The Ideology of the United Nations Charter and the Philosophy of Peace of Immanuel Kant 1795-1945

Abstract

1945-the year which witnessed the final rout of the forces of Fascist and National Socialist reaction in Europe, and the drafting of a Charter for a new world of United Nations1945 is also the 150th anniversary of the appearance of Immanuel Kant's Essay on Eternal Peace. The wizened little man with the giant mind, so provincial in his personal life as never to have left his native city of K6nigsberg, so universal in his sympathy as to feel himself a fellow of the American and French revolutionaries, hammered out in his seventy-first year a brief discourse of prophetic insight. He sought to show and to prove as best he could that peace, eternal, universal peace, was not only desirable, (that had been done by many others before him), was not only conceivable, (that too had been done repeatedly), but was necessary and inevitable. Clothed in the quaint and involved eighteenth century German which was just emerging from medieval Latin, the short Essay is nevertheless as inspired as anything Kant wrote. And far from being a marginal by-product of his old age, this little treatise flowed from the very core of Kant's feeling. It develops more fully ideas which crop up again and again in other places in his writings on ethics and social philosophy. It rests squarely upon Kant's extraordinary philosophy of history. What is more, looking back from San Francisco in 1945 we can test his ideas by the intervening century and a half,