6 - Reorganizing reality: sovereignty, modernity and the international

Summary

The old philosophy assigned to man an entirely incorrect standpoint in the world by making him into a machine within the world, a machine which as such was meant to be wholly dependent on the world or on external things and circumstances; in this way it made man into an almost passive part in the world. – Now the Critique of Pure Reason appeared and allotted man a thoroughly active existence in the world. Man himself is the primordial creator of all his representations and concepts and ought to be the unique author of all his deeds.

Kant, Der Streit der Facultäten

The word international, writes Bentham in his Principles (1789), ‘is a new one … sufficiently analogous and intelligible’. What, we must ask, are the conditions that make it intelligible as an object of knowledge? What makes it possible to speak of something international, and to subject it to theoretical and empirical inquiry?

It has been said by historians that the modern theory and practice of the present international system originated somewhere between the end of the eighteenth century and the Napoleonic wars, with the waning of absolutism and the rise of the nation-state as the main forces behind its development.