Peace Without Domination: Kant, Adorno, and the Possibility of Reconciliation

“Peace is the state of differentiation without domination, with the differentiated participating in each other”

— Adorno, On Subject and Object

1. What Does It Mean to Establish Peace?

The absence of war does not necessarily mean that peace has been established. Hostilities may cease while the conditions that made conflict possible remain unchanged. Two States, for example, may maintain formally peaceful relations while their coexistence depends on military threats and unequal distributions of power. A society may likewise avoid open conflict while remaining organized through relations of subordination. In both cases, the absence of direct confrontation leaves an important question unresolved: what makes a relationship genuinely peaceful when the parties involved do not meet on equal terms?

This question goes beyond the distinction between war and peace. It asks whether the absence of open conflict is sufficient when relations between different factions remain structured by domination. Can there be peace under such conditions?

Kant and Adorno approach this problem from different but related directions. Kant examines the juridical and political conditions under which lasting peace can be established among independent political entities. Adorno takes up the utopian aspiration associated with perpetual peace but extends the question to forms of domination that cannot be understood solely in terms of relations between States. Reading them together allows us to investigate both the conditions that make peaceful coexistence possible and the deeper transformation of relationships that reconciliation would require.

2. Kant: The Juridical Conditions of Perpetual Peace

In Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795), Kant begins by distinguishing the cessation of hostilities from the establishment of a state of peace. The state of peace, he argues, is not the natural condition of human beings living alongside one another. The natural condition is one of war, even when hostilities are not continuously taking place. In the absence of a common juridical order, the possibility of conflict remains unresolved. Peace must therefore be established rather than simply awaited. It requires a legal condition in which the rights of those involved are secured (Kant, 1996).

This connection between peace and right becomes clearer through Kant's conception of freedom. Right regulates the external relations between individuals so that the freedom of each can coexist with the freedom of everyone else under a universal law. A juridical order does not eliminate differences of interest or guarantee agreement on every question. Its purpose is to establish conditions under which individuals can exercise their freedom without making the freedom of others impossible. Peace is therefore more than obedience imposed by a stronger power: it depends on a legitimate order that secures the reciprocal exercise of external freedom.

Kant extends this reasoning to relations between States. He regards republican constitutions as an essential condition of perpetual peace because citizens who must bear the costs of war should have a say in deciding whether it is undertaken. Since they would have to accept its consequences, they would have strong reasons to consider the dangers of armed conflict. At the international level, however, peace cannot be secured by one State simply imposing its authority on the others. Kant proposes a federation of free States, a juridical association intended to overcome the insecurity of their relations without absorbing them into a universal State.

The project also has a cosmopolitan dimension. Kant's principle of universal hospitality concerns the right of a stranger arriving in another territory not to be treated with hostility, provided that the stranger behaves peacefully. This is a limited right of visitation, not an unrestricted right to settle permanently. Nevertheless, it extends the question of peace beyond agreements between governments to the conditions under which individuals encounter one another across political boundaries. Kant's principle of publicity, developed in the appendices, adds that political maxims affecting the rights of others must be capable of being made public.

Perpetual peace thus requires a juridical and political order that makes lasting coexistence possible among independent States while extending certain rights to individuals beyond their own political communities. Yet the establishment of such an order leaves a further question: does juridical coexistence by itself address the forms of domination that may persist within society and in humanity's relationship with the world?

3. Adorno: From Perpetual Peace to Reconciliation

Adorno's engagement with the idea of perpetual peace provides a point of departure for extending this question. In aphorism 100 of Minima Moralia, “Sur l'eau,” he writes: “Of all the abstract concepts, none comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of perpetual peace” (Adorno, 2005). The remark establishes an explicit connection with Kant's project. Adorno recognizes in the idea of perpetual peace an aspiration that reaches beyond the temporary cessation of hostilities: the possibility of a world in which human relations are no longer governed by the threat of violence.

In “On Subject and Object,” Adorno gives the idea of peace a wider philosophical reach. Reflecting on the relation between subject and object, he writes: “Peace is the state of differentiation without domination, with the differentiated participating in each other” (Adorno, 2005, p. 247). The formulation is significant because it does not associate peace with the disappearance of difference or the establishment of an undifferentiated unity. Instead, it points towards a relationship in which what is different need not be subordinated to what it encounters.

Adorno's reflection extends beyond the relation between subject and object. He connects the possibility of peace with relations among human beings and between humanity and nature. The question therefore reaches beyond the juridical conditions under which political entities can coexist. Even where a legal order has been established, relationships may remain shaped by forms of domination that the existence of that order does not itself overcome.

This is the principal shift in Adorno's treatment of the problem. The aspiration expressed by Kant's idea of perpetual peace remains, but its implications extend to the character of relationships themselves. To understand what such a transformation would involve, we must examine why Adorno regards the reduction of what is different to an imposed identity as a fundamental problem.

4. Identity and Non-Identity: Why Peace Requires Difference

Adorno's critique of identity thinking helps explain why domination cannot be understood only as the exercise of direct power. Conceptual thought necessarily identifies things by bringing them under categories. Without this activity, we could not recognize, compare or understand what we encounter. The problem arises when we mistake the identity established by a concept for an exhaustive account of the object itself. To identify something as belonging to a particular category is not to know everything about it. Its particular features may exceed what the category allows us to recognize.

Adorno draws attention to this discrepancy through the idea of non-identity. The object is not fully identical with the concept under which it is understood. Something about it remains unaccounted for by the act of identification. Non-identity does not refer to a mysterious reality beyond all thought, nor does it mean that concepts should simply be abandoned. It indicates that conceptual identification never completely exhausts what it identifies. The object cannot be reduced without remainder to the terms through which thought makes it intelligible (Adorno, 1973).

This point is closely connected to Adorno's insistence on the priority of the object. The subject does not produce entirely what it knows. Although knowledge is mediated by concepts and forms of thought, what is known is not simply a construction of the knowing subject. The object has a dimension that resists being reduced to the conditions through which it is understood. To acknowledge this priority is not to claim access to an entirely unmediated reality. It is to recognize that the object cannot be made to coincide completely with the subject's conceptual account of it.

How does this epistemological argument matter for the question of peace? Conceptual identification and social domination are not the same phenomenon. Adorno's critique should not be turned into the claim that every act of classification is an exercise of power. Nevertheless, his analysis helps us recognize a related tendency: the attempt to make what is different conform to an identity imposed upon it. When this tendency governs social relationships, whatever does not fit the dominant framework may be treated as an obstacle to be corrected, assimilated or excluded. The particular is acknowledged only insofar as it conforms to the terms established by that framework.

The connection between identity thinking and domination is therefore not a simple equivalence. It concerns the tendency to treat identification as exhaustive and to deny significance to whatever exceeds the identity assigned to it. Applied to relationships between human beings, this way of thinking helps explain how domination can persist even in the absence of open conflict. The problem is no longer simply that one party exercises power over another, but that the terms of their relationship leave the latter little room to exist otherwise than as the dominant framework permits.

5. Reconciliation: Beyond Uniformity and Mere Coexistence

If domination involves imposing the terms of a relationship upon what is different, what alternative does Adorno's conception of peace suggest? The answer lies in the final part of his formulation: peace is a condition in which “the differentiated” participate in each other. Reconciliation involves more than allowing differences to remain. It requires a relationship in which the parties can affect and participate in one another without one having to subordinate the other.

It may help to distinguish three possible forms of relation. Uniformity establishes unity by subordinating differences to a common identity. Coexistence allows differences to remain, but does not necessarily require them to enter into a meaningful relationship. Reconciliation goes further: different elements participate in a shared existence without being required to abandon what distinguishes them. This is an explanatory distinction developed for the present argument, rather than a classification explicitly proposed by Adorno. Its purpose is to clarify what reconciliation adds to the idea of mere coexistence.

Adorno's aesthetics offers a complementary way of thinking about this possibility. In Aesthetic Theory, the artwork can be understood as a unity whose elements do not simply disappear into an imposed whole. Its parts acquire significance through their relations with one another, while retaining particular features that cannot be reduced to a single function. The organization of the work thus makes perceptible how unity might be achieved without uniformity. This does not mean that an artwork realizes social reconciliation or provides a political model to be reproduced. Its significance is more limited: it offers an experience through which the relation between particular elements and the whole can be thought differently (Adorno, 1997).

Reconciliation, then, does not mean preserving differences in isolation, nor does it mean absorbing them into a superior unity. It points towards a relationship in which the parties participate in a common existence without having to surrender their particularity. Unity would emerge through their relation rather than through the imposition of a single identity upon them.

6. What Would Perpetual Peace Mean After Adorno?

Kant and Adorno approach peace from different but related directions. Kant establishes the juridical and political conditions under which independent States can enter into lasting relations, while cosmopolitan right extends this concern to individuals across political boundaries. Adorno retains the utopian aspiration of perpetual peace but extends the question to forms of domination that may persist even where juridical coexistence has been secured.

The difference between their approaches is therefore not that Adorno rejects the need for a legal order. Kant's project addresses an indispensable condition of peace: the establishment of relations in which conflict is no longer left to the insecurity of competing powers. Adorno's contribution is to show why this condition cannot exhaust the problem. Peace must also be considered in relation to the forms of domination that shape how different beings and things relate to one another.

The question that remains is not simply whether different parties can coexist without open conflict, but whether they can participate in a common existence without one determining the terms under which the others are allowed to exist. Peace becomes possible when unity no longer depends on the suppression of difference, and when what is different can participate in a common existence without domination.

References

Adorno, T. W. (1973). Negative dialectics (E. B. Ashton, Trans.). Seabury Press. (Original work published 1966)

Adorno, T. W. (1997). Aesthetic theory (R. Hullot-Kentor, Trans.; G. Adorno & R. Tiedemann, Eds.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1970)

Adorno, T. W. (2005a). Critical models: Interventions and catchwords (H. W. Pickford, Trans.). Columbia University Press.

Adorno, T. W. (2005b). Minima moralia: Reflections on a damaged life (E. F. N. Jephcott, Trans.). Verso. (Original work published 1951)

Kant, I. (1996). Toward perpetual peace. In M. J. Gregor (Ed. & Trans.), Practical philosophy (pp. 311–352). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1795)