Eternal Peace

a term used to designate a number of projects to establish world peace which were put forth by humanists and educators from the 16th to the beginning of the 19th century.

In his treatise The Complaints of Peace (1518), Erasmus of Rotterdam called upon people to unite against war. During the 17th century, projects for eternal peace were proposed by the Czech philosopher and educator J. A. Comenius, the British thinker W. Penn, and others. Wide renown was gained in the 18th century by the Project for Perpetual Peace in Europe (1713-17), written by C. I. Saint-Pierre, a representative of the early French Enlightenment. He envisioned a guarantee of peace in the creation of a union of European states, the members of which would be obligated to refrain from using weapons in resolving any conflicts arising among them. This project was subjected to criticism by J. J. Rousseau (in his Opinion of Perpetual Peace, 1761), who demonstrated the impossibility of achieving such a union of states under the conditions of a despotic system. In his treatise Eternal Peace (1795), I. Kant conjectured about the objective principles which would lead in the future to the creation of a union of peoples and to the establishment of peace; the union of states proposed by him would have to ensure not only continual peace but also the sovereignty of each state. In Russia the most all-encompassing program for eternal peace was advanced by the educator and democrat V. F. Malinovskii in his work A Discourse on Peace and War (parts 1-2, 1803).