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  • Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy
  • Alyssa R. Bernstein
Arthur Ripstein. Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy. Cambridge, MA-London: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii + 399. Cloth, $49.95.

This superb, exemplary account of Immanuel Kant’s legal and political philosophy is essential reading not only for Kant scholars, but also for political philosophers and philosophers of law. Lucidly reasoned and written with crystalline clarity, the book is both accessible to non-specialists and a pleasure to read. Ripstein reveals the coherent, systematic structure of thought in Kant’s obscurely written Doctrine of Right, and goes beyond illumination to defense and development of Kant’s conception of equal freedom. In the course of doing all of this, he not only presents Kant in historical context, but also brings to light important differences between Kant’s views and those of other political philosophers and philosophers of law, including John Locke, John Stuart Mill, H. L. A. Hart, and Ronald Dworkin, often enriching the discussion by referring to decisions or arguments made by courts in the U.S. or elsewhere. Ripstein shows that it is unjustifiable to exclude Kant from the primary canon of political philosophy, as is typical of current English-language teaching and scholarship.

State governments both tell people what to do and force them to do as they are told; they also claim rights to do these things. Yet people claim the right to be free. Can these claims be consistent? Ripstein argues that Kant shows that they can. By working out the implications of the entitlement to be independent, one’s own master, and free from domination by others, Kant develops answers to the basic questions of political philosophy, addressing state legitimacy, the rule of law, political obligation, revolution, punishment, private property, taxation, and redistribution.

The book begins with an overview chapter, followed by a chapter on what Kant calls the “innate right of humanity” in one’s own person, which is the right to be independent. Topics of private right are then addressed in three chapters, with topics of public right in five subsequent chapters, building on the previous ones. A central, bridging chapter explains Kant’s account of the transition from private right to public right, thus his account of political authority, which takes the form of arguments about the state of nature, its defects, and the need for the legal and political institutions of a state. The book ends with an appendix in which Ripstein explains the relation between the Universal Principle of Right and the Categorical Imperative.

The right to independence is an original right in the sense that it does not require establishment by any affirmative act, Ripstein explains. Persons capable of acquiring rights through their actions must have the capacity to act in ways that have consequences for rights and thus for others’ conduct. Therefore, any system of rights must presuppose some basic moral capacities that do not depend on antecedent acts on the part of the person exercising them, and thus must presuppose the “innate right” to one’s own person. Each person’s entitlement to independence from another’s choice is the basis of all further rights. It sets restrictions on the capacity to acquire new rights and structures the rights [End Page 531] that each person can acquire. It also imposes duties on the state and restricts the means it can use for achieving its purposes. Equal freedom, understood in terms of restrictions on coercion, governs both private right and public right.

In a system of equal freedom, each person is free to use his or her own powers, individually or cooperatively, in order to pursue his or her own purposes, and each person decides what ends to pursue with his or her own means. The right to such independence is an aspect of one’s status as a person in relation to other persons; within a system of reciprocal limits on freedom, it is an entitlement that restricts the conduct of others, consistent with everyone being subject to the same restrictions. It can be violated only by others’ conduct. The sole point of a system of equal freedom is...

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