ABSTRACT

Civil peace is the condition that makes possible the actualization of property rights and of meaningful ways of life. Human beings, who are temperamentally inclined sometimes to laziness, sometimes to aggression, are in reality forced by nature to bring about freedom's supreme achievement, perpetual peace. Domestic peace can be said to be identical to the reign of law because each person in the political community is its author, its defender, and its subject by the intermediary of the legislative, executive, and judiciary powers. Desire brings war, even though, paradoxically, desire simultaneously needs peace. Although the theme of war and peace is not central to the Critique of Pure Reason, it lays the groundwork for it. In 1781, before the political works had been written, we can already make out the broad outline into which the republican constitution and, later, the doctrine of peace will fit.