Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- 1 The Rise and Fall of the Cold War in Comparative Perspective
- 2 History Ends, World Collide
- 3 Globalization and National Governance: Antinomies or Interdependence?
- 4 Beyond Westphalia?: Capitalism after the ‘Fall’
- 5 The Potentials of Enlightenment
- 6 Marxism after Communism
- 7 Liberalism Since the Cold War: An Enemy to Itself?
- 8 Clausewitz Rules, OK? The Future is the Past—with GPS
- 9 Mission Impossible? The IMF and the Failure of the Market Transition in Russia
- 10 Europe after the Cold War: Interstate Order or post-Sovereign Regional System?
- 11 Where is the Third World Now?
- 12 Whatever Happened to the Pacific Century?
- 13 Still the American Century
- Index
5 - The Potentials of Enlightenment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- 1 The Rise and Fall of the Cold War in Comparative Perspective
- 2 History Ends, World Collide
- 3 Globalization and National Governance: Antinomies or Interdependence?
- 4 Beyond Westphalia?: Capitalism after the ‘Fall’
- 5 The Potentials of Enlightenment
- 6 Marxism after Communism
- 7 Liberalism Since the Cold War: An Enemy to Itself?
- 8 Clausewitz Rules, OK? The Future is the Past—with GPS
- 9 Mission Impossible? The IMF and the Failure of the Market Transition in Russia
- 10 Europe after the Cold War: Interstate Order or post-Sovereign Regional System?
- 11 Where is the Third World Now?
- 12 Whatever Happened to the Pacific Century?
- 13 Still the American Century
- Index
Summary
‘The radical critique of reason exacts a high price for taking leave of modernity’, Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), p. 336.
Introduction: the challenges of the 1990s
The greatest works of political and social theory are often the shortest, and none more so than the text of Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History, written just over two hundred years ago in 1784: it is all of thirteen pages long, and advances a thesis that should concern us all. In essence, it argues that history can, and to some degree does, move in a progressive direction—one in which the domestic organisation of states on an increasingly legal, constitutional, basis will lead to greater cooperation between states and ultimately to some form of world government. Kant's hope was ‘that after many reformative revolutions, a universal cosmopolitan condition, which Nature has as her ultimate purpose, will come into being as the womb wherein all the original capacities of the human race can develop’. There are many readings of Professor Kant, not least when this text is combined with others. Yet to put it in modern terms, not entirely traducing his meaning, his work can be read as envisaging a world of constitutional regimes and liberal democracies, one that will be without war. This is a bold thesis with many unproven assumptions: but it is not entirely implausible, on either theoretical or historical grounds.
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- Information
- The Interregnum: Controversies in World Politics 1989–1999 , pp. 105 - 126Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000