Theory Workshop - Luigi Caranti

Abstract: In the definitive articles of Toward Perpetual Peace (1795), Kant advocated three main institutional reforms to eliminate the greatest self-inflicted tragedy of humanity: 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 so called Democratic Peace Theory (DPT). The Kantian heritage, however, has been at times misinterpreted by DPT scholars and their research thereby made vulnerable to 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. Once the difference between Kant’s path toward perpetual peace and the one suggested by DPT scholars is made clear, a new agenda for normative thinking and empirical research is defined. The paper offers one case study – focussed on the Arab League’s record of international controversy composition – meant to show how the new model proposed – or at least a very significant portion of it – receives some empirical confirmation.

Luigi Caranti (Ph.D. Boston University) is associate professor of Political Philosophy at the Università di Catania (Italy) and Marie Curie Fellow at the School of International and Public Affairs of Columbia University. His area of specialization is Kant and his areas of competence are political philosophy, human rights and democratic peace theory. Among his publications: “Kant’s Theory of Human Rights,” and “Democracy and Human Rights” in The Handbook of Human Rights, ed. Thomas Cushman, (New York: Routledge, 2011); Kant and the Scandal of Philosophy, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); (Ed.) Kant's Perpetual Peace. New Interpretative Essays, (Roma: Luiss University Press, 2007), “Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace? Reflections on the Realist Critique of Kant's Project,” in Journal of Human Rights 18 (3), 2006: 23-45, “Logical Purposiveness and the Principle of Taste,” in: Kant Studien, 96 (3), 2005: 364-375.

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