Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (review)

Immanuel Kant did not hold with giving money to beggars on the street but not because, like some of us, he resented the intrusion on his sidewalk reverie or the random claim on his wallet. It was, instead, for reasons that lie at the heart of his complex and fascinating political theory, the subject of Ripstein’s fine new book. The panhandler, Kant argued, is attempting to annex a bit of public space – the rightful passageway of the street – for his private purposes. (Try using that reasoning the next time you feel uncomfortable digging for a dollar as a scrawny tattooed tramp applies his squeegee to your windshield.) Kant also believed, however, that the state has a rightful duty to alleviate the suffering of the poor, since poverty as such is a threat to their freedom and dignity.

On these issues Kant thus emerges as a figure not unlike Ebenezer Scrooge; or rather, Scrooge shows himself an untutored Kantian. When Scrooge demands, in the face of importunate pleas for individual charity, ‘Are there no workhouses?,’ Scrooge is making a version of just this distinction between public and private right. Private charity saddles the poor with a dependent condition that is not far from slavery, since it relies upon the variable interests of other individuals and so robs the receiver of independence. Scrooge’s parallel query, meanwhile – ‘Are there no prisons?’ – pulls in a different direction. In Kant’s view, prisons are retributive and deterrent mechanisms for restoring the primacy of right when it has been breached. A crime is wrong not because it causes damage – something which may or may not be true – but because it stands as a private exemption from the authority of public law.

Ripstein does not mention Scrooge in his elegant and persuasive account, and if you count that a flaw – I don’t, since it means I can do the mentioning here – then it is one of the few scuffs on an otherwise unblemished book. Ripstein’s aim in this study is twofold: (a) to set out Kant’s legal and political theory in a way that demonstrates its unity; and (b) to bring this theory into contact with contemporary debates among political theorists. The second aim may seem without motive to those who recall only Rawls’s or Habermas’s ‘Kantian’ influence, but Ripstein demonstrates that the richness – and sometimes peculiarity – of Kant’s actual views is not always evident in these influential descendants. He shows that Kant’s political thinking is not, as many suppose, a derivation or simple application at the social level of his moral theory. The social order is not an elaboration or extension of the familiar categorical imperative, even in its ‘kingdom of ends’ version; instead, the social order is grounded in what Kant calls the ‘universal doctrine of right,’ namely that no person shall be rightfully dominated by another. The freedom of persons, not their wealth or well-being or desires or interests, is the mark of the rightful order. This is why, for example, slavery is always wrong even if the slaves are treated well and why one cannot enter into slavery rightfully. It is also why the demand at the heart of Terence Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy – ‘Let right be done!,’ indicating the state’s consent to a legitimate citizen claim against it – is precisely in the Kantian spirit.

Showing the private and public rights that in turn can be derived from the universal doctrine of right is the main business of the book’s central chapters. Along the way, Ripstein illuminates not only Kant’s distinctive views but also his enduring relevance to current discourse. Consider private property. On one standard view, John Locke’s (more or less), something becomes property when I ‘mix my labour’ with the natural world and leave ‘enough and as good’ for others. Kant notes that this mysterious change in the matter of the world is incoherent. Property is partly based on a...