My favorite headline so far in 2024: Kaliningrad Governor Blames Immanuel Kant for Ukraine War.*
The governor of Kant’s hometown no doubt has in mind Kant’s late “Perpetual Peace” essay, which projects a future republican cosmopolitan federation of states committed to universal duties and dignities. Such a future is the opposite of Putin’s nationalistic and authoritarian Russia (my short talk on so-called ‘Putin’s Brain’ Alexander Dugin.) So conflict would follow and it’s the dead-for-over 200-years Kant’s fault.
Nyet. In part because (a) authoritarians are the bad guys, (b) those who start wars are almost always the bad guys, and (c) if we’re listing thinkers who articulated an enlightened futures, Kant is pretty far down the list (see “Does Kant Have a Place in Classical Liberalism?”) Further, Kant did say the following about war:
“at the stage of culture at which the human race still stands, war is an indispensable means for bringing it to a still higher stage” (Kant, “Speculative Beginning of Human History” [1786])
(* Thanks to Jeffery Small for the headline link.)