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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2012
This article reexamines the works of Erasmus, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Kant, and other pacifists who have advocated collective societal efforts toward a lasting world peace. In contrast to Thucydides' (Realist) view of the inevitability of war due to intrinsic human nature, the author presents the early Christian arguments of pacifism grounded in morality and religion, including the “just-war” views of Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, who believed that war fought for self-defense, or other “justifiable” purposes, was morally and religiously grounded in efforts to punish wrongdoings and “convert unbelievers.” Is the state of peace a natural one or one that must be achieved through practical steps within moral constraints by leaders of nations and their citizens? Realist thinkers who once rejected, on strictly normative grounds, the moral claims of the possibility of a lasting world peace now take the strategic position that the goal of attaining lasting world peace is clearly worth striving for, “however utopian it seemed when first advocated.”
1 For the works by Erasmus that contributed most to this tradition, see notes 3, 5, and 7 below. See also Mead, Edwin D., ed., The Great Design of Henry IV from the Memoirs of the Duke of Sully (1559–1641) (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1909)Google Scholar; Penn, William, “An Essay Towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe” (1693), in Tolles, Fredrick B. and Alderfer, E. Gordon, eds., The Witness of William Penn (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1957), pp. 140–59Google Scholar; deSaint-Pierre, Abbé, Selections from the 2nd Edition of the Abrégé du Projet de Paix Perpétuelle (1712) (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1927)Google Scholar; Kant, Immanuel, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” (1795), in Reiss, Hans, ed., Kant's Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 93–130Google Scholar; Jeremy Bentham, “Essay on Universal Peace. Essay IV. A Plan for a Universal and Perpetual Peace” (1789, first published in 1843), reprinted in Everett, Charles W., ed., Jeremy Bentham (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), pp. 195–229Google Scholar.
2 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, “Observation sur le projet ďune paix perpétuelle de M. l'abbé de St. Pierre,” in Dutens, L., ed., Opera Omnia Vol. V (Geneve, 1768)Google Scholar; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (editing and commenting upon the work of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre), A Project of Perpetual Peace, trans. Nuttall, Edith M. (London: Richard Cobden-Sanderson, 1927)Google Scholar; Hegel, Friedrich, Philosophy of Right (1821), trans. Knox, T.M. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), pp. 208–16Google Scholar.
3 The Adages were first published in 1500. A later edition, published in 1515, contained a greatly expanded version of “Dulce Bellum Inexpertis.” See Phillips, Margaret Mann, ed., The Adages of Erasmus: A Study with Interpretations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), pp. 308–53.Google Scholar
4 In 1516, France and Switzerland concluded the Treaty of Fribourg, known as “La paix perpétuelle,” which lasted until the French Revolution. The year before, Henry VIII had concluded a “permanent” but much more short-lived peace with France. For a few years, nevertheless, Erasmus, Thomas More, and other humanists had hopes for a flowering of peace that would permit the shaping of a new political and cultural order.Google Scholar
5 Erasmus, , The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. Born, Lester K. (New York: Octagon Books, 1973).Google Scholar
6 Machiavelli, Niccolo, The Prince and the Discourses (New York: Random House, 1950Google Scholar).
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8 Erasmus, The Complaint of Peace (Boston: Charles Williams, 1813)Google Scholar. For a more recent translation, though not entirely complete, see “Peace Protests!” in Chapiro, Jose, trans., Erasmus and Our Struggle for Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), pp. 131–84Google Scholar. In a letter from 1523, Erasmus comments bitterly to a friend that he must “soon compose the Epitaph, rather than the Complaint, of Peace, as she seems to be dead and buried and not very likely to revive.” (Cited in translator's preface, 1813 edition of The Complaint of Peace, p. iv).
9 Erasmus, , Education, p. 249Google Scholar.
10 Ibid., p. 250.Google Scholar
11 Ibid., p. 251.Google Scholar
12 Comparisons between animals and human beings traditionally placed humans above animals in the chain of being. Cicero, among many others, had argued that the two ways of doing wrong—by force or by fraud—were both bestial: “Fraud seems to belong to the cunning fox, force to the lion: both are wholly unworthy of man, but fraud is the more contemptible.”(On Moral Duties, 1, XIII, p. 41). Machiavelli had accepted the comparison only to argue that human beings ought to learn from the fox and the lion in those respects. Erasmus intended to show, on the contrary, that force and fraud on the scale practiced by humans and with the means at their disposal were of an entirely different order, and that to attribute such aspects of human conduct to animals was merely to calumny them.Google Scholar
13 Erasmus, , Complaint, p. 51Google Scholar.
14 Ibid., p. 79.Google Scholar
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16 See Battaillon, Marcel, Erasme et ĽEspagne, Vol. II (Paris: Librarie E. Droz, 1937), p. 29.Google Scholar
17 Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Selections from the 2nd Edition of the Abrégé du Projet de Paix Perpétuelle. See also Rousseau, A Project of Perpetual Peace (note 2, above).Google Scholar
18 Kant, , “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” and “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in Reiss, , ed., Kant's Political Writings, pp. 93–130 and 41–53.Google Scholar
19 Ibid., p. 103.Google Scholar
20 Ibid., p. 96.Google Scholar
21 Ibid., p. 114.Google Scholar
22 Ibid., p. 96.Google Scholar
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24 Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” p. 108.Google Scholar
25 Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” address delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953. Reprinted in Alrutz, Kenneth E. et al. , eds, War and Peace, Lynchburg College Symposium Readings, Vol. V (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1982), p. 621.Google Scholar
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27 Kant explicitly defended this motto; but while it committed him to absolutism with respect to lying, it did not do so when it came to violence, since he regarded violence in self-defense as legitimate. See Bok, Sissela, “Kant's Arguments in Support of the Maxim ‘Do What Is Right Though the World Should Perish,’” Argumentation, Vol. 2 (1988), pp. 7–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in Rosenthal, David M. and Shehadi, Fadlou, eds., Applied Ethics and Ethical Theory (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), pp. 191–212Google Scholar.
28 Havel, Václav, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Havel, Václav et al. , The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe (London: Hutchinson, 1985), p. 39Google Scholar.
29 Kennan, George, The Nuclear Delusion (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982Google Scholar).
30 National Council of Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response (Washington, D.C.: Office of Publishing Services, U.S.C.C., 1983), p. 39.Google Scholar For a secular interpretation of just-war doctrine that similarly restricts the causes for just war, see Tucker, Robert W., The Just War: A Study in Contemporary American Doctrine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1960).Google Scholar
31 Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of Peace, p. v.
32 Lenin, Vladimir I., “The Question of Peace,” in Collected Works Vol. 21 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), pp. 290–94, and 297–338Google Scholar; see also “Socialism and War,” Ibid., pp. 297–338Google Scholar; and “April Theses, 1917,” Ibid., Vol. 24, pp 21–26.Google Scholar
33 Rejai, M., ed., Mao Tse-tung: On Revolution and War (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970), p. 67Google Scholar.
34 McLellan, D., ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 568–9Google Scholar.
35 See Bok, , Strategy for Peace, Chapter IV.Google Scholar