Commercial reform against the tide: Reapproaching the eighteenth-century decline of the republics of Venice and the United Provinces
The emergence of ‘civilized monarchies’, reformed European territorial states that had turned commercial, created major challenges to the old trade republics of Venice and the United Provinces. Would they perish and cease to exist, which seemed a logical corollary to the recent history of their decline, or might they be reconstituted and integrated into a new interstate system? Rather than to approach this question from the perspective of the history of political thought, which offers a range of rival outlooks on this issue, the present article treats the issue more from the inside and thus connects theories about decline to their concrete manifestations and experiences; from the spheres of diplomatic tensions over unpaid debts, publishing networks and the oscillation of consular and maritime law reform between Venice and the Dutch Republic.
The Rights of War and Peace. Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant , Oxford University Press, Nueva York, 1999.
In this part of his book, Richard Tuck reveals a new perspective on the philosophical tradition that gave birth to some of the most fundamental liberal principles. The author explains how the skepticism and the raison d´etat  recovered by Renaissance theorists are applied to the behavior of the nation-states in International Relations during the European expansion, suppressing all kind of affective or moral quality and are translated to the civil society in order to convert the individuals into perfect liberal agents.
KANT'S SECOND THOUGHTS ON RACE
During the 1780s, as Kant was developing his universalistic moral theory, he published texts in which he defended the superiority of whites over non-whites. Whether commentators see this as evidence of inconsistent universalism or of consistent inegalitarianism, they generally assume that Kant's position on race remained stable during the 1780s and 1790s. Against this standard view, I argue on the basis of his texts that Kant radically changed his mind. I examine his 1780s race theory and his hierarchical conception of the races, and subsequently address the question of the significance of these views, especially in the light of Kant's own ethical theory. I then show that during the 1790s Kant restricts the role of the concept of race, and drops his hierarchical account of the races in favour of a more genuinely egalitarian and cosmopolitan view.