Answer to Question #288319 in English for Jnls

Question

Identify Immanuel Kant and his contribution to internationalism.

Answer 1

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and one of the foremost thinkers of the Enlightenment. His comprehensive and systematic work in epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics greatly influenced all subsequent philosophy, especially the various schools of Kantianism and idealism. Internationalism is a political principle that advocates greater political or economic cooperation among states and nations. It is associated with other political movements and ideologies, but can also reflect a doctrine, belief system, or movement in itself. Kant had proposed the establishment of a league of nations whose aim would be to manage conflicts between states and facilitate peace. He was the first writer to connect the Enlightenment’s belief in an age of reason and criticism with the emergence of a new international order after the French Revolution. Kant was the architect of the human rights revolution that would later find expression in institutions like the United Nations and in charters like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Kant offered a road map to “perpetual peace” with his argument that when seen from a “cosmopolitan” perspective, humanity has been evolving, by fits and starts to be sure, to a condition of global governance overseen by international law. The chapter argues that Kant represents the high point of Enlightenment, yet he also dangerously underestimated the forces of nationalism and tribalism that would govern later modernity.