Moving Beyond Fear: Rousseau and Kant on Cosmopolitan Education

Abstract

Recent attention to the role that education can play in averting the danger of war has raised anew the question of the relationship between education and character formation. Contemporary peace educators seem to rely chiefly on enlightened fear. Immanuel Kant's writings offer both a diagnosis of the psychological causes of war and a proposal for dealing with them through a new scheme of education. If the passionate desire for honor is the problem, Kant argues, the moral love of honor--in other words, the attachment to human dignity--is the solution. Education can serve to connect honor and morality. Yet, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Emile arguably inspires much of Kant's moral psychology, suggests that true cosmopolitanism is too rare to be a reasonable political goal. The disagreement between the two turns on whether morality is innate or must be constructed in human beings out of other elements.