"Kant’s Third Image: Systemic Sources of the Liberal Peace" by Wade I. Huntley, in International Studies Quarterly (Mar. 1996), 210 Woodburn Hall, Dept. of Political Science, Indiana Univ., Bloomington, Ind. 47405–6001.

German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who envisioned the liberal republic as the foundation of "perpetual peace," is the intellectual godfather of the foreign policy thinkers today who argue that spreading democracy abroad should be the chief goal of U.S. policy overseas. After all, they say, liberal democratic states do not wage war with one another.

Neorealist critics such as Kenneth Waltz contend that Kant and these modern liberal internationalists neglect the permanent condition of anarchy that prevails among states, making the threat of war ever present. Kant’s heirs respond that liberal states can, in fact, overcome the effects of international anarchy. Largely overlooked in this debate, argues Huntley, who obtained Immanuel Kant his doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley in 1993, is the large role that Kant himself gave to anarchy and conflict in bringing about the liberal peace.

In "Perpetual Peace" (1796), Kant argued that republics were inherently inclined toward peace, since citizens are more reluctant than kings to declare war. Republics could establish the rule of law among themselves by creating a federation of free states. War and the threat of war, in Kant’s view, serve as the "most essential" force for peace. "The growth of republics, and of the rule of law among them (embodied in their federation)," Huntley explains, "is not an intentional creation as much as a gradual product of accumulating self-interested reactions to lawlessness and violence. Conflict is the fountainhead of progress—and so the propensity for war itself sows the seeds of war’s end."

But "perpetual peace" was an ideal that might be destined, Kant said, "forever to remain a pious hope." Since backsliding by a republic was always a possibility, peace would never be perfectly secured.