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While Immanuel Kant is not widely seen as an important political thinker on a par with Aristotle, Locke, or Rousseau, his work has had a tremendous influence on the past fifty years of scholarship in political theory. His insistence on the imperative of setting laws that could command universal consent inspired John Rawls’s attempts to establish the basic principles for a just society by imagining what a rational individual could consent to in abstraction from the particulars of his life situation. His concept of a regulative ideal that should guide our actions even if we can never meet it is the basis for Jürgen Habermas’s consensus-oriented political philosophy that aims at identifying procedures and policies that could claim universal validity , even if perhaps this goal is ever beyond our reach. Finally, his prediction of a cosmopolitan future in which federations govern the peaceable relations between states has inspired the nascent literature on cosmopolitan justice that explores how global institutions would have to be designed for all humans to be able to consent to them. These contemporary appropriations tend to interpret Kant’s work as that of a moral philosopher who abstracts away from the complexity of reality in order to identify clear, systematic rules that could guide rational agents in their everyday lives. This familiar way of reading Kant figures him as a rigorous and systematic thinker who seeks to bring the precision of universal moral law to bear on political matters. Those who find this version of Kant appealing try to reconcile apparent inconsistencies between his political writings and his larger body of work either by designating these essays as 6 unsocial sociability: perpetual antagonism in kant’s political thought Michaele Ferguson perpetual antagonism 151 dilettantish forays into relatively unfamiliar topics, incomplete investigations into matters that were not a central part of his philosophical interests, or (in the case of his earlier works) immature expressions of views later incorporated into his system in more extensive works like the Critique of Judgment or Religion Within the Boundaries of Reason Alone. Those who find this version of Kant dull and unreceptive to the messiness of human existence are unlikely to think him redeemed by a few uncharacteristic essays on politics and some reflections on the French Revolution. Captivated by conventionalinterpretationsofKant ,opponentsandalliesalikeofRawls,Habermas, and cosmopolitanism have tended to overlook the critical potential contained in the tensions and contradictions in his political writings.1 I suggest in this essay that we can find the resources for an alternative reading of Kant that provides a counterpoint to contemporary neo-Kantianism by taking seriously moments in his political texts where he appears to be inconsistent. If we read these seeming tensions and contradictions in his argument as reflections of the complexity of his position, rather than as symptomatic of the underdevelopment or immaturity of his arguments, a much richer Kant emerges. In this piece, I look specifically at the different accounts he gives of the role of antagonism in moral and political life. The tensions in his view of antagonism come to the fore in his treatment of the concept of “unsocial sociability” in the brief essay “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose.”2 Commentators on Idea usually interpret unsocial sociability in terms of Kant’s moral philosophy.3 They take it to refer to a natural human tendency toward conflictual behaviors fueled by competition, jealousy, and self-interest . These natural unsociable desires are at odds with the categorical imperative that we should make the moral law the maxim of our actions. Since we have free will, humans are caught in the struggle between choosing to do what is good (obeying the moral law for its own sake) and choosing to do what is evil (acting from our selfish desires). For Kant, this is the source of all social conflict, from interpersonal strife all the way up to interstate war: all conflict is the result of the free choices of individuals acting in accord with their natural unsociability. In order to manage this antagonism and achieve perpetual peace, we must counteract the natural tendencies we have to will evil. At first, Kant calls for legal systems and executive powers capable of ensuring our external obedience to the moral law. Gradually, however, he hopes that humans will develop their rationality to the point where their obedience is internal as well. On this reading of Kant, then, we [3.142.53.68...

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