I've resisted Penguin's Great Ideas series until now, but bought a few last week. They have lovely covers and are an interesting selection of extracts from longer works or short books shorn of introductions and notes. The selection of Kant's political writing, unlike most of the others, isn't based on a Penguin book but on one of the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. I don't think it's Kant at his best - he adopts his usual lofty tone of detachment, and argues from pure a priori principles that the best form of government that could possibly exist is an enlightened absolute monarchy. By a remarkable coincidence, Kant was a subject of Frederick the Great. Some interesting thoughts on open government, though (Kant says any policy which has to be kept secret from others - the citizens or foreign governments - has to be wrong). He also quotes Hume at the end of Is the Human Race Continually Improving?, a passage I hadn't come across before:
'When I now see the nations engaged in war', he says, 'it is as if I witnessed two drunken wretches bludgeoning each other in a china-shop. For it is not just that the injuries they inflict on each other will be long in healing; they will also have to pay for all the damage they have caused.'
