The Revolutionism embodied in the work of Martin Wight and Hedley Bull by Kant is not wholly made manifest in Kant’s normative
prescriptions for international life. This we see in On Perpetual Peace
as an attempt to overcome the scourge of human conflict through the critical
reason he had already plotted and investigated across his critiques; now
applied as normative judgement to the international realm. Famously
encapsulated in the six preliminary and three definitive articles of perpetual
peace, Kant ascertains that the only mechanism for overturning the statist
condition of conflict is to transform the essential qualities of the order
within which states interact.
Such a holistic transformative schema is
the very bedrock of Revolutionism that makes Wight and Bull recognise Kant –
rather than Comte, Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, or even Marx – the basis for
the Revolutionist tradition. What Kant constructs is a comprehensive and impermeable
schematic by which: (a) a theory of international order as it stands is
expounded; (b) the chief undesirable quality of such an ordered condition is
located in conflict; (c) the means such a quality may be expunged, remaining
absent or ideally repressible and as such reprehensible, are articulated; (d) points
a-c are the prognosis of a wider epistemological project that is an extension
of the rational human mind, latched to both ethical and normative claims
concerning universal justice.
It is not the content of a-d that makes
Kant the revolutionist. It is not that he happens to advocate for an
international society that characterises itself by the ‘thickening’ – to use a
Buzanian term – of international society to the precipice of a world state as
part of liberal internationalism by focus on the broader humanitas of
the norms underpinning the civitas maxima. Rather it is because of his
comprehensive approach to the transformation of international society out of
its current mode, through a shift in epistemological, ethical and ontological
thinking, that makes Kant the Revolutionist par excellence. Kant is not the
revolutionist of International Society because he embodies the universalist
humanitarian ethics that are symbolised in a theological dove of peace, nor the
comprehensive wisdom of the mythical owl of Minerva. Rather, it is that
Kantianism follows in the footsteps of a phoenix – seeking to transform
condition to one more just out of the residual ashes of that which stands, of
the world as it is, in all its crookedness.