ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I discuss the emergence of the international problematic by focusing on two thinkers-David Hume and Immanuel Kant-and the lineage that can be traced back to them. Hume was responsible for the positivist interpretation of Newtonian mechanics. Hume was also among the first to theorise balance of power, which is one of the mechanistic solutions to the problem of order. It was also Hume who woke Kant up from his ‘illusionary dreams’. In contrast to Hume, however, Kant defended the realm of autonomous and critical reason. Reason says that war is detrimental to morality and progress. Kant maintained that, in the long run, all human development, indeed human survival, is dependent upon solutions to the problem of peace and war. By applying Hobbes’s notion of state of nature to the sphere of relations between nations and states, he argued for an international social contract. He proposed that the problem of war could be overcome by an arrangement of rule of law, republicanism, free trade and ‘league of nations’. This is the beginning of the international problematic.
