Political philosophy of Immanuel Kant

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Immanuel Kant favoured a classical liberal approach to political philosophy.^[1] In Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795) Kant listed several conditions that he thought necessary for ending wars and creating a lasting peace. They included a world of constitutional republics.^[2] This was the first version of the democratic peace theory. Critics of the European Union assert that the Union's relative inability to establish itself as an influential external policy entity in the international level stems from the fact that the EU's institutions function on Kantian premises and are therefore ill-equipped to face the more primitive, non-Kantian world outside.

He opposed "democracy", which, in that era, meant direct democracy, believing that majority rule posed a threat to individual liberty. He stated, "…democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power in which "all" decide for or even against one who does not agree; that is, "all", who are not quite all, decide, and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom."^[3]