The greatest worksof political and social theory are often the shortest, and none more so than thetext of Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History, written just overtwo hundred years ago in 1784: it is all of thirteen pages long, and advances athesis that should concern us all. In essence, it argues that history can, and tosome degree does, move in a progressive direction—one in which the domesticorganisation of states on an increasingly legal, constitutional, basis will leadto greater cooperation between states and ultimately to some form of worldgovernment. Kant's hope was ‘that after many reformative revolutions,a universal cosmopolitan condition, which Nature has as her ultimate purpose,will come into being as the womb wherein all the original capacities of the humanrace can develop’. There are many readings of Professor Kant, not least when this textis combined with others. Yet to put it in modern terms, not entirely traducing hismeaning, his work can be read as envisaging a world of constitutional regimes andliberal democracies, one that will be without war. This is a bold thesis withmany unproven assumptions: but it is not entirely implausible, on eithertheoretical or historical grounds. Abused as it may have been by the twin menacesof a modish post-1989 triumphalism, and a postmodernist pessimism, it nonethelesssets us a goal that can, and should, command attention. Two centuries later, thegoals of Enlightenment, and a measured concept of progress, retain an, albeitchastened, validity in international as in domestic affairs.