Rousseau versus Rawls on International Relations

This article uses Rousseau’s little-known responses to the Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s Project for Perpetual Peace and his fragments on ‘The State of War’ as a foil for Rawls’s claim that the international society he envisions in The Law of Peoples constitutes a ‘realistic utopia’. The main conclusion is that in a post-9/11 world Rousseau may have more to teach us about the possibilities for international security than Rawls does, since Rousseau’s theory accounts for the moral corruptibility of both individuals and groups. Most of the article focuses on comparing Rousseau’s and Rawls’s assumptions about human nature, but the final section also includes a brief discussion of their contrasting views of reason and the common good. The two philosophers agree, however, that the possibilities for international justice can only evolve out of the careful practice of local justice