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Kant's View of Reason in Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

W. B. Gallie
W. B. Gallie
Affiliation:
Peterhouse, Cambridge
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Extract

The political writings of Kant and of Hegel present two contrasts, whose connection and explanation have (so far as I know) never been adequately explored. The first contrast is in respect of the quality of their discussions of ‘home’ politics—in Kant's language, the ‘problem of establishing a perfect civic constitution’. Here Hegel shines. However much one may dislike the tone of voice, the vocabulary, the style and the arrangement of its arguments, his Philosophy of Right, especially when supplemented by his more topical political writings, presents an array of dicta, judgments and arguments of notable penetration, balance and prescience. Consider for instance his account of the very different political functions of free associations and of representative bodies, and his perception of the symbolic—but crucially symbolic—role of head of state. On these, as on many other issues, Hegel's views deserve the credit that has of late begun to be restored to them. Whatever his philosophical failings, he had a remarkable sense of the key junctures of different strands in the life of politics; so that, although the kind of state he describes and admires retains little practical relevance today, his exposition of it remains a valuable training-ground in political appreciation. By contrast Kant's philosophy of the state, as we find it in Part II of his Philosophy of Right (itself being Part I of his Metaphysics of Morals), in Part II of Theory and Practice and in Appendices I and II of Perpetual Peace, is at first sight little more than an academic exercise. It amounts to a restatement, in dehistoricized terms and in accordance with Kant's rationalist theory of morals, of Rousseau's central political teachings, viz. that an original, unanimous, unrescindable contract explains political allegiance, and that the idea of a General Will is a sufficient criterion of political justice within the state. From these two basic positions Kant develops a theory of civic obedience far more restrictive than that of Rousseau or indeed than that of Hobbes. Throughout, Kant accepts—in the spirit which one might accord to revelation—Rousseau's assumptions that government can be confined to issues that fall under a General Will, and that such a Will can be ‘found’ for the resolution of every political issue, so that honest men need never disagree about what the General Will is. But to say this is to say that Kant's concern with home politics is little more than academic.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 54 , Issue 207 , January 1979 , pp. 19 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1979

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References

1 Reiss, , p. 47Google Scholar. (For convenience, references are given whenever possible to The Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Smith, Norman Kemp, and to Kant's Political WritingsGoogle Scholar, ed. Hans Reiss.)

2 Ibid., p. 44.

3 Ibid., pp. 44–45 and 108–114.

4 But see Smith, Kemp, p. 42Google Scholar (A2) and A474 and (for the primacy of Practical Reason) A550–2 and A796.

5 Beginning from the incomparably imaginative passage (Smith, Kemp, p. 20, B xiii)Google Scholar ‘Reason, holding in one hand its principles … and in the other hand the experiment devised in conformity with these principles’ from which so much of the best of twentieth-century philosophy has been developed.

6 Recognition of this had to wait for nearly 100 years after the publication of the first Critique. In 1878 Maxwell concluded his whimsical philosophical paper ‘Psychophysik’ with the remarkable sentences: ‘In this search for information about myself from eminent thinkers of different types, I seem to have learnt one lesson, that all science and philosophy, and every form of human speech, is about objects capable of being perceived by the speaker and the hearer; and that when our thought pretends to deal with the Subject it is really only dealing with an Object under a false name. The only proposition about the Subject, namely, “I am”, cannot be used in the same sense by any two of us, and, therefore, it can never become science at all’ (reprinted in Campbell, and Garnett, 's The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, p. 382)Google Scholar. And in the same year, in ‘The Fixation of Belief Peirce wrote explicitly, for the first time, of ‘the public character of Truth’.

7 Nothing, for instance, about the characteristic ways in which efforts and habits of self-control, loyal adherence to certain persons and institutions, and self-dedication to certain ideal pictures of life (however abstract or symbolic) fuse together and support each other in the character of every good human being.

8 Quoted by Kelly, G. A., Idealism, Politics and History, p. 157Google Scholar, from Reflexionen zur Rechtsphilosophie (G.S. Vol. XIX, No. 7778, p. 513).Google Scholar

9 The Metaphysics of Morals Section 44 (Reiss, , p. 137).Google Scholar

10 Ibid, Section 54 (Reiss, , p. 165).Google Scholar

11 The outstanding exception is Professor F. H. Kinsley whose chapter on Kant in his Power and the Pursuit of Peace is among the most remarkable pieces of Kantian exegesis ever written, putting to shame all previous professional Kantian scholars for their relative ignorance, carelessness and lack of imaginative penetration in their comments on Kant's political philosophy.

12 Perpetual Peace: First Supplement (Reiss, , p. 112).Google Scholar