Two Faces of Liberalism: Kant, Paine, and the Question of Intervention

Abstract

Compared with the realist tradition, relatively few students of international relations explore variations within liberalism. This paper introduces a particular interpretation of Immanuel Kant's evolutionary liberalism and then compares it with Thomas Paine's revolutionary liberalism. Paine was an ebullient optimist while Kant was more guarded and cautious. These different assumptions lead to distinct liberal views on voting rights, how trade fosters peace, and defense policies. The most striking disagreement, and one that endures in contemporary liberal circles, revolves around the question of military interventions to spread democratic rule. Kant advocated nonintervention while Paine actively pursued military intervention to spread democratic rule. Differences between Kant and Paine represent some enduring tensions still residing within the liberal tradition in international relations.

Liberal Warfare: A Crusade Twice Removed

“…On the one hand, there is the Kantian/meliorist/communitarian variety of liberalism that holds that liberalism must be allowed to evolve organically—through virtuous conduct, so to speak—and that history cannot be accelerated by waging war to impose liberal values on non‐believers. On the other hand, we find the Painean/messianic/cosmopolitan variety of liberalism that treats military intervention as justifiable wherever violations of liberal values are to be found in the conviction that those values will flourish once obstacles to their realization are removed (Walker ; Doyle ).…”

Renaissance Catholicism and Contemporary Liberalism

“…One could, for instance, point to contractarian, utilitarian, and rights‐based manifestations of liberalism, each acquiring different inflections in the writings of different authors according to historical circumstance. One could distinguish between an evolutionary, Kantian form of liberalism that advocates gradual change and a messianic, Painean type of liberalism that seeks to remake the world through violent means (Walker ). The inevitable conclusion is: “Liberalism is not the kind of thing that has an essence.…”

International Law: Normative Contestation in the Transnational Realm

“…It is interesting to note that one of the few other approaches to legal studies (Kornprobst, 2009;Walker, 2008). The important characteristic of this research agenda is that there is a lack of an overarching authority with coercive power to impose its laws on the rest of the transnational community.…”