Comprehensive philosophy of internationalism and human fellowship

FOR A WORLD SOCIETY By RK DASGUPTA The Statesman Oct 14, 2001

Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) says in his The Ideal of Human Unity first published in Arya in 1918: “There is likely to be either a centralised World-State or a looser world which may be either a close federation or a simple confederacy of the peoples for the common ends of mankind.” (Peter Heehs, ed, The Essential Writings of Sri Aurobindo, 1998, p 151) Sri Aurobindo’s The Ideal of Human Unity, The Human Cycle and War and Self-Determinations included in the 15th volume of Sri Aurobindo Birth-Centenary Library (1972) present a comprehensive philosophy of internationalism and human fellowship in their bearing on the problems of the modern world.

But who was the first to conceive a world society sustained by a world government? He was Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the German philosopher who presented this idea in his Zum ewipen frieden Einphilosophischer Entwurf (To Eternal Peace; A Philosophical Design) published in 1795. Europe, then busy with the aftermath of the French Revolution, did not take any notice of this great human document. When HC Smith’s English edition of the work appeared in 1915 it was the second year of the First World War. Who would then think of a world government and world peace?

It was in 1974, 250th birth anniversary of Kant, that the world’s attention to his Perpetual Peace was drawn for the first time. In that year appeared Immanuel Kant: Kant as a Political Thinker edited by Eduard Gerresheim and published at Bonn. The only great philosopher of world repute to speak enthusiastically of Kant’s perpetual peace before this is Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) who said about the work in his A History of Western Philosophy (1946); “In Perpetual Peace Kant advocates a federation of free States, bound together by covenant forbidding war. Reason, he says, utterly condemns war, which only an international government can prevent” (p 738). Russell himself desired a world government and he speaks of the idea at several places in his Autobiography (1971).