Immanuel Kant’s political philosophy
Introduction
Kant's most
significant contribution to political philosophy and the philosophy of law is
the doctrine of Rechtsstaat. According to this doctrine, the power of the state
is limited in order to protect citizens from the arbitrary exercise of
authority. The Rechtsstaat is a concept in continental European legal thinking,
originally borrowed from German jurisprudence, which can be translated as
"the legal state" or "state of rights".
It is a
"constitutional state" in which the exercise of governmental power is
constrained by the law, and is often tied to the Anglo-American concept of the
rule of law. Kant's political philosophy has been described as liberal for its
presumption of limits on the state based on the social contract as a regulative
matter. In a Rechtsstaat, the citizens share legally based civil liberties and
they can use the courts. A country cannot be a liberal democracy without first
being a Rechtsstaat. German writers usually place Immanuel Kant's theories at
the beginning of their accounts of the movement toward the Rechtsstaat. The
Rechtsstaat in the meaning of "constitutional state" was introduced
in the latest works of Immanuel Kant after US and French constitutions were
adopted in the late 18th century.
Immanuel Kant’s political philosophy
Kant’s
approach is based on the supremacy of a country’s written constitution. This
supremacy must create guarantees for implementation of his central idea: a
permanent peaceful life as a basic condition for the happiness of its people
and their prosperity. Kant was basing his doctrine on none other but
constitutionalism and constitutional government. Kant had thus formulated the
main problem of constitutionalism, “The constitution of a state is eventually
based on the morals of its citizens, which, in its turns, is based on the
goodness of this constitution.”[citation needed] Kant’s idea is the foundation
for the constitutional theory of the twentieth century.
The
Rechtsstaat concept is based on the ideas, discovered by Immanuel Kant, for
example, in his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals: "The task of
establishing a universal and permanent peaceful life is not only a part of the
theory of law within the framework of pure reason, but per se an absolute and
ultimate goal. To achieve this goal, a state must become the community of a
large number of people, living provided with legislative guarantees of their
property rights secured by a common constitution.
Immanuel Kant’s political philosophy
Kant wrote
his social and political philosophy in order to champion the Enlightenment in
general and the idea of freedom in particular. His work came within both the
natural law and the social contract traditions. Kant held that every rational
being had both an innate right to freedom and a duty to enter into a civil
condition governed by a social contract in order to realize and preserve that
freedom.
His writings
on political philosophy consist of one book and several shorter works. The
“Doctrine of Right”, Part One of his two-part Metaphysics of Morals and
first published as a stand-alone book in February 1797, contains virtually
every directly political topic he treats. Other shorter works include a useful
short summary of his discussion of the basis and role of the state in the
second section of the essay “Theory and Practice”, an extended discussion of
international relations in the essay “Toward Perpetual Peace”, and the essay
“An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?.” Other published material
relevant to the topics include material on history, on practical philosophy in
general, and, for his social philosophy, his work on religion, education, and
anthropology. Kant also offered a biennial lecture course on “Natural Right”, a
student’s (Feyerabend) transcript of which is available in English translation.
Immanuel Kant’s political philosophy
Kant’s
political philosophy is a branch of practical philosophy, one-half of one of
the broadest divisions in Kant’s thought between practical and theoretical
philosophy. Political philosophy is also to be distinguished within practical
philosophy from both empirically-based elements and from virtue proper. The
separation from virtue is treated later in this section. Regarding the
empirical elements, it is worth mentioning that practical philosophy, as a set
of rules governing free behavior of rational beings, covers all human action in
both its pure and applied (empirical, or “impure”) aspects. Pure practical
philosophy, the rational elements of practical philosophy in abstraction from
anything empirical, is called by Kant “metaphysics of morals” (4:388). Kant so
emphasized the priority of the pure aspect of political philosophy that he
wrote part of his essay “On the Common Saying: That May be Correct in Theory,
but it is of No Use in Practice” in opposition to the view he associates with
Hobbes that the politician need not be concerned with abstract right but only
with pragmatic governance (8:289–306). Yet Kant also included the more
pragmatic, impure, empirical study of human behavior as part of practical
philosophy. For ethics in general, Kant called the empirical study of human
beings as agents within particular cultures and with particular natural
capacities “anthropology”. Some of Kant’s social philosophy fits into this
rubric (see section 10). While Kant always based his claims about right on a
priori principle, he was applying the a priori principles to actually existing
beings, so he did at times include empirical claims in his analysis. Some of
these empirical claims are quite general and uncontroversial (e.g. that there
are a plurality of human beings living on the limited surface of a sphere)
while others are more specific to Kant’s own time, place, and individual biases
(e.g. his views on women).
Immanuel Kant’s political philosophy
Political philosophy is not only a branch of Kant’s practical philosophy, it strongly depends upon Kant’s core practical philosophy for its basis. Kant’s practical philosophy and the categorical imperative that governs it were intended to form the ground not only for what is thought today to be ethics proper but also for everything that broadly speaking had to do with deliberative human behavior. He defined practical philosophy as that concerned with “rules of behavior in regard to free choice”, as opposed to theoretical philosophy that concerned “the rule of knowledge” (Kant 27: 243). Practical philosophy provided rules to govern human deliberative action. The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals provided Kant’s main arguments that the categorical imperative is the supreme rule for human deliberative action. In its Preface, he notes that the Groundwork is to be a preparatory book for a future Metaphysics of Morals. Twelve years later he published that Metaphysics of Morals in two parts, the “Doctrine of Right” and the “Doctrine of Virtue”. Both are equally parts of Kant’s practical philosophy, and both thus have the categorical imperative as their highest principle.
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