---
type: article
status: Published
slug: "kant-perpetual-peace"
title: "Toward Perpetual Peace"
author: "Immanuel Kant"
tradition: "european"
language: "de"
genre: "political philosophy"
period: "1796"
source_url: "https://archive.org/details/10042445bsb"
certainty: observed
source: "https://archive.org/details/10042445bsb"
---
# Toward Perpetual Peace

## Original

### Title and preface

Zum ewigen Frieden.

Ein philosophischer Entwurf von Immanuel Kant.

Neue vermehrte Auflage.

Königsberg, bey Friedrich Nicolovius. 1796.

Zum ewigen Frieden.

Ob diese satyrische Ueberschrift auf dem Schilde jenes holländischen Gastwirths, worauf ein Kirchhof gemahlt war, die *Menschen* überhaupt, oder besonders die Staatsoberhäupter, die des Krieges nie satt werden können, oder wohl gar nur die Philosophen gelte, die jenen süßen Traum träumen, mag dahin gestellt seyn. Das bedingt sich aber der Verfasser des Gegenwärtigen aus, daß, da der praktische Politiker mit dem theoretischen auf dem Fuß steht, mit großer Selbstgefälligkeit auf ihn als einen Schulweisen herabzusehen, der dem Staat, welcher von Erfahrungsgrundsätzen ausgehen müsse, mit seinen sachleeren Ideen keine Gefahr bringe, und den man immer seine eilf Kegel auf einmal werfen lassen kann, ohne, daß sich der *weltkundige* Staatsmann daran kehren darf, dieser auch, im Fall eines Streits mit jenem sofern consequent verfahren müsse, hinter seinen auf gut Glück gewagten, und öffentlich geäusserten Meynungen nicht Gefahr für den Staat zu wittern; — durch welche *Clausula salvatoria* der Verfasser dieses sich dann hiemit in der besten Form wider alle bösliche Auslegung ausdrücklich verwahrt wissen will.

### Preliminary articles

Erster Abschnitt,

welcher die Präliminarartikel zum ewigen Frieden unter Staaten enthält.

1. „Es soll kein Friedensschluß für einen solchen gelten, der mit dem geheimen Vorbehalt des Stoffs zu einem künftigen Kriege gemacht worden.“

Denn alsdenn wäre er ja ein bloßer Waffenstillstand, Aufschub der Feindseligkeiten, nicht *Friede*, der das Ende aller Hostilitäten bedeutet, und dem das Beywort *ewig* anzuhängen ein schon verdächtiger Pleonasm ist. Die vorhandene, obgleich jetzt vielleicht den Paciscirenden selbst noch nicht bekannte, Ursachen zum künftigen Kriege sind durch den Friedensschluß insgesammt vernichtet, sie mögen auch aus archivarischen Dokumenten mit noch so scharfsichtiger Ausspähungsgeschicklichkeit ausgeklaubt seyn. — Der Vorbehalt (*reseruatio mentalis*) alter allererst künftig auszudenkender Prätensionen, deren kein Theil für jetzt Erwähnung thun mag, weil beyde zu sehr erschöpft sind, den Krieg fortzusetzen, bey dem bösen Willen, die erste günstige Gelegenheit zu diesem Zweck zu benutzen, gehört zur Jesuitencasuistik, und ist unter der Würde der Regenten, so wie die Willfährigkeit zu dergleichen Deduktionen unter der Würde eines Ministers desselben, wenn man die Sache, wie sie an sich selbst ist beurtheilt. —

Wenn aber, nach aufgeklärten Begriffen der Staatsklugheit, in beständiger Vergrößerung der Macht, durch welche Mittel es auch sey, die wahre Ehre des Staats gesetzt wird, so fällt freylich jenes Urtheil als schulmäßig und pedantisch in die Augen.

2. „Es soll kein für sich bestehender Staat (klein oder groß, das gilt hier gleichviel) von einem andern Staate durch Erbung, Tausch, Kauf oder Schenkung, erworben werden können.“

Ein Staat ist nämlich nicht (wie etwa der Boden, auf dem er seinen Sitz hat) eine Haabe (*patrimonium*). Er ist eine Gesellschaft von Menschen, über die Niemand anders, als er selbst, zu gebieten und zu disponiren hat. Ihn aber, der selbst als Stamm seine eigene Wurzel hatte, als Pfropfreis einem andern Staate einzuverleiben, heißt seine Existenz, als einer moralischen Person, aufheben, und aus der letzteren eine Sache machen, und widerspricht also der Idee des ursprünglichen Vertrags, ohne die sich kein Recht über ein Volk denken läßt[1]. In welche Gefahr das Vorurtheil dieser Erwerbungsart Europa, denn die andern Welttheile haben nie davon gewußt, in unsern bis auf die neuesten Zeiten gebracht habe, daß sich nämlich auch Staaten einander heyrathen könnten, ist jedermann bekannt, theils als eine neue Art von Industrie, sich auch ohne Aufwand von Kräften durch Familienbündnisse übermächtig zu machen, theils auch auf solche Art den Länderbesitz zu erweitern. — Auch die Verdingung der Truppen eines Staats an einen andern, gegen einen nicht gemeinschaftlichen Feind, ist dahin zu zählen; denn die Unterthanen werden dabey als nach Belieben zu handhabende Sachen gebraucht und verbraucht.

3. „Stehende Heere (*miles perpetuus*) sollen mit der Zeit ganz aufhören.“

Denn sie bedrohen andere Staaten unaufhörlich mit Krieg, durch die Bereitschaft, immer dazu gerüstet zu erscheinen; reitzen diese an, sich einander in Menge der gerüsteten, die keine Grenzen kennt, zu übertreffen, und, indem durch die darauf verwandten Kosten der Friede endlich noch drückender wird als ein kurzer Krieg, so sind sie selbst Ursache von Angriffskriegen, um diese Last loszuwerden; wozu kommt, daß zum Tödten, oder getödtet zu werden in Sold genommen zu seyn, einen Gebrauch von Menschen als bloßen Maschinen und Werkzeugen in der Hand eines Andern (des Staats) zu enthalten scheint, der sich nicht wohl mit dem Rechte der Menschheit in unserer eigenen Person vereinigen läßt. Ganz anders ist es mit der freywilligen periodisch vorgenommenen Uebung der Staatsbürger in Waffen bewandt, sich und ihr Vaterland dadurch gegen Angriffe von außen zu sichern. — Mit der Anhäufung eines Schatzes würde es eben so gehen, daß er, von andern Staaten als Bedrohung mit Krieg angesehen, zu zuvorkommenden Angriffen nöthigte (weil unter den drey Mächten, der *Heeresmacht*, der *Bundesmacht* und der *Geldmacht*, die letztere wohl das zuverläßigste Kriegswerkzeug seyn dürfte; wenn nicht die Schwierigkeit, die Größe desselben zu erforschen, dem entgegenstände).

4. „Es sollen keine Staatsschulden in Beziehung auf äußere Staatshändel gemacht werden.“

Zum Behuf der Landesökonomie (der Wegebesserung, neuer Ansiedelungen, Anschaffung der Magazine für besorgliche Mißwachsjahre u. s. w.), außerhalb oder innerhalb dem Staate Hülfe zu suchen, ist diese Hülfsquelle unverdächtig. Aber, als entgegenwirkende Maschine der Mächte gegen einander, ist ein Creditsystem ins Unabsehliche anwachsender und doch immer für die gegenwärtige Forderung (weil sie doch nicht von allen Gläubigern auf einmal geschehen wird) gesicherter Schulden, — die sinnreiche Erfindung eines handeltreibenden Volks in diesem Jahrhundert —, eine gefährliche Geldmacht, nämlich ein Schatz zum Kriegführen, der die Schätze aller andern Staaten zusammengenommen übertrifft, und nur durch den einmal bevorstehenden Ausfall der Taxen (der doch auch durch die Belebung des Verkehrs, vermittelst der Rückwirkung auf Industrie und Erwerb, noch lange hingehalten wird) erschöpft werden kann. Diese Leichtigkeit Krieg zu führen, mit der Neigung der Machthabenden dazu, welche der menschlichen Natur eingeartet zu seyn scheint, verbunden, ist also ein großes Hinderniß des ewigen Friedens, welches zu verbieten um desto mehr ein Präliminarartikel desselben seyn müßte, weil der endlich doch unvermeidliche Staatsbankerott manche andere Staaten unverschuldet in den Schaden mit verwickeln muß, welches eine öffentliche Läsion der letzteren seyn würde. Mithin sind wenigstens andere Staaten berechtigt, sich gegen einen solchen und dessen Anmaßungen zu verbünden.

5. „Kein Staat soll sich in die Verfassung und Regierung eines andern Staats gewaltthätig einmischen.“

Denn was kann ihn dazu berechtigen? Etwa das Skandal, was er den Unterthanen eines andern Staats giebt? Es kann dieser vielmehr, durch das Beyspiel der großen Uebel, die sich ein Volk durch seine Gesetzlosigkeit zugezogen hat, zur Warnung dienen; und überhaupt ist das böse Beyspiel, was eine freye Person der andern giebt, (als *scandalum acceptum*) keine Läsion derselben. — Dahin würde zwar nicht zu ziehen seyn, wenn ein Staat sich durch innere Veruneinigung in zwey Theile spaltete, deren jeder für sich einen besondern Staat vorstellt, der auf das Ganze Anspruch macht; wo einem derselben Beystand zu leisten einem äußern Staat nicht für Einmischung in die Verfassung des andern (denn es ist alsdann Anarchie) angerechnet werden könnte. So lange aber dieser innere Streit noch nicht entschieden ist, würde diese Einmischung äußerer Mächte Verletzung der Rechte eines nur mit seiner innern Krankheit ringenden, von keinem andern abhängigen Volks, selbst also ein gegebenes Skandal seyn, und die Autonomie aller Staaten unsicher machen.

6. „Es soll sich kein Staat im Kriege mit einem andern solche Feindseligkeiten erlauben, welche das wechselseitige Zutrauen im künftigen Frieden unmöglich machen müssen: als da sind, Anstellung der *Meuchelmörder* (*percussores*), *Giftmischer* (*venefici*), *Brechung der Capitulation*, *Anstiftung des Verraths* (*perduellio*), in dem bekriegten Staat &c.“

Das sind ehrlose Stratagemen. Denn irgend ein Vertrauen auf die Denkungsart des Feindes muß mitten im Kriege noch übrig bleiben, weil sonst auch kein Friede abgeschlossen werden könnte, und die Feindseligkeit in einen Ausrottungskrieg (*bellum internecinum*) ausschlagen würde; da der Krieg doch nur das traurige Nothmittel im Naturzustande ist, (wo kein Gerichtshof vorhanden ist, der rechtskräftig urtheilen könnte) durch Gewalt sein Recht zu behaupten; wo keiner von beyden Theilen für einen ungerechten Feind erklärt werden kann (weil das schon einen Richterausspruch voraussetzt), sondern der *Ausschlag* desselben (gleich als vor einem so genannten Gottesgerichte) entscheidet, auf wessen Seite das Recht ist; zwischen Staaten aber sich kein Bestrafungskrieg (*bellum punitiuum*) denken läßt (weil zwischen ihnen kein Verhältniß eines Obern zu einem Untergebenen statt findet). — Woraus denn folgt: daß ein Ausrottungskrieg, wo die Vertilgung beyde Theile zugleich, und mit dieser auch alles Rechts treffen kann, den ewigen Frieden nur auf dem großen Kirchhofe der Menschengattung statt finden lassen würde. Ein solcher Krieg also, mithin auch der Gebrauch der Mittel, die dahin führen, muß schlechterdings unerlaubt seyn. — Daß aber die genannte Mittel unvermeidlich dahin führen, erhellet daraus: daß jene höllische Künste, da sie an sich selbst niederträchtig sind, wenn sie in Gebrauch gekommen, sich nicht lange innerhalb der Grenze des Krieges halten, wie etwa der Gebrauch der Spione (*vti exploratoribus*), wo nur die Ehrlosigkeit *Anderer* (die nun einmal nicht ausgerottet werden kann) benutzt wird, sondern auch in den Friedenszustand übergehen, und so die Absicht desselben gänzlich vernichten würden.

Obgleich die angeführte Gesetze objectiv, d. i. in der Intention der Machthabenden, lauter *Verbotgesetze* (*leges prohibitiuae*) sind, so sind doch einige derselben von der *strengen*, ohne Unterschied der Umstände geltenden Art (*leges strictae*), die *so fort* auf Abschaffung dringen (wie Nr. 1, 5, 6), andere aber (wie Nr. 2, 3, 4), die zwar nicht als Ausnahmen von der Rechtsregel, aber doch in Rücksicht auf die *Ausübung* derselben, durch die Umstände, *subjektiv* für die Befugniß erweiternd (*leges latae*), und Erlaubnisse enthalten, die Vollführung *aufzuschieben*, ohne doch den Zweck aus den Augen zu verlieren, der diesen Aufschub, z. B. der *Wiedererstattung* der gewissen Staaten, nach Nr. 2, entzogenen Freyheit, nicht auf den Nimmertag (wie August zu versprechen pflegte, *ad calendas graecas*) auszusetzen, mithin die Nichterstattung, sondern nur, damit sie nicht übereilt und so der Absicht selbst zuwider geschehe, die Verzögerung erlaubt. Denn das Verbot betrifft hier nur die *Erwerbungsart*, die fernerhin nicht gelten soll, aber nicht den *Besitzstand*, der, ob er zwar nicht den erforderlichen Rechtstitel hat, doch zu seiner Zeit (der putativen Erwerbung), nach der damaligen öffentlichen Meynung, von allen Staaten für rechtmäßig gehalten wurde[2].

[1] Ein Erbreich ist nicht ein Staat, der von einem andern Staate, sondern dessen Recht zu regieren an eine andere physische Person vererbt werden kann. Der Staat erwirbt alsdann einen Regenten, nicht dieser als ein solcher (d. i. der schon ein anderes Reich besitzt) den Staat.

[2] Ob es außer dem Gebot (*leges praeceptiuae*), und Verbot (*leges prohibitiuae*), noch *Erlaubnißgesetze* (*leges permissiuae*) der reinen Vernunft geben könne, ist bisher nicht ohne Grund bezweifelt worden. Denn Gesetze überhaupt enthalten einen Grund objektiver praktischer Nothwendigkeit, Erlaubniß aber einen der praktischen Zufälligkeit gewisser Handlungen; mithin würde ein *Erlaubnißgesetz* Nöthigung zu einer Handlung, zu dem, wozu jemand nicht genöthiget werden kann, enthalten, welches, wenn das Objekt des Gesetzes in beyderley Beziehung einerley Bedeutung hätte, ein Widerspruch seyn würde. — Nun geht aber hier im Erlaubnißgesetze das vorausgesetzte Verbot nur auf die künftige Erwerbungsart eines Rechts (z. B. durch Erbschaft), die Befreyung aber von diesem Verbot, d. i. die Erlaubniß, auf den gegenwärtigen Besitzstand, welcher letztere, im Ueberschritt aus dem Naturzustande in den bürgerlichen, als ein, obwohl unrechtmäßiger, dennoch *ehrlicher, Besitz* (*possessio putatiua*) nach einem Erlaubnißgesetze des Naturrechts noch fernerhin fortdauern kann, obgleich ein putativer Besitz, so bald er als ein solcher erkannt worden, im Naturzustande, imgleichen eine ähnliche Erwerbungsart im nachmaligen bürgerlichen (nach geschehenem Ueberschritt) verboten ist, welche Befugniß des fortdauernden Besitzes nicht statt finden würde, wenn eine solche vermeintliche Erwerbung im bürgerlichen Zustande geschehen wäre; denn da würde er, als Läsion, sofort nach Entdeckung seiner Unrechtmäßigkeit aufhören müssen.

Ich habe hiemit nur beyläufig die Lehrer des Naturrechts auf den Begriff einer *lex permissiua*, welcher sich einer systematisch-eintheilenden Vernunft von selbst darbietet, aufmerksam machen wollen; vornehmlich, da im Civilgesetze (statuarischen) öfters davon Gebrauch gemacht wird, nur mit dem Unterschiede, daß das Verbotgesetz für sich allein dasteht, die Erlaubniß aber nicht als einschränkende Bedingung (wie es sollte) in jenes Gesetz mit hinein gebracht, sondern unter die Ausnahmen geworfen wird. — Da heißt es dann: dies oder jenes wird verboten: *es sey denn* Nr. 1, Nr. 2, Nr. 3, und so weiter ins Unabsehliche, die Erlaubnisse nur zufälliger Weise, nicht nach einem Princip, sondern durch Herumtappen unter vorkommenden Fällen, zum Gesetz hinzukommen; denn sonst hätten die Bedingungen *in die Formel des Verbotsgesetzes* mit hineingebracht werden müssen, wodurch es dann zugleich ein Erlaubnißgesetz geworden wäre. — Es ist daher zu bedauern, daß die sinnreiche, aber unaufgelöst gebliebene, Preisaufgabe des eben so weisen als scharfsinnigen Herrn *Grafen von Windischgrätz*, welche gerade auf das letztere drang, sobald verlassen worden. Denn die Möglichkeit einer solchen (der mathematischen ähnlichen) Formel ist der einzige ächte Probierstein einer consequent bleibenden Gesetzgebung, ohne welche das so genannte *ius certum* immer ein frommer Wunsch bleiben wird. — Sonst wird man bloß *generale* Gesetze (die im *Allgemeinen* gelten), aber keine universale (die *allgemein* gelten) haben, wie es doch der Begriff eines Gesetzes zu erfordern scheint.

### Definitive articles: introduction

Zweyter Abschnitt,

welcher die Definitivartikel zum ewigen Frieden unter Staaten enthält.

Der Friedenszustand unter Menschen, die neben einander leben, ist kein Naturstand (*status naturalis*), der vielmehr ein Zustand des Krieges ist, d. i. wenn gleich nicht immer ein Ausbruch der Feindseligkeiten, doch immerwährende Bedrohung mit denselben. Er muß also *gestiftet* werden; denn die Unterlassung der letzteren ist noch nicht Sicherheit dafür, und, ohne daß sie einem Nachbar von dem andern geleistet wird (welches aber nur in einem *gesetzlichen* Zustande geschehen kann), kann jener diesen, welchen er dazu aufgefordert hat, als einen Feind behandeln[3].

[3] Gemeiniglich nimmt man an, daß man gegen Niemand feindlich verfahren dürfe, als nur, wenn er mich schon thätig *lädirt hat*, und das ist auch ganz richtig, wenn beyde im *bürgerlich-gesetzlichen* Zustande sind. Denn dadurch, daß dieser in denselben getreten ist, leistet er jenem (vermittelst der Obrigkeit, welche über Beyde Gewalt hat) die erforderliche Sicherheit. — Der Mensch aber (oder das Volk) im bloßen Naturstande benimmt mir diese Sicherheit, und lädirt mich schon durch eben diesen Zustand, indem er neben mir ist, obgleich nicht thätig (*facto*), doch durch die Gesetzlosigkeit seines Zustandes (*statu iniusto*), wodurch ich beständig von ihm bedrohet werde, und ich kann ihn nöthigen, entweder mit mir in einen gemeinschaftlich-gesetzlichen Zustand zu treten, oder aus meiner Nachbarschaft zu weichen. — Das Postulat also, was allen folgenden Artikeln zum Grunde liegt, ist: Alle Menschen, die auf einander wechselseitig einfließen können, müssen zu irgend einer bürgerlichen Verfassung gehören.

Alle rechtliche Verfassung aber ist, was die Personen betrifft, die darin stehen,

1) die nach dem *Staatsbürgerrecht* der Menschen, in einem Volk (*ius ciuitatis*),

2) nach dem *Völkerrecht* der Staaten in Verhältnis gegen einander (*ius gentium*),

3) die nach dem *Weltbürgerrecht*, so fern Menschen und Staaten, in äußerem auf einander einfließendem Verhältnis stehend, als Bürger eines allgemeinen Menschenstaats anzusehen sind (*ius cosmopoliticum*). Diese Eintheilung ist nicht willkührlich, sondern nothwendig in Beziehung auf die Idee vom ewigen Frieden. Denn wenn nur einer von diesen im Verhältnisse des physischen Einflusses auf den andern, und doch im Naturstande wäre, so würde damit der Zustand des Krieges verbunden seyn, von dem befreyet zu werden hier eben die Absicht ist.

### First definitive article

Erster Definitivartikel zum ewigen Frieden.

Die bürgerliche Verfassung in jedem Staate soll republikanisch seyn.

Die erstlich nach Principien der *Freyheit* der Glieder einer Gesellschaft (als Menschen); zweytens nach Grundsätzen der *Abhängigkeit* aller von einer einzigen gemeinsamen Gesetzgebung (als Unterthanen); und drittens, die nach dem Gesetz der *Gleichheit* derselben (*als Staatsbürger*) gestiftete Verfassung — die einzige, welche aus der Idee des ursprünglichen Vertrags hervorgeht, auf der alle rechtliche Gesetzgebung eines Volks gegründet seyn muß — ist die *republikanische*[4]. Diese ist also, was das Recht betrifft, an sich selbst diejenige, welche allen Arten der bürgerlichen Constitution ursprünglich zum Grunde liegt; und nun ist nur die Frage: ob sie auch die einzige ist, die zum ewigen Frieden hinführen kann?

Nun hat aber die republikanische Verfassung, außer der Lauterkeit ihres Ursprungs, aus dem reinen Quell des Rechtsbegriffs entsprungen zu seyn, noch die Aussicht in die gewünschte Folge, nämlich den ewigen Frieden; wovon der Grund dieser ist. — Wenn (wie es in dieser Verfassung nicht anders seyn kann) die Beystimmung der Staatsbürger dazu erfordert wird, um zu beschließen, „ob Krieg seyn solle, oder nicht,“ so ist nichts natürlicher, als daß, da sie alle Drangsale des Krieges über sich selbst beschließen müßten (als da sind: selbst zu fechten; die Kosten des Krieges aus ihrer eigenen Haabe herzugeben; die Verwüstung, die er hinter sich läßt, kümmerlich zu verbessern; zum Uebermaße des Uebels endlich noch eine, den Frieden selbst verbitternde, nie (wegen naher immer neuer Kriege) zu tilgende Schuldenlast selbst zu übernehmen), sie sich sehr bedenken werden, ein so schlimmes Spiel anzufangen: Da hingegen in einer Verfassung, wo der Unterthan nicht Staatsbürger, die also nicht republikanisch ist, es die unbedenklichste Sache von der Welt ist, weil das Oberhaupt nicht Staatsgenosse, sondern Staatseigenthümer ist, an seinen Tafeln, Jagden, Lustschlössern, Hoffesten u. d. gl. durch den Krieg nicht das Mindeste einbüßt, diesen also wie eine Art von Lustparthie aus unbedeutenden Ursachen beschließen, und der Anständigkeit wegen dem dazu allezeit fertigen diplomatischen Corps die Rechtfertigung desselben gleichgültig überlassen kann.

Damit man die republikanische Verfassung nicht (wie gemeiniglich geschieht) mit der demokratischen verwechsele, muß Folgendes bemerkt werden. Die Formen eines Staats (*ciuitas*) können entweder nach dem Unterschiede der Personen, welche die oberste Staatsgewalt inne haben, oder nach der *Regierungsart* des Volks durch sein Oberhaupt, er mag seyn welcher er wolle, eingetheilt werden; die erste heißt eigentlich die Form der *Beherrschung* (*forma imperii*), und es sind nur drey derselben möglich, wo nämlich entweder nur *Einer*, oder *Einige* unter sich verbunden, oder *Alle* zusammen, welche die bürgerliche Gesellschaft ausmachen, die Herrschergewalt besitzen (*Autokratie*, *Aristokratie* und *Demokratie*, Fürstengewalt, Adelsgewalt und Volksgewalt). Die zweyte ist die Form der Regierung (*forma regiminis*), und betrifft die auf die Constitution (den Akt des allgemeinen Willens, wodurch die Menge ein Volk wird) gegründete Art, wie der Staat von seiner Machtvollkommenheit Gebrauch macht: und ist in dieser Beziehung entweder *republikanisch* oder *despotisch*. Der *Republikanism* ist das Staatsprincip der Absonderung der ausführenden Gewalt (der Regierung) von der Gesetzgebenden; der Despotism ist das der eigenmächtigen Vollziehung des Staats von Gesetzen, die er selbst gegeben hat, mithin der öffentliche Wille, sofern er von dem Regenten als sein Privatwille gehandhabt wird. — Unter den drey Staatsformen ist die der *Demokratie*, im eigentlichen Verstande des Worts, nothwendig ein *Despotism*, weil sie eine exekutive Gewalt gründet, da alle über und allenfalls auch wider Einen (der also nicht mit einstimmt), mithin Alle, die doch nicht Alle sind, beschließen; welches ein Widerspruch des allgemeinen Willens mit sich selbst und mit der Freyheit ist.

Alle Regierungsform nämlich, die nicht *repräsentativ* ist, ist eigentlich eine *Unform*, weil der Gesetzgeber in einer und derselben Person zugleich Vollstrecker seines Willens (so wenig, wie das Allgemeine des Obersatzes in einem Vernunftschlusse zugleich die Subsumtion des Besondern unter jenem im Untersatze) seyn kann, und, wenn gleich die zwey andern Staatsverfassungen so fern immer fehlerhaft sind, daß sie einer solchen Regierungsart Raum geben, so ist es bey ihnen doch wenigstens möglich, daß sie eine dem *Geiste* eines repräsentativen Systems gemäße Regierungsart annähmen, wie etwa Friedrich II. wenigstens *sagte*: er sey bloß der oberste Diener des Staats[5], da hingegen die demokratische es unmöglich macht, weil Alles da Herr seyn will. — Man kann daher sagen: je kleiner das Personale der Staatsgewalt (die Zahl der Herrscher), je größer dagegen die Repräsentation derselben, desto mehr stimmt die Staatsverfassung zur Möglichkeit des Republikanism, und sie kann hoffen, durch allmähliche Reformen sich dazu endlich zu erheben. Aus diesem Grunde ist es in der Aristokratie schon schwerer, als in der Monarchie, in der Demokratie aber unmöglich anders, als durch gewaltsame Revolution zu dieser einzigen vollkommen rechtlichen Verfassung zu gelangen. Es ist aber an der Regierungsart[6] dem Volk ohne alle Vergleichung mehr gelegen, als an der Staatsform (wiewohl auch auf dieser ihre mehrere oder mindere Angemessenheit zu jenem Zwecke sehr viel ankommt). Zu jener aber, wenn sie dem Rechtsbegriffe gemäß seyn soll, gehört das repräsentative System, in welchem allein eine republikanische Regierungsart möglich, ohne welches sie (die Verfassung mag seyn welche sie wolle) despotisch und gewaltthätig ist. — Keine der alten so genannten Republiken hat dieses gekannt, und sie mußten sich darüber auch schlechterdings in den Despotism auflösen, der unter der Obergewalt eines Einzigen noch der erträglichste unter allen ist.

[4] *Rechtliche* (mithin äußere) *Freyheit* kann nicht, wie man wohl zu thun pflegt, durch die Befugniß definirt werden: „alles zu thun, was man will, wenn man nur Keinem Unrecht thut.“ Denn was heißt *Befugniß*? Die Möglichkeit einer Handlung, so fern man dadurch Keinem Unrecht thut. Also würde die Erklärung so lauten: „Freyheit ist die Möglichkeit der Handlungen, dadurch man keinem Unrecht thut (man mag auch thun, was man will), wenn man nur Keinem Unrecht thut:“ folglich ist es leere Tautologie. — Vielmehr ist meine äußere (rechtliche) *Freyheit* so zu erklären: sie ist die Befugniß, keinen äußeren Gesetzen zu gehorchen, als zu denen ich meine Beystimmung habe geben können. — Eben so ist äußere (rechtliche) *Gleichheit* in einem Staate dasjenige Verhältniß der Staatsbürger, nach welchem Keiner den andern wozu rechtlich verbinden kann, ohne daß er sich zugleich dem Gesetz unterwirft, von diesem wechselseitig auf dieselbe Art auch verbunden werden zu *können*. (Vom Princip der *rechtlichen* Abhängigkeit, da dieses schon in dem Begriffe einer Staatsverfassung überhaupt liegt, bedarf es keiner Erklärung). — Die Gültigkeit dieser angebohrnen, zur Menschheit nothwendig gehörenden und unveräußerlichen Rechte wird durch das Princip der rechtlichen Verhältnisse des Menschen selbst zu höheren Wesen (wenn er sich solche denkt) bestätigt und erhoben, indem er sich nach eben denselben Grundsätzen auch als Staatsbürger einer übersinnlichen Welt vorstellt. — Denn, was meine Freyheit betrifft, so habe ich, selbst in Ansehung der göttlichen, von mir durch bloße Vernunft erkennbaren Gesetze, keine Verbindlichkeit, als nur so fern ich dazu selber habe meine Beystimmung geben können (denn durchs Freyheitsgesetz meiner eigenen Vernunft mache ich mir allererst einen Begriff vom göttlichen Willen). Was in Ansehung des erhabensten Weltwesens außer Gott, welches ich mir etwa denken möchte (einen großen *Aeon*), das Princip der *Gleichheit* betrifft, so ist kein Grund da, warum ich, wenn ich in meinem Posten meine Pflicht thue, wie jener Aeon es in dem seinigen, mir bloß die Pflicht zu gehorchen, jenem aber das Recht zu befehlen zukommen solle. — Daß dieses Princip der *Gleichheit* nicht (so wie das der Freyheit) auch auf das Verhältnis zu Gott paßt, davon ist der Grund dieser, weil dieses Wesen das einzige ist, bey dem der Pflichtbegriff aufhört.

Was aber das Recht der Gleichheit aller Staatsbürger, als Unterthanen, betrifft, so kommt es in Beantwortung der Frage von der Zuläßigkeit des *Erbadels* allein darauf an: „ob der vom Staat zugestandene *Rang* (eines Unterthans vor dem andern) vor dem *Verdienst*, oder dieses vor jenem vorhergehen müsse.“ — Nun ist offenbar: daß, wenn der Rang mit der Geburt verbunden wird, es ganz ungewiß ist, ob das Verdienst (Amtsgeschicklichkeit und Amtstreue) auch folgen werde; mithin ist es eben so viel, als ob er ohne alles Verdienst dem Begünstigten zugestanden würde (Befehlshaber zu seyn); welches der allgemeine Volkswille in einem ursprünglichen Vertrage, (der doch das Princip aller Rechte ist) nie beschließen wird. Denn ein Edelmann ist darum nicht so fort ein *edler* Mann. — Was den *Amtsadel* (wie man den Rang einer höheren Magistratur nennen könnte, und den man sich durch Verdienste erwerben muß) betrifft, so klebt der Rang da nicht, als Eigenthum, an der Person, sondern am Posten, und die Gleichheit wird dadurch nicht verletzt; weil, wenn jene ihr Amt niederlegt, sie zugleich den Rang ablegt, und unter das Volk zurücktritt. —

[5] Man hat die hohe Benennungen, die einem Beherrscher oft beygelegt werden (die eines göttlichen Gesalbten, eines Verwesers des göttlichen Willens auf Erden und Stellvertreters desselben), als grobe, schwindlich machende Schmeicheleyen oft getadelt; aber mich dünkt, ohne Grund. — Weit gefehlt, daß sie den Landesherrn sollten hochmüthig machen, so müssen sie ihn vielmehr in seiner Seele demüthigen, wenn er Verstand hat (welches man doch voraussetzen muß), und es bedenkt, daß er ein Amt übernommen habe, was für einen Menschen zu groß ist, nämlich das Heiligste, was Gott auf Erden hat, das *Recht der Menschen* zu verwalten, und diesem Augapfel Gottes irgend worinn zu nahe getreten zu seyn, jederzeit in Besorgnis stehen muß.

[6] Mallet dü Pan rühmt in seiner Genietönenden, aber hohlen und sachleeren Sprache: nach vieljähriger Erfahrung endlich zur Ueberzeugung von der Wahrheit des bekannten Spruchs des *Pope* gelangt zu seyn: „laß über die beste Regierung Narren streiten; die bestgeführte ist die beste.“ Wenn das soviel sagen soll: die am besten geführte Regierung ist am besten geführt, so hat er, nach Schwifts Ausdruck, eine Nuß aufgebissen, die ihn mit einer Made belohnte; soll es aber bedeuten, sie sey auch die beste Regierungsart, d. i. Staatsverfassung, so ist es grundfalsch; denn Exempel von guten Regierungen beweisen nichts für die Regierungsart. — Wer hat wohl besser regiert als ein *Titus* und *Markus Aurelius*, und doch hinterließ der eine einen *Domitian*, der andere einen *Commodus* zu Nachfolgern; welches bey einer guten Staatsverfassung nicht hätte geschehen können, da ihre Untauglichkeit zu diesem Posten früh genug bekannt war, und die Macht des Beherrschers auch hinreichend war, um sie auszuschließen.

### Second definitive article

Zweyter Definitivartikel zum ewigen Frieden.

Das Völkerrecht soll auf einen *Föderalism* freyer Staaten gegründet seyn.

Völker, als Staaten, können wie einzelne Menschen beurtheilt werden, die sich in ihrem Naturzustande (d. i. in der Unabhängigkeit von äußern Gesetzen) schon durch ihr Nebeneinanderseyn lädiren, und deren jeder, um seiner Sicherheit willen, von dem andern fordern kann und soll, mit ihm in eine, der bürgerlichen ähnliche, Verfassung zu treten, wo jedem sein Recht gesichert werden kann. Dies wäre ein *Völkerbund*, der aber gleichwohl kein Völkerstaat seyn müßte. Darinn aber wäre ein Widerspruch; weil ein jeder Staat das Verhältnis eines *Oberen* (Gesetzgebenden) zu einem *Unteren* (gehorchenden, nämlich dem Volk) enthält, viele Völker aber in einem Staat nur ein Volk ausmachen würden, welches (da wir hier das Recht der *Völker* gegen einander zu erwägen haben, so fern sie so viel verschiedene Staaten ausmachen, und nicht in einem Staat zusammenschmelzen sollen) der Voraussetzung widerspricht.

Gleichwie wir nun die Anhänglichkeit der Wilden an ihre gesetzlose Freyheit, sich lieber unaufhörlich zu balgen, als sich einem gesetzlichen, von ihnen selbst zu constituirenden, Zwange zu unterwerfen, mithin die tolle Freyheit der vernünftigen vorzuziehen, mit tiefer Verachtung ansehen, und als Rohigkeit, Ungeschliffenheit, und viehische Abwürdigung der Menschheit betrachten, so, sollte man denken, müßten gesittete Völker (jedes für sich zu einem Staat vereinigt) eilen, aus einem so verworfenen Zustande je eher desto lieber herauszukommen: Statt dessen aber setzt vielmehr jeder *Staat* seine Majestät (denn Volksmajestät ist ein ungereimter Ausdruck) gerade darin, gar keinem äußeren gesetzlichen Zwange unterworfen zu seyn, und der Glanz seines Oberhaupts besteht darin, daß ihm, ohne daß er sich eben selbst in Gefahr setzen darf, viele Tausende zu Gebot stehen, sich für eine Sache, die sie nichts angeht, aufopfern zu lassen[7], und der Unterschied der europäischen Wilden von den amerikanischen besteht hauptsächlich darin, daß, da manche Stämme der letzteren von ihren Feinden gänzlich sind gegessen worden, die ersteren ihre Ueberwundene besser zu benutzen wissen, als sie zu verspeisen, und lieber die Zahl ihrer Unterthanen, mithin auch die Menge der Werkzeuge zu noch ausgebreiteteren Kriegen durch sie zu vermehren wissen.

Bey der Bösartigkeit der menschlichen Natur, die sich im freyen Verhältnis der Völker unverholen blicken läßt (indessen daß sie im bürgerlich-gesetzlichen Zustande durch den Zwang der Regierung sich sehr verschleyert), ist es doch zu verwundern, daß das Wort *Recht* aus der Kriegspolitik noch nicht als pedantisch ganz hat verwiesen werden können, und sich noch kein Staat erkühnet hat, sich für die letztere Meynung öffentlich zu erklären; denn noch werden *Hugo Grotius*, *Puffendorf*, *Vattell* u. a. m. (lauter leidige Tröster), obgleich ihr Codex, philosophisch oder diplomatisch abgefaßt, nicht die mindeste *gesetzliche* Kraft hat, oder auch nur haben kann (weil Staaten als solche nicht unter einem gemeinschaftlichen äußeren Zwange stehen), immer treuherzig zur *Rechtfertigung* eines Kriegsangriffs angeführt, ohne daß es ein Beyspiel giebt, daß jemals ein Staat durch mit Zeugnissen so wichtiger Männer bewaffnete Argumente wäre bewogen worden, von seinem Vorhaben abzustehen. — Diese Huldigung, die jeder Staat dem Rechtsbegriffe (wenigstens den Worten nach) leistet, beweist doch, daß eine noch größere, ob zwar zur Zeit schlummernde, moralische Anlage im Menschen anzutreffen sey, über das böse Princip in ihm (was er nicht ableugnen kann) doch einmal Meister zu werden, und dies auch von andern zu hoffen; denn sonst würde das Wort *Recht* den Staaten, die sich einander befehden wollen, nie in den Mund kommen, es sey denn, bloß um seinen Spott damit zu treiben, wie jener gallische Fürst es erklärte: „Es ist der Vorzug, den die Natur dem Stärkern über den Schwächern gegeben hat, daß dieser ihm gehorchen soll.“

Da die Art, wie Staaten ihr Recht verfolgen, nie, wie bey einem äußern Gerichtshofe, der Proceß, sondern nur der Krieg seyn kann, durch diesen aber und seinen günstigen Ausschlag, den *Sieg*, das Recht nicht entschieden wird, und durch den *Friedensvertrag* zwar wohl dem diesmaligen Kriege, aber nicht dem Kriegszustande (immer zu einem neuen Vorwand zu finden) ein Ende gemacht wird (den man auch nicht geradezu für ungerecht erklären kann, weil in diesem Zustande jeder in seiner eigenen Sache Richter ist), gleichwohl aber von Staaten, nach dem Völkerrecht, nicht eben das gelten kann, was von Menschen im gesetzlosen Zustande nach dem Naturrecht gilt, „aus diesem Zustande herausgehen zu sollen“ (weil sie, als Staaten, innerlich schon eine rechtliche Verfassung haben, und also dem Zwange anderer, sie nach ihren Rechtsbegriffen unter eine erweiterte gesetzliche Verfassung zu bringen, entwachsen sind), indessen daß doch die Vernunft vom Throne der höchsten moralisch gesetzgebenden Gewalt herab, den Krieg als als Rechtsgang schlechterdings verdammt, den Friedenszustand dagegen zur unmittelbaren Pflicht macht, welcher doch, ohne einen Vertrag der Völker unter sich, nicht gestiftet oder gesichert werden kann: — so muß es einen Bund von besonderer Art geben, den man den *Friedensbund* (*foedus pacificum*) nennen kann, der vom *Friedensvertrag* (*pactum pacis*) darin unterschieden seyn würde, daß dieser bloß *einen* Krieg, jener aber *alle* Kriege auf immer zu endigen suchte. Dieser Bund geht auf keinen Erwerb irgend einer Macht des Staats, sondern lediglich auf Erhaltung und Sicherung der *Freyheit* eines Staats, für sich selbst und zugleich anderer verbündeten Staaten, ohne daß diese doch sich deshalb (wie Menschen im Naturzustande) öffentlichen Gesetzen, und einem Zwange unter denselben, unterwerfen dürfen. — Die Ausführbarkeit (objective Realität) dieser Idee der *Föderalität*, die sich allmählig über alle Staaten erstrecken soll, und so zum ewigen Frieden hinführt, läßt sich darstellen. Denn wenn das Glück es so fügt: daß ein mächtiges und aufgeklärtes Volk sich zu einer Republik (die ihrer Natur nach zum ewigen Frieden geneigt seyn muß) bilden kann, so giebt diese einen Mittelpunkt der föderativen Vereinigung für andere Staaten ab, um sich an sie anzuschließen, und so den Freyheitszustand der Staaten, gemäß der Idee des Völkerrechts, zu sichern, und sich durch mehrere Verbindungen dieser Art nach und nach immer weiter auszubreiten.

Daß ein Volk sagt: „es soll unter uns kein Krieg seyn; denn wir wollen uns in einen Staat formiren, d. i. uns selbst eine oberste gesetzgebende, regierende und richtende Gewalt setzen, die unsere Streitigkeiten friedlich ausgleicht“ — das läßt sich verstehen. — — Wenn aber dieser Staat sagt: „es soll kein Krieg zwischen mir und andern Staaten seyn, obgleich ich keine oberste gesetzgebende Gewalt erkenne, die mir mein, und der ich ihr Recht sichere,“ so ist es gar nicht zu verstehen, worauf ich dann das Vertrauen zu meinem Rechte gründen wolle, wenn es nicht das Surrogat des bürgerlichen Gesellschaftbundes, nämlich der freye Föderalism ist, den die Vernunft mit dem Begriffe des Völkerrechts nothwendig verbinden muß, wenn überall etwas dabey zu denken übrig bleiben soll.

Bey dem Begriffe des Völkerrechts, als eines Rechts *zum* Kriege, läßt sich eigentlich gar nichts denken (weil es ein Recht seyn soll, nicht nach allgemein gültigen äußern, die Freyheit jedes Einzelnen einschränkenden Gesetzen, sondern nach einseitigen Maximen durch Gewalt, was Recht sey, zu bestimmen), es müßte denn darunter verstanden werden: daß Menschen, die so gesinnet sind, ganz recht geschieht, wenn sie sich unter einander aufreiben, und also den ewigen Frieden in dem weiten Grabe finden, das alle Gräuel der Gewaltthätigkeit sammt ihren Urhebern bedeckt. — Für Staaten, im Verhältnisse unter einander, kann es nach der Vernunft keine andere Art geben, aus dem gesetzlosen Zustande, der lauter Krieg enthält, herauszukommen, als daß sie, eben so wie einzelne Menschen, ihre wilde (gesetzlose) Freyheit aufgeben, sich zu öffentlichen Zwangsgesetzen bequemen, und so einen (freylich immer wachsenden) *Völkerstaat* (*ciuitas gentium*), der zuletzt alle Völker der Erde befassen würde, bilden. Da sie dieses aber nach ihrer Idee vom Völkerrecht durchaus nicht wollen, mithin, was *in thesi* richtig ist, *in hypothesi* verwerfen, so kann an die Stelle der positiven Idee *einer Weltrepublik* (wenn nicht alles verlohren werden soll) nur das *negative* Surrogat eines den Krieg abwehrenden, bestehenden, und sich immer ausbreitenden *Bundes*, den Strom der rechtscheuenden, feindseligen Neigung aufhalten, doch mit beständiger Gefahr ihres Ausbruchs (*Furor impius intus-fremit horridus ore cruento. Virgil.*)[8].

[7] So gab ein bulgarischer Fürst dem griechischen Kayser, der gutmüthigerweise seinen Streit mit ihm durch einen Zweykampf ausmachen wollte, zur Antwort: „Ein Schmidt, der Zangen hat, wird das glühende Eisen aus den Kohlen nicht mit seinen Händen herauslangen.“

[8] Nach einem beendigten Kriege, beym Friedensschlusse, möchte es wohl für ein Volk nicht unschicklich seyn, daß nach dem Dankfeste ein Bußtag ausgeschrieben würde, den Himmel, in Namen des Staats, um Gnade für die große Versündigung anzurufen, die das menschliche Geschlecht sich noch immer zu Schulden kommen läßt, sich keiner gesetzlichen Verfassung, im Verhältnis auf andere Völker, fügen zu wollen, sondern stolz auf seine Unabhängigkeit lieber das barbarische Mittel des Krieges (wodurch doch das, was gesucht wird, nämlich das Recht eines jeden Staats nicht ausgemacht wird) zu gebrauchen. — Die Dankfeste während dem Kriege über einen erfochtenen *Sieg*, die Hymnen, die (auf gut israelitisch) dem *Herrn der Heerschaaren* gesungen werden, stehen mit der moralischen Idee des Vaters der Menschen in nicht minder starkem Contrast; weil sie außer der Gleichgültigkeit wegen der Art, wie Völker ihr gegenseitiges Recht suchen (die traurig genug ist), noch eine Freude hineinbringen, recht viel Menschen, oder ihr Glück zernichtet zu haben.

### Third definitive article

Dritter Definitivartikel zum ewigen Frieden.

„Das *Weltbürgerrecht* soll auf Bedingungen der allgemeinen *Hospitalität* eingeschränkt seyn.“

Es ist hier, wie in den vorigen Artikeln, nicht von Philanthrophie, sondern vom *Recht* die Rede, und da bedeutet *Hospitalität* (Wirthbarkeit) das Recht eines Fremdlings, seiner Ankunft auf dem Boden eines andern wegen, von diesem nicht feindselig behandelt zu werden. Dieser kann ihn abweisen, wenn es ohne seinen Untergang geschehen kann; so lange er aber auf seinem Platz sich friedlich verhält, ihm nicht feindlich begegnen. Es ist kein *Gastrecht*, worauf dieser Anspruch machen kann (wozu ein besonderer wohlthätiger Vertrag erfordert werden würde, ihn auf eine gewisse Zeit zum Hausgenossen zu machen), sondern ein *Besuchsrecht*, welches allen Menschen zusteht, sich zur Gesellschaft anzubieten, vermöge des Rechts des gemeinschaftlichen Besitzes der Oberfläche der Erde, auf der, als Kugelfläche, sie sich nicht ins Unendliche zerstreuen können, sondern endlich sich doch neben einander dulden zu müssen, ursprünglich aber niemand an einem Orte der Erde zu seyn, mehr Recht hat, als der Andere. — Unbewohnbare Theile dieser Oberfläche, das Meer und die Sandwüsten, trennen diese Gemeinschaft, doch so, daß das *Schiff*, oder das *Kameel* (das *Schiff* der Wüste) es möglich machen, über diese herrenlose Gegenden sich einander zu nähern, und das Recht der *Oberfläche*, welches der Menschengattung gemeinschaftlich zukommt, zu einem möglichen Verkehr zu benutzen. Die Unwirthbarkeit der Seeküsten (z. B. der Barbaresken), Schiffe in nahen Meeren zu rauben, oder gestrandete Schiffsleute zu Sklaven zu machen, oder die der Sandwüsten (der arabischen Beduinen), die Annäherung zu den nomadischen Stämmen als ein Recht anzusehen, sie zu plündern, ist also dem Naturrecht zuwider, welches Hospitalitätsrecht aber, d. i. die Befugnis der fremden Ankömmlinge, sich nicht weiter erstreckt, als auf die Bedingungen der Möglichkeit, einen Verkehr mit den alten Einwohnern zu *versuchen*. — Auf diese Art können entfernte Welttheile mit einander friedlich in Verhältnisse kommen, die zuletzt öffentlich gesetzlich werden, und so das menschliche Geschlecht endlich einer weltbürgerlichen Verfassung immer näher bringen können.

Vergleicht man hiemit das *inhospitale* Betragen der gesitteten, vornehmlich handeltreibenden Staaten unseres Welttheils, so geht die Ungerechtigkeit, die sie in dem *Besuche* fremder Länder und Völker (welches ihnen mit dem *Erobern* derselben für einerley gilt) beweisen, bis zum Erschrecken weit. Amerika, die Negerländer, die Gewürzinseln, das Kap ꝛc. waren, bey ihrer Entdeckung, für sie Länder, die keinem angehörten; denn die Einwohner rechneten sie für nichts. In Ostindien (Hindustan) brachten sie, unter dem Vorwande blos beabsichtigter Handelsniederlagen, fremde Kriegesvölker hinein, mit ihnen aber Unterdrückung der Eingebohrnen, Aufwiegelung der verschiedenen Staaten desselben zu weit ausgebreiteten Kriegen, Hungersnoth, Aufruhr, Treulosigkeit, und wie die Litaney aller Uebel, die das menschliche Geschlecht drücken, weiter lauten mag.

China[9] und Japan (*Nipon*), die den Versuch mit solchen Gästen gemacht hatten, haben daher weislich, jenes zwar den Zugang, aber nicht den Eingang, dieses auch den ersteren nur einem einzigen europäischen Volk, den Holländern, erlaubt, die sie aber doch dabey, wie Gefangene, von der Gemeinschaft mit den Eingebohrnen ausschließen. Das Aergste hiebey (oder, aus dem Standpunkte eines moralischen Richters betrachtet, das Beste) ist, daß sie dieser Gewaltthätigkeit nicht einmal froh werden, daß alle diese Handlungsgesellschaften auf dem Punkte des nahen Umsturzes stehen, daß die Zuckerinseln, dieser Sitz der allergrausamsten und ausgedachtesten Sklaverey, keinen wahren Ertrag abwerfen, sondern nur mittelbar, und zwar zu einer nicht sehr löblichen Absicht, nämlich zu Bildung der Matrosen für Kriegsflotten, und also wieder zu Führung der Kriege in Europa dienen, und dieses möchten, die von der Frömmigkeit viel Werks machen, und, indem sie Unrecht wie Wasser trinken, sich in der Rechtgläubigkeit für Auserwählte gehalten wissen wollen.

Da es nun mit der unter den Völkern der Erde einmal durchgängig überhand genommenen (engeren oder weiteren) Gemeinschaft so weit gekommen ist, daß die Rechtsverletzung an *einem* Platz der Erde an *allen* gefühlt wird: so ist die Idee eines Weltbürgerrechts keine phantastische und überspannte Vorstellungsart des Rechts, sondern eine nothwendige Ergänzung des ungeschriebenen Codex, sowohl des Staats- als Völkerrechts zum öffentlichen Menschenrechte überhaupt, und so zum ewigen Frieden, zu dem man sich in der continuirlichen Annäherung zu befinden, nur unter dieser Bedingung schmeicheln darf.

[9] Um dieses große Reich mit dem Namen, womit es sich selbst benennt, zu schreiben (nämlich *China*, nicht Sina, oder einen diesem ähnlichen Laut), darf man nur *Georgii Alphab. Tibet. pag. 651 - 654.* vornehmlich *Nota b* unten, nachsehen. — Eigentlich führt es, nach des Petersb. Prof. *Fischer* Bemerkung, keinen bestimmten Namen, womit es sich selbst benennt; der gewöhnlichste ist noch der des Worts *Kin*, nämlich Gold (welches die Tibetaner mit *Ser* ausdrücken), daher der Kayser König des *Goldes* (des herrlichsten Landes von der Welt) genannt wird, welches Wort wohl im Reiche selbst wie *Chin* lauten, aber von den italiänischen Missionarien (des Gutturalbuchstabens wegen), wie *Kin* ausgesprochen seyn mag. — Hieraus ersieht man dann, daß das von den Römern sogenannte Land der *Serer* China war, die Seide aber über *Groß-Tibet* (vermuthlich durch *Klein-Tibet* und die Bucharey über Persien, so weiter) nach Europa gefördert worden, welches zu manchen Betrachtungen über das Alterthum dieses erstaunlichen Staats, in Vergleichung mit dem von Hindustan, bey der Verknüpfung mit *Tibet*, und, durch dieses, mit Japan, hinleitet; indessen daß der Name Sina, oder Tschina, den die Nachbarn diesem Lande geben sollen, zu nichts hinführt. — — Vielleicht läßt sich auch die uralte, ob zwar nie recht bekannt gewordene Gemeinschaft Europens mit Tibet aus dem, was uns *Hesychius* hievon aufbehalten hat, nämlich dem Zuruf Κονξ Ομπαξ (*Konx Ompax*) des Hierophanten in den Eleusinischen Geheimnissen erklären. (S. Reise des jüngern Anacharsis, 5ter Theil, S. 447 u. f.) — Denn nach *Georgii Alph. Tibet.* bedeutet das Wort *Concioa* *Gott*, welches eine auffallende Aehnlichkeit mit *Konx* hat. *Pah-cio.* (*ib. p. 520*), welches von den Griechen leicht wie *pax* ausgesprochen werden konnte, *promulgator legis*, die durch die ganze Natur vertheilte Gottheit (auch *Cencresi* genannt, *p. 177.*) — *Om* aber, welches *La Croze* durch *benedictus*, *gesegnet*, übersetzt, kann, auf die Gottheit angewandt, wohl nichts anders als den *Seliggepriesenen* bedeuten, *p. 507.* Da nun *P. Franz. Horatius* von den Tibetanischen *Lhama's*, die er oft befrug, was sie unter Gott (*Concioa*) verständen, jederzeit die Antwort bekam: „*es ist die Versammlung aller Heiligen*“ (d. i. der seligen durch die Lamaische Wiedergeburt, nach vielen Wanderungen durch allerley Körper, endlich in die Gottheit zurückgekehrten, in *Burchane*, d. i. anbetungswürdige Wesen, verwandelten Seelen (*p. 223*), so wird jenes geheimnisvolle Wort, *Konx Ompax*, wohl das *heilige* (*Konx*) *selige* (*Om*) und *weise* (*Pax*), durch die Welt überall verbreitete höchste Wesen (die personificirte Natur) bedeuten sollen, und in den griechischen *Mysterien* gebraucht, wohl den *Monotheism* für die Epopten, im Gegensatz mit dem *Polytheism* des Volks angedeutet haben; obwohl *P. Horatius* (a. a. O.) hierunter einen *Atheism* witterte. — Wie aber jenes geheimnisvolle Wort über Tibet zu den Griechen gekommen, läßt sich auf obige Art erklären und umgekehrt dadurch auch das frühe Verkehr Europens mit China über Tibet (vielleicht eher noch als mit Hindustan) wahrscheinlich machen.

### First supplement

Erster Zusatz.
Von der Garantie des ewigen Friedens.

Das, was diese Gewähr (Garantie) leistet, ist nichts Geringeres, als die große Künstlerin, *Natur* (natura daedala rerum), aus deren mechanischem Laufe sichtbarlich Zweckmäßigkeit hervorleuchtet, durch die Zwietracht der Menschen Eintracht selbst wider ihren Willen emporkommen zu lassen, und darum, gleich als Nöthigung einer ihren Wirkungsgesetzen nach uns unbekannten Ursache, *Schicksal*, bey Erwägung aber ihrer Zweckmäßigkeit im Laufe der Welt, als tiefliegende Weisheit einer höheren, auf den objectiven Endzweck des menschlichen Geschlechts gerichteten, und diesen Weltlauf prädeterminirenden Ursache *Vorsehung* [10], genannt wird, die wir zwar eigentlich nicht an diesen Kunstanstalten der Natur *erkennen*, oder auch nur daraus auf sie *schließen*, sondern (wie in aller Beziehung der Form der Dinge auf Zwecke überhaupt) nur *hinzudenken* können und müssen, um uns von ihrer Möglichkeit, nach der Analogie menschlicher Kunsthandlungen, einen Begriff zu machen, deren Verhältniß und Zusammenstimmung aber zu dem Zwecke, den uns die Vernunft unmittelbar vorschreibt (dem moralischen), sich vorzustellen, eine Idee ist, die zwar in *theoretischer* Absicht überschwenglich, in praktischer aber (z. B. in Ansehung des Pflichtbegriffs *vom ewigen Frieden*, um jenen Mechanism der Natur dazu zu benutzen) dogmatisch und ihrer Realität nach wohl gegründet ist. — Der Gebrauch des Worts *Natur* ist auch, wenn es, wie hier, bloß um Theorie (nicht um Religion) zu thun ist, schicklicher für die Schranken der menschlichen Vernunft (als die sich in Ansehung des Verhältnisses der Wirkungen zu ihren Ursachen, innerhalb den Grenzen möglicher Erfahrung halten muß), und *bescheidener*, als der Ausdruck einer für uns erkennbaren *Vorsehung*, mit dem man sich vermessenerweise ikarische Flügel ansetzt, um dem Geheimniß ihrer unergründlichen Absicht näher zu kommen.

Ehe wir nun diese Gewährleistung näher bestimmen, wird es nöthig seyn, vorher den Zustand nachzusuchen, den die Natur für die auf ihrem großen Schauplatz handelnde Personen veranstaltet hat, der ihre Friedenssicherung zuletzt nothwendig macht; — alsdann aber allererst die Art, wie sie diese leiste.

Ihre provisorische Veranstaltung besteht darin: daß sie 1) für die Menschen in allen Erdgegenden gesorgt hat, daselbst leben zu können; — 2) sie durch *Krieg* allerwärts hin, selbst in die unwirthbarste Gegenden, getrieben hat, um sie zu bevölkern; 3) — durch eben denselben sie in mehr oder weniger gesetzliche Verhältnisse zu treten genöthigt hat. — Daß in den kalten Wüsten am Eismeer noch das Moos wächst, welches das *Rennthier* unter dem Schnee hervorscharrt, um selbst die Nahrung, oder auch das Angespann des Ostiaken oder Samojeden zu seyn; oder daß die salzigten Sandwüsten doch noch dem *Cameel*, welches zu Bereisung derselben gleichsam geschaffen zu seyn scheint, um sie nicht unbenutzt zu lassen, enthalten, ist schon bewundernswürdig. Noch deutlicher aber leuchtet der Zweck hervor, wenn man gewahr wird, wie außer den bepelzten Thieren am Ufer des Eismeeres, noch Robben, Wallrosse und Wallfische an ihrem Fleische Nahrung, und mit ihrem Thran Feurung für die dortigen Anwohner darreichen. Am meisten aber erregt die Vorsorge der Natur durch das Treibholz Bewunderung, was sie (ohne daß man recht weiß, wo es herkommt) diesen gewächslosen Gegenden zubringt, ohne welches Material sie weder ihre Fahrzeuge und Waffen, noch ihre Hütten zum Aufenthalt zurichten könnten; wo sie dann mit dem Kriege gegen die Thiere gnug zu thun haben, um unter sich friedlich zu leben. — — Was sie aber *dahin getrieben* hat, ist vermuthlich nichts anders als der Krieg gewesen. Das erste *Kriegswerkzeug* aber unter allen Thieren, die der Mensch, binnen der Zeit der Erdbevölkerung, zu zähmen und häuslich zu machen gelernt hatte, ist das *Pferd* (denn der Elephant gehört in die spätere Zeit, nämlich des Luxus schon errichteter Staaten), so wie die Kunst, gewisse, für uns jetzt, ihrer ursprünglichen Beschaffenheit nach, nicht mehr erkennbare Grasarten, *Getraide* genannt, anzubauen, ingleichen die Vervielfältigung und Verfeinerung der *Obstarten* durch Verpflanzung und Einpfropfung (vielleicht in Europa bloß zweyer Gattungen, der Holzäpfel und Holzbirnen), nur im Zustande schon errichteter Staaten, wo gesichertes Grundeigenthum statt fand, entstehen konnte, — nachdem die Menschen vorher in gesetzloser Freyheit von dem *Jagd-* [11], Fischer- und Hirtenleben bis zum *Ackerleben* durchgedrungen waren, und nun *Salz* und *Eisen* erfunden ward, vielleicht die ersteren weit und breit gesuchten Artikel eines Handelsverkehrs verschiedener Völker wurden, wodurch sie zuerst in ein *friedliches Verhältniß* gegen einander, und so, selbst mit Entfernteren, in Einverständniß, Gemeinschaft und friedliches Verhältniß unter einander gebracht wurden.

Indem die Natur nun dafür gesorgt hat, daß Menschen allerwärts auf Erden leben *könnten*, so hat sie zugleich auch despotisch gewollt, daß sie allerwärts leben *sollten*, wenn gleich wider ihre Neigung, und selbst ohne daß dieses Sollen zugleich einen Pflichtbegriff voraussetzte, der sie hiezu, vermittelst eines moralischen Gesetzes, verbände, — sondern sie hat, zu diesem ihrem Zweck zu gelangen, den Krieg gewählt. — Wir sehen nämlich Völker, die an der Einheit ihrer Sprache die Einheit ihrer Abstammung kennbar machen, wie die *Samojeden* am Eismeer einerseits, und ein Volk von ähnlicher Sprache, zweyhundert Meilen davon entfernt, im *Altaischen* Gebirge andererseits, wozwischen sich ein anderes, nämlich mongalisches, berittenes und hiemit kriegerisches Volk, gedrängt, und so jenen Theil ihres Stammes, weit von diesem, in die unwirthbarsten Eisgegenden, versprengt hat, wo sie gewiß nicht aus eigener Neigung sich hin verbreitet hätten [12]; — eben so die *Finnen* in der nördlichsten Gegend von Europa, *Lappen* genannt, von den jetzt eben so weit entferneten, aber der Sprache nach mit ihnen verwandten *Ungern*, durch dazwischen eingedrungne Gothische und Sarmatische Völker getrennt; und was kann wohl anders die *Eskimos* (vielleicht uralte Europäische Abentheurer, ein von allen Amerikanern ganz unterschiedenes Geschlecht) in Norden, und die *Pescheräs*, im Süden von Amerika, bis zum Feuerlande hingetrieben haben, als der Krieg, dessen sich die Natur als Mittels bedient, die Erde allerwärts zu bevölkern. Der Krieg aber selbst bedarf keines besondern Bewegungsgrundes, sondern scheint auf die menschliche Natur gepfropft zu seyn, und sogar als etwas Edles, wozu der Mensch durch den Ehrtrieb, ohne eigennützige Triebfedern, beseelt wird, zu gelten: so, daß *Kriegesmuth* (von amerikanischen Wilden sowohl, als den europäischen, in den Ritterzeiten) nicht bloß *wenn* Krieg ist (wie billig), sondern auch, *daß* Krieg sey, von unmittelbarem großem Werth zu seyn geurtheilt wird, und er oft, bloß um jenen zu zeigen, angefangen, mithin in dem Kriege an sich selbst eine innere *Würde* gesetzt wird, sogar daß ihm auch wohl Philosophen, als einer gewissen Veredelung der Menschheit, eine Lobrede halten, uneingedenk des Ausspruchs jenes Griechen: „Der Krieg ist darin schlimm, daß er mehr böse Leute macht, als er deren wegnimmt.“ — So viel von dem, was die Natur für *ihren eigenen Zweck*, in Ansehung der Menschengattung als einer Thierklasse, thut.

Jetzt ist die Frage, die das Wesentliche der Absicht auf den ewigen Frieden betrifft: „Was die Natur in dieser Absicht, Beziehungsweise auf den Zweck, den dem Menschen seine eigene Vernunft zur Pflicht macht, mithin zu Begünstigung seiner *moralischen Absicht* thue, und wie sie die Gewähr leiste, daß dasjenige, was der Mensch nach Freyheitsgesetzen thun *sollte*, aber nicht thut, dieser Freyheit unbeschadet auch durch einen Zwang der Natur, daß er es thun *werde*, gesichert sey, und zwar nach allen drey Verhältnissen des öffentlichen Rechts, des *Staats-*, *Völker-* und *weltbürgerlichen Rechts*.“ — Wenn ich von der Natur sage: sie *will*, daß dieses oder jenes geschehe, so heißt das nicht soviel, als: sie legt uns eine Pflicht auf, es zu thun (denn das kann nur die zwangsfreye praktische Vernunft), sondern sie *thut* es selbst, wir mögen wollen oder nicht (fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt).

1. Wenn ein Volk auch nicht durch innere Mißhelligkeit genöthigt würde, sich unter den Zwang öffentlicher Gesetze zu begeben, so würde es doch der Krieg von außen thun, indem, nach der vorher erwähnten Naturanstalt, ein jedes Volk ein anderes es drängende Volk zum Nachbar vor sich findet, gegen das es sich innerlich zu einem *Staat* bilden muß, um, als *Macht*, gegen diesen gerüstet zu seyn. Nun ist die *republikanische* Verfassung die einzige, welche dem Recht der Menschen vollkommen angemessen, aber auch die schwerste zu stiften, vielmehr noch zu erhalten ist, dermaßen, daß viele behaupten, es müsse ein Staat von *Engeln* seyn, weil Menschen mit ihren selbstsüchtigen Neigungen einer Verfassung von so sublimer Form nicht fähig wären. Aber nun kommt die Natur dem verehrten, aber zur Praxis ohnmächtigen allgemeinen, in der Vernunft gegründeten Willen, und zwar gerade durch jene selbstsüchtige Neigungen, zu Hülfe, so, daß es nur auf eine gute Organisation des Staats ankommt (die allerdings im Vermögen der Menschen ist), jener ihre Kräfte so gegen einander zu richten, daß eine die anderen in ihrer zerstöhrenden Wirkung aufhält, oder diese aufhebt: so daß der Erfolg für die Vernunft so ausfällt, als wenn beyde gar nicht da wären, und so der Mensch, wenn gleich nicht ein moralisch-guter Mensch, dennoch ein guter Bürger zu seyn gezwungen wird. Das Problem der Staatserrichtung ist, so hart wie es auch klingt, selbst für ein Volk von Teufeln (wenn sie nur Verstand haben), auflösbar und lautet so: „Eine Menge von vernünftigen Wesen, die insgesammt allgemeine Gesetze für ihre Erhaltung verlangen, deren jedes aber in Geheim sich davon auszunehmen geneigt ist, so zu ordnen und ihre Verfassung einzurichten, daß, obgleich sie in ihren Privatgesinnungen einander entgegen streben, diese einander doch so aufhalten, daß in ihrem öffentlichen Verhalten der Erfolg eben derselbe ist, als ob sie keine solche böse Gesinnungen hätten.“ Ein solches Problem muß *auflöslich* seyn. Denn es ist nicht die moralische Besserung der Menschen, sondern nur der Mechanism der Natur, von dem die Aufgabe zu wissen verlangt, wie man ihn an Menschen benutzen könne, um den Widerstreit ihrer unfriedlichen Gesinnungen in einem Volk so zu richten, daß sie sich unter Zwangsgesetze zu begeben einander selbst nöthigen, und so den Friedenszustand, in welchem Gesetze Kraft haben, herbeyführen müssen. Man kann dieses auch an den wirklich vorhandenen, noch sehr unvollkommen organisirten Staaten sehen; daß sie sich doch im äußeren Verhalten dem, was die Rechtsidee vorschreibt, schon sehr nähern, ob gleich das Innere der Moralität davon sicherlich nicht die Ursache ist (wie denn auch nicht von dieser die gute Staatsverfassung, sondern vielmehr umgekehrt, von der letzteren allererst die gute moralische Bildung eines Volks zu erwarten ist), mithin der Mechanism der Natur durch selbstsüchtige Neigungen, die natürlicherweise einander auch äußerlich entgegen wirken, von der Vernunft zu einem Mittel gebraucht werden kann, dieser ihrem eigenen Zweck, der rechtlichen Vorschrift, Raum zu machen, und hiemit auch, soviel an dem Staat selbst liegt, den inneren sowohl als äußeren Frieden zu befördern und zu sichern. — Hier heißt es also: Die Natur *will* unwiderstehlich, daß das Recht zuletzt die Obergewalt erhalte. Was man nun hier verabsäumt zu thun, das macht sich zuletzt selbst, obzwar mit viel Ungemächlichkeit. — „Biegt man das Rohr zu stark, so bricht's; und wer zu viel will, der will nichts.“ *Bouterwek*.

2. Die Idee des Völkerrechts setzt die *Absonderung* vieler von einander unabhängiger benachbarter Staaten voraus, und, obgleich ein solcher Zustand an sich schon ein Zustand des Krieges ist (wenn nicht eine föderative Vereinigung derselben dem Ausbruch der Feindseligkeiten vorbeugt): so ist doch selbst dieser, nach der Vernunftidee, besser als die Zusammenschmelzung derselben, durch eine die andere überwachsende, und in eine Universalmonarchie übergehende Macht; weil die Gesetze mit dem vergrößten Umfange der Regierung immer mehr an ihrem Nachdruck einbüßen, und ein seelenloser Despotism, nachdem er die Keime des Guten ausgerottet hat, zuletzt doch in Anarchie verfällt. Indessen ist dieses das Verlangen jedes Staats (oder seines Oberhaupts), auf diese Art sich in den dauernden Friedenszustand zu versetzen, daß er, wo möglich, die ganze Welt beherrscht. Aber die *Natur will es* anders. — Sie bedient sich zweyer Mittel, um Völker von der Vermischung abzuhalten und sie abzusondern, der Verschiedenheit der *Sprachen* und der *Religionen*[13], die zwar den Hang zum wechselseitigen Hasse, und Vorwand zum Kriege bey sich führt, aber doch bey anwachsender Cultur und der allmähligen Annäherung der Menschen, zu größerer Einstimmung in Principien, zum Einverständnisse in einem Frieden leitet, der nicht, wie jener Despotism (auf dem Kirchhofe der Freyheit), durch Schwächung aller Kräfte, sondern durch ihr Gleichgewicht, im lebhaftesten Wetteifer derselben, hervorgebracht und gesichert wird.

3. So wie die Natur weislich die Völker trennt, welche der Wille jedes Staats, und zwar selbst nach Gründen des Völkerrechts, gern unter sich durch List oder Gewalt vereinigen möchte; so vereinigt sie auch andererseits Völker, die der Begriff des Weltbürgerrechts gegen Gewaltthätigkeit und Krieg nicht würde gesichert haben, durch den wechselseitigen Eigennutz. Es ist der *Handelsgeist*, der mit dem Kriege nicht zusammen bestehen kann, und der früher oder später sich jedes Volks bemächtigt. Weil nämlich unter allen, der Staatsmacht untergeordneten, Mächten (Mitteln), die *Geldmacht* wohl die zuverläßigste seyn möchte, so sehen sich Staaten (freylich wohl nicht eben durch Triebfedern der Moralität) gedrungen, den edlen Frieden zu befördern, und, wo auch immer in der Welt Krieg auszubrechen droht, ihn durch Vermittelungen abzuwehren, gleich als ob sie deshalb im beständigen Bündnisse ständen; denn große Vereinigungen zum Kriege können, der Natur der Sache nach, sich nur höchst selten zutragen; und noch seltener glücken. — — Auf die Art garantirt die Natur, durch den Mechanism in den menschlichen Neigungen selbst, den ewigen Frieden; freylich mit einer Sicherheit, die nicht hinreichend ist, die Zukunft desselben (theoretisch) zu *weissagen*, aber doch in praktischer Absicht zulangt, und es zur Pflicht macht, zu diesem (nicht bloß schimärischen) Zwecke hinzuarbeiten.

[10] Im Mechanism der Natur, wozu der Mensch (als Sinnenwesen) mit gehört, zeigt sich eine ihrer Existenz schon zum Grunde liegende Form, die wir uns nicht anders begreiflich machen können, als indem wir ihr den Zweck eines sie vorher bestimmenden Welturhebers unterlegen, dessen Vorherbestimmung wir die (göttliche) *Vorsehung* überhaupt, und, sofern sie in den *Anfang* der Welt gelegt wird, die *gründende* (prouidentia conditrix; semel iussit, semper parent, *Augustin.*), im *Laufe* der Natur aber diesen nach allgemeinen Gesetzen der Zweckmäßigkeit zu erhalten, die *waltende Vorsehung* (prouidentia gubernatrix), ferner zu besonderen, aber von dem Menschen nicht vorherzusehenden, sondern nur aus dem Erfolg vermutheten Zwecken, die *leitende* (prouidentia directrix), endlich sogar in Ansehung einzelner Begebenheiten, als göttlicher Zwecke, nicht mehr Vorsehung, sondern *Fügung* (directio extraordinaria) nennen, welche aber (da sie in der That auf Wunder hinweiset, obgleich die Begebenheiten nicht so genannt werden) als solche erkennen zu wollen, thörigte Vermessenheit des Menschen ist; weil aus einer einzelnen Begebenheit auf ein besonderes Princip der wirkenden Ursache (daß diese Begebenheit Zweck, und nicht bloß naturmechanische Nebenfolge aus einem anderen uns ganz unbekannten Zwecke sey) zu schließen ungereimt und voll Eigendünkel ist, so fromm und demüthig auch die Sprache hierüber lauten mag. — Eben so ist auch die Eintheilung der Vorsehung (*materialiter* betrachtet), wie sie auf *Gegenstände* in der Welt geht, in die *allgemeine* und *besondere*, falsch und sich selbst widersprechend (daß sie z. B. zwar eine Vorsorge zur Erhaltung der Gattungen der Geschöpfe sey, die Individuen aber dem Zufall überlasse); denn sie wird eben in der Absicht allgemein genannt, damit kein einziges Ding als davon ausgenommen gedacht werde. — Vermuthlich hat man hier die Eintheilung der Vorsehung (*formaliter* betrachtet) nach der Art der Ausführung ihrer Absicht gemeynt: nämlich in *ordentliche* (z. B. das jährliche Sterben und Wiederaufleben der Natur nach dem Wechsel der Jahreszeiten) und *außerordentliche* (z. B. die Zuführung des Holzes an die Eisküsten, das da nicht wachsen kann, durch die Meerströme, für die dortigen Einwohner, die ohne das nicht leben könnten), wo, ob wir gleich die physisch-mechanische Ursache dieser Erscheinungen uns gut erklären können (z. B. durch die mit Holz bewachsene Ufer der Flüsse der temperirten Länder, in welche jene Bäume hineinfallen, und etwa durch den Gulfstrom weiter verschleppt werden), wir dennoch auch die teleologische nicht übersehen müssen, die auf die Vorsorge einer über die Natur gebietenden Weisheit hinweiset. — Nur was den in den Schulen gebräuchlichen Begriff eines göttlichen *Beytritts*, oder Mitwirkung (concursus) zu einer Wirkung in der Sinnenwelt betrifft, so muß dieser wegfallen. Denn das Ungleichartige paaren wollen (gryphes jungere equis) und den, der selbst die vollständige Ursache der Weltveränderungen ist, seine eigene prädeterminirende Vorsehung während dem Weltlaufe *ergänzen* zu lassen (die also mangelhaft gewesen seyn müßte), z. B. zu sagen, daß *nächst Gott* der Arzt den Kranken zurecht gebracht habe, also als Beystand dabey gewesen sey, ist *Erstlich* an sich widersprechend. Denn causa solitaria non iuuat. Gott ist der Urheber des Arztes sammt allen seinen Heilmitteln, und so muß ihm, wenn man ja bis zum höchsten, uns theoretisch unbegreiflichen Urgrunde hinaufsteigen will, die Wirkung *ganz* zugeschrieben werden. Oder man kann sie auch *ganz* dem Arzt zuschreiben, sofern wir diese Begebenheit als nach der Ordnung der Natur erklärbar in der Kette der Weltursachen verfolgen. *Zweytens* bringt eine solche Denkungsart auch um alle bestimmte Principien der Beurtheilung eines Effekts. Aber in *moralisch-praktischer* Absicht (die also ganz aufs Uebersinnliche gerichtet ist), z. B. in dem Glauben, daß Gott den Mangel unserer eigenen Gerechtigkeit, wenn nur unsere Gesinnung ächt war, auch durch uns unbegreifliche Mittel ergänzen werde, wir also in der Bestrebung zum Guten nichts nachlassen sollen, ist der Begriff des göttlichen Concursus ganz schicklich und sogar nothwendig; wobey es sich aber von selbst versteht, daß niemand eine gute Handlung (als Begebenheit in der Welt) hieraus zu *erklären* versuchen muß, welches ein vorgebliches theoretisches Erkenntniß des Uebersinnlichen, mithin ungereimt ist.

[11] Unter allen Lebensweisen ist das *Jagdleben* ohne Zweifel der gesitteten Verfassung am meisten zuwider; weil die Familien, die sich da vereinzelen müssen, einander bald *fremd* und sonach in weitläuftigen Wäldern zerstreut, auch bald *feindselig* werden, da eine jede zu Erwerbung ihrer Nahrung und Kleidung viel Raum bedarf. — Das *Noachische Blutverbot*, 1 M. IX, 4:6. (welches, öfters wiederholt, nachher gar den neuangenommenen Christen aus dem Heidenthum, ob zwar in anderer Rücksicht, von den Judenchristen zur Bedingung gemacht wurde, Apost. Gesch. XV, 20. XXI, 25 —) scheint uranfänglich nichts anders, als das Verbot des *Jägerlebens* gewesen zu seyn; weil in diesem der Fall, das Fleisch roh zu essen, oft eintreten muß, mit dem letzteren also das erstere zugleich verboten wird.

[12] Man könnte fragen: Wenn die Natur gewollt hat, diese Eisküsten sollten nicht unbewohnt bleiben, was wird aus ihren Bewohnern, wenn sie ihnen dereinst (wie zu erwarten ist) kein Treibholz mehr zuführete? Denn es ist zu glauben, daß, bey fortrückender Cultur, die Einsassen der temperirten Erdstriche das Holz, was an den Ufern ihrer Ströme wächst, besser benutzen, es nicht in die Ströme fallen, und so in die See wegschwemmen lassen werden. Ich antworte: Die Anwohner des *Obstroms*, des Jenisey, des Lena u. s. w. werden es ihnen durch Handel zuführen, und dafür die Produkte aus dem Thierreich, woran das Meer an den Eisküsten so reich ist, einhandeln; wenn sie (die Natur) nur allererst den Frieden unter ihnen erzwungen haben wird.

[13] *Verschiedenheit der Religionen*: ein wunderlicher Ausdruck! gerade, als ob man auch von verschiedenen *Moralen* spräche. Es kann wohl verschiedene *Glaubensarten* historischer, nicht in die Religion, sondern in die Geschichte der zu ihrer Beförderung gebrauchten, ins Feld der Gelehrsamkeit einschlagender Mittel und eben so verschiedene *Religionsbücher* (Zendavesta, Vedam; Koran u. s. w.) geben, aber nur eine einzige, für alle Menschen und in allen Zeiten gültige *Religion*. Jene also können wohl nichts anders als nur das Vehikel der Religion, was zufällig ist, und nach Verschiedenheit der Zeiten und Oerter verschieden seyn kann, enthalten.

### Second supplement

Zweyter Zusatz.
Geheimer Artikel zum ewigen Frieden.

Ein geheimer Artikel in Verhandlungen des öffentlichen Rechts ist objectiv, d. i. seinem Inhalte nach betrachtet, ein Widerspruch; subjectiv aber, nach der Qualität der Person beurtheilt, die ihn dictirt, kann gar wohl darin ein Geheimniß statt haben, daß sie es nämlich für ihre Würde bedenklich findet, sich öffentlich als Urheberin desselben anzukündigen.

Der einzige Artikel dieser Art ist in dem Satze enthalten: „*Die Maximen der Philosophen über die Bedingungen der Möglichkeit des öffentlichen Friedens sollen von den zum Kriege gerüsteten Staaten zu Rathe gezogen werden.*“

Es scheint aber für die Gesetzgebende Autorität eines Staats, dem man natürlicherweise die größte Weisheit beylegen muß, verkleinerlich zu seyn, über die Grundsätze seines Verhaltens gegen andere Staaten bey *Unterthanen* (den Philosophen) Belehrung zu suchen; gleichwohl aber sehr rathsam es zu thun. Also wird der Staat die letztere *stillschweigend* (also, indem er ein Geheimniß daraus macht) *dazu auffordern*, welches soviel heißt, als: er wird sie frey und öffentlich über die allgemeine Maximen der Kriegsführung und Friedensstiftung *reden laßen* (denn das werden sie schon von selbst thun, wenn man es ihnen nur nicht verbietet) und die Uebereinkunft der Staaten unter einander über diesen Punkt bedarf auch keiner besonderen Verabredung der Staaten unter sich in dieser Absicht, sondern liegt schon in der Verpflichtung durch allgemeine (moralische gesetzgebende) Menschenvernunft. — Es ist aber hiemit nicht gemeynt: daß der Staat den Grundsätzen des Philosophen vor den Aussprüchen des Juristen (des Stellvertreters der Staatsmacht) den Vorzug einräumen müße, sondern nur daß man ihn *höre*. Der letztere, der die *Waage* des Rechts und, neben bey auch das *Schwerdt* der Gerechtigkeit sich zum Symbol gemacht hat, bedient sich gemeiniglich des letztern, nicht um etwa bloß alle fremde Einflüsse von dem ersteren abzuhalten, sondern wenn die eine Schaale nicht sinken will, das Schwerdt mit hinein zu legen: (vae victis), wozu der Jurist, der nicht zugleich (auch der Moralität nach) Philosoph ist, die größte Versuchung hat, weil es seines Amts nur ist, vorhandene Gesetze anzuwenden, nicht aber, ob diese selbst nicht einer Verbesserung bedürfen, zu untersuchen und rechnet diesen in der That niedrigeren Rang seiner Facultät, darum weil er mit Macht begleitet ist (wie es auch mit den beiden Anderen der Fall ist) zu den Höheren. — Die philosophische steht unter dieser verbündeten Gewalt auf einer sehr niedrigen Stufe. So heißt es z. B. von der Philosophie, sie sey die *Magd* der Theologie (und eben so lautet es von den zwey Anderen). — Man sieht aber nicht recht „ob sie ihrer gnädigen Frauen die Fackel vorträgt oder die Schleppe nachträgt.“

Daß Könige philosophiren, oder Philosophen Könige würden, ist nicht zu erwarten, aber auch nicht zu wünschen; weil der Besitz der Gewalt das freye Urtheil der Vernunft unvermeidlich verdirbt. Daß aber Könige oder königliche (sich selbst nach Gleichheitsgesetzen beherrschende) Völker die Classe der Philosophen nicht schwinden oder verstummen, sondern öffentlich sprechen lassen, ist Beyden zu Beleuchtung ihres Geschäfts unentbehrlich und, weil diese Classe ihrer Natur nach der Rottirung und Clubbenverbündung unfähig ist, wegen der Nachrede einer *Propagande* verdachtlos.

### Appendix I

Anhang.
I.
Ueber die Mishelligkeit zwischen der Moral und der Politik, in Absicht auf den ewigen Frieden.

Die Moral ist schon an sich selbst eine Praxis in objectiver Bedeutung, als Inbegriff von unbedingt gebietenden Gesetzen, nach denen wir handeln *sollen*, und es ist offenbare Ungereimtheit, nachdem man diesem Pflichtbegriff seine Autorität zugestanden hat, noch sagen zu wollen, daß man es doch nicht *könne*. Denn alsdann fällt dieser Begriff aus der Moral von selbst weg (ultra posse nemo obligatur); mithin kann es keinen Streit der Politik, als ausübender Rechtslehre, mit der Moral, als einer solchen, aber theoretischen (mithin keinen Streit der Praxis mit der Theorie) geben: man müßte denn unter der letzteren eine allgemeine *Klugheitslehre*, d. i. eine Theorie der Maximen verstehen, zu seinen auf Vortheil berechneten Absichten die tauglichsten Mittel zu wählen, d. i. läugnen, daß es überhaupt eine Moral gebe.

Die Politik sagt: „*Seyd klug wie die Schlangen*;“ die Moral setzt (als einschränkende Bedingung) hinzu: „*und ohne Falsch, wie die Tauben.*“ Wenn beydes nicht in einem Gebote zusammen bestehen kann, so ist wirklich ein Streit der Politik mit der Moral; soll aber doch durchaus beydes vereinigt seyn, so ist der Begriff vom Gegentheil absurd, und die Frage, wie jener Streit auszugleichen sey, läßt sich gar nicht einmal als Aufgabe hinstellen. Obgleich der Satz: *Ehrlichkeit ist die beste Politik*, eine Theorie enthält, der die Praxis, leider! sehr häufig widerspricht: so ist doch der gleichfalls theoretische: *Ehrlichkeit ist besser denn alle Politik*, über allen Einwurf unendlich erhaben, ja die unumgängliche Bedingung der letzteren. Der Grenzgott der Moral weicht nicht dem Jupiter (dem Grenzgott der Gewalt); denn dieser steht noch unter dem Schicksal, d. i. die Vernunft ist nicht erleuchtet genug, die Reihe der vorherbestimmenden Ursachen zu übersehen, die den glücklichen oder schlimmen Erfolg aus dem Thun und Lassen der Menschen, nach dem Mechanism der Natur, mit Sicherheit vorher verkündigen (obgleich ihn dem Wunsche gemäß hoffen) lassen. Was man aber zu thun habe, um im Gleise der Pflicht (nach Regeln der Weisheit) zu bleiben, dazu und hiemit zum Endzweck leuchtet sie uns überall hell genug vor.

Nun gründet aber der Praktiker (dem die Moral bloße Theorie ist) seine trostlose Absprechung unserer gutmüthigen Hoffnung (selbst bey eingeräumtem *Sollen* und *Können*) eigentlich darauf: daß er aus der Natur des Menschen vorher zu sehen vorgiebt, er *werde* dasjenige nie *wollen*, was erfordert wird, um jenen zum ewigen Frieden hinführenden Zweck zu Stande zu bringen. — Freylich ist das Wollen *aller einzelnen* Menschen, in einer gesetzlichen Verfassung nach Freyheitsprincipien zu leben (die *distributive* Einheit des Willens *Aller*), zu diesem Zweck nicht hinreichend, sondern daß *Alle zusammen* diesen Zustand wollen (die *collective* Einheit des vereinigten Willens), diese Auflösung einer schweren Aufgabe, wird noch dazu erfordert, damit ein Ganzes der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft werde, und, da also über diese Verschiedenheit des particularen Wollens Aller, noch eine vereinigende Ursache desselben hinzukommen muß, um einen gemeinschaftlichen Willen herauszubringen, welches Keiner von Allen vermag: so ist in der *Ausführung* jener Idee (in der Praxis) auf keinen andern Anfang des rechtlichen Zustandes zu rechnen, als den durch *Gewalt*, auf deren Zwang nachher das öffentliche Recht gegründet wird; welches dann freylich (da man ohnedem des Gesetzgebers moralische Gesinnung hiebey wenig in Anschlag bringen kann, er werde, nach geschehener Vereinigung der wüsten Menge in ein Volk, diesem es nur überlassen, eine rechtliche Verfassung durch ihren gemeinsamen Willen zu Stande zu bringen) große Abweichungen von jener Idee (der Theorie) in der wirklichen Erfahrung schon zum voraus erwarten läßt.

Da heißt es dann: wer einmal die Gewalt in Händen hat, wird sich vom Volk nicht Gesetze vorschreiben lassen. Ein Staat, der einmal im Besitz ist, unter keinen äußeren Gesetzen zu stehen, wird sich in Ansehung der Art, wie er gegen andere Staaten sein Recht suchen soll, nicht von ihrem Richterstuhl abhängig machen, und selbst ein Welttheil, wenn er sich einem andern, der ihm übrigens nicht im Wege ist, überlegen fühlt, wird das Mittel der Verstärkung seiner Macht, durch Beraubung oder gar Beherrschung desselben, nicht unbenutzt lassen; und so zerrinnen nun alle Plane der Theorie, für das Staats-, Völker- und Weltbürgerrecht, in sachleere unausführbare Ideale, dagegen eine Praxis, die auf empirische Principien der menschlichen Natur gegründet ist, welche es nicht für zu niedrig hält, aus der Art, wie es in der Welt zugeht, Belehrung für ihre Maximen zu ziehen, einen sicheren Grund für ihr Gebäude der Staatsklugheit zu finden allein hoffen könnte.

Freylich, wenn es keine Freyheit und darauf gegründetes moralisches Gesetz giebt, sondern alles, was geschieht oder geschehen kann, bloßer Mechanism der Natur ist, so ist Politik (als Kunst, diesen zur Regierung der Menschen zu benutzen) die ganze praktische Weisheit, und der Rechtsbegriff ein sachleerer Gedanke. Findet man diesen aber doch unumgänglich nöthig, mit der Politik zu verbinden, ja ihn gar zur einschränkenden Bedingung der letztern zu erheben, so muß die Vereinbarkeit beyder eingeräumt werden. Ich kann mir nun zwar einen *moralischen Politiker*, d. i. einen, der die Principien der Staatsklugheit so nimmt, daß sie mit der Moral zusammen bestehen können, aber nicht einen *politischen Moralisten* denken, der sich eine Moral so schmiedet, wie es der Vortheil des Staatsmanns sich zuträglich findet.

Der moralische Politiker wird es sich zum Grundsatz machen: wenn einmal Gebrechen in der Staatsverfassung oder im Staatenverhältniß angetroffen werden, die man nicht hat verhüten können, so sey es Pflicht, vornehmlich für Staatsoberhäupter, dahin bedacht zu seyn, wie sie, sobald wie möglich, gebessert, und dem Naturrecht, so wie es in der Idee der Vernunft uns zum Muster vor Augen steht, angemessen gemacht werden könne: sollte es auch ihrer Selbstsucht Aufopferungen kosten. Da nun die Zerreißung eines Bandes der Staats- oder Weltbürgerlichen Vereinigung, ehe noch eine bessere Verfassung an die Stelle derselben zu treten in Bereitschaft ist, aller, hierin mit der Moral einhelligen, Staatsklugheit zuwider ist, so wäre es zwar ungereimt, zu fordern, jenes Gebrechen müsse sofort und mit Ungestüm abgeändert werden; aber daß wenigstens die Maxime der Nothwendigkeit einer solchen Abänderung dem Machthabenden innigst beywohne, um in beständiger Annäherung zu dem Zwecke (der nach Rechtsgesetzen besten Verfassung) zu bleiben, das kann doch von ihm gefordert werden. Ein Staat kann sich auch schon republikanisch *regieren*, wenn er gleich noch, der vorliegenden Constitution nach, despotische *Herrschermacht* besitzt: bis allmählig das Volk des Einflusses der bloßen Idee der Autorität des Gesetzes (gleich als ob es physische Gewalt besäße) fähig wird, und sonach zur eigenen Gesetzgebung (welche ursprünglich auf Recht gegründet ist) tüchtig befunden wird. Wenn auch durch den Ungestüm einer von der schlechten Verfassung erzeugten *Revolution* unrechtmäßigerweise eine gesetzmäßigere errungen wäre, so würde es doch auch alsdann nicht mehr für erlaubt gehalten werden müssen, das Volk wieder auf die alte zurück zu führen, obgleich während derselben jeder, der sich damit gewaltthätig oder arglistig bemengt, mit Recht den Strafen des Aufrührers unterworfen seyn würde. Was aber das äußere Staatenverhältniß betrifft, so kann von einem Staat nicht verlangt werden, daß er seine, obgleich despotische, Verfassung (die aber doch die stärkere in Beziehung auf äußere Feinde ist) ablegen solle, so lange er Gefahr läuft, von andern Staaten so fort verschlungen zu werden; mithin muß bey seinem Vorsatz doch auch die Verzögerung der Ausführung bis zu besserer Zeitgelegenheit erlaubt seyn[14].

Es mag also immer seyn: daß die despotisirende (in der Ausübung fehlende) Moralisten wider die Staatsklugheit (durch übereilt genommene oder angepriesene Maaßregeln) mannichfaltig verstoßen, so muß sie doch die Erfahrung, bey diesem ihrem Verstoß wider die Natur, nach und nach in ein besseres Gleis bringen; statt dessen die moralisirende Politiker, durch Beschönigung rechtswidriger Staatsprincipien, unter dem Vorwande einer des Guten, nach der Idee, wie sie die Vernunft vorschreibt, nicht *fähigen* menschlichen Natur, so viel an ihnen ist, das Besserwerden *unmöglich machen*, und die Rechtsverletzung verewigen.

Statt der Praxis, deren sich diese staatskluge Männer rühmen, gehen sie mit *Praktiken* um, indem sie bloß darauf bedacht sind, dadurch, daß sie der jetzt herrschenden Gewalt zum Munde reden (um ihren Privatvortheil nicht zu verfehlen), das Volk, und, wo möglich, die ganze Welt Preis zu geben; nach der Art ächter Juristen (vom Handwerk, nicht von der *Gesetzgebung*), wenn sie sich bis zur Politik versteigen. Denn da dieser ihr Geschäfte nicht ist, über Gesetzgebung selbst zu vernünfteln, sondern die gegenwärtige Gebote des Landrechts zu vollziehen, so muß ihnen jede, jetzt vorhandene, gesetzliche Verfassung, und, wenn diese höhern Orts abgeändert wird, die nun folgende, immer die beste seyn; wo dann alles so in seiner gehörigen mechanischen Ordnung ist. Wenn aber diese Geschicklichkeit, für alle Sättel gerecht zu seyn, ihnen den Wahn einflößt, auch über Principien einer *Staatsverfassung* überhaupt nach Rechtsbegriffen (mithin a priori, nicht empirisch) urtheilen zu können: wenn sie darauf groß thun, *Menschen* zu kennen (welches freylich zu erwarten ist, weil sie mit vielen zu thun haben), ohne doch *den Menschen*, und was aus ihm gemacht werden kann, zu kennen (wozu ein höherer Standpunkt der Anthropologischen Beobachtung erfordert wird), mit diesen Begriffen aber versehen, ans Staats- und Völkerrecht, wie es die Vernunft vorschreibt, gehen: so können sie diesen Ueberschritt nicht anders, als mit dem Geist der Chicane thun, indem sie ihr gewohntes Verfahren (eines Mechanisms nach despotisch gegebenen Zwangsgesetzen) auch da befolgen, wo die Begriffe der Vernunft einen nur nach Freyheitsprincipien gesetzmäßigen Zwang begründet wissen wollen, durch welchen allererst eine zu Recht beständige Staatsverfassung möglich ist; welche Aufgabe der vorgebliche Praktiker, mit Vorbeygehung jener Idee, empirisch, aus Erfahrung, wie die bisher noch am besten bestandene, mehrentheils aber rechtswidrige, Staatsverfassungen eingerichtet waren, lösen zu können glaubt. — Die Maximen, deren er sich hiezu bedient (ob er sie zwar nicht laut werden läßt), laufen ohngefähr auf folgende sophistische Maximen hinaus.

1. Fac et excusa. Ergreife die günstige Gelegenheit zur eigenmächtigen Besitznehmung (entweder eines Rechts des Staats über sein Volk, oder über ein anderes benachbarte); die Rechtfertigung wird sich weit leichter und zierlicher *nach der That* vortragen, und die Gewalt beschönigen lassen (vornehmlich im ersten Fall, wo die obere Gewalt im Innern so fort auch die gesetzgebende Obrigkeit ist, der man gehorchen muß, ohne darüber zu vernünfteln); als wenn man zuvor auf überzeugende Gründe sinnen, und die Gegengründe darüber noch erst abwarten wollte. Diese Dreustigkeit selbst giebt einen gewissen Anschein von innerer Ueberzeugung der Rechtmäßigkeit der That, und der Gott bonus euentus ist nachher der beste Rechtsvertreter.

2. Si fecisti nega. Was du selbst verbrochen hast, z. B. um dein Volk zur Verzweiflung, und so zum Aufruhr zu bringen, das läugne ab, daß es *deine* Schuld sey; sondern behaupte, daß es die der Widerspenstigkeit der Unterthanen, oder auch, bey deiner Bemächtigung eines benachbarten Volks, die Schuld der Natur des Menschen sey, der, wenn er dem Andern nicht mit Gewalt zuvorkommt, sicher darauf rechnen kann, daß dieser ihm zuvorkommen und sich seiner bemächtigen werde.

3. Diuide et impera. Das ist: sind gewisse privilegirte Häupter in deinem Volk, welche dich bloß zu ihrem Oberhaupt (primus inter pares) gewählt haben, so veruneinige jene unter einander, und entzweye sie mit dem Volk: stehe nun dem letztern, unter Vorspiegelung größerer Freyheit, bey, so wird alles von deinem unbedingten Willen abhängen. Oder sind es äußere Staaten, so ist Erregung der Mishelligkeit unter ihnen ein ziemlich sicheres Mittel, unter dem Schein des Beystandes des Schwächeren, einen nach dem andern dir zu unterwerfen.

Durch diese politische Maximen wird nun zwar niemand hintergangen; denn sie sind insgesamt schon allgemein bekannt; auch ist es mit ihnen nicht der Fall sich zu schämen, als ob die Ungerechtigkeit gar zu offenbar in die Augen leuchtete. Denn, weil sich große Mächte nie vor dem Urtheil des gemeinen Haufens, sondern nur eine vor der andern schämen, was aber jene Grundsätze betrifft, nicht das Offenbarwerden, sondern nur das *Mislingen* derselben sie beschämt machen kann (denn in Ansehung der Moralität der Maximen kommen sie alle unter einander überein), so bleibt ihnen immer die *politische Ehre* übrig, auf die sie sicher rechnen können, nämlich die der *Vergrößerung ihrer Macht*, auf welchem Wege sie auch erworben seyn mag[15].

* * *

Aus allen diesen Schlangenwendungen einer unmoralischen Klugheitslehre, den Friedenszustand unter Menschen, aus dem kriegerischen des Naturzustandes herauszubringen, erhellet wenigstens so viel: daß die Menschen, eben so wenig in ihren Privatverhältnissen, als in ihren öffentlichen, dem Rechtsbegriff entgehen können, und sich nicht getrauen, die Politik öffentlich bloß auf Handgriffe der Klugheit zu gründen, mithin dem Begriffe eines öffentlichen Rechts allen Gehorsam aufzukündigen (welches vornehmlich in dem des Völkerrechts auffallend ist), sondern ihm an sich alle gebührende Ehre wiederfahren lassen, wenn sie auch hundert Ausflüchte und Bemäntelungen aussinnen sollten, um ihm in der Praxis auszuweichen, und der verschmitzten Gewalt die Autorität anzudichten, der Ursprung und der Verband alles Rechts zu seyn. — Um dieser Sophisterey (wenn gleich nicht der durch sie beschönigten Ungerechtigkeit) ein Ende zu machen, und die falsche *Vertreter* der Mächtigen der Erde zum Geständnisse zu bringen, daß es nicht das Recht, sondern die Gewalt sey, der sie zum Vortheil sprechen, von welcher sie, gleich als ob sie selbst hiebey was zu befehlen hätten, den Ton annehmen, wird es gut seyn, das Blendwerk aufzudecken, womit man sich und andere hintergeht, das oberste Princip, von dem die Absicht auf den ewigen Frieden ausgeht, ausfindig zu machen und zu zeigen: daß alles das Böse, was ihm im Wege ist, davon herrühre: daß der politische Moralist da anfängt, wo der moralische Politiker billigerweise endigt, und, indem er so die Grundsätze dem Zweck unterordnet (d. i. die Pferde hinter den Wagen spannt), seine eigene Absicht vereitelt, die Politik mit der Moral in Einverständniß zu bringen.

Um die praktische Philosophie mit sich selbst einig zu machen, ist nöthig, zuförderst die Frage zu entscheiden: ob in Aufgaben der praktischen Vernunft vom *materialen Prinzip* derselben, dem *Zweck* (als Gegenstand der Willkühr) der Anfang gemacht werden müsse, oder vom *formalen*, d. i. demjenigen (bloß auf Freyheit im äußern Verhältniß gestellten), darnach es heißt: handle so, daß du wollen kannst, deine Maxime solle ein allgemeines Gesetz werden (der Zweck mag seyn welcher er wolle).

Ohne alle Zweifel muß das letztere Princip vorangehen: denn es hat, als Rechtsprincip, unbedingte Nothwendigkeit, statt dessen das erstere, nur unter Voraussetzung empirischer Bedingungen des vorgesetzten Zwecks, nämlich der Ausführung desselben, nöthigend ist, und, wenn dieser Zweck (z. B. der ewige Friede) auch Pflicht wäre, so müßte doch diese selbst aus dem formalen Princip der Maximen äußerlich zu handeln abgeleitet worden seyn. — Nun ist das erstere Princip, das des *politischen Moralisten* (das Problem des Staats-, Völker- und Weltbürgerrechts), eine bloße *Kunstaufgabe* (problema technicum), das zweyte dagegen, als Princip des *moralischen Politikers*, welchem es eine *sittliche Aufgabe* (problxma morale) ist, im Verfahren von dem anderen himmelweit unterschieden, um den ewigen Frieden, den man nun nicht bloß als physisches Gut, sondern auch als einen aus Pflichtanerkennung hervorgehenden Zustand wünscht, herbeyzuführen.

Zur Auflösung des ersten, nämlich des Staats-Klugheitsproblems, wird viel Kenntnis der Natur erfordert, um ihren Mechanism zu dem gedachten Zweck zu benutzen, und doch ist alle diese ungewiß in Ansehung ihres Resultats, den ewigen Frieden betreffend; man mag nun die eine oder die andere der drey Abtheilungen des öffentlichen Rechts nehmen. Ob das Volk im Gehorsam und zugleich im Flor besser durch Strenge, oder Lockspeise der Eitelkeit, ob durch Obergewalt eines Einzigen, oder durch Vereinigung mehrerer Häupter, vielleicht auch bloß durch einen Dienstadel, oder durch Volksgewalt, im Innern, und zwar auf lange Zeit, gehalten werden könne, ist ungewiß. Man hat von allen Regierungsarten (die einzige ächt-republikanische, die aber nur einem moralischen Politiker in den Sinn kommen kann, ausgenommen) Beyspiele des Gegentheils in der Geschichte. — Noch ungewisser ist ein auf Statute nach Ministerialplanen vorgeblich errichtetes Völkerrecht, welches in der That nur ein Wort ohne Sache ist, und auf Verträgen beruht, die in demselben Akt ihrer Beschließung zugleich den geheimen Vorbehalt ihrer Uebertretung enthalten. — Dagegen dringt sich die Auflösung des zweyten, nämlich des *Staatsweisheitsproblems*, so zu sagen, von selbst auf, ist jedermann einleuchtend, und macht alle Künsteley zu Schanden, führt dabey gerade zum Zweck; doch mit der Erinnerung der Klugheit, ihn nicht übereilterweise mit Gewalt herbey zu ziehen, sondern sich ihm, nach Beschaffenheit der günstigen Umstände, unabläßig zu nähern.

Da heißt es denn: „trachtet allererst nach dem Reiche der reinen praktischen Vernunft und nach seiner *Gerechtigkeit*, so wird euch euer Zweck (die Wohlthat des ewigen Friedens) von selbst zufallen.“ Denn das hat die Moral Eigenthümliches an sich, und zwar in Ansehung ihrer Grundsätze des öffentlichen Rechts, (mithin in Beziehung auf eine a priori erkennbare Politik), daß, je weniger sie das Verhalten von dem vorgesetzten Zweck, dem beabsichtigten, es sey physischem oder sittlichem Vortheil, abhängig macht, desto mehr sie dennoch zu diesem im Allgemeinen zusammenstimmt; welches daher kömmt, weil es gerade der a priori gegebene allgemeine Wille (in einem Volk, oder im Verhältnis verschiedener Völker unter einander) ist, der allein, was unter Menschen Rechtens ist, bestimmt; diese Vereinigung des Willens Aller aber, wenn nur in der Ausübung consequent verfahren wird, auch nach dem Mechanism der Natur, zugleich die Ursache seyn kann, die abgezweckte Wirkung hervorzubringen, und dem Rechtsbegriffe Effekt zu verschaffen. — So ist es z. B. ein Grundsatz der moralischen Politik: daß sich ein Volk zu einem Staat nach den alleinigen Rechtsbegriffen der Freyheit und Gleichheit vereinigen solle, und dieses Princip ist nicht auf Klugheit, sondern auf Pflicht gegründet. Nun mögen dagegen politische Moralisten noch so viel über den Naturmechanism einer in Gesellschaft tretenden Menschenmenge, welcher jene Grundsätze entkräftete, und ihre Absicht vereiteln werde, vernünfteln, oder auch durch Beyspiele schlecht organisirter Verfassungen alter und neuer Zeiten (z. B. von Demokratien ohne Repräsentationssystem) ihre Behauptung dagegen zu beweisen suchen, so verdienen sie kein Gehör; vornehmlich, da eine solche verderbliche Theorie das Uebel wohl gar selbst bewirkt, was sie vorhersagt, nach welcher der Mensch mit den übrigen lebenden Maschinen in eine Classe geworfen wird, denen nur noch das Bewußtseyn, daß sie nicht freye Wesen sind, beywohnen dürfte, um sie in ihrem eigenen Urtheil zu den elendesten unter allen Weltwesen zu machen.

Der zwar etwas renomistisch klingende, sprüchwörtlich in Umlauf gekommene, aber wahre Satz: fiat iustitia, pereat mundus, das heißt zu deutsch: „es herrsche Gerechtigkeit, die Schelme in der Welt mögen auch insgesammt darüber zu Grunde gehen,“ ist ein wackerer, alle durch Arglist oder Gewalt vorgezeichnete krumme Wege abschneidender Rechtsgrundsatz; nur daß er nicht mißverstanden, und etwa als Erlaubnis, sein eigenes Recht mit der größten Strenge zu benutzen (welches der ethischen Pflicht widerstreiten würde), sondern als Verbindlichkeit der Machthabenden, niemanden sein Recht aus Ungunst oder Mitleiden gegen Andere zu weigern oder zu schmälern, verstanden wird; wozu vorzüglich eine nach reinen Rechtsprincipien eingerichtete innere Verfassung des Staats, dann aber auch die der Vereinigung desselben mit andern benachbarten oder auch entfernten Staaten zu einer (einem allgemeinen Staat analogischen) gesetzlichen Ausgleichung ihrer Streitigkeiten erfordert wird. — Dieser Satz will nichts anders sagen, als: die politische Maximen müssen nicht von der, aus ihrer Befolgung zu erwartenden, Wohlfahrt und Glückseligkeit eines jeden Staats, also nicht vom Zweck, den sich ein jeder derselben zum Gegenstande macht (vom Wollen), als dem obersten (aber empirischen) Princip der Staatsweisheit, sondern von dem reinen Begriff der Rechtspflicht (vom Sollen, dessen Princip a priori durch reine Vernunft gegeben ist) ausgehen, die physische Folgen daraus mögen auch seyn, welche sie wollen. Die Welt wird keinesweges dadurch untergehen, daß der bösen Menschen weniger wird. Das moralisch Böse hat die von seiner Natur unabtrennliche Eigenschaft, daß es in seinen Absichten (vornehmlich in Verhältnis gegen andere Gleichgesinnete) sich selbst zuwider und zerstöhrend ist, und so dem (moralischen) Princip des Guten, wenn gleich durch langsame Fortschritte, Platz macht.

*   *
  *

Es giebt also *objectiv* (in der Theorie) gar keinen Streit zwischen der Moral und der Politik. Dagegen *subjectiv* (in dem selbstsüchtigen Hange der Menschen, der aber, weil er nicht auf Vernunftmaximen gegründet ist, noch nicht Praxis genannt werden muß), wird und mag er immer bleiben, weil er zum Wetzstein der Tugend dient, deren wahrer Muth (nach dem Grundsatze: tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito) in gegenwärtigem Falle nicht sowohl darin besteht, den Uebeln und Aufopferungen mit festem Vorsatz sich entgegenzusetzen, welche hiebey übernommen werden müssen, sondern dem weit gefährlichern lügenhaften und verrätherischen, aber doch vernünftelnden, die Schwäche der menschlichen Natur zur Rechtfertigung aller Uebertretung vorspiegelnden bösen Princip in uns selbst, in die Augen zu sehen und seine Arglist zu besiegen.

In der That kann der politische Moralist sagen: Regent und Volk, oder Volk und Volk thun *einander* nicht Unrecht, wenn sie einander gewaltthätig oder hinterlistig befehden, ob sie zwar überhaupt darin Unrecht thun, daß sie dem Rechtsbegriffe, der allein den Frieden auf ewig begründen könnte, alle Achtung versagen. Denn weil der eine seine Pflicht gegen den andern übertritt, der gerade eben so rechtswidrig gegen jenen gesinnt ist, so *geschieht* ihnen beyderseits ganz recht, wenn sie sich unter einander aufreiben, doch so, daß von dieser Race immer noch genug übrig bleibt, um dieses Spiel bis zu den entferntesten Zeiten nicht aufhören zu lassen, damit eine späte Nachkommenschaft an ihnen dereinst ein warnendes Beyspiel nehme. Die Vorsehung im Laufe der Welt ist hiebey gerechtfertigt; denn das moralische Princip im Menschen erlöscht nie, die, pragmatisch, zur Ausführung der rechtlichen Ideen nach jenem Princip tüchtige Vernunft wächst noch dazu beständig durch immer fortschreitende Cultur, mit ihr aber auch die Schuld jener Uebertretungen. Die Schöpfung allein: daß nämlich ein solcher Schlag von verderbten Wesen überhaupt hat auf Erden seyn sollen, scheint durch keine Theodicee gerechtfertigt werden zu können (wenn wir annehmen, daß es mit dem Menschengeschlechte nie besser bestellt seyn werde noch könne); aber dieser Standpunkt der Beurtheilung ist für uns viel zu hoch, als daß wir unsere Begriffe (von Weisheit) der obersten uns unerforschlichen Macht in theoretischer Absicht unterlegen könnten. — Zu solchen verzweifelten Folgerungen werden wir unvermeidlich hingetrieben, wenn wir nicht annehmen, die reine Rechtsprincipien haben objective Realität, d. i. sie lassen sich ausführen; und darnach müsse auch von Seiten des Volks im Staate, und weiterhin von Seiten der Staaten gegen einander, gehandelt werden; die empirische Politik mag auch dagegen einwenden, was sie wolle. Die wahre Politik kann also keinen Schritt thun, ohne vorher der Moral gehuldigt zu haben, und ob zwar Politik für sich selbst eine schwere Kunst ist, so ist doch Vereinigung derselben mit der Moral gar keine Kunst; denn diese haut den Knoten entzwey, den jene nicht aufzulösen vermag, sobald beyde einander widerstreiten. — Das Recht dem Menschen muß heilig gehalten werden, der herrschenden Gewalt mag es auch noch so große Aufopferung kosten. Man kann hier nicht halbiren, und das Mittelding eines pragmatisch-bedingten Rechts (zwischen Recht und Nutzen) aussinnen, sondern alle Politik muß ihre Kniee vor dem erstern beugen, kann aber dafür hoffen, ob zwar langsam, zu der Stufe zu gelangen, wo sie beharrlich glänzen wird.

[14] Dies sind Erlaubnißgesetze der Vernunft, den Stand eines mit Ungerechtigkeit behafteten öffentlichen Rechts noch so lange beharren zu lassen, bis zur völligen Umwälzung alles entweder von selbst gereift, oder durch friedliche Mittel der Reife nahe gebracht worden; weil doch irgend eine *rechtliche*, obzwar nur in geringem Grade rechtmäßige, Verfassung besser ist als gar keine, welches letztere Schicksal (der Anarchie) eine *übereilte* Reform treffen würde. — Die Staatsweisheit wird sich also in dem Zustande, worin die Dinge jetzt sind, Reformen, dem Ideal des öffentlichen Rechts angemessen, zur Pflicht machen: Revolutionen aber, wo sie die Natur von selbst herbey führt, nicht zur Beschönigung einer noch größeren Unterdrückung, sondern als Ruf der Natur benutzen, eine auf Freyheitsprincipien gegründete gesetzliche Verfassung, als die einzige dauerhafte, durch gründliche Reform zu Stande zu bringen.

[15] Wenn gleich eine gewisse in der menschlichen Natur gewurzelte Bösartigkeit von *Menschen*, die in einem Staat zusammen leben, noch bezweifelt, und, statt ihrer, der Mangel einer noch nicht weit genug fortgeschrittenen Cultur (die Rohigkeit) zur Ursache der gesetzwidrigen Erscheinungen ihrer Denkungsart mit einigem Scheine angeführet werden möchte, so fällt sie doch, im äußeren Verhältniß der *Staaten* gegen einander, ganz unverdeckt und unwidersprechlich in die Augen. Im Innern jedes Staats ist sie durch den Zwang der bürgerlichen Gesetze verschleyert, weil der Neigung zur wechselseitigen Gewaltthätigkeit der Bürger eine größere Gewalt, nämlich die der Regierung, mächtig entgegenwirkt, und so nicht allein dem Ganzen einen moralischen Anstrich (causae non causae) giebt, sondern auch dadurch, daß dem Ausbruch gesetzwidriger Neigungen ein Riegel vorgeschoben wird, die Entwickelung der moralischen Anlage, zur unmittelbaren Achtung fürs Recht, wirklich viel Erleichterung bekommt. — Denn ein jeder glaubt nun von sich, daß er wohl den Rechtsbegriff heilig halten und treu befolgen würde, wenn er sich nur von jedem andern eines Gleichen gewärtigen könnte; welches letztere ihm die Regierung zum Theil sichert; wodurch dann ein großer Schritt *zur* Moralität (obgleich noch nicht moralischer Schritt) gethan wird, diesem Pflichtbegriff auch um sein selbst willen, ohne Rücksicht auf Erwiederung, anhänglich zu seyn. — Da ein jeder aber, bey seiner guten Meynung von sich selber, doch die böse Gesinnung bey allen anderen voraussetzt, so sprechen sie einander wechselseitig ihr Urtheil: daß sie alle, was das *Factum* betrifft, wenig taugen (woher es komme, da es doch der *Natur* des Menschen, als eines freyen Wesens, nicht Schuld gegeben werden kann, mag unerörtert bleiben). Da aber doch auch die Achtung für den Rechtsbegriff, deren der Mensch sich schlechterdings nicht entschlagen kann, die Theorie des Vermögens, ihm angemessen zu werden, auf das feyerlichste sanctionirt, so sieht ein jeder, daß er seinerseits jenem gemäß handeln müsse, Andere mögen es halten, wie sie wollen.

### Appendix II

II.
Von der Einhelligkeit der Politik mit der Moral nach dem transscendentalen Begriffe des öffentlichen Rechts.

Wenn ich von aller *Materie* des öffentlichen Rechts (nach den verschiedenen empirisch-gegebenen Verhältnissen der Menschen im Staat oder auch der Staaten unter einander), so wie es sich die Rechtslehrer gewöhnlich denken, abstrahire, so bleibt mir noch die *Form der Publicität* übrig, deren Möglichkeit ein jeder Rechtsanspruch in sich enthält, weil ohne jene es keine Gerechtigkeit (die nur als *öffentlich kundbar* gedacht werden kann), mithin auch kein Recht, das nur von ihr ertheilt wird, geben würde.

Diese Fähigkeit der Publicität muß jeder Rechtsanspruch haben, und sie kann also, da es sich ganz leicht beurtheilen läßt, ob sie in einem vorkommenden Falle statt finde, d. i. ob sie sich mit den Grundsätzen des Handelnden vereinigen lasse oder nicht, ein leicht zu brauchendes, a priori in der Vernunft anzutreffendes Criterium abgeben, im letzteren Fall die Falschheit (Rechtswidrigkeit) des gedachten Anspruchs (praetensio iuris), gleichsam durch ein Experiment der reinen Vernunft, so fort zu erkennen.

Nach einer solchen Abstraction von allem Empirischen, was der Begriff des Staats- und Völkerrechts enthält (dergleichen das Bösartige der menschlichen Natur ist, welches den Zwang nothwendig macht), kann man folgenden Satz die *transscendentale Formel* des öffentlichen Rechts nennen:

„Alle auf das Recht anderer Menschen bezogene Handlungen, deren Maxime sich nicht mit der Publicität verträgt, sind unrecht“

Dieses Princip ist nicht bloß als *ethisch* (zur Tugendlehre gehörig), sondern auch als *juridisch* (das Recht der Menschen angehend) zu betrachten. Denn eine Maxime, die ich nicht darf *laut werden* lassen, ohne dadurch meine eigene Absicht zugleich zu vereiteln, die durchaus *verheimlicht* werden muß, wenn sie gelingen soll, und zu der ich mich nicht *öffentlich bekennen* kann, ohne daß dadurch unausbleiblich der Widerstand Aller gegen meinen Vorsatz gereizt werde, kann diese nothwendige und allgemeine, mithin a priori einzusehende, Gegenbearbeitung Aller gegen mich nirgend wovon anders, als von der Ungerechtigkeit her haben, womit sie jedermann bedroht. — Es ist ferner bloß *negativ*, d. i. es dient nur, um, vermittelst desselben, was gegen Andere *nicht recht* ist, zu erkennen. — Es ist gleich einem Axiom unerweißlich-gewiß und überdem leicht anzuwenden, wie aus folgenden Beyspielen des öffentlichen Rechts zu ersehen ist.

1. *Was das Staatsrecht* (ius ciuitatis), nämlich das innere *betrifft*: so kommt in ihm die Frage vor, welche Viele für schwer zu beantworten halten, und die das transscendentale Princip der Publicität ganz leicht auflöset: „ist Aufruhr ein rechtmäßiges Mittel für ein Volk, die drückende Gewalt eines so genannten Tyrannen (non titulo sed exercitio talis) abzuwerfen?“ Die Rechte des Volks sind gekränkt, und ihm (dem Tyrannen) geschieht kein Unrecht durch die Entthronung; daran ist kein Zweifel. Nichts desto weniger ist es doch von den Unterthanen im höchsten Grade unrecht, auf diese Art ihr Recht zu suchen, und sie können eben so wenig über Ungerechtigkeit klagen, wenn sie in diesem Streit unterlägen und nachher deshalb die härteste Strafe ausstehen müßten.

Hier kann nun Vieles für und dawider vernünftelt werden, wenn man es durch eine dogmatische Deduction der Rechtsgründe ausmachen will; allein das transscendentale Princip der Publicität des öffentlichen Rechts kann sich diese Weitläuftigkeit erspahren. Nach demselben frägt sich vor Errichtung des bürgerlichen Vertrags das Volk selbst, ob es sich wohl getraue, die Maxime des Vorsatzes einer gelegentlichen Empörung öffentlich bekannt zu machen. Man sieht leicht ein, daß, wenn man es bey der Stiftung einer Staatsverfassung zur Bedingung machen wollte, in gewissen vorkommenden Fällen gegen das Oberhaupt Gewalt auszuüben, so müßte das Volk sich einer rechtmäßigen Macht über jenes anmaßen. Alsdann wäre jenes aber nicht das Oberhaupt, oder, wenn beydes zur Bedingung der Staatserrichtung gemacht würde, so würde gar keine möglich seyn, welches doch die Absicht des Volks war. Das Unrecht des Aufruhrs leuchtet also dadurch ein, daß die Maxime desselben dadurch, daß man sich *öffentlich dazu bekennte*, seine eigene Absicht unmöglich machen würde. Man müßte sie also nothwendig verheimlichen. — Das letztere wäre aber von Seiten des Staatsoberhaupts eben nicht nothwendig. Er kann frey heraussagen, daß er jeden Aufruhr mit dem Tode der Rädelsführer bestrafen werde, diese mögen auch immer glauben, er habe seinerseits das Fundamentalgesetz zuerst übertreten; denn wenn er sich bewußt ist, die *unwiderstehliche* Obergewalt zu besitzen (welches auch in jeder bürgerlichen Verfassung so angenommen werden muß, weil der, welcher nicht Macht genug hat, einen jeden im Volk gegen den andern zu schützen, auch nicht das Recht hat, ihm zu befehlen), so darf er nicht sorgen, durch die Bekanntwerdung seiner Maxime seine eigene Absicht zu vereiteln, womit auch ganz wohl zusammenhängt, daß, wenn der Aufruhr dem Volk gelänge, jenes Oberhaupt in die Stelle des Unterthans zurücktreten, eben sowohl keinen Wiedererlangungsaufruhr beginnen, aber auch nicht zu befürchten haben müßte, wegen seiner vormaligen Staatsführung zur Rechenschaft gezogen zu werden.

2. *Was das Völkerrecht betrifft.* — Nur unter Voraussetzung irgend eines rechtlichen Zustandes (d. i. derjenigen äußeren Bedingung, unter der dem Menschen ein Recht wirklich zu Theil werden kann), kann von einem Völkerrecht die Rede seyn; weil es, als ein öffentliches Recht, die Publication eines, jedem das Seine bestimmenden, allgemeinen Willens schon in seinem Begriffe enthält, und dieser *status iuridicus* muß aus irgend einem Vertrage hervorgehen, der nicht eben (gleich dem, woraus ein Staat entspringt,) auf Zwangsgesetze gegründet seyn darf, sondern allenfalls auch der einer *fortwährend-freyen* Association seyn kann, wie der oben erwähnte der Föderalität verschiedener Staaten. Denn ohne irgend einen *rechtlichen Zustand*, der die verschiedene (physische oder moralische) Personen thätig verknüpft, mithin im Naturstande, kann es kein anderes als bloß ein Privatrecht geben. — Hier tritt nun auch ein Streit der Politik mit der Moral (diese als Rechtslehre betrachtet) ein, wo dann jenes Criterium der Publicität der Maximen gleichfalls seine leichte Anwendung findet, doch nur so: daß der Vertrag die Staaten nur in der Absicht verbindet, unter einander und zusammen gegen andere Staaten sich im Frieden zu erhalten, keinesweges aber um Erwerbungen zu machen. — Da treten nun folgende Fälle der Antinomie zwischen Politik und Moral ein, womit zugleich die Lösung derselben verbunden wird.

a) „Wenn einer dieser Staaten dem andern etwas versprochen hat: es sey Hülfleistung, oder Abtretung gewisser Länder, oder Subsidien u. d. gl., frägt sich, ob er sich in einem Fall, an dem des Staats Heil hängt, vom Worthalten dadurch los machen kann, daß er sich in einer doppelten Person betrachtet wissen will, erstlich als *Souverän*, da er Niemanden in seinem Staat verantwortlich ist; dann aber wiederum bloß als oberster *Staatsbeamte*, der dem Staat Rechenschaft geben müsse: da denn der Schluß dahin ausfällt, daß, wozu er sich in der ersteren Qualität verbindlich gemacht hat, davon werde er in der zweyten losgesprochen.“ — Wenn nun aber ein Staat (oder dessen Oberhaupt) diese seine Maxime laut werden ließe, so würde natürlicherweise entweder ein jeder Andere ihn fliehen, oder sich mit Anderen vereinigen, um seinen Anmaßungen zu widerstehen, welches beweiset, daß Politik mit aller ihrer Schlauigkeit auf diesen Fuß (der Offenheit) ihren Zweck selber vereiteln, mithin jene Maxime unrecht seyn müßte.

b) „Wenn eine bis zur furchtbaren Größe (*potentia tremenda*) angewachsene benachbarte Macht Besorgnis erregt: kann man annehmen, sie werde, weil sie *kann*, auch unterdrücken *wollen*, und giebt das der Mindermächtigen ein Recht zum (vereinigten) Angriffe derselben, auch ohne vorhergegangene Beleidigung?“ — Ein Staat, der seine Maxime hier bejahend *verlautbaren* wollte, würde das Uebel nur noch gewisser und schneller herbeyführen. Denn die größere Macht würde der kleineren zuvorkommen, und, was die Vereinigung der letzteren betrifft, so ist das nur ein schwacher Rohrstab gegen den, der das *diuide et impera* zu benutzen weiß. — Diese Maxime der Staatsklugheit, öffentlich erklärt, vereitelt also nothwendig ihre eigene Absicht, und ist folglich ungerecht.

c) „Wenn ein kleinerer Staat durch seine Lage den Zusammenhang eines größeren trennt, der diesem doch zu seiner Erhaltung nöthig ist, ist dieser nicht berechtigt, jenen sich zu unterwerfen und mit dem seinigen zu vereinigen?“ — Man sieht leicht, daß der größere eine solche Maxime ja nicht vorher müsse laut werden lassen; denn, entweder die kleinern Staaten würden sich frühzeitig vereinigen, oder andere Mächtige würden um diese Beute streiten, mithin macht sie sich durch ihre Offenheit selbst unthunlich; ein Zeichen, daß sie ungerecht ist und es auch in sehr hohem Grade seyn kann; denn ein klein Object der Ungerechtigkeit hindert nicht, daß die daran bewiesene Ungerechtigkeit sehr groß sey.

3. *Was das Weltbürgerrecht betrifft*, so übergehe ich es hier mit Stillschweigen; weil, wegen der Analogie desselben mit dem Völkerrecht, die Maximen desselben leicht anzugeben und zu würdigen sind.

* * *

Man hat hier nun zwar an dem Princip der Unverträglichkeit der Maximen des Völkerrechts mit der Publicität, ein gutes Kennzeichen der *Nichtübereinstimmung* der Politik mit der Moral (als Rechtslehre). Nun bedarf man aber auch belehrt zu werden, welches denn die Bedingung ist, unter der ihre Maximen mit dem Recht der Völker übereinstimmen? Denn es läßt sich nicht umgekehrt schließen: daß, welche Maximen die Publicität vertragen, dieselbe darum auch gerecht sind; weil, wer die entschiedene Obermacht hat, seiner Maximen nicht heel haben darf. — Die Bedingung der Möglichkeit eines Völkerrechts überhaupt ist: daß zuvörderst ein *rechtlicher Zustand* existire. Denn ohne diesen giebts kein öffentliches Recht, sondern alles Recht, was man sich außer demselben denken mag (im Naturzustande), ist bloß Privatrecht. Nun haben wir oben gesehen: daß ein föderativer Zustand der Staaten, welcher bloß die Entfernung des Krieges zur Absicht hat, der einzige, mit der *Freyheit* derselben vereinbare, *rechtliche* Zustand sey. Also ist die Zusammenstimmung der Politik mit der Moral nur in einem föderativen Verein (der also nach Rechtsprincipien *a priori* gegeben und nothwendig ist) möglich, und alle Staatsklugheit hat zur rechtlichen Basis die Stiftung des ersteren, in ihrem größt-möglichen Umfange, ohne welchen Zweck alle ihre Klügeley Unweisheit und verschleyerte Ungerechtigkeit ist. — Diese Afterpolitik hat nun ihre *Casuistik*, trotz der besten Jesuiterschule — die *reservatio mentalis*; in Abfassung öffentlicher Verträge, mit solchen Ausdrücken, die man gelegentlich zu seinem Vortheil auslegen kann, wie man will (z. B. den Unterschied des *status quo de fait* und *de droit*); — den *Probabilismus*: böse Absichten an Anderen zu erklügeln, oder auch Wahrscheinlichkeiten ihres möglichen Uebergewichts zum Rechtsgrunde der Untergrabung anderer friedlicher Staaten zu machen; — Endlich das *peccatum philosophicum* (*peccatillum, bagatelle*). Das Verschlingen eines *kleinen* Staats, wenn dadurch ein viel *größerer*, zum vermeyntlich größern Weltbesten, gewinnt, für eine leicht-verzeihliche Kleinigkeit zu halten[16].

Den Vorschub hiezu giebt die Zweyzüngigkeit der Politik in Ansehung der Moral, einen oder den andern Zweig derselben zu ihrer Absicht zu benutzen. — Beydes, die Menschenliebe und die Achtung fürs Recht der Menschen, ist Pflicht; jene aber nur *bedingte*, diese dagegen *unbedingte*, schlechthin gebietende Pflicht, welche nicht übertreten zu haben derjenige zuerst völlig versichert seyn muß, der sich dem süßen Gefühl des Wohlthuns überlassen will. Mit der Moral im ersteren Sinne (als Ethik) ist die Politik leicht einverstanden, um das Recht der Menschen ihren Oberen Preis zu geben: Aber mit der in der zweyten Bedeutung (als Rechtslehre), vor der sie ihre Knie beugen müßte, findet sie es rathsam, sich gar nicht auf Vertrag einzulassen, ihr lieber alle Realität abzustreiten, und alle Pflichten auf lauter Wohlwollen auszudeuten; welche Hinterlist einer lichtscheuen Politik doch von der Philosophie durch die Publicität jener ihrer Maximen leicht vereitelt werden würde, wenn jene es nur wagen wollte, dem Philosophen die Publicität der seinigen angedeihen zu lassen.

In dieser Absicht schlage ich ein anderes transscendentales und bejahendes Princip des öffentlichen Rechts vor, dessen Formel diese seyn würde:

„Alle Maximen, die der Publicität *bedürfen* (um ihren Zweck nicht zu verfehlen), stimmen mit Recht und Politik vereinigt zusammen.“

Denn, wenn sie nur durch die Publicität ihren Zweck erreichen können, so müssen sie dem allgemeinen Zweck des Publicums (der Glückseligkeit) gemäs seyn, womit zusammen zu stimmen (es mit seinem Zustande zufrieden zu machen), die eigentliche Aufgabe der Politik ist. Wenn aber dieser Zweck nur durch die Publicität, d. i. durch die Entfernung alles Mistrauens gegen die Maximen derselben, erreichbar seyn soll, so müssen diese auch mit dem Recht des Publicums in Eintracht stehen; denn in diesem Allein ist die Vereinigung der Zwecke Aller möglich. — Die weitere Ausführung und Erörterung dieses Princips muß ich für eine andere Gelegenheit aussetzen; nur daß es eine transscendentale Formel sey, ist aus der Entfernung aller empirischen Bedingungen (der Glückseligkeitslehre), als der Materie des Gesetzes und der bloßen Rücksicht auf die Form der allgemeinen Gesetzmäßigkeit zu ersehen.

* * *

Wenn es Pflicht, wenn zugleich gegründete Hofnung da ist, den Zustand eines öffentlichen Rechts, obgleich nur in einer ins Unendliche fortschreitenden Annäherung wirklich zu machen, so ist der *ewige Friede*, der auf die bisher fälschlich so genannte Friedensschlüsse (eigentlich Waffenstillstände) folgt, keine leere Idee, sondern eine Aufgabe, die nach und nach aufgelöst, ihrem Ziele (weil die Zeiten, in denen gleiche Fortschritte geschehen, hoffentlich immer kürzer werden) beständig näher kommt.

[16] Die Belege zu solchen Maximen kann man in des Herrn Hofr. Garve Abhandlung: „über die Verbindung der Moral mit der Politik, 1788,“ antreffen. Dieser würdige Gelehrte gesteht gleich zu Anfange, eine genugthuende Antwort auf diese Frage nicht geben zu können. Aber sie dennoch gut zu heißen, ob zwar mit dem Geständnis, die dagegen sich regende Einwürfe nicht völlig heben zu können, scheint doch eine größere Nachgiebigkeit gegen die zu seyn, die sehr geneigt sind, sie zu misbrauchen, als wohl rathsam seyn möchte, einzuräumen.

## Translation — Mouseia

> Machine-assisted translation directly from Kant's complete German text of the expanded 1796 edition, including both supplements, both appendices and his notes. Source: Internet Archive, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek copy.

### Title and preface

Toward Perpetual Peace.

A Philosophical Sketch by Immanuel Kant.

New, expanded edition.

Königsberg, published by Friedrich Nicolovius. 1796.

Toward Perpetual Peace.

Whether this satirical inscription on the sign of a Dutch innkeeper, which bore a painting of a graveyard, applies to *human beings* in general, or especially to heads of state who can never have enough of war, or perhaps only to the philosophers who dream that sweet dream, may remain an open question. The author of the present work does, however, make one reservation: since the practical politician regards the theoretical politician with great complacency as a mere academic whose insubstantial ideas pose no danger to a state that must proceed on principles drawn from experience, and whom he may always allow to knock down all eleven of his skittles at once without the *worldly-wise* statesman needing to take notice, the latter must also remain consistent in any dispute with him and not scent danger to the state behind opinions ventured at random and expressed in public. By this *protective clause*, the author hereby expressly safeguards himself, in due form, against every malicious interpretation.

### Preliminary articles

First section,

containing the preliminary articles for perpetual peace among states.

1. “No peace settlement shall count as such if it is made with a secret reservation of grounds for a future war.”

For then it would be merely an armistice, a postponement of hostilities, not *peace*, which means the end of all hostilities; to attach the epithet *perpetual* to it would already be a suspicious redundancy. Every existing cause of a future war, even if the parties making peace are themselves perhaps still unaware of it, is extinguished by the peace settlement, however acutely it might be unearthed from archival documents. The reservation (*reseruatio mentalis*) of old claims still to be devised in the future, which neither party wishes to mention for the moment because both are too exhausted to continue the war, coupled with the malicious intention of exploiting the first favorable opportunity for this purpose, belongs to Jesuit casuistry. Judged as the matter stands in itself, it is beneath the dignity of rulers, just as a minister's readiness to entertain such deductions is beneath his own dignity.

But if, according to enlightened notions of statecraft, the true honor of a state lies in the constant enlargement of its power, whatever the means, then of course that judgment appears scholastic and pedantic.

2. “No independently existing state, whether small or large—that makes no difference here—shall be capable of acquisition by another state through inheritance, exchange, purchase, or gift.”

A state is not a possession (*patrimonium*), as the land on which it stands might be. It is a society of human beings over whom no one but itself has the right to command or dispose. To incorporate it, a trunk with roots of its own, into another state as a graft is to abolish its existence as a moral person and turn that person into a thing. It therefore contradicts the idea of the original contract, without which no right over a people can be conceived.[1] Everyone knows the dangers into which this prejudice about a way of acquiring states has brought Europe down to the most recent times—the other parts of the world have never known it. The prejudice is that states themselves can marry one another: partly as a new kind of industry, to become overwhelmingly powerful through family alliances without even expending strength, and partly to enlarge territorial possessions in this way. The hiring out of one state's troops to another against an enemy they do not share must be counted here as well, for subjects are thereby used and used up as things to be handled at will.

3. “Standing armies (*miles perpetuus*) shall in time cease altogether.”

For they incessantly threaten other states with war by appearing perpetually prepared for it. They provoke those states to outdo one another in the numbers under arms, an undertaking that knows no bounds. Since the resulting expense eventually makes peace even more burdensome than a short war, standing armies themselves become a cause of wars of aggression intended to cast off this burden. Moreover, being hired to kill or be killed seems to involve using human beings as mere machines and instruments in the hands of another—the state—in a way that can scarcely be reconciled with the right of humanity in our own person. The voluntary, periodic training of citizens in arms, to secure themselves and their country against attacks from outside, is an entirely different matter. Accumulating a treasury would have a similar effect: other states would regard it as a threat of war and be driven to anticipatory attacks. For of the three powers—*military power*, *the power of alliances*, and *financial power*—the last might well be the most dependable instrument of war, were it not for the difficulty of discovering its extent.

4. “No national debt shall be contracted in connection with the state's external affairs.”

Seeking assistance outside or within the state for the purposes of its domestic economy—improving roads, establishing new settlements, providing stores against years of poor harvest, and so forth—is an unobjectionable source of help. But as an instrument by which powers oppose one another, a credit system of debts that grow without limit yet remain secure against present demands, since not all creditors will make their demands at once, is a dangerous financial power. This ingenious invention of a commercial people in the present century is a treasury for waging war that exceeds the treasuries of all other states combined. It can be exhausted only by the eventual failure of tax revenues, which can itself be postponed for a long time by the stimulation of commerce through its effect on industry and earnings. This ease of making war, combined with the inclination toward it among those in power—an inclination that seems ingrained in human nature—is therefore a great obstacle to perpetual peace. A preliminary article prohibiting it is all the more necessary because the national bankruptcy that is ultimately inevitable must also entangle other states in losses through no fault of their own, thereby publicly injuring them. Other states are therefore at least entitled to unite against such a state and its pretensions.

5. “No state shall forcibly interfere in the constitution and government of another state.”

For what could entitle it to do so? Perhaps the scandal that the other state gives to its subjects? That state can instead serve as a warning through the example of the great evils a people has brought upon itself by its lawlessness. In general, the bad example one free person gives another, as an offense taken (*scandalum acceptum*), does not injure the latter's rights. A different case would be a state divided by internal dissension into two parts, each constituting a separate state that claims the whole. To assist one of them could not be charged against an outside state as interference in the constitution of the other, since the condition is then one of anarchy. But so long as this internal conflict remains undecided, interference by external powers would violate the rights of an independent people struggling only with its internal sickness. It would itself therefore be a scandal and make the autonomy of all states insecure.

6. “No state at war with another shall permit such acts of hostility as must make mutual confidence in a future peace impossible: the employment of *assassins* (*percussores*) and *poisoners* (*venefici*), *breach of a capitulation*, *incitement to treason* (*perduellio*) in the state with which it is at war, and the like.”

These are dishonorable stratagems. Even in the midst of war, some confidence in the enemy's way of thinking must remain, since otherwise no peace could be concluded and hostilities would turn into a war of extermination (*bellum internecinum*). War is, after all, only the sad expedient of the state of nature, where no court exists that could deliver a legally binding judgment, for asserting one's right by force. Neither party can there be declared an unjust enemy, since that already presupposes a judicial verdict; rather, the war's *outcome*, as before a so-called judgment of God, decides on which side right lies. Nor can a punitive war (*bellum punitiuum*) between states be conceived, since they do not stand in the relation of superior and subordinate. It follows that a war of extermination, in which annihilation could overtake both parties together and with them all right, would permit perpetual peace only in the great graveyard of the human race. Such a war, and therefore the use of means leading to it, must be absolutely forbidden. That the means named above inevitably lead to it is clear from this: those infernal arts, being base in themselves, cannot remain long within the bounds of war once they have come into use. The use of spies (*vti exploratoribus*) is one such example, where only the dishonesty of *others*, which cannot be eradicated, is exploited. These practices would pass over into the condition of peace as well and thus utterly destroy its purpose.

Although the laws set out above are objectively—that is, in the intention of those in power—all *prohibitive laws* (*leges prohibitiuae*), some are of the *strict* kind, applying without regard to circumstances (*leges strictae*) and demanding abolition *at once*, as do articles 1, 5, and 6. Others, such as articles 2, 3, and 4, are not exceptions to the rule of right, yet circumstances allow a *subjective* extension of discretion regarding their *execution* (*leges latae*), and they permit that execution to be *postponed*. This must never lose sight of its purpose. For instance, postponing the *restoration* of freedom taken from certain states, under article 2, does not permit putting it off until the day that never comes—as Augustus used to promise, *ad calendas graecas*—and thus failing to restore it at all. It permits delay only so that restoration does not take place precipitately and thereby defeat its own purpose. For the prohibition concerns only the *manner of acquisition*, which must cease to be valid in the future, not the *state of possession*. Although the latter lacks the requisite legal title, it was nevertheless regarded as lawful by all states at the time of its supposed acquisition, according to the public opinion prevailing then.[2]

[1] A hereditary realm is not a state that can be inherited by another state. Rather, its right of government can pass by inheritance to another natural person. The state then acquires a ruler; the ruler, as such—that is, as one who already possesses another realm—does not acquire the state.

[2] Whether pure reason can contain *permissive laws* (*leges permissiuae*) in addition to commands (*leges praeceptiuae*) and prohibitions (*leges prohibitiuae*) has so far been doubted, not without reason. Laws in general contain a ground of objective practical necessity, whereas permission contains a ground of the practical contingency of certain actions. A *permissive law* would therefore contain compulsion to an action to which no one can be compelled. If the law's object had the same meaning in both respects, this would be a contradiction. Here, however, the prohibition presupposed in the permissive law concerns only the future manner of acquiring a right, for example through inheritance, while exemption from that prohibition—that is, permission—concerns the existing state of possession. In the passage from the state of nature to the civil condition, this possession, though unlawful, may nevertheless continue as *honest possession* (*possessio putatiua*) under a permissive law of natural right. This holds even though a merely supposed possession, as soon as it is recognized as such, is forbidden in the state of nature, as is a similar manner of acquisition in the subsequent civil condition, after the transition. This authorization to continue possessing would not apply if such a supposed acquisition had occurred in the civil condition; for there, as an injury to right, it would have to cease immediately upon discovery of its unlawfulness.

I have wished only incidentally to draw the attention of teachers of natural right to the concept of a *lex permissiva*, which presents itself naturally to a reason that divides things systematically. This is especially pertinent because it is often used in civil, statutory law, with this difference: the prohibitory law stands by itself, while permission is not incorporated into that law as a limiting condition, as it should be, but is relegated to the exceptions. The formula then runs: this or that is forbidden, *unless* it is case 1, case 2, case 3, and so on without end. Permissions thus enter the law merely by chance, not according to a principle, but by groping among the cases that arise. Otherwise the conditions would have had to be incorporated *into the formula of the prohibitory law*, which would thereby have become a permissive law as well. It is therefore regrettable that the ingenious but unresolved prize question proposed by that equally wise and acute gentleman, *Count von Windischgrätz*, which pressed precisely for this, was abandoned so soon. The possibility of such a formula, analogous to a mathematical one, is the sole genuine touchstone of legislation that remains consistent; without it, so-called *ius certum*, certain law, will always remain a pious wish. Otherwise we shall have merely *general* laws, valid *in general*, but no universal laws, valid *universally*, as the very concept of a law seems to require.

### Definitive articles: introduction

Second section,

containing the definitive articles for perpetual peace among states.

The condition of peace among human beings living beside one another is not the natural condition (*status naturalis*), which is rather a condition of war: even if hostilities do not always break out, their threat is perpetual. Peace must therefore be *established*. For refraining from hostilities does not yet guarantee security against them; unless one neighbor gives another that security, which can happen only in a *lawful* condition, the one who has demanded it may treat the other as an enemy.[3]

[3] It is commonly assumed that I may act with hostility toward no one unless he has already actively *injured me*. This is entirely correct when both of us are in a *civil, lawful* condition. For by entering that condition, he gives the other the required security through the authority that has power over both. But a human being—or a people—in the mere state of nature deprives me of this security and injures me by that very condition, simply by being beside me: not actively, in deed (*facto*), yet through the lawlessness of his condition (*statu iniusto*), by which I am constantly threatened. I may compel him either to enter with me into a shared lawful condition or to withdraw from my neighborhood. The postulate underlying all the following articles is therefore this: all human beings capable of affecting one another must belong to some civil constitution.

Rightful constitutions, considered in relation to the persons within them, are:

1) those founded on the *civic right* of human beings within a people (*ius ciuitatis*);

2) those founded on the *right of nations*, governing states in their relations with one another (*ius gentium*);

3) those founded on *cosmopolitan right*, insofar as human beings and states, standing in relations of external influence upon one another, must be regarded as citizens of a universal state of humanity (*ius cosmopoliticum*). This division is not arbitrary, but necessary in relation to the idea of perpetual peace. For if even one of these persons stood in a relation of physical influence upon another while remaining in the state of nature, that would entail the condition of war, from which it is precisely our purpose here to be freed.

### First definitive article

First definitive article for perpetual peace.

The civil constitution of every state shall be republican.

A constitution established, first, on principles of the *freedom* of the members of a society as human beings; second, on principles of the *dependence* of all upon a single common legislation as subjects; and third, on the law of their *equality as citizens*, is the *republican* constitution.[4] It alone proceeds from the idea of the original contract, on which all rightful legislation of a people must be founded. In respect of right, it is therefore in itself the constitution originally underlying every kind of civil constitution. The only question now is whether it is also the only one that can lead to perpetual peace.

Besides the purity of its origin in the pure source of the concept of right, the republican constitution also offers the prospect of the desired result, perpetual peace. The reason is this. If the consent of the citizens is required to decide “whether there shall be war or not,” as it must be under this constitution, nothing is more natural than that they will think very carefully before embarking on so disastrous a game. They would have to decree all the hardships of war upon themselves: fighting in person, paying its costs from their own property, painfully repairing the devastation it leaves behind, and finally, to complete the burden of evils, taking on a load of debt that embitters peace itself and can never be paid off because new wars are always imminent. By contrast, in a constitution where the subject is not a citizen, and which is therefore not republican, deciding on war is the most untroubling matter in the world. The head of state is not a fellow member of the state but its owner; war costs him nothing of his banquets, hunts, pleasure palaces, court festivities, and the like. He may therefore resolve upon it as a kind of pleasure outing, for the most trivial reasons, and indifferently leave its justification, for propriety's sake, to the diplomatic corps that is always ready to provide one.

To avoid confusing the republican constitution with the democratic, as commonly happens, the following distinction must be observed. The forms of a state (*ciuitas*) can be divided either according to the persons who hold supreme state power or according to the *manner of government* exercised over the people by their head, whoever that may be. The first is properly called the form of *sovereignty* (*forma imperii*). Only three are possible: either *one*, *some* united together, or *all* who compose civil society possess ruling power—*autocracy*, *aristocracy*, and *democracy*: the power of a prince, of the nobility, and of the people. The second is the form of government (*forma regiminis*). It concerns the way the state exercises its plenary power on the basis of its constitution—the act of the general will by which a multitude becomes a people. In this respect it is either *republican* or *despotic*. *Republicanism* is the political principle that separates executive power, the government, from legislative power. Despotism is the state's arbitrary execution of laws it has itself given: the public will, in other words, insofar as the ruler handles it as his private will. Of the three forms of state, *democracy*, in the strict sense of the word, is necessarily a *despotism*, because it establishes an executive power in which all decide about, and if necessary against, one who does not agree. Thus all, who are nevertheless not all, decide—a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom.

Every form of government that is not *representative* is, properly speaking, a malformed constitution. For the legislator cannot in one and the same person also be the executor of his will, any more than the universal proposition of a syllogism's major premise can also be the subsumption of the particular under it in the minor premise. Although the other two constitutions of state are always defective insofar as they leave room for such a manner of government, it is at least possible for them to adopt one consistent with the *spirit* of a representative system. Frederick II, for example, at least *said* that he was merely the highest servant of the state.[5] A democratic constitution, on the other hand, makes this impossible, because everyone there wishes to be master. We may therefore say: the smaller the personnel of state power—the number of rulers—and the greater its representation, the more the constitution accords with the possibility of republicanism and can hope eventually to rise to it through gradual reforms. For this reason it is already harder in an aristocracy than in a monarchy to attain this sole perfectly rightful constitution, while in a democracy it is impossible except through violent revolution. Yet the manner of government[6] matters incomparably more to the people than the form of state, although the latter's greater or lesser suitability to that end also matters a great deal. If the former is to accord with the concept of right, it requires the representative system, in which alone a republican manner of government is possible. Without that system, whatever the constitution may be, government is despotic and violent. None of the ancient so-called republics knew this system, and they therefore necessarily dissolved into despotism, which is still most bearable under the supreme power of a single ruler.

[4] *Rightful*, and therefore external, *freedom* cannot be defined, as is often done, as the authorization “to do whatever one wishes, provided one wrongs no one.” For what does *authorization* mean? The possibility of an action insofar as one thereby wrongs no one. The definition would therefore run: “Freedom is the possibility of actions by which one wrongs no one—one may do whatever one wishes—provided one wrongs no one.” This is an empty tautology. Rather, my external, rightful *freedom* must be defined as the authorization to obey no external laws except those to which I could have given my consent. Similarly, external, rightful *equality* within a state is the relation among citizens in which no one can legally bind another to anything without at the same time submitting to the law under which that other could reciprocally bind him in the same way. The principle of *rightful* dependence needs no explanation, since it already lies in the very concept of a constitution of state. The validity of these innate, inalienable rights, which necessarily belong to humanity, is confirmed and elevated by the principle governing a human being's rightful relations even to higher beings, if he conceives of such beings. For he represents himself as a citizen of a supersensible world under those very same principles. As regards my freedom, I am bound even by divine laws knowable to me through reason alone only insofar as I could myself have consented to them; for it is through the law of freedom of my own reason that I first form a concept of the divine will. As regards the principle of *equality* in relation to the loftiest being in the world apart from God that I might conceive—a great *Aeon*—there is no reason why, if I perform my duty in my station as that Aeon does in his, I should have only the duty to obey while he has the right to command. The reason this principle of *equality*, unlike that of freedom, does not also apply to the relation to God is that God is the only being to whom the concept of duty does not apply.

As for the right of equality of all citizens as subjects, the question whether *hereditary nobility* is permissible turns entirely on this: “Must the *rank* granted by the state to one subject over another precede *merit*, or must merit precede rank?” Now it is plain that if rank is attached to birth, it is wholly uncertain whether merit—competence and fidelity in office—will follow. It is therefore just as if the favored person were granted the right to command without any merit at all. The general will of the people would never decree this in an original contract, which is the principle of all rights. For a nobleman is not on that account immediately a *noble* man. As for *official nobility*, as the rank of a higher magistracy might be called, which must be earned by merit, rank does not attach to the person as property, but to the office. Equality is not thereby violated, because when the person lays down the office, he also lays down the rank and returns to the people.

[5] The lofty titles often bestowed upon a ruler—God's anointed, administrator of the divine will on earth, and its representative—have often been censured as crude flattery that makes the head swim. But this seems to me to be without reason. Far from making a sovereign arrogant, they must rather humble him in his soul, if he has understanding, as we must presume, and reflects that he has undertaken an office too great for a human being: administering the holiest thing God possesses on earth, the *right of human beings*. He must always fear that he may in some respect have encroached upon this apple of God's eye.

[6] Mallet du Pan, with a show of genius in his hollow, insubstantial language, boasts that after many years of experience he has finally become convinced of the truth of *Pope*'s familiar saying: “Let fools dispute which government is best; the best conducted is the best.” If this means that the government best conducted is best conducted, he has, in Swift's phrase, cracked a nut that rewarded him with a maggot. If it means, however, that it is also the best manner of government—that is, the best constitution of state—it is fundamentally false. Examples of good governments prove nothing about the manner of government. Who ever governed better than *Titus* and *Marcus Aurelius*? Yet one left *Domitian* and the other *Commodus* as successors. This could not have happened under a good constitution of state, since their unfitness for the office was known early enough, and the ruler's power was also sufficient to exclude them.

### Second definitive article

Second definitive article for perpetual peace.

The right of nations shall be founded on a *federalism* of free states.

Peoples, considered as states, can be judged like individual human beings who, in their natural condition—that is, in independence from external laws—injure one another merely by existing side by side. Each, for the sake of its security, can and ought to require the other to enter with it into a constitution resembling a civil one, in which each can be assured of its right. This would be a *league of peoples*, which would not, however, have to be a state of peoples. The latter would involve a contradiction. Every state contains the relation of a *superior*, the legislator, to an *inferior*, the obedient subject, namely the people; but many peoples within one state would constitute only one people. That contradicts the presupposition here, since we are considering the right of *peoples* toward one another insofar as they constitute so many different states and are not to be fused into a single state.

We regard with profound contempt the attachment of savages to their lawless freedom: their preference for incessant fighting over submission to a lawful constraint they would themselves establish, and thus for a mad freedom over a rational one. We consider it barbarism, uncouthness, and a bestial degradation of humanity. One would therefore think that civilized peoples, each united in a state of its own, would hasten to escape so debased a condition as soon as possible. Instead, every *state* locates its majesty precisely in being subject to no external lawful constraint at all—for the majesty of a people is an absurd expression. Its ruler's splendor consists in having many thousands at his command who can be made to sacrifice themselves for a cause that does not concern them, without his needing to place himself in danger.[7] The chief difference between European savages and American ones is that, whereas some tribes of the latter have been entirely eaten by their enemies, the former know better how to use their vanquished than to devour them: they prefer to increase the number of their subjects and thereby the number of instruments for still more extensive wars.

Given the wickedness of human nature, which shows itself undisguised in the free relations among peoples, though the government's constraint greatly conceals it in the civil, lawful condition, it is nevertheless remarkable that the word *right* has not yet been wholly banished from the politics of war as pedantic, and that no state has yet dared publicly to declare itself for that view. *Hugo Grotius*, *Pufendorf*, *Vattel*, and others—all sorry comforters—are still candidly cited to *justify* a military attack, although their code, whether composed philosophically or diplomatically, has not the slightest *legal* force and cannot have any, since states as such are not subject to a common external constraint. Yet there is no example of a state ever being moved to abandon its purpose by arguments armed with the testimony of such important men. The homage every state pays to the concept of right, at least in words, nevertheless proves that a still greater moral capacity lies within the human being, though it now slumbers: a capacity eventually to master the evil principle within him, which he cannot deny, and to hope the same of others. Otherwise the word *right* would never enter the mouths of states wishing to make war on one another, except merely to mock it, as that Gallic ruler declared: “It is the advantage nature has given the stronger over the weaker that the latter should obey him.”

States can pursue their right only through war, never through a lawsuit before an external court; yet war and its favorable outcome, *victory*, do not decide what is right. A *peace treaty* may end the present war, but not the condition of war, for which a new pretext can always be found. Nor can this condition simply be declared unjust, since in it everyone is judge in his own cause. Nevertheless, what natural right requires of human beings in a lawless condition—“that they ought to leave this condition”—cannot apply in quite the same way to states under the right of nations. As states, they already possess an internal rightful constitution and have thus outgrown the coercion of others who would bring them, according to their own concepts of right, under a wider lawful constitution. Yet reason, speaking from the throne of supreme moral legislative authority, unconditionally condemns war as a legal procedure and makes the condition of peace an immediate duty. Since that condition cannot be established or secured without a compact among peoples, there must be a league of a special kind, which may be called a *league of peace* (*foedus pacificum*). It would differ from a *peace treaty* (*pactum pacis*) in this: the treaty seeks to end only *one* war, while the league seeks to end *all* wars forever. This league aims at acquiring no power belonging to a state, but solely at preserving and securing the *freedom* of a state for itself and at the same time for its allied states. These states need not therefore submit, as human beings in the state of nature must, to public laws and coercion under them. The feasibility, or objective reality, of this idea of *federation*, which is gradually to extend over all states and thereby lead to perpetual peace, can be shown. If fortune so ordains that a powerful and enlightened people can form itself into a republic, which by its nature must incline toward perpetual peace, that republic provides a center of federal association for other states to join. It can thus secure the condition of freedom among states in accordance with the idea of the right of nations, and gradually extend further through additional associations of this kind.

When a people says, “There shall be no war among us, for we intend to form ourselves into a state—that is, to establish over ourselves a supreme legislative, governing, and judicial power that settles our disputes peacefully,” this is intelligible. But when this state says, “There shall be no war between me and other states, although I recognize no supreme legislative authority that secures my right to me, and whose right I secure to it,” it is quite unintelligible what could then ground my confidence in my right, unless it is the substitute for the civil social compact: free federalism. Reason must necessarily connect this with the concept of the right of nations if anything at all is to remain thinkable in that concept.

Strictly speaking, nothing can be thought in the concept of the right of nations as a right *to* war. It would mean a right to determine what is right by force, according to unilateral maxims rather than universally valid external laws restricting the freedom of each individual. The only possible meaning would be that human beings who think in this way are treated quite rightly when they wear one another down and thus find perpetual peace in the vast grave that covers all the horrors of violence together with their authors. For states in their relations with one another, reason can offer no way out of the lawless condition of sheer war except that they, like individual human beings, abandon their savage, lawless freedom, accommodate themselves to public coercive laws, and form a *state of peoples* (*ciuitas gentium*), necessarily always growing, that would ultimately embrace every people on earth. Yet according to their idea of the right of nations they will not have this at all: they reject *in application* what is right *in principle*. If all is not to be lost, therefore, only the *negative* substitute of an enduring and ever-expanding *league* that wards off war can take the place of the positive idea of *a world republic* and check the stream of hostile inclinations that shun right—though always with the danger that they will break out (*“Impious Fury rages within, ghastly and bloody-mouthed.” Virgil.*).[8]

[7] Thus a Bulgarian prince answered a Greek emperor who good-naturedly wished to settle their dispute by single combat: “A smith who has tongs will not pull the glowing iron out of the coals with his hands.”

[8] After a war has ended, at the conclusion of peace, it might not be unfitting for a people to proclaim a day of repentance after its thanksgiving celebration, invoking heaven in the name of the state for forgiveness of the great sin of which the human race still makes itself guilty: its refusal to submit to a lawful constitution in relation to other peoples, preferring, in its pride in independence, the barbarous means of war, which does not decide the very thing sought, namely each state's right. Thanksgiving celebrations during a war for a *victory* won, and hymns sung, in good Israelite fashion, to the *Lord of Hosts*, stand in no less sharp a contrast with the moral idea of the Father of human beings. Besides indifference to the manner in which peoples seek their mutual right, which is sad enough, they introduce delight at having destroyed a great many human beings or their happiness.

### Third definitive article

Third definitive article for perpetual peace.

“*Cosmopolitan right* shall be limited to the conditions of universal *hospitality*.”

Here, as in the preceding articles, the concern is not philanthropy but *right*. In this sense, *hospitality*, or hospitable conduct, means the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility because he has arrived on another's soil. The other may turn him away if this can be done without bringing about his destruction; but so long as he conducts himself peacefully where he is, he must not be treated as an enemy. He can claim no *right to be a guest*, which would require a special agreement granting him the favor of membership in the household for a certain time. He has only a *right of visitation*: the right of all human beings to offer to associate with others, by virtue of their right to common possession of the earth's surface. Since that surface is spherical, they cannot disperse over it without limit but must eventually tolerate one another's presence; originally, no one has more right than another to be in any particular place on earth. Uninhabitable parts of this surface—the sea and sandy deserts—divide this community, yet the *ship* and the *camel*, the *ship* of the desert, make it possible to approach one another across these unowned regions and use the right to the *surface*, which belongs to humanity in common, for possible intercourse. The inhospitable conduct of coastal peoples, such as the Barbary corsairs, who plunder ships in neighboring seas or enslave shipwrecked sailors, and that of desert peoples, the Arabian Bedouins, who regard an approach to their nomadic tribes as entitling them to plunder those who come, is therefore contrary to natural right. Yet this right of hospitality, the authorization of foreign arrivals, extends only to the conditions that make it possible to *attempt* intercourse with the established inhabitants. In this way, distant parts of the world can enter peacefully into relations that eventually become publicly lawful, and thus bring the human race ever closer to a cosmopolitan constitution.

Compare this with the *inhospitable* behavior of the civilized states of our part of the world, especially the commercial ones. The injustice they display in *visiting* foreign lands and peoples, which they consider equivalent to *conquering* them, reaches terrifying proportions. America, the lands of Black peoples, the Spice Islands, the Cape, and so forth were, upon their discovery, lands that in their eyes belonged to no one; for they counted the inhabitants as nothing. In the East Indies, Hindustan, they brought foreign troops under the pretext of merely intending to establish trading posts. With them came oppression of the inhabitants, the incitement of its different states to extensive wars, famine, rebellion, treachery, and whatever else belongs to the litany of evils that oppress the human race.

China[9] and Japan, *Nipon*, having tried the experiment with such guests, have therefore acted wisely: China has allowed approach but not entry, while Japan has allowed even the former to only one European people, the Dutch, whom it nevertheless excludes, like prisoners, from contact with the inhabitants. The worst of it—or the best, from the standpoint of a moral judge—is that the perpetrators do not even enjoy the fruits of this violence. All these trading companies stand on the brink of collapse. The sugar islands, that seat of the cruelest and most calculated slavery, yield no genuine return; they serve only indirectly, for a purpose that is not very praiseworthy: training sailors for war fleets, and thus once again for wars in Europe. This is what is wanted by those who make much of their piety and, while drinking injustice like water, wish to be counted among the elect in orthodox belief.

The narrower or wider community that has now everywhere taken hold among the peoples of the earth has developed so far that a violation of right in *one* place is felt in *all*. The idea of cosmopolitan right is therefore no fanciful, extravagant conception of right. It is a necessary supplement to the unwritten code of civil right and of the right of nations, completing public right for humanity as a whole and thus serving perpetual peace. Only under this condition may we flatter ourselves that we are continually approaching it.

[9] To write this great empire's name as it calls itself—*China*, not Sina or a similar sound—one need only consult *Georgii Alphab. Tibet. pag. 651 - 654.*, especially *Nota b* at the foot of the page. According to the observation of the St. Petersburg professor *Fischer*, it actually has no fixed name by which it calls itself. The most usual is still the word *Kin*, meaning gold, which the Tibetans express by *Ser*; hence the emperor is called King of *Gold*, of the most splendid country in the world. Within the empire itself this word may well sound like *Chin*, though the Italian missionaries may have pronounced it *Kin* because of the guttural letter. This shows that the land the Romans called that of the *Seres* was China, but that silk was conveyed to Europe through *Greater Tibet*, presumably through *Lesser Tibet* and Bukharia, through Persia, and onward. This leads to various reflections on the antiquity of this astonishing state in comparison with Hindustan, given its connection with *Tibet* and, through Tibet, with Japan; whereas the name Sina or Tschina, supposedly given to the country by its neighbors, leads nowhere. Perhaps the ancient, though never properly known, connection between Europe and Tibet can also be explained by what *Hesychius* has preserved for us: the hierophant's cry Κονξ Ομπαξ, *Konx Ompax*, in the Eleusinian mysteries. (S. Reise des jüngern Anacharsis, 5ter Theil, S. 447 u. f.) For according to *Georgii Alph. Tibet.*, *Concioa* means *God*, a striking resemblance to *Konx*. *Pah-cio.* (*ib. p. 520*), which the Greeks could easily have pronounced *pax*, means *promulgator legis*, proclaimer of the law: the deity diffused throughout nature, also called *Cencresi*, *p. 177.* But *Om*, which *La Croze* translates as *benedictus*, blessed, can, when applied to the deity, surely mean nothing other than the *one proclaimed blessed*, *p. 507.* Now *P. Franz. Horatius*, who often asked the Tibetan *lamas* what they understood by God, *Concioa*, always received the answer: “*It is the assembly of all saints*.” These are the souls of the blessed who, through Lamaist rebirth, after many wanderings through bodies of every kind, have finally returned to the deity and been transformed into *Burchane*, that is, beings worthy of worship (*p. 223*). That mysterious expression, *Konx Ompax*, would therefore presumably signify the *holy* (*Konx*), *blessed* (*Om*), and *wise* (*Pax*) supreme being diffused everywhere throughout the world—personified nature. Used in the Greek *mysteries*, it would presumably have indicated *monotheism* to the fully initiated, in contrast to the people's *polytheism*, although *P. Horatius* (a. a. O.) scented *atheism* in it. The way this mysterious expression reached the Greeks through Tibet can be explained as above; conversely, this also makes an early connection between Europe and China through Tibet, perhaps earlier even than with Hindustan, probable.

### First supplement

First supplement.

On the guarantee of perpetual peace.

What provides this assurance (guarantee) is nothing less than the great artist *nature* (natura daedala rerum), from whose mechanical course purposiveness visibly shines forth, and who lets concord arise by means of the discord of human beings, even against their will. For this reason nature, when we think of her as the compulsion of a cause whose laws of operation are unknown to us, is called *fate*; but when we consider her purposiveness in the course of the world as the deep-lying wisdom of a higher cause, directed to the objective final end of the human race and predetermining this course of the world, she is called *providence*[10]. Strictly speaking, we cannot *recognize* this providence in the artful arrangements of nature, or even *infer* it from them; rather (as in every relation of the form of things to ends generally) we can and must only *add it in thought*, in order to form a concept of its possibility on the analogy of human works of art. But to represent its relation and accord to the end that reason prescribes to us directly (the moral end) is an idea that, though transcendent for *theoretical* purposes, is dogmatic and well grounded as to its reality for practical ones (for example, with regard to the concept of duty *concerning perpetual peace*, in order to turn that mechanism of nature to its use). The use of the word *nature* is also, when the concern is merely theory (not religion), as it is here, more fitting to the limits of human reason (which, in regard to the relation of effects to their causes, must keep within the bounds of possible experience), and *more modest* than the expression of a *providence* knowable to us, with which one presumptuously fits on Icarian wings in order to come closer to the mystery of its unfathomable purpose.

Before we define this guarantee more closely, it will be necessary first to inquire into the condition that nature has arranged for the persons acting on her great stage, a condition that in the end makes her securing of peace necessary—and only then the manner in which she provides it.

Her provisional arrangement consists in this: that she 1) has seen to it that human beings can live in every region of the earth; 2) has driven them by *war* everywhere, even into the most inhospitable regions, in order to populate them; 3) by that same means has compelled them to enter into more or less lawful relations. That moss still grows in the cold wastes by the Arctic Ocean, which the *reindeer* scrapes out from under the snow in order itself to be the food, or even the draft team, of the Ostyak or Samoyed; or that the salty sandy deserts still contain the *camel*, which seems as if created for traveling across them, so that they not be left unused, is already admirable. But the purpose shines forth still more clearly when one notices how, besides the fur-bearing animals on the shore of the Arctic Ocean, seals, walruses, and whales also supply the local inhabitants with food in their flesh and with fuel in their blubber oil. Most of all, though, nature's foresight arouses admiration through the driftwood that she brings to these regions bare of vegetation (without anyone quite knowing where it comes from), a material without which the inhabitants could prepare neither their boats and weapons nor their huts for shelter; and there they have enough to do with the war against the animals to live peacefully among themselves. But what *drove them there* was presumably nothing other than war. The first *instrument of war* among all the animals that human beings, in the course of the earth's being populated, had learned to tame and domesticate is the *horse* (for the elephant belongs to a later time, namely that of the luxury of already established states), just as the art of cultivating certain kinds of grass, called *grain*, which in their original nature we can no longer recognize, and likewise the multiplication and refinement of the *varieties of fruit* by transplanting and grafting (perhaps in Europe only two species, crab apples and wild pears), could arise only in the condition of already established states, where secure ownership of land existed—after human beings, in lawless freedom, had first made their way from the *hunting*[11], fishing, and herding life to the *farming life*, and now *salt* and *iron* were discovered and perhaps became the first articles, sought far and wide, of trade among different peoples, by which they were first brought into a *peaceful relation* with one another, and so, even with more distant peoples, into understanding, community, and peaceful relations with one another.

In providing that human beings *could* live everywhere on earth, nature at the same time despotically willed that they *should* live everywhere, even against their inclination, and even without this “should” presupposing a concept of duty that would bind them to it by means of a moral law; instead, to attain this end of hers, she chose war. For we see peoples who make the unity of their descent recognizable through the unity of their language, such as the *Samoyeds* on the Arctic Ocean on one side, and on the other a people of similar language two hundred miles away in the *Altaic* Mountains, between whom another people, a Mongol one, mounted and therefore warlike, has pressed in and so scattered that part of their stock, far from the other, into the most inhospitable icy regions, where they would certainly not have spread of their own inclination[12]; so too the *Finns* in the northernmost region of Europe, called *Lapps*, are separated from the *Hungarians*, now just as far away but related to them in language, by Gothic and Sarmatian peoples who pushed in between; and what else could have driven the *Eskimos* (perhaps ancient European adventurers, a race entirely distinct from all the Americans) in the north, and the *Pescheräs* in the south of America, as far as Tierra del Fuego, if not war, which nature employs as a means to populate the earth everywhere? War itself, however, needs no particular motive but seems to be grafted onto human nature, and even to pass as something noble, to which human beings are inspired by the drive for honor, without self-interested incentives: so that *martial courage* (among the native peoples of America as well as among Europeans in the age of chivalry) is judged to be of great and immediate worth not merely *when* there is war (as is fitting) but also *that* there be war, and war is often begun merely to display that courage; consequently an inner *dignity* is attributed to war in itself, to the point that even philosophers, as though it were a certain ennobling of humanity, deliver a eulogy upon it, unmindful of the saying of that Greek: “War is bad in that it makes more wicked people than it removes.” So much for what nature does for *her own end* with regard to the human species as a class of animals.

Now comes the question that concerns the essential point of the aim of perpetual peace: “What does nature do toward this aim, in relation to the end that human beings' own reason makes their duty, and thus to favor their *moral aim*; and how does she provide the guarantee that what human beings *ought* to do according to laws of freedom, but do not do, is also secured, without prejudice to this freedom, by a compulsion of nature, so that they *will* do it—and this in all three relations of public right: *civil* right, the right of *nations*, and *cosmopolitan right*?” When I say of nature that she *wills* this or that to happen, this does not mean that she lays upon us a duty to do it (for only practical reason, free of coercion, can do that), but that she *does* it herself, whether we want to or not (fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt).

1. When a people is not compelled by internal dissension to submit to the constraint of public laws, war from without would still do so, since, by the natural arrangement mentioned earlier, each people finds another people pressing upon it as a neighbor, against which it must form itself internally into a *state* in order to be armed, as a *power*, against that neighbor. Now the *republican* constitution is the only one fully suited to the right of human beings, but it is also the hardest to establish, and harder still to maintain, so much so that many assert it would have to be a state of *angels*, because human beings with their selfish inclinations would be incapable of a constitution of so sublime a form. But now nature comes to the aid of the revered general will, grounded in reason but powerless in practice, and does so precisely by means of those selfish inclinations, so that all that matters is a good organization of the state (which is certainly within the power of human beings) to direct the forces of those inclinations against one another in such a way that one checks the others in their destructive effect, or cancels it; so that, as far as reason is concerned, the result is as if neither were there at all, and thus a human being, though not a morally good human being, is nevertheless compelled to be a good citizen. The problem of establishing a state, hard as it sounds, can be solved even for a nation of devils (provided they have understanding), and runs thus: “To order a multitude of rational beings who all demand universal laws for their preservation, but each of whom is secretly inclined to exempt themselves from them, and so to arrange their constitution that, although in their private dispositions they strive against one another, these check one another in such a way that in their public conduct the result is exactly the same as if they had no such evil dispositions.” Such a problem must be *solvable*. For it is not the moral improvement of human beings, but only the mechanism of nature, that the task requires us to know how to use on human beings in order to direct the conflict of their unpeaceable dispositions within a people in such a way that they themselves compel one another to submit to coercive laws, and so must bring about the condition of peace in which laws have force. One can also see this in the states that actually exist, still very imperfectly organized as they are: that in their external conduct they already come very close to what the idea of right prescribes, although the inner side of morality is certainly not the cause of this (just as it is not from morality that a good constitution is to be expected but, conversely, from the good constitution that the good moral formation of a people is first to be expected), and that consequently the mechanism of nature, operating through selfish inclinations that naturally also work against one another outwardly, can be used by reason as a means of making room for reason's own end, the precept of right, and thereby also, so far as it lies with the state itself, of promoting and securing peace both internal and external. Here, then, the rule is: nature irresistibly *wills* that right should in the end gain the upper hand. What one neglects to do here comes about by itself in the end, though with much inconvenience. “Bend the reed too hard and it breaks; and whoever wants too much wants nothing.” *Bouterwek*.

2. The idea of the right of nations presupposes the *separation* of many neighboring states independent of one another; and although such a condition is in itself already a condition of war (unless a federative union among them prevents the outbreak of hostilities), even this, according to the idea of reason, is better than their fusion under a power that overgrows the rest and passes over into a universal monarchy; because laws lose more and more of their force as the scope of government grows, and a soulless despotism, after it has uprooted the seeds of the good, finally lapses into anarchy all the same. Yet it is the desire of every state (or of its head) to establish itself in a lasting condition of peace in this way: by ruling, if possible, the whole world. But *nature wills it* otherwise. She makes use of two means to keep peoples from mixing and to separate them: the difference of *languages* and of *religions*[13], which does bring with it a propensity to mutual hatred and a pretext for war, but which, with growing culture and the gradual approach of human beings to greater agreement in principles, leads to an accord in a peace that is brought about and secured not, like that despotism (in the graveyard of freedom), by the weakening of all forces, but by their equilibrium, in their liveliest competition.

3. Just as nature wisely separates the peoples that the will of every state, even on grounds of the right of nations, would gladly unite under itself by cunning or force, so on the other hand she unites, through reciprocal self-interest, peoples whom the concept of cosmopolitan right would not have secured against violence and war. It is the *spirit of commerce*, which cannot coexist with war and which sooner or later takes hold of every people. For since, among all the powers (means) subordinate to the power of the state, the *power of money* may well be the most reliable, states find themselves impelled (to be sure, not exactly by incentives of morality) to promote noble peace and, wherever in the world war threatens to break out, to avert it by mediation, as if they stood in a permanent alliance for that purpose; for great leagues for war can, by the nature of the case, occur only very rarely, and succeed more rarely still. In this way nature guarantees perpetual peace through the mechanism in human inclinations themselves; to be sure with a certainty that is not sufficient to *prophesy* its future (theoretically), but that is nonetheless adequate in a practical respect and makes it a duty to work toward this (not merely chimerical) end.

[10] In the mechanism of nature, to which the human being (as a sensible being) also belongs, there shows itself a form already underlying its existence, which we can make comprehensible to ourselves only by attributing to it the purpose of an author of the world who determines it beforehand. We call this author's predetermination (divine) *providence* in general; insofar as it is laid into the *beginning* of the world, *founding* providence (prouidentia conditrix; semel iussit, semper parent, *Augustin.*); insofar as it serves, in the *course* of nature, to maintain that course according to universal laws of purposiveness, *governing providence* (prouidentia gubernatrix); further, insofar as it aims at particular ends that human beings cannot foresee but can only surmise from the outcome, *guiding* providence (prouidentia directrix); and finally, with regard to individual events considered as divine ends, no longer providence but *dispensation* (directio extraordinaria). To want to recognize this as such (since it in fact points to miracles, although the events are not so named) is foolish presumption on the part of human beings; for to infer from a single event a particular principle of the operative cause (that this event is an end, and not merely a natural-mechanical by-product of some other end wholly unknown to us) is absurd and full of self-conceit, however pious and humble the language about it may sound. Likewise the division of providence (considered *materialiter*), as it extends to *objects* in the world, into *general* and *particular* providence, is false and self-contradictory (namely that it is, for example, a provision for the preservation of the species of creatures but leaves the individuals to chance); for it is called general precisely so that no single thing may be thought of as exempt from it. Presumably what was meant here is the division of providence (considered *formaliter*) according to the manner in which its purpose is carried out: namely into *ordinary* providence (for example, the yearly dying and reviving of nature with the change of the seasons) and *extraordinary* providence (for example, the conveyance of wood by ocean currents to the icy coasts, where it cannot grow, for the inhabitants there, who could not live without it), where, although we can explain the physical-mechanical cause of these phenomena well (for example, by the wooded banks of the rivers of temperate lands, into which those trees fall and are carried farther along, perhaps by the Gulf Stream), we must nevertheless not overlook the teleological cause as well, which points to the foresight of a wisdom that governs nature. As for the concept, customary in the schools, of a divine *participation*, or cooperation (concursus), in an effect in the sensible world, it must be dropped. For to want to pair things unlike in kind (gryphes jungere equis), and to let the complete cause of the changes in the world *supplement* its own predetermining providence during the course of the world (which would then have had to be deficient)—to say, for example, that *next to God* the physician has restored the patient to health, and so was present as an assistant in the matter—is, *first*, contradictory in itself. For causa solitaria non iuuat. God is the author of the physician together with all the physician's remedies, and so, if one really wants to ascend to the highest ground, theoretically incomprehensible to us, the effect must be ascribed *wholly* to God. Or one can also ascribe it *wholly* to the physician, insofar as we trace this event, as explicable according to the order of nature, in the chain of the world's causes. *Second*, such a way of thinking also deprives us of all definite principles for judging an effect. But in a *morally practical* respect (which is therefore wholly directed to the supersensible), for example in the belief that God will make up for the deficiency of our own righteousness, provided only that our disposition was genuine, even by means incomprehensible to us, so that we should therefore relax nothing in our striving for the good, the concept of a divine Concursus is entirely fitting and even necessary; but it goes without saying that no one is to try to *explain* a good action (as an event in the world) by it, which would be a supposed theoretical cognition of the supersensible, and hence absurd.

[11] Of all ways of life, the *hunting life* is without doubt the most opposed to a civilized constitution; for the families, which must isolate themselves there, soon become *strangers* to one another and, thus scattered in vast forests, soon *hostile* as well, since each needs a great deal of space to obtain its food and clothing. The *Noachian prohibition of blood*, Genesis IX, 4:6. (which, repeatedly renewed, was afterward even made a condition by the Jewish Christians for the newly converted Christians from paganism, though in another respect, Acts XV, 20; XXI, 25—) seems originally to have been nothing other than the prohibition of the *hunter's life*; because in that life the case of eating meat raw must often occur, so that with the latter the former is forbidden at the same time.

[12] One might ask: If nature has willed that these icy coasts should not remain uninhabited, what will become of their inhabitants if she someday (as is to be expected) no longer brings them driftwood? For it is to be believed that, with advancing culture, the settlers of the temperate zones will make better use of the wood that grows on the banks of their rivers, and will not let it fall into the rivers and so be washed away into the sea. I answer: The dwellers along the *Ob*, the Yenisei, the Lena, and so on will bring it to them by trade, and in exchange will obtain the products of the animal kingdom with which the sea along the icy coasts is so rich; provided only that she (nature) shall first have enforced peace among them.

[13] *Difference of religions*: a curious expression! Just as if one were to speak of different *moralities* too. There may well be different *kinds of faith*, historical ones, which belong not to religion but to the history of the means employed to promote it, means falling within the field of scholarship, and likewise different *religious books* (Zendavesta, Vedam; Koran, and so on), but only a single *religion*, valid for all human beings and at all times. The former, then, can contain nothing but the mere vehicle of religion, which is contingent and can vary according to differences of times and places.

### Second supplement

Second supplement.

Secret article for perpetual peace.

A secret article in negotiations concerning public right is, objectively—that is, considered in its content—a contradiction. Subjectively, however, judged by the standing of the person who dictates it, there may very well be a secret in the fact that this person considers it beneath their dignity to announce publicly that they are its author.

The sole article of this kind is contained in the proposition: “*The maxims of philosophers concerning the conditions that make public peace possible shall be consulted by states armed for war.*”

For the legislative authority of a state, to which the greatest wisdom must naturally be ascribed, it seems demeaning to seek instruction from *subjects*, the philosophers, about the principles governing its conduct toward other states. Yet it is very advisable to do so. The state will therefore *invite* them *tacitly*—thus making a secret of it—to do this. That means it will *let them speak* freely and publicly about the general maxims of making war and establishing peace; for they will do so of their own accord if only they are not forbidden. For states to agree on this point requires no special arrangement among them: their agreement already lies in the obligation imposed by universal human reason as moral legislator. This does not mean that the state must give the philosopher's principles precedence over the pronouncements of the jurist, the representative of state power, but only that the philosopher should be *heard*. The jurist, who has adopted as his symbols the *scales* of right and, beside them, the *sword* of justice, commonly uses the latter not merely to keep foreign influences away from the former, but to throw the sword into the scale when one pan refuses to sink: *vae victis*, woe to the vanquished. The jurist who is not also a philosopher, in the moral sense as well, is strongly tempted to do this, since his office is only to apply existing laws, not to examine whether those laws themselves need improvement. He counts his faculty's actually lower rank among the higher ones because it is accompanied by power, as is also the case with the other two. Under this allied power, the philosophical faculty occupies a very low station. Thus philosophy is called the *maid* of theology, and the same is said in relation to the other two faculties. Yet it is not quite clear “whether she carries the torch before her gracious mistress or carries her train behind her.”

That kings should philosophize, or philosophers become kings, is neither to be expected nor to be desired, for possession of power inevitably corrupts the free judgment of reason. But kings, or sovereign peoples who govern themselves under laws of equality, must not allow the class of philosophers to disappear or fall silent; they must let them speak publicly. This is indispensable to both for illuminating their business. Such speech is also above suspicion of the *propaganda* alleged against it, since this class is by its nature incapable of forming factions and alliances of clubs.

### Appendix I

Appendix.

I.

On the discord between morality and politics, with regard to perpetual peace.

Morality is in itself already a practice in the objective sense, as the sum of unconditionally commanding laws according to which we *ought* to act, and it is manifest absurdity, once one has granted this concept of duty its authority, still to want to say that one nonetheless *cannot*. For in that case this concept drops out of morality of itself (ultra posse nemo obligatur); consequently there can be no conflict of politics, as applied doctrine of right, with morality, as such a doctrine but a theoretical one (and so no conflict of practice with theory), unless one were to understand by the latter a general *doctrine of prudence*, that is, a theory of maxims for choosing the means best suited to one's aims calculated for advantage, that is, to deny that there is any morality at all.

Politics says: “*Be prudent as serpents*”; morality adds (as a limiting condition): “*and without guile, like doves.*” If both cannot subsist together in a single command, there is indeed a conflict between politics and morality; but if the two are nonetheless to be absolutely united, the concept of the opposite is absurd, and the question how that conflict is to be resolved cannot even be posed as a problem. Although the proposition *Honesty is the best policy* contains a theory which practice, alas! very often contradicts, the equally theoretical proposition *Honesty is better than all policy* is infinitely exalted above every objection, indeed is the indispensable condition of policy. The boundary god of morality does not yield to Jupiter (the boundary god of force); for the latter still stands under fate, that is, reason is not enlightened enough to survey the series of predetermining causes that would let us foretell with certainty, according to the mechanism of nature, the happy or evil outcome of what human beings do and leave undone (though we may hope for it in accordance with our wish). But what one has to do in order to remain on the track of duty (according to rules of wisdom), for that, and thereby for the final end, reason lights our way clearly enough everywhere.

Now the practical man (for whom morality is mere theory) really grounds his bleak denial of our good-natured hope (even with *ought* and *can* granted) on this: that he professes to foresee from human nature that human beings *will* never *want* what is required to bring about that end which leads to perpetual peace. True, the willing of *each individual* human being to live in a lawful constitution according to principles of freedom (the *distributive* unity of the will of *all*) is not sufficient for this end; rather, that *all together* will this condition (the *collective* unity of the united will), this solution of a difficult problem, is required in addition, so that a whole of civil society may come about. And since, accordingly, a uniting cause must be added to this diversity of the particular willing of all, in order to produce a common will, which none of them is able to do, no other beginning of the rightful condition is to be counted on, in the *execution* of that idea (in practice), than one by *force*, on whose compulsion public right is afterward founded; which, to be sure (since one can in any case reckon little here on the moral disposition of the lawgiver, that once the lawless multitude has been united into a people he will leave it to the people to bring about a rightful constitution through their common will), allows great departures from that idea (the theory) in actual experience to be expected in advance.

Then it is said: whoever has once got power into his hands will not let the people prescribe laws to him. A state that is once in possession of the position of standing under no external laws will not, in regard to the manner in which it is to seek its right against other states, make itself dependent on their tribunal; and even a continent, when it feels itself superior to another that is otherwise not in its way, will not leave unused the means of strengthening its power by plundering or even subjugating it; and so all the plans of theory for the right of the state, the right of nations, and cosmopolitan right dissolve into insubstantial, unrealizable ideals, whereas a practice founded on empirical principles of human nature, which does not think it too low to draw instruction for its maxims from the way things go in the world, could alone hope to find a secure foundation for its edifice of political prudence.

To be sure, if there is no freedom and no moral law founded upon it, but everything that happens or can happen is mere mechanism of nature, then politics (as the art of using this mechanism for the government of human beings) is the whole of practical wisdom, and the concept of right an insubstantial thought. But if one finds it indispensably necessary to connect this concept with politics, indeed even to raise it to the limiting condition of the latter, then the compatibility of the two must be conceded. Now I can indeed conceive of a *moral politician*, that is, one who takes the principles of political prudence in such a way that they can subsist together with morality, but not of a *political moralist*, who forges for himself such a morality as the statesman's advantage finds conducive to itself.

The moral politician will make it his principle that, if defects are once found in the constitution of the state or in the relations among states that could not be prevented, it is a duty, above all for heads of state, to take thought how they can be remedied as soon as possible and brought into conformity with natural right, as it stands before our eyes as a model in the idea of reason, even if this should cost their selfishness sacrifices. Now since the severing of a bond of civic or cosmopolitan union, before a better constitution is ready to take its place, is contrary to all political prudence, which on this point agrees with morality, it would indeed be absurd to demand that such a defect be changed at once and impetuously; but that the maxim of the necessity of such a change should at least dwell most intimately in the holder of power, so as to remain in constant approach to the end (the best constitution according to laws of right), that can surely be demanded of him. A state can already *govern* itself in a republican manner even while it still possesses, according to its present constitution, despotic *sovereign power*, until the people gradually becomes capable of the influence of the mere idea of the authority of law (just as if it possessed physical force), and is accordingly found fit for its own legislation (which is originally founded on right). Even if, through the impetuosity of a *revolution* produced by the bad constitution, a more lawful one had been won illegitimately, it would nonetheless have to be held no longer permissible to lead the people back to the old one, although during the revolution anyone who meddled in it by violence or by cunning would justly be subject to the penalties of an insurgent. As for the external relation of states, however, a state cannot be required to lay aside its constitution, despotic though it is (which is nonetheless the stronger one in relation to external enemies), so long as it runs the risk of being swallowed up at once by other states; consequently, in its resolve too, delay of the execution until a more favorable occasion must be permitted.[14]

Granted, then, that despotizing moralists (erring in execution) offend in many ways against political prudence (through measures hastily taken or commended); experience must nonetheless bring them gradually onto a better track, in this offense of theirs against nature; whereas the moralizing politicians, by glossing over principles of state contrary to right, under the pretext of a human nature not *capable* of the good in accordance with the idea as reason prescribes it, as far as in them lies *make impossible* any improvement, and perpetuate the violation of right.

Instead of the practice of which these men of political prudence boast, they deal in *practices*, being intent solely on this: that, by telling the power now ruling what it wishes to hear (so as not to miss their private advantage), they sacrifice the people and, if possible, the whole world; after the manner of genuine jurists (of the trade, not of *legislation*) when they venture up into politics. For since their business is not to quibble about legislation itself but to carry out the present commands of the law of the land, every lawful constitution now in existence, and, when this is altered from above, the one that then follows, must always be the best to them; so that everything is thus in its proper mechanical order. But if this skill of fitting every saddle instills in them the delusion that they can also judge of the principles of a *constitution of the state* in general according to concepts of right (hence a priori, not empirically): if they make much of knowing *human beings* (which is indeed to be expected, since they have to do with many), without nevertheless knowing *the human being*, and what can be made of him (for which a higher standpoint of anthropological observation is required), but, provided with these concepts, approach the right of the state and the right of nations as reason prescribes them: then they can make this crossing over in no other way than in the spirit of chicanery, since they follow their customary procedure (that of a mechanism according to despotically given laws of compulsion) even where the concepts of reason would have a coercion established that is lawful only according to principles of freedom, through which alone a constitution of the state enduring in accordance with right is possible; a problem which the supposed practical man, passing by that idea, believes he can solve empirically, from experience, from how the constitutions that have so far lasted best, though for the most part contrary to right, were arranged. The maxims of which he makes use for this (though he does not let them be heard aloud) come roughly to the following sophistical maxims.

1. Fac et excusa. Seize the favorable opportunity for an unauthorized taking of possession (either of a right of the state over its own people, or over another, neighboring one); the justification will be far easier and more graceful to present *after the deed*, and will serve to gloss over the force (above all in the first case, where the supreme power within is at once also the legislating authority which one must obey without quibbling about it), than if one wanted first to devise convincing grounds and then to await the counter-grounds against them. This very audacity gives a certain appearance of inner conviction of the rightfulness of the deed, and the god bonus euentus is afterward the best advocate.

2. Si fecisti nega. What you have yourself done wrong, for example to drive your people to despair and so to rebellion, deny that it is *your* fault; but assert that it is the fault of the subjects' recalcitrance, or else, in your seizure of a neighboring people, the fault of human nature, since a human being who does not forestall the other by force can reckon with certainty that the other will forestall him and seize him.

3. Diuide et impera. That is: if there are certain privileged heads in your people who have chosen you merely as their chief (primus inter pares), then set them at variance with one another and divide them from the people; now stand by the latter, under the pretense of greater freedom, and everything will depend on your unconditional will. Or if it is a matter of external states, then the stirring up of discord among them is a fairly sure means of subjecting one after another to yourself, under the semblance of assisting the weaker.

By these political maxims, to be sure, no one is deceived; for they are one and all already generally known; nor are they a cause for shame, as if the injustice shone all too plainly into the eyes. For since great powers are never ashamed before the judgment of the common crowd, but only one before another, and since, as concerns those principles, it is not their coming to light but only their *failure* that can make them ashamed (for with regard to the morality of the maxims they all agree with one another), there always remains to them the *political honor* on which they can surely count, namely that of the *enlargement of their power*, by whatever path it may have been acquired.[15]

* * *

From all these serpentine windings of an immoral doctrine of prudence for bringing the condition of peace among human beings out of the warlike condition of the state of nature, this much at least is clear: that human beings can escape the concept of right neither in their private relations nor in their public ones, and do not dare to found politics openly on mere devices of prudence, and thus to renounce all obedience to the concept of a public right (which is especially striking in that of the right of nations), but accord it in itself all due honor, even if they should devise a hundred evasions and cloaks to elude it in practice, and impute to wily force the authority of being the origin and bond of all right. To put an end to this sophistry (though not to the injustice it glosses over), and to bring the false *representatives* of the mighty of the earth to the confession that it is not right but force in whose favor they speak, and from which they take their tone, as if they themselves had anything to command in the matter, it will be well to uncover the illusion by which one deceives oneself and others, to discover the supreme principle from which the aim at perpetual peace proceeds, and to show that all the evil which stands in its way derives from this: that the political moralist begins where the moral politician properly ends, and, by thus subordinating the principles to the end (that is, harnessing the horses behind the wagon), defeats his own purpose of bringing politics into accord with morality.

To bring practical philosophy into agreement with itself, it is necessary first to decide the question whether in problems of practical reason the beginning must be made from its *material principle*, the *end* (as object of choice), or from the *formal* one, that is, from the one (founded merely on freedom in external relations) according to which it is said: act so that you can will that your maxim should become a universal law (whatever the end may be).

Without any doubt the latter principle must come first: for as a principle of right it has unconditional necessity, whereas the former is compelling only on the presupposition of empirical conditions of the end proposed, namely of its execution, and, even if this end (for example perpetual peace) were also a duty, this duty itself would still have to have been derived from the formal principle of maxims for acting externally. Now the former principle, that of the *political moralist* (the problem of the right of the state, the right of nations, and cosmopolitan right), is a mere *technical problem* (problema technicum), the second, on the other hand, as the principle of the *moral politician*, for whom it is a *moral problem* (problema morale), is worlds apart from the other in procedure, when perpetual peace is to be brought about, which one now wishes not merely as a physical good but also as a condition proceeding from the recognition of duty.

For the solution of the first, namely the problem of political prudence, much knowledge of nature is required, in order to use its mechanism for the end in view, and yet all of this is uncertain as to its result concerning perpetual peace, whichever of the three divisions of public right one takes. Whether the people can be kept, in obedience and at the same time in prosperity, better by severity or by the bait of vanity, by the supreme power of a single person or by the union of several heads, perhaps even merely by a nobility of service, or by the power of the people, internally, and indeed for a long time, is uncertain. Of all forms of government (excepting the one genuinely republican, which can occur only to a moral politician) there are examples of the opposite in history. Still more uncertain is a right of nations ostensibly erected upon statutes according to ministerial plans, which is in fact only a word without a thing, and rests on treaties that in the very act of their conclusion contain at the same time the secret reservation of their violation. The solution of the second, on the other hand, namely of the *problem of political wisdom*, presses itself upon us, so to speak, of its own accord, is evident to everyone, puts all artifice to shame, and leads straight to the end; yet with the reminder of prudence not to draw it on in haste by force, but to approach it unceasingly, as favorable circumstances permit.

Here, then, it is said: “Seek first the kingdom of pure practical reason and its *justice*, and your end (the blessing of perpetual peace) will fall to you of itself.” For morality has this peculiarity, and indeed in regard to its principles of public right (hence in relation to a politics knowable a priori), that the less it makes conduct dependent on the end proposed, the intended advantage, whether physical or moral, the more it nonetheless agrees with this in general; which comes about because it is precisely the general will, given a priori (in a people, or in the relation of different peoples to one another), that alone determines what is right among human beings; and this union of the will of all, if only one proceeds consistently in the exercise, can at the same time, according to the mechanism of nature as well, be the cause of producing the effect aimed at and of giving effect to the concept of right. So it is, for example, a principle of moral politics that a people should unite into a state solely according to the concepts of right of freedom and equality, and this principle is founded not on prudence but on duty. Let political moralists now quibble as much as they like about the natural mechanism of a multitude of human beings entering society, which would invalidate those principles and frustrate their aim, or seek to prove their contrary assertion by examples of badly organized constitutions of ancient and modern times (for example, of democracies without a representative system): they deserve no hearing, above all since such a pernicious theory itself brings about, perhaps, the very evil that it predicts, a theory according to which the human being is thrown into one class with the other living machines, to which only the consciousness that they are not free beings would still have to be added to make them, in their own judgment, the most wretched of all creatures in the world.

The proposition, which sounds somewhat swaggering, has come into proverbial currency, yet is true: fiat iustitia, pereat mundus, that is, in German: “let justice reign, even if all the rogues in the world should perish on that account,” is a stalwart principle of right, one that cuts off all crooked paths marked out by cunning or force; only it must not be misunderstood, and perhaps taken as a permission to use one's own right with the greatest strictness (which would conflict with ethical duty), but understood as an obligation of those in power not to refuse or diminish anyone's right out of disfavor or compassion toward others; for which there is required above all an internal constitution of the state set up according to pure principles of right, but then also that of its union with other states, neighboring or even distant, for a lawful settlement of their disputes (analogous to a universal state). This proposition means nothing other than this: political maxims must proceed not from the welfare and happiness to be expected from their observance in each state, hence not from the end which each of them makes the object of its aim (from willing), as the supreme (but empirical) principle of political wisdom, but from the pure concept of the duty of right (from the ought, whose principle is given a priori by pure reason), whatever the physical consequences may be. The world will by no means perish through there being fewer evil human beings. The morally evil has the property, inseparable from its nature, that in its aims (above all in relation to others of like mind) it is contrary to itself and self-destructive, and so makes way for the (moral) principle of the good, though by slow progress.

*   *
  *

There is therefore *objectively* (in theory) no conflict at all between morality and politics. *Subjectively*, on the other hand (in the self-seeking propensity of human beings, which, however, because it is not founded on maxims of reason, need not yet be called practice), it will and may always remain, because it serves as the whetstone of virtue, whose true courage (according to the principle tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito) in the present case consists not so much in resolutely setting oneself against the evils and sacrifices that must be undertaken here, as in looking squarely in the face the far more dangerous lying and treacherous, yet quibbling, evil principle within ourselves, which feigns the weakness of human nature as a justification for every transgression, and in conquering its cunning.

In fact the political moralist can say: ruler and people, or people and people, do *one another* no wrong when they fight one another violently or insidiously, although in general they do wrong in denying all respect to the concept of right, which alone could found peace forever. For since the one transgresses his duty toward the other, who is disposed in precisely the same unlawful way toward him, it *serves* them both quite right when they wear one another down, yet in such a way that enough of this stock always remains to keep this game from ceasing down to the most remote times, so that a late posterity may some day take a warning example from them. Providence in the course of the world is hereby justified; for the moral principle in the human being never goes out, and reason, competent pragmatically to carry out the ideas of right according to that principle, grows besides constantly through ever-advancing culture, but with it also the guilt of those transgressions. Creation alone: namely, that such a stamp of corrupt beings should have been on earth at all, seems capable of being justified by no theodicy (if we assume that things will never be nor can be better with the human race); but this standpoint of judgment is far too high for us to be able to apply our concepts (of wisdom) to the supreme power, unfathomable to us, for theoretical purposes. To such desperate conclusions we are inevitably driven if we do not assume that the pure principles of right have objective reality, that is, that they can be carried out; and that action must accordingly be taken, on the part of the people in the state, and further on the part of states toward one another, whatever empirical politics may object to the contrary. True politics, therefore, cannot take a single step without first having paid homage to morality, and although politics in itself is a difficult art, its union with morality is no art at all; for the latter cuts in two the knot that the former is unable to untie, as soon as the two conflict with one another. The right of the human being must be held sacred, however great a sacrifice it may cost the ruling power. One cannot halve matters here and devise the middle thing of a pragmatically conditioned right (between right and utility), but all politics must bend its knee before the former, and can hope in return, though slowly, to reach the stage where it will shine enduringly.

[14] These are permissive laws of reason, permitting the condition of a public right afflicted with injustice to persist until, toward complete upheaval, everything has either ripened of itself or been brought near to ripeness by peaceful means; for some *rightful* constitution, even if legitimate only to a slight degree, is still better than none at all, which latter fate (anarchy) would befall a *hasty* reform. Political wisdom will therefore, in the condition in which things now are, make reforms conforming to the ideal of public right a duty; but revolutions, where nature brings them about of itself, it will use not to gloss over a still greater oppression, but as a call of nature to establish through thorough reform a lawful constitution founded on principles of freedom, as the only enduring one.

[15] Even if a certain wickedness rooted in human nature may still be doubted among *human beings* who live together in a state, and in its place the lack of a culture not yet advanced far enough (rawness) may, with some plausibility, be adduced as the cause of the lawless appearances of their way of thinking, it is nonetheless, in the external relation of *states* to one another, entirely undisguised and incontestably plain to the eye. In the interior of every state it is veiled by the compulsion of civil laws, because a greater force, namely that of the government, powerfully counteracts the inclination of the citizens to mutual violence, and so not only gives the whole a moral coat of paint (causae non causae), but also, by putting a bolt on the outbreak of lawless inclinations, really eases to a great degree the development of the moral predisposition toward immediate respect for right. For each now believes of himself that he would indeed hold the concept of right sacred and follow it faithfully, if only he could expect the same from every other; which latter the government in part secures to him; by which a great step *toward* morality (though not yet a moral step) is taken, to be attached to this concept of duty even for its own sake, without regard to reciprocation. But since each, with his good opinion of himself, nevertheless presupposes an evil disposition in all the others, they pass upon one another the mutual judgment that, as far as the *fact* is concerned, they are all worth little (how this comes about, since it cannot after all be laid to the charge of the *nature* of the human being as a free being, may remain unexamined). But since respect for the concept of right, of which the human being absolutely cannot rid himself, also most solemnly sanctions the theory of the capacity to become adequate to it, each sees that he for his part must act in accordance with it, let others do as they will.

### Appendix II

II.
On the agreement between politics and morality according to the transcendental concept of public right.

If I abstract from all the *matter* of public right (according to the various empirically given relations of human beings within a state, or also of states to one another), as the teachers of right commonly conceive it, there still remains to me the *form of publicity*, whose possibility every claim of right contains in itself. For without that form there would be no justice (which can be thought only as *publicly knowable*), and hence no right either, since it is justice alone that confers right.

Every claim of right must have this capacity for publicity. And since it is quite easy to judge whether it obtains in a given case—that is, whether it can be united with the principles of the agent or not—it can furnish an easily used criterion, to be met with a priori in reason, for recognizing at once, in the latter case, the falsity (illegality) of the claim in question (*praetensio iuris*), as it were by an experiment of pure reason.

After such an abstraction from everything empirical that the concept of the right of the state and of the right of nations contains (such as the malevolence of human nature, which makes coercion necessary), one may call the following proposition the *transcendental formula* of public right:

“All actions relating to the right of other human beings, whose maxim is incompatible with publicity, are wrong.”

This principle is to be considered not merely as *ethical* (belonging to the doctrine of virtue), but also as *juridical* (concerned with the right of human beings). For a maxim that I may not *let be known* without thereby at once defeating my own intention, a maxim that must by all means be *kept secret* if it is to succeed, and to which I cannot *publicly confess* without the resistance of all being inevitably provoked against my purpose: such a necessary and universal, and hence a priori knowable, counterworking of all against me can have its source nowhere but in the injustice with which it threatens everyone.—It is further merely *negative*, that is, it serves only to recognize, by its means, what is *not right* against others.—It is, like an axiom, unprovably certain, and besides easy to apply, as may be seen from the following examples of public right.

1. *As regards the right of the state* (*ius ciuitatis*), namely the internal right: the question arises here which many hold hard to answer, and which the transcendental principle of publicity resolves quite easily: “Is rebellion a lawful means for a people to throw off the oppressive power of a so-called tyrant (*non titulo sed exercitio talis*)?” The rights of the people are injured, and no injustice is done to the tyrant by his dethronement; of this there is no doubt. Nevertheless it is in the highest degree wrong in the subjects to seek their right in this way, and they can complain just as little of injustice if they succumb in this struggle and must afterwards endure the harshest punishment on that account.

Here much can now be reasoned for and against, if one will settle the matter by a dogmatic deduction of the grounds of right; but the transcendental principle of the publicity of public right can spare itself this tediousness. According to that principle, before the institution of the civil contract the people themselves ask whether they could well trust themselves to make publicly known the maxim of the intention to rebel on some occasion. One easily sees that, if the founding of a state constitution were to make it a condition to exercise force against the head in certain given cases, the people would thereby arrogate to themselves a lawful power over him. But then he would not be the head; or, if both were made conditions of the founding of a state, no state at all would be possible, which was nevertheless the people's aim. The wrongfulness of rebellion is therefore evident from this, that the maxim of it, by the very fact of *publicly confessing to it*, would make its own aim impossible. One would therefore necessarily have to keep it secret.—The latter, however, is by no means necessary on the part of the head of the state. He may freely declare that he will punish every rebellion with the death of the ringleaders, even though these may always believe that he was the first to transgress the fundamental law on his side; for if he is conscious of possessing the *irresistible* supreme power (which must also be assumed in every civil constitution, since whoever lacks power enough to protect every member of the people against every other has also no right to command him), then he need not fear to defeat his own aim by making his maxim known. With this it also agrees very well that, if the rebellion succeeded for the people, that head would step back into the place of a subject, and would then just as little dare to begin a rebellion to regain his position, nor yet have to fear being called to account for his former conduct of the state.

2. *As regards the right of nations.*—Only under the presupposition of some lawful condition (that is, that external condition under which a right can actually befall a human being) can there be any talk of a right of nations; because, as a public right, it already contains in its concept the publication of a general will determining for each what is his, and this *status iuridicus* must proceed from some contract that need not indeed be founded on coercive laws (like the one from which a state arises), but can also be that of a *permanently free* association, such as the federal union of various states mentioned above. For without some *lawful condition* that actively connects the various (physical or moral) persons, hence in the state of nature, there can be no other than merely a private right.—Here too there now occurs a conflict of politics with morality (considered as a doctrine of right), where that criterion of the publicity of maxims likewise finds its easy application, though only thus: that the contract unites states only with the intention of preserving themselves in peace among one another and together against other states, by no means in order to make acquisitions.—The following cases of the antinomy between politics and morality now occur, together with their solution.

a) “If one of these states has promised another something—whether assistance, or the cession of certain lands, or subsidies and the like—the question is whether, in a case on which the state's salvation depends, it can release itself from keeping its word by wanting to be regarded in a double person: first as *sovereign*, in which capacity it is responsible to no one within the state, then again merely as the supreme *state official*, who must give an account to the state. The conclusion then turns out to be that what he bound himself to in the first capacity is remitted to him in the second.”—But if a state (or its head) let this maxim of his be known, then naturally either every other would flee from him, or would unite with others to withstand his presumptions, which proves that politics with all its cunning on this footing (that of openness) would defeat its own aim, and that the maxim must therefore be wrong.

b) “If a neighboring power grown to fearful size (*potentia tremenda*) excites anxiety: may one assume that, because it *can*, it will also *want* to oppress, and does this give the less powerful a right to attack it (in union with others), even without any preceding injury?”—A state that wanted to *proclaim* this maxim of its own affirmatively would only bring the evil about more certainly and more swiftly. For the greater power would anticipate the smaller one; and as for the union of the latter, that is only a weak reed against one who knows how to use *diuide et impera*.—This maxim of political prudence, publicly declared, therefore necessarily defeats its own aim, and is consequently unjust.

c) “If a smaller state by its situation separates the connection of a larger one, which the latter nevertheless needs for its preservation, is the larger not entitled to subject the former and unite it with its own?”—One easily sees that the larger must by no means let such a maxim be known beforehand; for either the smaller states would unite early, or other powerful states would fight over this booty, and thus it makes itself impracticable by its openness: a sign that it is unjust, and can be so in a very high degree; for a small object of injustice does not prevent the injustice shown in it from being very great.

3. *As regards cosmopolitan right*, I pass over it here in silence, because, on account of its analogy with the right of nations, its maxims are easy to state and to appraise.

* * *

One now has here, in the principle of the incompatibility of the maxims of the right of nations with publicity, a good mark of the *disagreement* of politics with morality (as a doctrine of right). But now one also needs to be instructed as to the condition under which their maxims agree with the right of nations. For one cannot infer conversely that the maxims which endure publicity are therefore also just, because whoever has the decided superior power need not keep his maxims secret.—The condition of the possibility of a right of nations in general is that first a *lawful condition* exist. For without that there is no public right; rather all right that one may think outside it (in the state of nature) is merely private right. Now we have seen above that a federal condition of states, which has merely the removal of war as its aim, is the only *lawful* condition compatible with their *freedom*. The agreement of politics with morality is therefore possible only in a federal union (which is thus given a priori according to principles of right and is necessary), and all political prudence has as its lawful basis the institution of that union in its greatest possible extent; without which end all its cleverness is unwisdom and veiled injustice.—This pseudo-politics now has its *casuistry* as good as that of the best school of the Jesuits: the *reservatio mentalis*, in drawing up public contracts, with such expressions as one can interpret in one's own favor as one pleases (for instance the distinction between the *status quo de fait* and *de droit*);—*probabilism*: to reason out evil intentions in others, or to make the probabilities of their possible preponderance a ground of right for undermining other peaceful states;—finally the *peccatum philosophicum* (*peccatillum, bagatelle*): to hold the swallowing of a *small* state, if a much *larger* one thereby gains, to the supposedly greater world good, for an easily forgivable trifle[16].

The promotion of this is given by the double tongue of politics with regard to morality, using one or the other branch of it for its purpose.—Both, love of human beings and respect for the right of human beings, are duty; the former, however, only a *conditional* duty, the latter an *unconditional*, absolutely commanding duty, and whoever wants to abandon himself to the sweet feeling of beneficence must first be fully assured that he has not transgressed it. With morality in the former sense (as ethics) politics is easily agreed, so as to surrender the right of human beings to its superiors: but with morality in the second meaning (as doctrine of right), before which it would have to bend its knees, it finds it advisable not to enter into any contract at all, but rather to deny it all reality, and to interpret all duties as mere benevolence. And this insidiousness of a politics that shuns the light would easily be defeated by philosophy through the publicity of those maxims of politics, if politics would only dare to let the philosopher enjoy the publicity of his own.

With this aim I propose another transcendental and affirmative principle of public right, whose formula would be this:

“All maxims that *need* publicity (in order not to fail of their aim) agree with right and politics united.”

For if they can attain their aim only through publicity, they must be in accordance with the general aim of the public (happiness), and it is the proper task of politics to agree with that aim, that is, to make the public content with its condition. But if this aim is to be attainable only through publicity, that is, through the removal of all mistrust against those maxims, then these must also stand in concord with the right of the public; for in this alone is the union of the aims of all possible.—The further elaboration and discussion of this principle I must reserve for another occasion; only that it is a transcendental formula is to be seen from the removal of all empirical conditions (the doctrine of happiness) as the matter of the law, and from the mere regard to the form of universal lawfulness.

* * *

If it is a duty, and if at the same time there is well-grounded hope, actually to bring about the condition of a public right, though only in an approximation advancing to infinity, then *perpetual peace*, which follows those peace treaties so falsely so called (actually armistices), is no empty idea, but a task that is solved gradually and steadily approaches its goal (since the times in which equal progress occurs will, it is to be hoped, always become shorter).

[16] Evidence of such maxims may be met with in Hofrat Garve's treatise “On the connection of morality with politics, 1788.” This worthy scholar admits at the very beginning that he cannot give a satisfactory answer to this question. But to approve of it nevertheless, though with the admission that he cannot entirely remove the objections stirring against it, seems to concede more to those who are very inclined to misuse it than may well be advisable.

## Translation — Mouseia

> Independent machine-assisted translation directly from the complete German 1796 edition, including its supplements, appendices and author's notes.

### Title and preface

Toward Perpetual Peace

A philosophical outline by Immanuel Kant.

New expanded edition.

Königsberg: Friedrich Nicolovius. 1796.

Toward Perpetual Peace

A Dutch innkeeper put this satirical heading on a sign painted with a graveyard. Who was it aimed at? *Human beings* in general? Heads of state in particular, who can never get enough of war? Or perhaps just the philosophers who dream that sweet dream? We can leave that question open. But the author of this work makes one condition. The practical politician treats the theoretical politician with smug contempt, as an armchair scholar. He thinks the scholar's empty ideas pose no danger to a state, which must base its actions on experience. They can always let him knock down all eleven pins at once without the *worldly-wise* statesman having to pay attention. So if the statesman gets into a dispute with him, he must be consistent. He must not sniff out a danger to the state behind the views the theorist has taken a chance on and expressed publicly. With this *safeguard clause*, the author expressly declares, in due form, that he is protected against any malicious interpretation.

### Preliminary articles

First section,

containing the preliminary articles for perpetual peace between states.

1. “No peace agreement may count as one if it is made with a secret reservation of grounds for a future war.”

That would be only a truce, a delay in the fighting, not *peace*. Peace means the end of all hostilities. Adding the word *perpetual* to it is already a suspicious redundancy. A peace agreement wipes out every existing cause of a future war, even those the parties themselves may not yet know about. It does not matter how cleverly or keenly someone might dig them out of archival documents. A secret reservation (*reservatio mentalis*) about old claims still to be thought up later is another matter. Neither side wants to mention them now, because both are too exhausted to continue the war. But they have the bad intention of using the first favorable opportunity to do so. This belongs to the Jesuits' moral hair-splitting. Judged on its own merits, it is beneath the dignity of rulers, just as a willingness to supply such arguments is beneath the dignity of their ministers.

But suppose that, according to enlightened ideas of statecraft, a state's true honor lies in constantly increasing its power, whatever the means. Then that judgment will of course look academic and pedantic.

2. “No independent state, large or small—it makes no difference here—may be acquired by another state through inheritance, exchange, purchase, or gift.”

A state is not property (*patrimonium*), as the land on which it stands might be. It is a society of human beings that no one but itself has the right to command or control. It is a tree trunk with roots of its own. To graft it onto another state as a shoot is to end its existence as a moral person and turn that person into a thing. This contradicts the idea of the original contract. Without that idea, no right to rule over a people is conceivable[1]. Everyone knows the danger that this assumed way of acquiring states has brought on Europe, even in the most recent times. The other parts of the world have never known it. It is the idea that states, too, can marry each other. Family alliances become a new kind of business: a way to gain overwhelming power without expending any strength, and also a way to extend territorial possessions. Hiring out one state's troops to another against an enemy they do not share also belongs here. Subjects are used and used up as things to be handled at will.

3. “Standing armies (*miles perpetuus*) must eventually cease altogether.”

Standing armies constantly threaten other states with war by always appearing ready for it. They provoke these states to outdo one another in the number of armed men, a competition with no limit. The costs eventually make peace even more burdensome than a short war. So standing armies themselves cause wars of aggression, undertaken to get rid of that burden. There is another consideration. Being paid to kill or be killed seems to involve using human beings as mere machines and tools in someone else's hands—the state's. That is hard to reconcile with the rights we have as human beings. It is quite different when citizens voluntarily take part in regular weapons training to protect themselves and their country against attacks from outside. Accumulating a treasury would have the same effect as a standing army. Other states would see it as a threat of war and be driven to launch preventive attacks. Of the three powers, *military power*, *alliance power*, and *financial power*, the last might well be the most reliable tool of war, if its size were not so difficult to discover.

4. “No state debts may be incurred for dealings with other states.”

There is nothing suspect about this resource when a state seeks help, at home or abroad, for its domestic economy: improving roads, establishing new settlements, providing stores against feared crop failures, and similar needs. But it is different when powers use a credit system as a machine against one another. The debts grow without any foreseeable limit, yet payment of current claims is always secure, since not all creditors will demand payment at once. This ingenious invention of a trading people in this century is a dangerous financial power. It is a war chest greater than the treasuries of all other states put together. Only the eventual loss of tax revenues can exhaust it. Even that can be delayed for a long time by stimulating commerce, with its effects in turn on industry and earnings. This makes war easy. Combined with rulers' inclination toward war, which seems ingrained in human nature, it is a major obstacle to perpetual peace. Prohibiting it must therefore be a preliminary article of that peace. There is all the more reason for this because the state's ultimately unavoidable bankruptcy must entangle many other states in losses through no fault of their own. That would be a public violation of their rights. So at least other states have the right to form an alliance against such a state and its pretensions.

5. “No state may use force to interfere in another state's constitution and government.”

What could give it that right? Perhaps the bad example a state sets for another state's subjects? Instead, a state can serve as a warning through the example of the great evils a people has brought on itself by its lawlessness. In general, the bad example one free person sets for another (*an offense taken*) does not violate the other's rights. There is a case that would not count as such interference. Internal conflict might split a state into two parts, each presenting itself as a separate state and claiming the whole. An outside state could then assist one of them without being charged with interfering in the other's constitution, since there would then be anarchy. But as long as this internal struggle has not been decided, interference by outside powers would violate the rights of an independent people struggling only with its own internal sickness. That interference would itself set a bad example and put every state's self-rule at risk.

6. “No state at war with another may allow itself acts of hostility that must make mutual trust impossible in a future peace. These include employing *assassins* (*percussores*) or *poisoners* (*venefici*), *breaking a surrender agreement*, *inciting treason* (*perduellio*) in the state it is fighting, and the like.”

These are dishonorable tactics. Even in the middle of a war, some trust in the enemy's way of thinking must remain. Otherwise no peace could be agreed on, and the hostility would turn into a war of extermination (*bellum internecinum*). War is only the sad last resort in a state of nature, where there is no court able to give a binding judgment. It is a way to assert one's rights by force. Neither side can be declared an unjust enemy, since that would already require a judge's ruling. Instead, the *outcome* decides which side is in the right, as in a so-called trial by ordeal. Nor can there be a war of punishment (*bellum punitivum*) between states, since neither is a superior and the other its subordinate. It follows that a war of extermination could destroy both sides and, with them, all right. It would bring perpetual peace only in the great graveyard of the human race. Such a war, and therefore the use of means that lead to it, must be absolutely forbidden. The means just mentioned inevitably lead there. Those hellish practices are base in themselves. Once they come into use, they will not stay within the limits of war for long. This applies, for example, to the use of spies (*uti exploratoribus*), which only exploits the dishonorable conduct of *others*—something that cannot be eradicated. They will spread into peacetime as well and completely defeat its purpose.

All the laws listed above are objectively, that is, in the intention of those in power, *prohibitory laws* (*leges prohibitivae*). But some are *strict* laws, valid regardless of circumstances (*leges strictae*). They insist on doing away with the prohibited practice *immediately*, as in Articles 1, 5, and 6. Others, such as Articles 2, 3, and 4, give those concerned more latitude *subjectively*, depending on circumstances (*leges latae*). This does not make them exceptions to the rule of right. It concerns only the rule's *application*. They permit *postponing* its implementation without losing sight of the goal. That goal allows a delay, for example, in *restoring* the freedom that certain states have been deprived of, as described in Article 2. But it does not allow that restoration to be put off forever—as Augustus used to promise, *until a date that will never come*—and so never carried out. It allows a delay only to avoid acting too hastily and defeating the purpose itself. The prohibition here concerns only the *way of acquiring* a state, which must no longer be accepted. It does not concern the *existing possession*. That possession lacks the required legal title. But at the time of its supposed acquisition, all states considered it lawful according to the public opinion of that time[2].

[1] A hereditary kingdom is not a state that can be inherited by another state. Rather, its right to govern can be inherited by another individual. The state then acquires a ruler. The ruler, as someone who already possesses another kingdom, does not acquire the state.

[2] There has been good reason to doubt whether pure reason can have *permissive laws* (*leges permissivae*) in addition to commands (*leges praeceptivae*) and prohibitions (*leges prohibitivae*). Laws in general provide a basis for the objective practical necessity of an action. Permission, on the other hand, provides a basis for certain actions being optional in practice. A *permissive law* would therefore require an action that someone cannot be required to perform. This would be a contradiction if the law's object meant the same thing in both respects. But here, in a permissive law, the assumed prohibition concerns only a future way of acquiring a right, for example through inheritance. The exemption from that prohibition, or permission, concerns existing possession. During the transition from the state of nature to a civil society, this possession can continue under a permissive law of natural right. Although unlawful, it is still *possession held in good faith* (*possessio putativa*). Yet in the state of nature, possession based on a supposed right is forbidden once it is recognized as such. A similar way of acquiring it is also forbidden in the later civil society, after the transition has taken place. This right to continued possession would not exist if the supposed acquisition had occurred within civil society. In that case, the possession would violate someone's rights and would have to end as soon as its unlawfulness was discovered.

I only wanted to draw the attention of teachers of natural right, in passing, to the concept of a *permissive law*. Reason naturally encounters this concept when it divides things up systematically. This is especially relevant because civil, statutory law often uses it, but with a difference. The prohibitory law stands on its own. Permission is not incorporated into that law as a limiting condition, as it should be, but is thrown in among the exceptions. The wording then runs: this or that is forbidden, *unless* number 1, number 2, number 3, continuing without any foreseeable end. Permissions are added to the law only by chance, not according to a principle, but by feeling one's way among the cases that arise. Otherwise the conditions would have had to be included *in the formula of the prohibitory law*. That would have made it a permissive law at the same time. It is therefore regrettable that the ingenious prize question of the equally wise and perceptive *Count von Windischgrätz*, which called for precisely this, was dropped so quickly without being solved. The possibility of such a formula, like a mathematical one, is the only genuine test of legislation that remains consistent. Without it, so-called *legal certainty* will always remain a pious wish. Otherwise we will have only *general* laws, which hold *for the most part*, but no universal laws, which hold *in every case*. Yet the very concept of a law seems to require the latter.

### Definitive articles: introduction

Second section,

containing the definitive articles for perpetual peace among states.

Peace among people living side by side is not a state of nature (*status naturalis*). The state of nature is instead a state of war. This does not always mean open hostilities, but it does mean a constant threat of them. Peace must therefore be *established*. Simply refraining from hostilities gives no assurance of peace. Unless each neighbor gives the other that assurance—which can happen only under a *legal* order—the one who has asked for it may treat the other as an enemy[3].

[3] People generally assume that I may act with hostility toward someone only if that person has already *harmed* me by an action. This is quite right when both of us live under a *civil legal* order. By entering that order, the other person gives me the necessary assurance through the authority that has power over us both. But a person (or a people) in a mere state of nature deprives me of this assurance. Simply by being beside me in that condition, that person already harms me. This is not harm through an action (*facto*), but through the lawless condition itself (*statu iniusto*, a condition without justice), which keeps me under constant threat. I may force that person either to enter a shared legal order with me or to leave my neighborhood. The basic requirement underlying all the following articles is therefore this: All people who can affect one another must belong to some civil constitution.

Every legal constitution, in terms of the persons who belong to it, falls into one of these categories:

1) A constitution based on the *right of citizens* within one people (*ius ciuitatis*).

2) A constitution based on the *right of nations*, governing states in their relations with one another (*ius gentium*).

3) A constitution based on the *right of world citizenship*, insofar as people and states stand in external relations that affect one another and are to be regarded as citizens of a universal human state (*ius cosmopoliticum*). This division is not arbitrary. It is necessary for the idea of perpetual peace. If even one of these persons or states could physically affect another while still living in a state of nature, a state of war would follow. Freedom from that state of war is precisely what we are seeking here.

### First definitive article

First definitive article for perpetual peace.

The civil constitution of every state must be republican.

A constitution is *republican*[4] when it is established on these principles: first, the *freedom* of society's members as human beings; second, everyone's *dependence* on a single shared system of legislation as subjects; and third, their *equality* *as citizens*. This is the only constitution that follows from the idea of the original contract, on which all of a people's rightful legislation must be based. In matters of right, then, it is in itself the original basis of every kind of civil constitution. The only question now is whether it is also the only constitution that can lead to perpetual peace.

The republican constitution has a pure origin: it comes from the pure source of the concept of right. Beyond this, it also offers the prospect of the result we want—perpetual peace. Here is why. If the citizens' agreement is required to decide “whether there should be war or not”—as it must be under this constitution—nothing is more natural than that they will think very carefully before starting such a harmful game. They would be deciding to bring all the hardships of war on themselves. They would have to fight in person, pay the costs of war from their own possessions, and struggle to repair the destruction it leaves behind. To make matters worse, they would finally have to take on a burden of debt themselves. This would spoil even the peace, and could never be paid off, because more wars would always be close at hand. Under a constitution where the subject is not a citizen, and which is therefore not republican, deciding on war is the easiest thing in the world. The head of state is not a fellow member of the state but its owner. War does not cost him the slightest loss in his banquets, hunts, pleasure palaces, court festivities, and the like. He can therefore decide on it for trivial reasons, as if it were a pleasure outing. For the sake of appearances, he can leave its justification to the diplomatic corps, which is always ready for the task, without giving it another thought.

To avoid confusing a republican constitution with a democratic one, as people generally do, we need to make the following distinction. The forms of a state (*ciuitas*) can be classified in two ways. One concerns which persons hold supreme state power. The other concerns the *way the people are governed* by their head of state, whoever that may be. The first is properly called the form of *rule* (*forma imperii*). Only three forms are possible. Either *one person*, *some people* joined together, or *everyone* who makes up civil society holds the ruling power. These are *autocracy*, *aristocracy*, and *democracy*: rule by a prince, rule by the nobility, and rule by the people. The second classification is the form of government (*forma regiminis*). It concerns how the state uses its full power on the basis of its constitution—the act of the general will that turns a multitude into a people. In this respect, government is either *republican* or *despotic*. *Republicanism* is the principle that separates the executive power, the government, from the legislative power. Despotism is the principle by which the state carries out, on its own authority, laws that it has made itself. In other words, the ruler handles the public will as his private will. Of the three forms of state, *democracy*, in the strict sense of the word, is necessarily a *despotism*. It establishes an executive power in which everyone decides about one person, and if necessary against that person, who therefore does not agree. Thus everyone decides, yet they are not everyone. This puts the general will in conflict with itself and with freedom.

Any form of government that is not *representative* is really a *misshapen form*. The lawmaker cannot also be the person who carries out that same will. In a logical argument, the general rule in the major premise likewise cannot also be the act of placing a particular case under that rule in the minor premise. The other two constitutions are always defective insofar as they leave room for a nonrepresentative form of government. Still, they at least allow the possibility of adopting a way of governing that follows the *spirit* of a representative system. For example, Frederick II at least *said* that he was merely the state's highest servant[5]. A democratic constitution, by contrast, makes this impossible, because everyone there wants to be the ruler. So we can say this: The fewer people hold state power—the smaller the number of rulers—and the greater their representation, the closer the constitution comes to making republicanism possible. It can then hope to reach republicanism eventually through gradual reforms. For this reason, reaching this sole fully rightful constitution is harder under aristocracy than under monarchy. Under democracy, it is impossible without violent revolution. But the way of governing[6] matters incomparably more to the people than the form of state. Even so, much also depends on how well or poorly the form of state suits that goal. If the way of governing is to fit the concept of right, it must include a representative system. Only that system makes republican government possible. Without it, whatever the constitution may be, government is despotic and violent. None of the ancient so-called republics knew this system. As a result, they inevitably had to fall apart into despotism. Of all forms of despotism, the one under a single supreme ruler is still the most bearable.

[4] *Legal* (and therefore external) *freedom* cannot be defined, as people often define it, as the permission “to do whatever you want, as long as you do no one any wrong.” For what does *permission* mean? The possibility of an action insofar as it does no one any wrong. So the definition would run: “Freedom is the possibility of actions through which you do no one any wrong (whatever you may do), as long as you do no one any wrong.” This is an empty repetition. Instead, my external (legal) *freedom* should be defined as follows: It is the permission not to obey any external laws except those to which I could have given my consent. Similarly, external (legal) *equality* within a state is a relation among citizens in which no one can place another under a legal obligation without also submitting to a law under which they *can* be placed under the same kind of obligation by the other in return. (The principle of *legal* dependence needs no explanation, since it is already included in the concept of a state constitution as such.) These rights are inborn, necessarily belong to humanity, and cannot be given up. Their validity is confirmed and raised still higher by the principle of human beings' legal relations even to higher beings, if they conceive of such beings. For human beings picture themselves as citizens of a world beyond the senses under these very same principles. As for my freedom, even divine laws that I can know through reason alone impose no obligation on me except insofar as I could have given my consent to them myself. For only through my own reason's law of freedom do I first form a concept of the divine will. Now consider the principle of *equality* in relation to the highest being in the world apart from God that I might imagine—a great *Aeon*. Suppose I do my duty in my position, just as that Aeon does in its own. There is then no reason why I should have only a duty to obey, while it has a right to command. The reason this principle of *equality*, unlike the principle of freedom, does not also apply to our relation to God is that God is the only being to whom the concept of duty does not apply.

As for the right to equality of all citizens as subjects, the question of whether *hereditary nobility* is permissible depends on this alone: “Must the *rank* granted by the state to one subject above another come before *merit*, or must merit come before rank?” Clearly, if rank is tied to birth, it is entirely uncertain whether merit—ability and faithfulness in office—will follow. This amounts to granting the favored person a rank, the position of commander, without any merit at all. The general will of the people would never decide on this in an original contract, which is, after all, the principle of all rights. Being a nobleman does not automatically make someone a *noble* man. As for *nobility of office*—as we might call the rank of a higher magistrate, which must be earned through merit—the rank does not belong to the person as property. It belongs to the position. This does not violate equality. When the person leaves office, they also give up the rank and return to the people.

[5] The lofty titles often given to a ruler—God's anointed, administrator of the divine will on earth, and God's representative—have often been criticized as crude flattery that makes his head spin. But I think this criticism is unfounded. Far from making the ruler arrogant, these titles must humble him in his own soul, if he has any understanding, as we must assume he does. He must consider that he has taken on an office too great for a human being: to administer the holiest thing God has on earth, *human rights*. He must always fear that he may have harmed in some way this apple of God's eye.

[6] In language that sounds brilliant but is hollow and empty of substance, Mallet du Pan boasts that many years of experience have finally convinced him of the truth of *Pope*'s familiar saying: “Let fools argue about the best government; the best-run is the best.” If this means that the best-run government is the best-run, then, to use Swift's expression, he has cracked a nut that rewarded him with a maggot. But if it means that this is also the best way of governing, that is, the best state constitution, it is completely false. Examples of good governments prove nothing about the way of governing. Who has governed better than *Titus* and *Marcus Aurelius*? Yet one left *Domitian* as his successor, and the other *Commodus*. This could not have happened under a good state constitution. Their unfitness for the position was known early enough, and the ruler also had enough power to exclude them.

### Second definitive article

Second definitive article for perpetual peace.

International law must be based on a *federation* of free states.

Peoples, as states, can be judged in the same way as individual human beings. In their natural condition—that is, independent of external laws—they harm one another simply by existing side by side. For its own security, each can and should demand that the others join it in an arrangement like a civil constitution, where everyone's rights can be secured. This would be a *league of nations*, but not necessarily a state made up of nations. Such a state would involve a contradiction. Every state involves a relationship between a *superior* who makes laws and an *inferior* who obeys them, namely, the people. But many peoples within one state would form just one people. That contradicts our starting point. We are considering the rights of *peoples* in relation to one another, as so many separate states, not as peoples that are to merge into one state.

We look with deep contempt at the attachment of savages to their lawless freedom. They would rather fight endlessly than submit to legal restraints that they themselves would establish. They prefer a mad freedom to a rational one. We see this as crudeness, lack of refinement, and a degradation of humanity to the level of animals. So we might expect civilized peoples, each united in a state of its own, to hurry out of such a degraded condition as soon as possible. Instead, every *state* places its majesty precisely in being subject to no external legal restraint at all. For “the majesty of the people” is an absurd expression. The glory of its ruler consists in having many thousands at his command who can be made to sacrifice themselves for a cause that does not concern them, without his having to put himself in danger.[7] The main difference between European and American savages is this: some tribes of the latter have been completely eaten by their enemies. The former know how to make better use of those they defeat than to eat them. They prefer to use them to increase the number of their subjects, and so the number of tools available for still more widespread wars.

Human nature's wickedness shows itself openly in the unrestricted relations between peoples. Within a state governed by law, the government's restraints largely conceal it. Given this wickedness, it is surprising that the word *right* has not yet been completely dismissed from the politics of war as pedantic, and that no state has yet dared to declare itself publicly in favor of that view. *Hugo Grotius*, *Pufendorf*, *Vattel*, and others—all of them miserable comforters—are still faithfully cited to *justify* an attack. Yet their code, whether written in philosophical or diplomatic terms, does not have, and cannot have, the slightest *legal* force. States as such are not subject to a common external power of enforcement. Nor is there any example of a state ever being persuaded to abandon its plans by arguments backed by the testimony of such important men. Still, every state's respect for the concept of right, at least in words, proves something. Human beings have an even greater moral capacity, though it is dormant for now, eventually to master the evil principle within them, which they cannot deny, and to hope that others will do the same. Otherwise, the word *right* would never pass the lips of states that want to fight one another, unless only to mock it. As that Gallic prince put it: “Nature has given the stronger this advantage over the weaker: the weaker must obey him.”

States can pursue their rights only through war, never through a lawsuit as they could before an external court. But war and its favorable outcome, *victory*, do not decide what is right. A *peace treaty* ends the current war, but not the state of war, for which a new pretext can always be found. Nor can this condition simply be declared unjust, since in it everyone judges their own case. Yet what natural law says of human beings in a lawless condition—that “they ought to leave this condition”—does not apply in quite the same way to states under the right of nations. As states, they already have a lawful constitution internally. They are therefore beyond being forced by others into a broader legal constitution according to those others' ideas of right. Even so, from its throne as the supreme authority for moral legislation, reason absolutely condemns war as a way to settle questions of right. It makes a state of peace an immediate duty. But peace cannot be established or secured without an agreement among peoples. So there must be a special kind of league, which can be called a *peace league* (*foedus pacificum*). It would differ from a *peace treaty* (*pactum pacis*) in this: the treaty seeks to end just *one* war, while the league seeks to end *all* wars forever. This league does not aim to acquire any of a state's power. It aims only to preserve and secure a state's *freedom*, both for itself and for the other states allied with it. Those states would not, for that reason, have to submit to public laws and their enforcement, as human beings in the natural condition must. We can show that this idea of *federation* is workable—that it has objective reality. It is to spread gradually over all states and so lead to perpetual peace. Suppose good fortune allows a powerful and enlightened people to form a republic, which by its nature must favor perpetual peace. This republic provides a center for a federal union that other states can join. In this way they can secure the freedom of states in keeping with the idea of the right of nations. Through further alliances of this kind, the union can gradually spread farther and farther.

It makes sense for a people to say: “There must be no war among us, because we want to form ourselves into a state. That is, we want to establish over ourselves a supreme power to make laws, govern, and judge, which will settle our disputes peacefully.” But suppose this state says: “There must be no war between me and other states, although I recognize no supreme lawmaking power that guarantees my rights and whose rights I guarantee in return.” Then it is impossible to understand what could give me confidence in my rights, unless it is a substitute for the compact that establishes civil society: a free federation. Reason must connect this federation with the concept of the right of nations, if that concept is to have any meaning at all.

The concept of a right of nations as a right *to* war really makes no sense. It would be a right to determine what is right by force, according to one-sided rules, rather than by universally valid external laws that limit each individual's freedom. It could mean only that people who think this way get what they deserve when they wear one another out and so find perpetual peace in the vast grave that covers all the horrors of violence along with those responsible for them. For states in their relations with one another, reason allows only one way out of the lawless condition that contains nothing but war. Like individuals, they must give up their wild, lawless freedom, accept public laws backed by force, and form a *state of nations* (*ciuitas gentium*). This state would, of course, keep growing until it finally included all the peoples of the earth. But their idea of the right of nations makes them utterly unwilling to do this. They reject *in practice* what is right *in principle*. So, if all is not to be lost, only a *negative* substitute can take the place of the positive idea of *a world republic*: a lasting, continually expanding *league* that keeps war away. Only this can hold back the flood of hostile tendencies that shun law, though there is a constant danger of their breaking out (*Godless fury rages within, hideous with its bloodstained mouth. Virgil.*).[8]

[7] A Bulgarian prince once gave this answer to the Greek emperor, who had kindly offered to settle their dispute by single combat: “A blacksmith who has tongs will not use his hands to pull the red-hot iron out of the coals.”

[8] When a war has ended and peace has been concluded, it might be fitting for a people to proclaim a day of repentance after the festival of thanksgiving. In the state's name, they would ask heaven's forgiveness for the great sin that the human race still commits: refusing to accept a legal constitution in its relations with other peoples. Proud of its independence, it prefers the barbaric means of war, even though war does not decide the very thing being sought, namely, the rights of each state. The thanksgiving festivals held during a war for a *victory*, and the hymns sung, in true Israelite fashion, to the *Lord of Hosts*, clash no less sharply with the moral idea of the Father of humankind. They show indifference to the way peoples seek to establish their rights against one another, which is sad enough. But they also add joy at having destroyed a great many people or their happiness.

### Third definitive article

Third definitive article for perpetual peace.

“The *right of world citizenship* must be limited to the conditions of universal *hospitality*.”

Here, as in the earlier articles, the subject is not charity but *right*. In this context, *hospitality* means a stranger's right not to be treated as an enemy because of arriving on someone else's land. The person whose land it is can turn the stranger away, if this can be done without causing the stranger's destruction. But as long as the stranger behaves peacefully where they are, that person must not treat them as an enemy. A stranger cannot claim a *right to stay as a guest*. That would require a special agreement granting the benefit of becoming a member of the household for a certain time. The stranger has only a *right to visit*: a right belonging to all human beings to offer to associate with others. This follows from their right to shared possession of the earth's surface. Since that surface is spherical, they cannot spread out endlessly. In the end they must tolerate one another's presence. Originally, no one has more right than anyone else to be in any particular place on earth. Uninhabitable parts of this surface—the sea and sandy deserts—divide this community. Yet the *ship* and the *camel*, the *ship* of the desert, make it possible for people to approach one another across these ownerless regions. They can use their shared right to the earth's *surface* to make contact possible. So the inhospitable behavior found on some coasts, such as the Barbary coast—robbing ships in nearby seas or enslaving shipwrecked sailors—is contrary to natural law. So is the behavior found in sandy deserts, among the Arab Bedouins, who take the approach of people to their nomadic tribes as a right to plunder them. But this right of hospitality, the right of arriving strangers, extends only to the conditions that make it possible to *try* to enter into relations with the existing inhabitants. In this way, distant parts of the world can enter into peaceful relations with one another. These relations can eventually be governed by public law and so bring the human race ever closer to a constitution for world citizenship.

Compare this with the *inhospitable* conduct of the civilized states in our part of the world, especially the trading states. The injustice they display in *visiting* foreign lands and peoples, which they treat as the same thing as *conquering* them, goes to horrifying lengths. When they discovered America, the lands of Black peoples, the Spice Islands, the Cape, and so on, they regarded them as lands belonging to no one. They counted the inhabitants as nothing. In the East Indies, Hindustan, they brought in foreign troops on the pretext that they only intended to set up trading posts. With the troops came oppression of the native inhabitants, incitement of the various states there to widespread wars, famine, rebellion, treachery, and the rest of the litany of evils that afflict the human race.

China[9] and Japan (*Nipon*) had tried admitting guests of this kind. Wisely, China has therefore allowed access but not entry. Japan has allowed even access only to a single European people, the Dutch. Even then, it keeps them like prisoners, cut off from contact with the native inhabitants. The worst of it—or the best, from the standpoint of a moral judge—is that those committing this violence do not even benefit from it. All these trading companies are on the verge of collapse. The sugar islands, the home of the cruelest and most elaborate slavery, produce no real return. They serve only indirectly, and for a purpose that is not very praiseworthy: training sailors for war fleets, and so, once again, waging wars in Europe. And this is what those who make a great show of piety want. They drink injustice like water, yet want to be regarded as the chosen ones because of their orthodox beliefs.

The closer or looser community that has now developed among all the earth's peoples has reached a point where a violation of rights in *one* place on earth is felt in *all* places. So the idea of a right of world citizenship is not a fanciful or exaggerated way of thinking about right. It is a necessary addition to the unwritten code of both the law within states and the right of nations, completing them as public human rights in general, and so leading to perpetual peace. Only on this condition can we flatter ourselves that we are continually approaching that peace.

[9] To write the name of this great empire as it calls itself—namely, *China*, not Sina or anything that sounds like it—we need only consult *Georgii Alphab. Tibet. pag. 651 - 654.*, especially *Nota b* at the bottom. According to Professor *Fischer* of St. Petersburg, it actually has no definite name by which it calls itself. The most common is still the word *Kin*, meaning gold, which the Tibetans express by *Ser*. Hence the emperor is called king of *gold*, of the most splendid country in the world. This word may well sound like *Chin* in the empire itself, but the Italian missionaries may have pronounced it *Kin* because of the guttural letter. This shows that the country the Romans called the land of the *Seres* was China. Silk was carried to Europe through *Greater Tibet*, presumably through *Lesser Tibet* and Bukharia, across Persia, and onward. This leads to various reflections on the antiquity of this remarkable state compared with Hindustan, through its connection with *Tibet* and, through Tibet, with Japan. By contrast, the name Sina or Tschina, which its neighbors are said to give the country, leads nowhere. Perhaps Europe's very ancient contact with Tibet, though never properly understood, can also be explained from what *Hesychius* preserved for us: the cry Κονξ Ομπαξ (*Konx Ompax*) of the hierophant in the Eleusinian mysteries. (S. Reise des jüngern Anacharsis, 5ter Theil, S. 447 u. f.) According to *Georgii Alph. Tibet.*, the word *Concioa* means *God*, and it bears a striking resemblance to *Konx*. *Pah-cio.* (*ib. p. 520*), which the Greeks could easily have pronounced *pax*, means proclaimer of the law, the deity spread throughout nature, also called *Cencresi*, *p. 177.* But *Om*, which *La Croze* translates as *benedictus*, *blessed*, can surely mean nothing other than *the one praised as blessed* when applied to the deity, *p. 507.* Now, whenever *P. Franz. Horatius* asked the Tibetan *lamas* what they understood by God (*Concioa*), they answered: “*It is the assembly of all the saints*.” He asked them often. These saints are the souls of the blessed who, through Lamaist rebirth, have wandered through all kinds of bodies and finally returned to the deity, transformed into *Burchane*, that is, beings worthy of worship (*p. 223*). So that mysterious expression, *Konx Ompax*, was probably meant to signify the *holy* (*Konx*), *blessed* (*Om*), and *wise* (*Pax*) supreme being spread everywhere throughout the world: nature personified. Used in the Greek *mysteries*, it probably indicated *monotheism* for the fully initiated, as opposed to the people's *polytheism*, although *P. Horatius* (a. a. O.) suspected *atheism* in it. How that mysterious expression reached the Greeks through Tibet can be explained in the way described above. Conversely, this can also make it probable that Europe had early contact with China through Tibet, perhaps even earlier than with Hindustan.

### First supplement

First supplement.
On the guarantee of perpetual peace.

What provides this guarantee is nothing less than the great artist *nature* (*natura daedala rerum*). Purposefulness clearly shines out of nature's mechanical course, and nature makes concord rise out of human discord even against their will. For that reason we call it *fate*, as though it were the compulsion of a cause whose laws of operation we do not know. But when we consider its purposefulness in the course of the world, we call it *providence*[10]: the deep-lying wisdom of a higher cause that aims at the objective final end of the human race and predetermines this world course. Strictly, we do not *know* providence from these artistic arrangements of nature, nor can we even *infer* it from them. We can only (as with every reference of the form of things to ends in general) *think it in addition*, and must do so in order to form a concept of its possibility by analogy with human works of art. To imagine its relation and agreement with the end that reason directly prescribes for us, namely the moral end, is an idea that is extravagant for *theoretical* purposes, but dogmatic, and well grounded in its reality, for practical ones (for instance in regard to the concept of the duty of *perpetual peace*, in order to use that mechanism of nature for it).—When the word *nature* is used, as it is here, merely for theory (not for religion), it also suits the limits of human reason better (reason must keep within the bounds of possible experience as regards the relation of effects to their causes) and is *more modest* than the expression of a *providence* that we could know, with which one presumptuously fits oneself with Icarus wings in order to come closer to the secret of its unfathomable intention.

Before we define this guarantee more closely, we must first look for the condition that nature has arranged for the actors on its great stage, the condition that in the end makes their securing of peace necessary; and only then say how nature provides it.

Its provisional arrangement consists in this: 1) nature has seen to it that people can live in every region of the earth; 2) it has driven them everywhere by *war*, even into the most inhospitable regions, so as to populate them; 3) by the same war it has forced them into more or less lawful relations.—It is already wonderful that moss still grows in the cold deserts by the Arctic Ocean, which the *reindeer* scrapes out from under the snow, so as to be food, and also the draught animal, for the Ostyak or the Samoyed; or that the salty sand deserts still hold the *camel*, which seems almost created for traveling them, so that they are not left unused. But the end shines out still more clearly when one notices that, besides the furred animals on the shore of the Arctic Ocean, seals, walruses and whales provide food with their flesh and fuel with their blubber for the people who live there. Most of all, nature's care through driftwood awakens admiration: it brings wood to these treeless regions (no one quite knows from where), without which material those people could make neither boats and weapons nor huts to live in; and then they have enough to do with war against the animals, so as to live at peace among themselves.—— But what *drove* them there was presumably nothing other than war. The first *instrument of war* among all the animals that humans learned to tame and domesticate within the time of the earth's peopling was the *horse* (the elephant belongs to a later time, that of the luxury of states already established), just as the art of cultivating certain grasses, now no longer recognizable to us in their original character, called *grain*, and likewise the multiplication and refinement of *fruit kinds* by transplanting and grafting (perhaps in Europe only two kinds, crab apples and wild pears), could arise only in the condition of already established states, where secure landed property existed. Before that, people in lawless freedom had pushed through from the *hunting*[11], fishing and herding life to the *farming* life; then *salt* and *iron* were invented, and perhaps these became the first articles, sought far and wide, of a trade between different peoples, through which those peoples first came into a *peaceful relation* with one another, and so, even with more distant peoples, into understanding, community and peaceful relation among themselves.

In seeing to it that people *could* live in every region of the earth, nature has also despotically willed that they *should* live everywhere, even against their inclination, and without this “should” presupposing a concept of duty that would bind them to it by means of a moral law. To reach this end of its own, nature chose war.—We see peoples who make the unity of their descent recognizable by the unity of their language: the *Samoyeds* on the Arctic Ocean on one side, and a people of similar language two hundred miles away in the *Altai* mountains on the other, with another people, the Mongol, mounted and therefore warlike, pressing in between them and scattering that part of the stock far from the rest into the most inhospitable ice regions, where they would certainly not have spread out of their own inclination[12]. So too the *Finns* in the northernmost region of Europe, called *Lapps*, separated from the *Hungarians*, now equally far away but related to them in language, by Gothic and Sarmatian peoples who pushed in between. And what else could have driven the *Eskimos* (perhaps ancient European adventurers, a stock wholly different from all other Americans) into the north, and the *Pescheräs* into the south of America as far as Tierra del Fuego, but war, which nature uses as its means to populate the earth everywhere? War itself needs no special motive; it seems grafted onto human nature, and even to count as something noble, for which a person is animated by the desire for honor without self-interested drives. Thus *warlike courage* (of American savages as much as of Europeans in the age of chivalry) is judged to be of immediate great worth not only *when* there is war (as is fair), but also so *that* there be war; and war is often begun merely to show that courage, so that an inner *dignity* is placed in war itself, to the point that even philosophers sometimes deliver a eulogy on it as a certain ennoblement of humanity, unmindful of that Greek's saying: “War is bad in this, that it makes more bad people than it takes away.”—So much for what nature does for *its own end* with regard to the human species as a class of animals.

Now comes the question that concerns the essential part of the aim of perpetual peace: “What does nature do for this aim, with reference to the end that man's own reason makes a duty for him, and therefore in favor of his *moral aim*, and how does it give the guarantee that what man *ought* to do by laws of freedom, but does not do, is secured by a compulsion of nature that he *will* do it, without prejudice to that freedom, and indeed in all three relations of public right, of *state*, *international* and *cosmopolitan right*?”—When I say of nature that it *wills* that this or that should happen, that does not mean that it lays a duty on us to do it (only free practical reason can do that), but that nature *does* it itself, whether we will or not (*fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt*).

1. Even if a people were not forced by internal discord to submit to the compulsion of public laws, war from outside would do it. For, by the arrangement of nature mentioned above, every people finds another people pressing upon it as a neighbor, and against that neighbor it must form itself inwardly into a *state* in order to be armed against it as a *power*. Now the *republican* constitution is the only one that is perfectly suited to the right of human beings, but it is also the hardest to establish, and still harder to preserve, so much so that many maintain that a state would have to consist of *angels*, because human beings with their selfish inclinations are not capable of a constitution of such sublime form. But then nature comes to the aid of the general will, which is revered but powerless in practice and grounded in reason, and it does so precisely through those selfish inclinations. So everything depends on a good organization of the state (which is indeed within human capacity), which directs those forces against one another in such a way that one holds the others back in their destructive effect, or cancels it out. The outcome for reason is then as if neither were there at all, and so the human being is forced to be a good citizen, even if not a morally good human being. The problem of establishing a state, hard as it sounds, is solvable even for a people of devils (if only they have understanding), and it runs like this: “A multitude of rational beings who all together require general laws for their preservation, but each of whom is secretly inclined to exempt himself from them, is to be ordered and its constitution set up in such a way that, although they strive against one another in their private dispositions, these dispositions hold one another back so that in their public conduct the outcome is exactly the same as if they had no such evil dispositions.” Such a problem *must* be solvable. For what the task asks us to know is not the moral improvement of human beings but only the mechanism of nature, and how one can use it on human beings so as to direct the conflict of their unpeaceful dispositions within a people in such a way that they force one another to submit to coercive laws, and so must bring about the condition of peace in which laws have force. One can see this even in the states that actually exist, still very imperfectly organized: in their external conduct they already come very close to what the idea of right prescribes, although the inner side of morality is certainly not the cause of it (and indeed a good moral formation of a people is rather to be expected from a good state constitution than the reverse). Thus the mechanism of nature, through selfish inclinations that naturally also work against one another externally, can be used by reason as a means to make room for its own end, the prescription of right, and so, as far as the state itself is concerned, to promote and secure inner as well as outer peace.—So here it is said: nature *wills* irresistibly that right should in the end gain the upper hand. What is neglected here is at last done by itself, though with much discomfort.—“Bend the reed too hard and it breaks; and whoever wills too much wills nothing.” *Bouterwek*.

2. The idea of the right of nations presupposes the *separation* of many neighboring states independent of one another; and although such a condition is in itself already a condition of war (unless a federal union of them prevents the outbreak of hostilities), still, by the idea of reason, even this condition is better than the merging of those states through a power that overgrows one of them and passes over into a universal monarchy. For as the extent of a government grows, its laws lose more and more of their emphasis, and a soulless despotism, after it has eradicated the seeds of good, at last falls into anarchy. Meanwhile it is the desire of every state (or of its head) to put itself into the lasting condition of peace in this way, by ruling the whole world if possible. But *nature wills it* otherwise.—Nature uses two means to keep peoples from mixing and to separate them: the difference of *languages* and of *religions*[13]. That difference does carry with it a tendency to mutual hatred and a pretext for war, but with growing culture and the gradual approach of human beings it leads to greater agreement in principles, and so to understanding in a peace that is brought about and secured not, as in that despotism (in the churchyard of freedom), by the weakening of all forces, but by their equilibrium, in the liveliest competition of those forces.

3. Just as nature wisely separates the peoples that the will of each state, even on grounds of the right of nations, would gladly unite under itself by cunning or force, so on the other side it unites peoples that the concept of cosmopolitan right would not have secured against violence and war, by their mutual self-interest. It is the *spirit of commerce*, which cannot coexist with war and which sooner or later takes hold of every people. For since among all the powers (means) subordinate to state power the *power of money* is likely to be the most reliable, states find themselves compelled (though certainly not by drives of morality) to promote the noble peace, and wherever in the world war threatens to break out, to ward it off by mediations, as if they stood in constant alliance for that purpose. For great unions for war can, by the nature of the thing, occur only very seldom, and still more seldom succeed.—— In this way nature guarantees perpetual peace through the mechanism of human inclinations themselves, though with a certainty that is not sufficient to *prophesy* its future (theoretically), but does suffice for practical purposes and makes it a duty to work toward this (not merely chimerical) end.

[10] In the mechanism of nature, to which the human being (as a sensible being) also belongs, there shows itself a form that already lies at the ground of its existence, and that we can make intelligible to ourselves only by placing under it the end of a world-author who determines it beforehand. We call that author's fore-determination *providence* (the divine providence) in general; and insofar as it is placed in the *beginning* of the world, we call it the *founding* providence (*prouidentia conditrix; semel iussit, semper parent*, *Augustine*); insofar as it maintains nature in its *course* according to general laws of purposefulness, the *governing* providence (*prouidentia gubernatrix*); insofar as it serves particular ends that the human being cannot foresee but only surmises from the outcome, the *guiding* providence (*prouidentia directrix*); and finally, in regard to single events as divine ends, we no longer call it providence but *dispensation* (*directio extraordinaria*). To want to recognize dispensation as such (since it really points to miracles, though the events are not called that) is foolish presumption in the human being. For to infer from a single event to a particular principle of the efficient cause (namely that this event is an end, and not merely a natural-mechanical side effect from another end wholly unknown to us) is absurd and full of self-conceit, however pious and humble the language about it may sound.—Likewise the division of providence (*materialiter* considered), as it goes to *objects* in the world, into *general* and *particular*, is false and contradicts itself (as if providence were indeed a care for the preservation of the kinds of creatures, but left the individuals to chance). For it is called general precisely with the intention that no single thing should be thought of as excepted from it.—What was presumably meant here is the division of providence (*formaliter* considered) according to the manner in which it carries out its end: namely into *ordinary* (for instance the yearly dying and reviving of nature with the change of seasons) and *extraordinary* (for instance the bringing of wood to the ice coasts, where it cannot grow, by the ocean currents, for the inhabitants there, who could not live without it). There, although we can explain the physical-mechanical cause of these appearances well enough (for instance through the wooded banks of rivers in temperate lands, into which those trees fall, and which are then carried further by the Gulf Stream, perhaps), we must still not overlook the teleological cause as well, which points to the care of a wisdom ruling over nature.—Only as regards the concept of a divine *assistance* or cooperation (*concursus*) in an effect in the sensible world, which is customary in the schools, that concept must be dropped. For to want to pair things of unlike kind (*gryphes jungere equis*), and to let him who is himself the complete cause of the changes in the world *supplement* his own predetermining providence during the course of the world (which would therefore have had to be defective)—for instance to say that *next to God* the doctor set the sick person right, and so was present as an assistant—is *first*, in itself contradictory. For *causa solitaria non iuvat*. God is the author of the doctor together with all his remedies, and so, if one wants to climb to the highest original ground, which is theoretically incomprehensible to us, the effect must be ascribed *wholly* to God. Or one can ascribe it *wholly* to the doctor, insofar as we follow this event as explicable according to the order of nature in the chain of world causes. *Second*, such a way of thinking also deprives us of all determinate principles for judging an effect. But for *moral-practical* purposes (which are therefore directed entirely at the supersensible)—for instance in the faith that God will also supplement the lack of our own righteousness, if only our disposition was genuine, by means we cannot comprehend, so that we should not slacken in our striving for the good—the concept of a divine *concursus* is quite fitting and even necessary. Here it goes without saying that no one must try to *explain* a good action (as an event in the world) from it, which would be a pretended theoretical cognition of the supersensible, and therefore absurd.

[11] Of all ways of life the *hunting life* is without doubt the most contrary to a civilized constitution, because the families that must isolate themselves there soon become *strange* to one another and so, scattered in wide forests, soon *hostile*, since each of them needs much space to obtain its food and clothing.—The *Noachic prohibition of blood*, Genesis IX, 4–6 (which, often repeated, was later even made a condition for newly received Christians coming from heathenism, though in another respect, by the Jewish Christians, Acts XV, 20; XXI, 25) seems originally to have been nothing other than the prohibition of the *hunter's life*, because in that life the case of eating flesh raw must often occur, so that with the latter the former is forbidden at the same time.

[12] One could ask: if nature willed that these ice coasts should not remain uninhabited, what will become of their inhabitants when nature one day (as is to be expected) brings them no more driftwood? For it is to be believed that, with advancing culture, the inhabitants of the temperate zones will use the wood that grows on the banks of their rivers better, and will not let it fall into the rivers and be washed out to sea. I answer: the people on the *Ob*, the Yenisei, the Lena and so on will bring it to them by trade, and take in exchange the products of the animal kingdom, of which the sea on the ice coasts is so rich—once nature has first forced peace among them.

[13] *Difference of religions*: a strange expression! as if one also spoke of different *morals*. There can well be different *kinds of faith*, historical, belonging not to religion itself but to the history of the means used to promote it, and falling in the field of scholarship, and likewise different *books of religion* (Zendavesta, Vedam, Koran and so on); but there is only one single *religion*, valid for all human beings and in all times. Those differences can therefore contain nothing other than the vehicle of religion, which is contingent and can be different according to differences of times and places.

### Second supplement

Second supplement.
Secret article on perpetual peace.

A secret article in negotiations about public law is, objectively—that is, looking at what it says—a contradiction. But subjectively, judging by the kind of person who dictates it, there can very well be a secret in it: that person may think it beneath their dignity to announce publicly that they are its author.

There is only one article of this kind, and it is contained in the proposition: “*The maxims of philosophers about the conditions that make public peace possible shall be taken into counsel by states armed for war.*”

Now, the legislative authority of a state must naturally be credited with the greatest wisdom. It seems beneath that authority to seek instruction from its *subjects*, the philosophers, about the principles of its conduct toward other states. And yet it is very advisable to do so. So the state will *silently* ask them to do this—that is, it makes a secret of doing so. This amounts to saying that the state will let them speak freely and publicly about the general maxims of waging war and making peace (for they will do that by themselves, so long as no one forbids them). And agreement among states on this point needs no special arrangement among them for that purpose: it already lies in the obligation imposed by universal human reason as a moral legislator.—This does not mean that the state must give the philosopher's principles precedence over the pronouncements of the jurist, who is the representative of state power. It means only that the philosopher should be *heard*. The jurist has taken as his symbol the *scales* of right and, beside them, the *sword* of justice. He commonly uses the sword not merely to keep every foreign influence away from the scales, but to throw it in when one pan refuses to go down: (*vae victis*), woe to the conquered. A jurist who is not also a philosopher (in moral matters as well) is strongly tempted to do this, because his office is only to apply laws that already exist, not to examine whether those laws themselves need improvement. And since his calling is accompanied by power (as are the other two), he counts its really lower rank among the higher ones.—The philosophical faculty stands at a very low level beneath this allied power. Philosophy, for example, is called the *maid* of theology (and the same is said of the other two).—But it is not quite clear “whether she carries the torch before her gracious lady or drags her train behind her.”

That kings should philosophize, or that philosophers should become kings, is not to be expected, and not to be wished for either, since possession of power inevitably spoils the free judgment of reason. But kings, or kingly peoples (peoples governing themselves by laws of equality), must not let the class of philosophers die out or fall silent; they must let them speak publicly. This is indispensable to both for the light it throws on their business. And since this class is by its nature incapable of forming factions or alliances of clubs, it is above any suspicion of *propaganda*.

### Appendix I

Appendix.
I.
On the disagreement between morality and politics with a view to perpetual peace.

Morality is already in itself a practice in the objective sense: it is the sum of laws that command unconditionally, laws according to which we *ought* to act. Once one has granted this concept of duty its authority, it is plainly absurd still to say that one cannot do it. For then the concept drops out of morality by itself (*ultra posse nemo obligatur*). So there can be no conflict of politics, as an applied doctrine of right, with morality as such, which is a theoretical doctrine (and so no conflict of practice with theory), unless by the latter one means a general *doctrine of prudence*, that is, a theory of the maxims for choosing the most useful means to one's aims as calculated for advantage, which would be to deny that there is any morality at all.

Politics says: “*Be wise as serpents*”; morality adds, as a limiting condition: “*and without guile, as doves*.” If the two cannot stand together in one command, then there really is a conflict of politics with morality. But if both are to be united through and through, the concept of the opposite is absurd, and the question how that conflict is to be reconciled cannot even be set up as a task. The proposition that *honesty is the best policy* contains a theory that practice, unfortunately, very often contradicts. Yet the equally theoretical proposition that *honesty is better than all policy* is infinitely above every objection, and indeed it is the indispensable condition of policy. The god of the border of morality does not yield to Jupiter, the god of the border of power. For Jupiter still stands under fate: that is, reason is not enlightened enough to survey the series of predetermining causes that would let it predict with certainty, by the mechanism of nature, the happy or bad outcome of human action and omission (though it may let us hope for that outcome as we wish). But as to what one has to do in order to stay in the track of duty, according to rules of wisdom, and so as to reach the final end, reason lights the way brightly enough everywhere.

But the practical man, to whom morality is mere theory, grounds his comfortless rejection of our good-hearted hope (even when *ought* and *can* are conceded) on this: he claims to foresee from human nature that people will *never want* what is required to bring about the end that leads to perpetual peace.—To be sure, the willing of *every single* human being to live in a lawful constitution according to principles of freedom (the *distributive* unity of the will of all) is not sufficient for this end. What is further required is that *all together* will this condition (the *collective* unity of the united will), and that is the solution of a hard task, so that a whole civil society may come about. And since, over and above this variety of the particular willing of all, a unifying cause of that willing must be added to bring out a common will, which none of them all can do, there is in the *execution* of that idea, in practice, no other beginning of the lawful condition to be counted on than *force*, on whose compulsion public right is afterwards founded. This then, since one can hardly count on the lawgiver's moral disposition here, and since after the wild crowd has been united into a people he leaves it to that people to bring about a lawful constitution through their common will, lets us expect in advance great deviations from that idea (the theory) in actual experience.

Then it is said: whoever once has power in his hands will not let the people prescribe laws to him. A state that is once in possession of not standing under any external laws will not make itself dependent on their tribunal as regards the way in which it is to seek its right against other states. And even a continent, if it feels itself superior to another that does not otherwise stand in its way, will not leave the means of strengthening its power unused, by robbing that other or even by ruling it. And so all the plans of theory for the right of the state, of nations and of world citizenship melt away into empty, unexecutable ideals, whereas a practice grounded on empirical principles of human nature, which does not think it beneath itself to draw instruction for its maxims from the way things go in the world, might alone hope to find a secure foundation for its building of statecraft.

To be sure, if there is no freedom and no moral law grounded on it, and everything that happens or can happen is mere mechanism of nature, then politics, as the art of using that mechanism to govern human beings, is the whole of practical wisdom, and the concept of right is an empty thought. But if one finds it indispensable to unite that concept with politics, indeed to raise it to the limiting condition of politics, then the compatibility of the two must be conceded. Now I can indeed think a *moral politician*, that is, one who takes the principles of statecraft in such a way that they can stand together with morality, but not a *political moralist*, who forges himself a morality as suits the advantage of the statesman.

The moral politician will make it his principle: if defects are met with in the state constitution or in the relation between states, defects that one could not prevent, then it is a duty, above all for heads of state, to see to it that they be improved as soon as possible and made appropriate to natural right as it stands before our eyes as a model in the idea of reason, even if this should cost sacrifices of their self-interest. Now since tearing apart a bond of the union of states or of world citizens, before a better constitution is ready to take its place, is contrary to all statecraft that is at one with morality here, it would indeed be absurd to demand that those defects be changed at once and with violence. But that at least the maxim of the necessity of such a change should dwell most inwardly in the holder of power, so that he remains in constant approach to the end, the best constitution according to laws of right, that can be demanded of him. A state can already *govern itself* in a republican way even when, by the constitution before it, it still possesses despotic *ruling power*, until gradually the people becomes capable of the influence of the mere idea of the authority of law (as though that idea possessed physical force), and so is found fit for its own legislation, which is originally grounded on right. And even if, by the violence of a *revolution* produced by a bad constitution, a more lawful one had been won unlawfully, it would still not be permitted afterwards to lead the people back to the old one, although during the revolution everyone who meddled in it by force or cunning would rightly be subject to the punishments of a rebel. But as regards the external relation between states, no state can be required to lay aside its constitution, even a despotic one (which is yet the stronger in relation to external enemies), so long as it runs the risk of being swallowed at once by other states. Hence, with its resolve, a postponement of the execution until a better opportunity must also be permitted[14].

So let it always be the case that the moralists who play the despot, and fail in the execution, offend in many ways against statecraft by measures taken or praised too hastily; experience will nevertheless bring them by and by onto a better track, in spite of this offense against nature. Whereas the moralizing politicians, by glossing over unlawful principles of the state, under the pretext of a human nature that is supposedly not *capable* of the good as reason prescribes it, make improvement *impossible* as far as in them lies, and perpetuate the violation of right.

In place of the practice these state-wise men boast of, they deal in *practices*. They are concerned only to deliver the people, and if possible the whole world, to the power that currently rules, by speaking to its taste so as not to miss their private advantage. This is the way of genuine jurists, of the craft rather than of *legislation*, when they climb up to politics. For since their business is not to reason about legislation itself but to carry out the present commands of the law of the land, every legal constitution that exists at the time, and, when that is changed by higher authority, the one that follows it, must always be the best for them. Then everything is in its proper mechanical order. But if this skill of being just right for every saddle gives them the delusion that they can also judge the principles of a *state constitution* in general according to concepts of right (hence a priori, not empirically), if they make much of knowing *human beings* (which is indeed to be expected, since they deal with many), without knowing *the human being* and what can be made of him (which requires a higher standpoint of anthropological observation), and with these concepts then approach the right of states and of nations as reason prescribes it: then they cannot make this step except in the spirit of chicanery. They follow their usual procedure, that of a mechanism according to despotically given coercive laws, even there where the concepts of reason want a coercion that is lawful only according to principles of freedom, and by which alone a state constitution that stands firm in right becomes possible. This task the supposed practical man believes he can solve empirically, from experience, by setting up the state constitutions that have so far held up best, though for the most part unlawfully, while passing over that idea.—The maxims he uses for this, though he does not let them be heard, come down roughly to the following sophistical maxims.

1. *Fac et excusa.* Seize the favorable opportunity for taking possession on your own authority, whether of a right of the state over its people or over a neighboring people. The justification can be presented far more easily and elegantly *after the deed*, and the force glossed over, especially in the first case, where the higher power within is at the same time the legislative authority, which one must obey without reasoning about it. This is easier than to think out convincing grounds beforehand and then wait for the counter-grounds. This very boldness gives a certain appearance of inner conviction of the lawfulness of the deed, and the god *bonus euentus* is afterwards the best advocate of right.

2. *Si fecisti nega.* What you yourself have done wrong, for instance to drive your people to despair and so to revolt, deny that it is *your* fault. Claim instead that it is the fault of the disobedience of the subjects, or, when you have taken possession of a neighboring people, the fault of human nature, which, if it does not forestall the other by force, can surely count on the other forestalling it and taking possession of it.

3. *Diuide et impera.* That is: if there are certain privileged heads in your people who chose you merely as their head (*primus inter pares*), then set them at variance among themselves and set them against the people. Then stand by the people, with the promise of greater freedom, and everything will depend on your unconditional will. Or, if they are external states, then stirring up disagreement among them is a fairly sure means of subjecting them to yourself one after another, under the appearance of supporting the weaker one.

By these political maxims no one is deceived, for they are all already generally known. Nor is there any reason to be ashamed of them, as though the injustice were too plainly visible. For great powers are never ashamed before the judgment of the common crowd, only one before another; and as regards those principles, it is not their becoming known but only their *failure* that can make them ashamed (since in regard to the morality of maxims they all agree among themselves). So *political honor* always remains to them, and on that they can surely count: the honor of *increasing their power*, by whatever path it may have been acquired[15].

* * *

Out of all these serpentine turnings of an immoral doctrine of prudence, which seeks to bring the condition of peace among human beings out of the warlike condition of nature, at least this much is clear: human beings can no more escape the concept of right in their public relations than in their private ones, and they do not dare to base politics publicly on mere tricks of prudence. They do not dare to renounce all obedience to the concept of a public right (which is most striking in the right of nations), but let all due honor be done to it, even if they should think up a hundred evasions and disguises in order to avoid it in practice, and to ascribe to cunning force the authority of being the origin and bond of all right.—In order to put an end to this sophistry (though not to the injustice it glosses over), and to bring the false *representatives* of the mighty of the earth to admit that it is not right but force in whose favor they speak, and from which they take their tone as though they had something to command in the matter, it will be good to uncover the illusion with which people deceive themselves and others, to find the supreme principle from which the aim of perpetual peace proceeds, and to show that all the evil that stands in its way comes from this: that the political moralist begins where the moral politician rightly ends, and, by thus subordinating the principles to the end (that is, hitching the horses behind the wagon), defeats his own aim of bringing politics into agreement with morality.

To make practical philosophy at one with itself, it is necessary first to decide this question: in the tasks of practical reason, must the beginning be made from the *material* principle, the *end* (as object of choice), or from the *formal* principle, that is, the one that rests solely on freedom in the external relation, and that runs: act so that you can will your maxim to become a universal law (let the end be whatever it may)?

Without any doubt the latter principle must come first, for as a principle of right it has unconditional necessity. The former, by contrast, is necessitating only under the presupposition of empirical conditions of the proposed end, namely its execution; and even if that end (for instance perpetual peace) were a duty, that duty itself would still have to be derived from the formal principle of maxims of external action.—Now the first principle, that of the *political moralist* (the problem of the right of the state, of nations and of world citizenship), is a mere *task of art* (*problema technicum*). The second, by contrast, as the principle of the *moral politician*, for whom it is a *moral task* (*problxma morale*), is as different as heaven from earth in its procedure. It seeks to bring about perpetual peace, which one then wishes not merely as a physical good but as a condition arising from the recognition of duty.

For the solution of the first, namely the problem of statecraft, much knowledge of nature is required, in order to use its mechanism for the intended end, and yet all of this is uncertain as regards its result, perpetual peace, whichever of the three divisions of public right one takes. Whether a people is better kept in obedience and at the same time in flourishing condition by severity or by the bait of vanity, by the supreme power of one man or by the union of several heads, perhaps also merely by an order of service nobility or by the power of the people, and that within, and over a long time, is uncertain. Of all kinds of government (except the only truly republican one, which can come into the mind only of a moral politician) history has examples of the opposite.—Still more uncertain is a right of nations supposedly set up by statutes after ministerial plans, which in truth is only a word without a thing, and rests on treaties that in the very act of their conclusion contain the secret reservation of their transgression.—By contrast the solution of the second, namely the *problem of state wisdom*, presses itself on one, so to speak, of itself. It is evident to everyone, puts all artifice to shame, and yet leads straight to the end, though with the reminder of prudence not to bring it about too hastily by force, but to approach it unceasingly according to the circumstances that favor it.

Then it is said: “First seek the kingdom of pure practical reason and its *righteousness*, and your end (the benefit of perpetual peace) will fall to you of itself.” For this is peculiar to morality, and indeed as regards its principles of public right (and so in relation to a politics knowable a priori): the less it makes conduct depend on the proposed end, the intended advantage, whether physical or moral, the more it nevertheless agrees with that end in general. This comes about because it is precisely the general will given a priori (in a people, or in the relation of different peoples to one another) that alone determines what is right among human beings. And this union of the will of all, if only one proceeds consistently in the execution, can also, by the mechanism of nature, be the cause that produces the intended effect and gives the concept of right effect.—Thus, for example, it is a principle of moral politics that a people should unite into a state according to the sole concepts of right of freedom and equality, and this principle is grounded not on prudence but on duty. Now let political moralists reason as much as they like against this, about the natural mechanism of a crowd of human beings entering into society, which would supposedly weaken those principles and defeat their aim, or let them try to prove their assertion by examples of badly organized constitutions of old and new times (for instance democracies without a system of representation): they deserve no hearing. This is especially so because such a pernicious theory itself brings about the evil it predicts, and by it the human being is thrown into one class with the other living machines, which would only need the consciousness of not being free beings to make them, in their own judgment, the most miserable of all beings in the world.

The proposition that sounds somewhat boastful, and has come into circulation as a proverb, but is true, is this: *fiat iustitia, pereat mundus*, in German: “let justice rule, even if all the scoundrels in the world should perish with it.” It is a sturdy principle of right that cuts off all the crooked paths marked out by cunning or force. Only it must not be misunderstood, as though it allowed one to pursue one's own right with the greatest severity (which would conflict with ethical duty). It is to be understood as the obligation of those in power not to refuse or diminish anyone's right out of disfavour or pity for others. For this there is required above all an internal constitution of the state set up according to pure principles of right, and then also the union of that state with other neighboring or even distant states in a lawful settlement of their disputes, analogous to a universal state.—This proposition means nothing else than this: political maxims must not start from the welfare and happiness of each state to be expected from following them, hence not from the end that each state makes its object (from willing), as the supreme but empirical principle of state wisdom, but from the pure concept of the duty of right (from the ought, whose principle is given a priori by pure reason), whatever physical consequences may follow. The world will by no means perish because there are fewer bad people in it. Moral evil has the property inseparable from its nature that in its aims (especially in relation to others of the same mind) it is contrary to itself and destructive, and so makes room for the moral principle of the good, even if by slow steps.

* *
 *

Objectively, then, in theory, there is no conflict at all between morality and politics. Subjectively, however, in the selfish inclination of human beings (which, because it is not grounded on maxims of reason, need not yet be called practice), the conflict will and may always remain, because it serves as a whetstone for virtue. The true courage of virtue (according to the principle: *tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito*) consists in the present case not so much in opposing with firm resolve the evils and sacrifices that must be taken on here, as in looking in the eye the far more dangerous, lying and treacherous, yet reasoning evil principle in ourselves, which holds up the weakness of human nature to justify every transgression, and in defeating its cunning.

In fact the political moralist can say: ruler and people, or people and people, do *one another* no wrong when they attack each other by force or by cunning, although they do wrong in general by refusing all respect to the concept of right, which alone could establish peace for ever. For since the one transgresses his duty toward the other, and the other is just as unlawfully disposed toward him, both are treated quite rightly when they wear each other down, though in such a way that enough of this race always remains to keep the game going into the most distant times, so that a late posterity may one day take a warning example from them. Providence in the course of the world is justified in this. For the moral principle in the human being never dies out, and the reason that is pragmatically fit to carry out the ideas of right according to that principle grows constantly through ever advancing culture, and with it the guilt of those transgressions. The creation alone, namely that such a breed of corrupt beings should have been on earth at all, seems incapable of justification by any theodicy (if we assume that it will never be, and can never be, better with the human race). But this standpoint of judgment is far too high for us to put our concepts of wisdom under the supreme power, which is inscrutable to us, in a theoretical aim.—We are inevitably driven to such desperate conclusions unless we assume that the pure principles of right have objective reality, that is, that they can be carried out, and that accordingly the people within the state, and further the states toward one another, must act on them, whatever empirical politics may object.

True politics, then, cannot take a single step without first having paid homage to morality. And although politics is in itself a hard art, its union with morality is no art at all, for morality cuts in two the knot that politics cannot untie as soon as the two conflict.—The right of human beings must be held sacred, however great a sacrifice it may cost the ruling power. Here one cannot halve matters and think out a middle thing of a pragmatically conditioned right, between right and utility. All politics must bend its knee before the former, and may then hope, though slowly, to reach the level where it will shine steadfastly.

[14] These are laws of permission of reason, allowing the condition of a public right tainted with injustice to persist until everything has either ripened of itself toward a complete transformation, or been brought near to ripeness by peaceful means. For some *lawful* constitution, even one only slightly in accordance with right, is better than none at all, and the latter fate, anarchy, would befall a *hasty* reform.—State wisdom will therefore, in the condition in which things now are, make reforms conformable to the ideal of public right a duty. But revolutions, where nature itself brings them about, it will use not to gloss over an even greater oppression, but as a call of nature to bring about, by thorough reform, a lawful constitution grounded on principles of freedom, as the only durable one.

[15] Even if a certain malice rooted in human nature among *human beings* living together in a state is still doubted, and instead of it the lack of a culture not yet far enough advanced (rawness) is cited with some appearance of reason as the cause of the unlawful appearances of their way of thinking, in the external relation of *states* to one another it strikes the eye entirely unveiled and irrefutably. Within each state it is veiled by the compulsion of civil laws, because a greater power, that of the government, works mightily against the citizens' inclination to mutual violence. In this way the government gives the whole not only a moral appearance (*causae non causae*), but, by putting a bolt before the outbreak of unlawful inclinations, really makes the development of the moral disposition, toward immediate respect for right, much easier.—For each person now believes of himself that he would surely hold the concept of right sacred and follow it faithfully, if only he could expect the same from everyone else, and the government secures that in part for him. Thereby a great step *toward* morality is taken (though not yet a moral step): to cling to this concept of duty also for its own sake, without regard to reciprocation.—But since each person, with his good opinion of himself, nevertheless presupposes the evil disposition in all others, they pass judgment on one another: that they are all, as regards the *fact*, of little worth (where this comes from, since it cannot be blamed on the *nature* of the human being as a free being, may be left undiscussed). But since respect for the concept of right, which the human being absolutely cannot shed, most solemnly sanctions the theory of the capacity to become conformable to it, each person sees that he for his part must act in accordance with it, let others do as they please.

### Appendix II

II.
On the agreement of politics with morality, according to the transcendental concept of public right.

If I set aside all the *content* of public right (the various empirically given relations of people within a state, or of states with one another), as jurists usually think of it, I am still left with the *form of publicity*. Every claim of right contains the possibility of that form, because without it there would be no justice (which can only be thought of as *publicly knowable*), and so no right either, since right is granted only by justice.

Every claim of right must have this capacity for publicity. It is very easy to judge whether the capacity is present in a case at hand, that is, whether the claim can be reconciled with the principles of the person acting or not. So it can serve as a criterion that is easy to use and is found a priori in reason, one that lets us recognize at once, in the latter case, as if by an experiment of pure reason, the falseness (the contradiction to right) of the claim in question (praetensio iuris).

If we set aside everything empirical contained in the concept of the right of the state and of the right of nations (the wickedness of human nature, for example, which makes coercion necessary), we can call the following proposition the *transcendental formula* of public right:

“All actions that bear on the right of other people, whose maxim is not compatible with publicity, are wrong.”

This principle must be regarded not merely as *ethical* (belonging to the doctrine of virtue) but also as *juridical* (concerning the right of human beings). For take a maxim that I cannot *say aloud* without at the same time defeating my own purpose, that absolutely must be *kept secret* if it is to succeed, and that I cannot *declare publicly* without inevitably provoking everyone's resistance to my plan. The opposition that everyone is bound to mount against me, universal and necessary and therefore knowable a priori, can have no source other than the injustice with which that maxim threatens everyone.—The principle is further merely *negative*, that is, it serves only to recognize, by means of it, what is *not right* toward others.—It is like an axiom, certain though it cannot be proved, and it is also easy to apply, as the following examples from public right show.

1. *As far as the right of the state* (ius ciuitatis), namely the internal kind, *is concerned*: a question arises in it that many consider hard to answer and that the transcendental principle of publicity resolves very easily: “Is rebellion a lawful means for a people to throw off the oppressive power of a so-called tyrant (non titulo sed exercitio talis)?” The rights of the people have been violated, and no wrong is done to him (the tyrant) by his dethronement; there is no doubt about that. Nonetheless it is wrong in the highest degree for the subjects to seek their right in this way. They could no more complain of injustice if they lost in this struggle and then had to endure the harshest punishment for it.

Here a great deal can be argued with sophistry for and against, if one wants to settle the matter by a dogmatic deduction of the grounds of right. The transcendental principle of the publicity of public right can spare itself this long-windedness. By that principle, the people ask themselves, before the civil contract is made, whether they would dare to make known publicly the maxim of resolving to rebel on occasion. It is easy to see that if, in founding a constitution, one wanted to make it a condition that force may be used against the head of state in certain cases that might arise, the people would have to claim for themselves a lawful power over the head of state. But then there would be no head of state. Or, if both were made conditions of founding the state, no state would be possible at all, which was nonetheless the people's intention. The wrong of rebellion is therefore plain from this: if one *declared it publicly*, the maxim of rebellion would make its own purpose impossible. So it would necessarily have to be kept secret.—The head of state, however, has no such need. The head of state can say openly that every uprising will be punished with the death of the ringleaders, even if the ringleaders believe, as they may, that the head of state was the first to break the fundamental law. For if the head of state is aware of possessing *irresistible* supreme power (which must be assumed in every civil constitution, because someone who does not have power enough to protect each person among the people against the others also has no right to command them), there is no need to worry that making the maxim known will defeat the head's own purpose. It fits well with this that if the rebellion succeeded, that head of state would have to step back into the position of a subject. The former head would equally have to refrain from starting a rebellion to regain power, but would also have nothing to fear in the way of being called to account for the earlier conduct of the state.

2. *As far as the right of nations is concerned.*—The right of nations can be spoken of only on the assumption of some lawful condition (that is, the external condition under which a person can actually be given a right). For as a public right it already contains in its concept the publication of a general will that assigns to each what is theirs. This *status iuridicus* must arise from some contract. The contract need not (like the one from which a state arises) be founded on coercive laws; if need be it can also be the contract of a *continually free* association, such as the federation of different states mentioned above. For without some *lawful condition* that actively connects different persons (physical or moral), and so in the state of nature, there can be no right other than merely private right.—Here a conflict of politics with morality (taken as the doctrine of right) also arises, and the criterion of the publicity of maxims again finds easy application, but only in this way: the contract binds the states only for the purpose of keeping themselves at peace with one another and together against other states, and by no means to make acquisitions.—The following cases of antinomy between politics and morality now arise, and the solution of each comes with it.

a) “If one of these states has promised the other something, whether assistance, or the cession of certain territories, or subsidies and the like, the question is whether, in a case on which the welfare of the state depends, it can release itself from keeping its word by wanting to be regarded as two persons: first as *sovereign*, answerable to no one in its state, and then again merely as the highest *state official*, who must give an account to the state. The conclusion then comes out that whatever it bound itself to in the first capacity, it is released from in the second.”—But if a state (or its head) were to say this maxim of its own aloud, then naturally either everyone else would avoid it, or would unite with others to resist its presumptions. This proves that politics, for all its cunning, would defeat its own purpose on these terms (of openness), and so that maxim must be wrong.

b) “If a neighboring power that has grown to a fearsome size (*potentia tremenda*) arouses concern, can one assume that because it *can* oppress, it also *wants* to? And does that give the less powerful a right to attack it (jointly), even without any prior offense?”—A state that wanted to *announce* its maxim here in the affirmative would bring about the evil only more certainly and more quickly. For the greater power would get ahead of the smaller ones, and as for the union of the smaller ones, that is only a frail staff of reed against someone who knows how to use *diuide et impera*.—This maxim of statecraft, declared publicly, therefore necessarily defeats its own purpose, and is consequently unjust.

c) “If a smaller state, by its position, breaks the continuity of a larger one, which the larger one nevertheless needs for its preservation, is the larger one not entitled to subjugate the smaller and merge it with its own?”—It is easy to see that the larger state must on no account say such a maxim aloud beforehand. For either the smaller states would unite early, or other powerful states would fight over this prey, and so the maxim makes itself unworkable through its openness. That is a sign that it is unjust, and can be so to a very high degree. For the smallness of the object of injustice does not prevent the injustice shown toward it from being very great.

3. *As far as the right of world citizenship is concerned*, I pass over it here in silence, because, owing to its analogy with the right of nations, its maxims are easy to state and to assess.

* * *

In the principle that the maxims of the right of nations are incompatible with publicity, we do have a good mark of the *disagreement* of politics with morality (as the doctrine of right). But we also need to be taught what the condition is under which their maxims agree with the right of nations. For one cannot conclude the reverse: that maxims which tolerate publicity are therefore also just. Someone who has decisive superior power need not hide their maxims.—The condition for the possibility of a right of nations at all is that a *lawful condition* first exists. For without it there is no public right; all right that one may imagine outside it (in the state of nature) is merely private right. Now we saw above that a federal condition of states, whose only purpose is to remove war, is the only *rightful* condition compatible with their *freedom*. So the agreement of politics with morality is possible only in a federal union (which is therefore given a priori according to principles of right, and is necessary). The lawful basis of all statecraft is the founding of this federal union, to the greatest possible extent. Without this aim, all of statecraft's scheming is folly and veiled injustice.—This sham politics has its own *casuistry*, which can hold its own against the best Jesuit school: the *reservatio mentalis*, in drafting public treaties, with terms that one can interpret on occasion to one's own advantage, as one likes (for example, the difference between the *status quo de fait* and *de droit*);—*probabilism*: contriving evil intentions in others, or making the probabilities of their possible superiority the legal ground for undermining other peaceful states;—and finally the *peccatum philosophicum* (*peccatillum, bagatelle*): regarding the swallowing of a *small* state, if a much *larger* one gains by it for the supposedly greater good of the world, as an easily forgivable trifle[16].

This practice is encouraged by the double tongue of politics toward morality, which uses one branch of it or the other for its purposes.—Both love of humanity and respect for the right of human beings are duties; but the first is only a *conditional* duty, the second an *unconditional* duty that commands absolutely. Whoever wants to give themselves over to the sweet feeling of doing good must first be fully assured of not having violated the second. Politics readily agrees with morality in the first sense (as ethics), in order to give up the right of human beings to their superiors. But with morality in the second sense (as the doctrine of right), before which it would have to bend its knee, politics finds it advisable to make no contract with it at all, to deny it all reality, and to reinterpret all duties as mere benevolence. Philosophy could easily foil this trickery of a politics that shuns the light, through the publicity of politics's maxims, if politics would only dare to grant publicity to the philosopher's own maxims.

To this end I propose another transcendental and affirmative principle of public right, whose formula would be this:

“All maxims that *need* publicity (in order not to miss their purpose) agree with right and politics united.”

For if they can reach their purpose only through publicity, they must conform to the general purpose of the public (happiness), and the proper task of politics is to agree with that purpose (to make the public content with its condition). But if this purpose is to be attainable only through publicity, that is, through the removal of all distrust of politics's maxims, then these maxims must also stand in harmony with the right of the public; for only in that right is the union of everyone's purposes possible.—I must put off the fuller development and discussion of this principle to another occasion. That it is a transcendental formula can be seen from this: all empirical conditions (those of the doctrine of happiness), which are the content of the law, are removed, and only the form of universal lawfulness is considered.

* * *

If it is a duty, and at the same time there is well-founded hope, to make the condition of a public right real, even if only in an approximation that advances without end, then *perpetual peace*, which follows the so-called peace treaties made until now (falsely so called; they are really truces), is no empty idea but a task. Solved little by little, it comes steadily closer to its goal (since the periods in which equal progress is made will, one hopes, grow ever shorter).

[16] The evidence for such maxims can be found in the essay by Court Councillor Garve: “On the connection of morality with politics, 1788.” This worthy scholar admits right at the start that he cannot give a satisfactory answer to this question. But to approve them nonetheless, even with the admission that he cannot fully remove the objections stirring against them, seems to be a greater indulgence toward those who are very inclined to abuse them than it would probably be advisable to grant.