British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalization of Democratic Nationalism 1805-2005
Abstract
Mazzini's democracy and the legacy of Immanuel Kant
Nadia Urbinati, Columbia University, New York
This paper explores the theoretical and historical link between national self-determination (modern democratic government) and the vision of the perpetual peace. Developing an idea I sketched in a previous article on Mazzini, this paper argues that democratic self-determination became the regulative idea of an international normative order able to pre-empt war.