Kant and Rousseau Reducing Conflicts Between States

The Theories of the Great Philosophers Rousseau and Kant

The great philosophers of the 18th century were the first of their kind to fully encapsulate what it meant to be an ethnocentric state, rather than a simple nation or territory, and also were the first philosophers able to address the question of war between states as not merely individual struggles for dominance, but rather persistent frictions present in the system of states themselves. The formal idea of statehood came of age in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Year's War, and affirmed the domination of the central government of each state as the supreme power of the land, rather than any religious or social power. At this time, every state was essentially a dictatorship, and the world was divided into fiefdoms. The peace reached at Westphalia created the conditions for two philosophers in particular to put forth ideas of Romanticism and the achieving of utopia as the ultimate goal of any state, and in studying this phenomenon the philosophers try to achieve a lasting reduction in conflict between states. These philosophers are Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a philosopher from the independent state of Geneva, a republican state controlled by a representational body elected by the people of the state. In Rousseau "s mind, Geneva was the ideal state, separated from the overarching power of the French Monarchy, and apart from the religious dominance of the Vatican in much of Italy's separate states at the time. Rousseau made the innovative argument that the state was merely the collective conscience of the people of the state, and whose power is derived from the consent of the people. The purpose of the state, according to Rousseau, is...

(Rousseau, 1762) This opinion was a direct response to the absolutist monarchs of Louis XIV, XV, and XVI, as the concentration of power in the king's hands was decidedly not an enlightenment idea. Rousseau's ideas eventually won out, however, and heavily influenced the 1789 French Revolution that deposed the French king and instilled the first major republican state in Europe for a time being.
Rousseau surrounded his works in the idea of equality of man, which was both applauded and reviled across Europe. The philosophers believed during the enlightenment that all European men were indeed created as equals, and thus should share equal rights that could not be infringed upon by the state, even between common men and aristocracy. In 'a lasting peace through the federation of Europe and the state of war', Rousseau makes the argument that only through a union of states will Europe be vanquished of the wars it had been plagued with for the centuries prior. (Rousseau, 1917) In contrast to Kant, who believes city-states are the ideal resolution to the matter of peace, and that democratic states only will achieve such an end, Rousseau believes that there does exist the idea of a social contract within society that must be fulfilled between those who have means and those who do not.

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher who lived through the enlightenment period of intellectual awakening in the 18th century. (Vincent Ferraro) He wrote a 1795 essay entitled Perpetual Peace, which created the early workings of the ideas necessary to enforce world peace, if states were to ever extend their spheres of influence worldwide. The essay calls for several necessary steps to envision…