The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization

by Arthur Herman

It is really a more sophisticated version of Rousseau’s “inner voice,” which ultimately answers the call of the General Will.28 Kant’s goal, however, was far grander and more utopian. He did not want to throw out enlightenment or commercial society or progress; instead, they should be fused together with our higher moral nature to create a brand-new stage of civil society, that of a single cosmopolitan culture and a single world government. Kant summed up the goal of this world government in the title of his tract Perpetual Peace, published in 1795; in which no nation may breach the peace of another and whose guarantor is Nature herself, as a reflection of divine providence, whose aim “is to produce a harmony among men, against their will and indeed through their discord.”