The six ‘preliminary articles’ that Kant introduces in the first section of his essay Toward Perpetual Peace formulate the negative conditions for securing peace between states. These principles have the status of laws that prohibit or permit certain courses of action universally – that is without exception. In contrast to the three ‘definite articles’ presented in the second section of the essay, they are based upon experience and thus make no claim to a completeness rigorously derived from a single principle. They envisage the sort of preventive measures that belong to the conventional repertoire of political action concerned with avoiding war and maintaining peace, and represent the indispensable, empirically identifiable conditions for a legally secured peace between states. These preliminary articles can procure a kind of preparatory peace that is simply an absence of war. But a mere absence of war cannot yet itself be regarded as a positive presence of peace. In order to advance from the absence of war to the presence of peace, we must also embark upon the path of right itself. It is only through recourse to principles of right that states and human beings can properly establish and achieve peace amongst themselves.

The state of war and the state of peace

If we translate the absence of war, as sketched in Kant's preliminary articles, into the contractual language of classical political philosophy, we immediately recognise that it is simply the state of nature, and thus a state of war after all.