Kant’s Nonideal Theory of Politics by Dilek Huseyinzadegan (review)

The opening pages of Kant’s Nonideal Theory of Politics present the controversial central claim of the book head on: Kant’s teleological arguments in political philosophy, which have a contentious reputation in Kant circles, not only should not be omitted from scholarly inquiry but form an essential part of what Dilek Huseyinzadegan calls “Kant’s nonideal theory,” or the second prong of his dual-focused political philosophy. Nonideal theory, a term Huseyinzadegan borrows from Charles Mills, is anchored, on her argument, in the regulative principle of Zweckmässigkeit, or purposiveness, and has as its purview the contingent variables of politics such as history, culture, and geography. Accordingly, she names “nonideal” the part of his political philosophy that takes up not a priori ideals and political goals but the messiness of actual, empirical history.

In The Racial Contract, Mills describes the aim of examining a nonideal contract, such as Rousseau’s in “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,” in order to “explain and expose the inequities of the actual nonideal polity” (Mills 1997, 9). The racial contract, in relation to social contract theory, starts with “uncomfortable reality” in order not to have to continually “retreat into illusory idealizing abstraction,” and so that it can readily shift between the hypothetical and the actual (Mills 1997, 130). Part of the historical support for Mills’s argument that the racial contract constructs not only racial exploitation but also race itself can be directly traced to Kant. Huseyinzadegan’s work is not an apologia for Kant, but a demonstration of the ways in which Kant countenanced the nonideal features of his own description of geography and peoples as a part of political philosophy that concerned itself with empirical, historical reality alongside the principles of political right.

Huseyinzadegan locates Kant’s political philosophy not only in the obvious “political writings” but in a range of critical and noncritical texts, focusing notably on the Critique of Judgment, a work that some may feel has nothing to do with politics. Of course, Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy argued convincingly for the relevance of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” to a Kantian political philosophy, and spurred a whole line of interpretations in this vein, but this is not Huseyinzadegan’s focus. She draws attention rather to the relatively neglected “Critique of Teleological Judgment,” fully aware of the controversy to which this focus might give rise. In emphasizing purposiveness as a regulative principle that informs Kant’s political philosophy, she argues that Kant’s use of teleology does not render up an unsavory narrative of world history moving inexorably toward a European end, but rather foregrounds the gap between the ideals put forward by his theory of Recht and the realities of current culture that fail to live up to them. It is in her identification of Zweckmässigkeit, which operates as a link, in the manner of reflective judgment, between the ideals of Recht and the nonideality of actual history, that Huseyinzadegan makes a decisive contribution to the interpretation of Kantian political philosophy.

Chapters 1–3 of Kant’s Nonideal Theory of Politics cover Kant’s essay “What is Orientation in Thinking?”; “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim”; “What is Enlightenment?”; and the Doctrine of Right. Huseyinzadegan starts by identifying in the Critique of Pure Reason a precursor to the concept of reflective judgment. Here Kant talks about ideas of reason as providing an “imaginary focus” that allows for a greater unity and extension between the concepts of the understanding and the sensible experience they constitute. This hypothetical unity gives rise to a hope that, despite all the diversity and seeming infinitude of empirical experiences, it still might be possible for us to draw them all together as if they belonged to this imaginary focal point. The regulative use of this imaginary point serves to orient us in an otherwise bewildering or overwhelming amount of sensible experience. We cannot dogmatically assert the...