Kant's Perpetual Peace and Cosmopolitan Right

Immanuel Kant's short 1795 essay Toward Perpetual Peace (Zum ewigen Frieden), written in the immediate aftermath of the Peace of Basel between Prussia and revolutionary France, remains the foundational text of modern philosophical cosmopolitanism. Kant structures the essay, somewhat playfully, as a formal peace treaty, opening with six "preliminary articles" that specify practices states must renounce to make lasting peace possible — including secret reservations in peace treaties, the acquisition of states by inheritance or purchase, standing armies (stehende Heere), national debts contracted for external war-making, forcible interference in another state's constitution, and acts of war so treacherous (such as employing assassins or poisoners) that they would destroy the very possibility of future trust between belligerents. These preliminary articles are followed by three "definitive articles" that specify the positive institutional conditions of perpetual peace, giving the essay its lasting systematic importance for international political theory.