Perpetual Peace and Liberal Peace: Three Misunderstandings

Luigi Caranti ()

In “Toward Perpetual Peace” (1795), Kant advocated three main institutional reforms in order to eliminate the greatest self-inflicted tragedy of humanity, i.e. war. In the 1980s, Michael Doyle (1983a; 1983b) interpreted a two hundred year absence of conflicts between democracies as a striking piece of evidence in favor of Kant’s theory and sparked one of the most important research programs in the social sciences of our times – the Democratic Peace Theory (henceforth DPT). In this context, the Kantian heritage has been at times misinterpreted – something that made the research program vulnerable to the serious criticisms and retorts. This paper identifies three points in the interpretation of Kant that could be challenged, one for each of the three definitive articles. In the end, the difference between Kant’s original path toward perpetual peace and the one suggested by DPT scholars should become evident, with its significance for contemporary politics.