD GOVERNMENT as the means to world peace is nowhere made in the great
books as explicitly as in Dante's De Monarchia. "Wherever there can be
contention," Dante writes, "there judgment should exist; otherwise things should
exist imperfectly, without their own means of adjustment or correction ... Between any two
governments, neither of which is in any way subordinate to the other, contention can arise
either through their own fault or that of their subjects. This is evident. Therefore there
should be judication between them. And since neither can know the affairs of the other,
not being subordinate (for among equals there is no authority), there must be a third and
wider power which rules both within its own jurisdiction.
"This third power," Dante continues,"is either the world-government, or it
is not. If it is, we have reached our conclusion; if it is not, it must in turn have its
equal outside its jurisdiction, and then it will need a third party as a judge, and so ad
infinitum, which is impossible. So we must arrive at a first and supreme judge for
whom all contentions are judicable either directly or indirectly . ... Therefore,
world-government is necessary for the world."
Aristotle, according to Dante, "saw this argument when he said, 'Things hate
to be in disorder, but a plurality of authorities is disorder; therefore authority is
single.'" But Aristotle certainly did not draw the conclusion that a single
government embracing all mankind should be instituted so that "by common law it might
lead all toward peace." Nor, with the exception of Kant, does any other great author
argue to this conclusion. But, as we have seen, Kant, unlike Dante, reaches this
conclusion only to qualify his acceptance of it and his advocacy of world government.
Nevertheless, several of the great books do contain the nerve of the argument. It is
contained in one fundamental proposition that is variously enunciated by Hobbes and Locke,
Rousseau and the Federalists.
That proposition is:
- As anarchy leads to war, government establishes peace, and
just laws preserve it. By inductive generalization, it seems to follow that, if local
peace depends on local government, world peace depends on world government.
But if, except for Dante and Kant, no one until the present made this inference,
the tradition of western thought does include, not only the essential premise for making
the inference, but also the controlling vision of a politically united humanity--all men
as fellow citizens in a single political society embracing the earth.
Kant speaks of "the right of man as a citizen of the world to attempt to enter into
communion with all others." Epictetus says, "there is but one course open to
men, to do as Socrates did: never to reply to one who asks his country, 'I am an
Athenian,' or 'I am a Corinthian,' but 'I am a citizen of the universe."'
Reflecting on the fact that man's "nature is rational and social," Marcus
Aurelius declares: "My city and my country, so far as I am Antoninus, is Rome, but so
far as I am a man, it is the world." If we look at "what value everything has
with reference to the whole," we will perceive that man "is a citizen of the
highest city, of which all other cities are like families." The reason which is
common to all men dictates a common law of human life. "If this is so," Aurelius
argues, "we are fellow citizens; if this is so, we are members of one political
community; if this is so, the world is in a manner a state."
Aristotle describes how the family is formed by the union of man and wife, parents and
children; and from this first of all social units, the tribe or village is formed by a
union of families, and the city or state by a union of villages. He does not carry this
series on to its natural terminus, but Augustine does. "After the state or
city," Augustine says, "comes the world, the third circle of human society--the
first being the family, the second the city."
Yet Augustine, who orders earthly peace to the peace of heaven, does not prophesy a single
political community of all men living together under one government. The heavenly city, he
says, "while it sojourns on earth, calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers
together a society of pilgrims of all languages, not scrupling about diversities in the
manners, laws, and institutions whereby earthly peace is secured and maintained, but
recognizing that, however various these are, they all tend to one and the same end of
earthly peace."
One and the same end of earthly peace may require one city of man as well as one city of
God. That, according to Dostoevsky, seems to be implied in the fact that "the craving
for universal unity is the third and last anguish of men. Mankind as a whole," he
writes, "has always striven to organize a universal state. There have been many great
nations with great histories, but the more highly developed the more unhappy they were,
for they felt more acutely than other people the craving for world-wide union."
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