Volume 42, Number 17 · November 2, 1995
Dreams of a Just World
By Stanley Hoffmann
On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993
edited by Stephen Shute, edited by Susan Hurley
Basic Books, 272 pp., $13.00 (paper)
John Rawls is the only prominent contemporary philosopher I know of who is trying to construct a theory of international affairs. Moral and political philosophy, on the whole, has had little to say about the subject. Rousseau and Kant wrote that we would never be truly free beings as long as wars pitted societies against one another and made it easier for authoritarian leaders to rule arbitrarily. But political and moral philosophers have been mainly concerned with the quest for the good life within a domestic society and for a definition of the just political state. Insofar as international affairs preoccupied them at all, some of them, the Realists, from Thucydides and Machiavelli to George Kennan and Hans Morgenthau, claimed that the 'state of nature,' in which states compete for power, ruled out moral behavior. Others, beginning with Kant and continuing through Woodrow Wilson, said that the triumph of representative government at home and of the principle of national self-determination would produce a harmonious liberal world of cooperating nation-states. Still others, the Marxists, claimed that the revolutionary triumph of the proletariat would result in the 'withering away' of the state and, therefore, of the division of the world into competing states as well.
Review, 6135 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |