Thorstein Veblen
"Immanuel Kant on Perpetual Peace."
Editorial

The Dial. A Fortnightly (New York)
Vol. LXVI (December 28, 1918, to July 12, 1919)

No. 789, May 3, 1919, p. 469.
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Immanuel Kant once wrote a sketch, a century and a quarter ago, on Perpetual 
Peace. He prefaced it with a jest, as tasteless as it was clumsy, to say that 
the running title under which he wrote Zum ewigen Frieden, that is to say, The 
House of Peace Everlasting-was borrowed from the signboard of a certain roadside 
tavern adjoining a certain ancient churchyard. Compounded of bar-room and 
graveyard, this wise man's jest will to many readers doubtless have seemed as 
pointless as it is tasteless. But that will be true only of those readers of 
Kant who have not had the inestimable fortune to live through these days of 
returning peace and to witness the maudlin deliberations of that conclave of 
elder statesmen who are now arranging to make the world safe for the vested 
rights of international dissension. The point of Kant's jest is plain now. Today 
his readers are in a position to marvel that even that wise old man should have 
been so wise as all that. It is quite uncanny.
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