ABSTRACT
Perhaps the grandest hope in the tradition of modern liberal thought is that the world might some day live in peace. What distin guished this hope from a utopian aspiration or a messianic dream was the belief that the means for realizing it were within our grasp. The key to establishing “perpetual peace,” as Immanuel Kant (1983) thought over two centuries ago, was to ensure that every nation was also (what we now call) a democratic republic.1 The citizens of demo cratic republics who had to bear the costs of war would be far more reluctant to assume war’s risks than a despot who could dispatch a country to war without having personally to pay the costs imposed. So simply put, Kant’s idea seems naïve (Thompson 1994). Yet, in recent years a rich literature has developed that confirms the essen tial insight that there is a close and positive connection between democracy and peace (Dixon 1994; Russett 1993). Democracy, of course, has not spread to every nation. Nor do we enjoy perpetual peace. Nevertheless, we possess enough experience with democra cies to be relatively confident that they are unlikely to go to war against one another, however likely they may be to wage war on
other states. There is good evidence to warrant hope for a demo cratic world order in which collective violence is much less com mon than it is at present.
