First of all, in order to ensure that it is the people who decide whether or not to make war, the states must be republics. In Perpetual Peace, Kant seeks to identify the conditions needed to create this “ civil society which can administer justice universally”. The aim of this contract will be the limitation, through coercive laws, of the freedom of states, or rather, the overcoming of the absolute sovereignty of states. While the idea of an original contract has in fact never truly been applied to individual men, it will, in relation to states, find concrete application through the formulation, by them, of a “” establishing “ within the limits of pure reason”. The contract between states, on the other hand, must be real. All that is needed to overcome the state of nature between individuals, regardless of the fact that force was in fact the means used to break free of that state, is an original social contract: an idea of reason. While the state of nature among individual men is just a supposition, and may never have been a historical reality, the anarchy of international relations is a very real fact and one which characterises the situation in which man effectively lives. Just as it is the duty of individuals to break free from the lawless state of nature, so states are duty bound to do the same, through the establishment of a legal system governing relations between them.

Immanuelkant