Kant’s Political Theory: Interpretations and Applications

Introduction

The study of Kant’s politics is undergoing what Patrick Riley has called “a remarkable renaissance.”1 Recent years have seen a flowering of interest in Kant’s politics among social scientists, political theorists, philosophers, legal scholars, historians, and many others. Among political scientists, research on transnational organizations, the democratic peace hypothesis, just war theory, human rights, and other areas has led to renewed interest in Kant’s thought.2 In political theory, one of the most influential new schools of thought is the deeply Kantian deliberative democratic theory, whose precepts are not only being discussed in academic journals but are also being implemented in new political institutions.3 Interestingly, critics of deliberative democratic theory’s perhaps too idealized notion of reasonableness have also found support in Kant’s work, though they have tended to focus on Kant’s political, anthropological, and historical work rather than his ethical theory.4 Political philosophers are turning to Kant for his concepts of provisionality, agency, cosmopolitan right, the public sphere, and of course for his systematic treatment of human freedom in general.51 Kant’s critical account of freedom is at the root both of the extraordinary appeal of his political thought and of its formidable interpretive challenge. Asking as he does about the conditions of possibility for human freedom in the world, Kant is able to offer authoritative and vigorous criticism of given social and political institutions while refraining from the construction of what he calls “castles in the air” (that is, idealized, specific models meant to apply across space and time). Focusing on the real and manifestly imperfect institutions of his day, Kant asks whether each political practice “leaves open the possibility” for progress toward freedom. Kant is much more interested in the drivers of actually possible, necessarily incremental improvement in human conditions than he is in describing profound but unreachable political perfection. His sustained interest in the public sphere, I would like to thank Brad Goodine, Zeke Anglim, and Megan Dyer for their research assistance on this project. The Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University, and the Ray A. Rothrock ’77 Fellowship each supported this project, for which I am very grateful. introduction Elisabeth Ellis 2 kant’s political theory for example, attests to Kant’s conviction that it is more important to assure the underlying mechanisms that might promote political progress over time than it is to make pronouncements about exactly what is wrong with our present circumstances. Kant’s historical circumstances as a university teacher subject to the censorship regime of late eighteenth-century Prussia made it difficult for him to offer blunt political critique in any case.6 From his early essay on enlightenment through his later political essays, Kant tends to approach his targets obliquely, allowing his readers to draw analogies between, for example, his criticism of paternalism in church governance and an implied general critique of domination. If Kant’s own reticence has made it hard to discover his powerful critical political thought, superficial interpretations of his moral theory have compounded that difficulty. The relationship between Kant’s ethics and his politics is complex and interesting (and the subject of much discussion in this volume), but it is by no means as straightforward as scholars used to presume. The soaring precepts of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals govern all human beings, according to Kant. Yet these same principles cannot simply be applied to political life directly. As Kant argues in the introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals, a system of political right is necessarily empirical and therefore always incomplete (6:205). Kant cannot provide a set of answers that will be right for every historically embedded political circumstance. Instead, he consistently asks about the conditions that might enable human freedom. This reading of Kant’s political thinking has itself been made possible by recent advances in the interpretation of Kant’s ethics. Scholars of Kant’s moral philosophy have definitively revised old images of Kant’s ethics as rigoristic and sterile. In a series of important books and essays, Christine Korsgaard has demonstrated that Kant’s moral theory is no dry summation of abstract and formulaic duty, but in fact envisions a rich and embedded life of ethical value whose applications are quite relevant to present-day problems.7 Like Korsgaard, Barbara Herman rejects the reading of Kant’s ethics...