2025/01/01 by Eric Schliesser · 2 voices
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Philosophical Ethics and Theory #Political Philosophy and Ethics #Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s0265052525100472
Abstract This essay links Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant more closely in their politics and political theory through a shared, substantially similar debt to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations . In particular, I argue that on some key political questions that are foundational to liberalism, they draw strikingly akin lessons from Smith and build on his ideas in a similar direction. That is, even otherwise very different strands of early liberalism find agreement on a constellation of ideas about trade, federalism, and peace. I show that these are not just preoccupations of Kant’s potentially idiosyncratic Perpetual Peace , but help define the whole political tradition.