Pacifist

Modern history

Pacifist ideals emerged from two strands of thought that coalesced at the end of the 18th century. One, rooted in the secular Enlightenment, promoted peace as the rational antidote to the world's ills, while the other was a part of the evangelical religious revival that had played an important part in the campaign for the abolition of slavery. Representatives of the former included Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in Extrait du Projet de Paix Perpetuelle de Monsieur l'Abbe Saint-Pierre (1756), Immanuel Kant, in his Thoughts on Perpetual Peace, and Jeremy Bentham who proposed the formation of a peace association in 1789. Representative of the latter, was William Wilberforce who thought that strict limits should be imposed on British involvement in the French Revolutionary Wars based on Christian ideals of peace and brotherhood. BohemianBernard Bolzano taught about the social waste of militarism and the needlessness of war. He urged a total reform of the educational, social, and economic systems that would direct the nation's interests toward peace rather than toward armed conflict between nations.