The moral person of the state: Pufendorf, sovereignty and composite polities
- Submitting institution
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University of Nottingham, The
- Unit of assessment
- 19 - Politics and International Studies
- Output identifier
- 1333573
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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10.1017/9781108242127
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- ISBN
- 9781108403405
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- January
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This 115,000-word, single-authored book is the fruit of a research project lasting for over a decade. It traces the inception and fate of a specific concept, over four centuries (from the end of the sixteenth- until the early twentieth-), in several languages (Latin, German and French as well as English), in a number of countries (Spain, Germany, Britain, Switzerland and the United States) and as it featured in various intellectual contexts (from theological disputes concerning free will and God’s concurrence with human action, through political debates about the nature of the body politic, to the genesis of modern international law).
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Chapter 3, part III, of The Moral Person of the State treads on much of the same ground as my article ‘The Perpetual Peace Puzzle: Kant on Persons and States’. Both deal with Immanuel Kant’s theory of international relations, which involves discussions of overlapping texts.
However, the book chapter differs in several important ways from the journal article.
First, the focus of the journal article is textual while that of the book’s sub-chapter is contextual. The book chapter situates Kant’s writings in terms of their development of a concept whose history the book tells, namely the concept of state personality. In the book, Kant’s writings are thus situated in relation to those who handled this concept before and after him; Kant’s debts to and departures from the use made by other writers of that concept are the subject of the analysis, as are his intentions in using that concept in the ways that he did. The journal article, by contrast, investigates Kant’s texts without an eye to context, and is more interested to probe their internal logic and consistency.
Second, the journal article situates itself with respect to debates in the discipline of philosophy (and also in international relations theory) but the book chapter is written for a readership primarily in intellectual history. The journal article studies Kant’s writings to find a via media between two major contemporary philosophers’ radically opposed interpretations of Kant’s enterprise and its relevance for cosmopolitan, liberal and realist understandings of the underpinnings of global order today. The book chapter, by contrast, seeks to tease out Kant’s use of concepts in relation to that of his own contemporaries and in respect of his own purposes.
Each discussion of Kant, although it works with the same primary material, investigates this material in the service of different arguments.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
