From universalism to situated universality: reconfiguring Kantian pacifism

In Toward Perpetual Peace , Kant argues that war’s violence enables humanity to envision perpetual peace as both reason’s moral end and history’s presumptive telos, thereby motivating action to renounce war. This article critiques the universalist assumption underlying this argument and argues instead for a pacifism grounded in what I call ‘situated universality’. I do so through a comparative political theoretical approach. After reconstructing Kant’s account of peace, I turn to post-World War II Japan, where a Kantian defense of its pacifist constitution initially flourished, but was later challenged by a nationalistic counter-discourse. Drawing on literary critic Katō Norihiro’s concept of the ‘dialectic of the defeated’, I argue that Japanese Kantian pacifists erred in hastily identifying with ‘humanity’ without acknowledging their positionality as a defeated people; this, in turn, has allowed calls to ‘normalize’ the constitution. I then engage novelist Oda Makoto’s reflections on ‘meaningless death’ to propose an alternative pacifism, one that moves from the affective response of the defeated to the meaninglessness of death in war, to a pacifist sensibility shared by all humanity. Because war yields victors and losers, it is in defeat – when not directed toward revenge – that we find the potential to imagine a radically universal, peace-oriented politics.