Kant's Political Liberalism: Right, Freedom, and Public Reason

Abstract

According to John Rawls s political liberalism, the exercise of political power should be justified by appeal to political values and principles that all citizens can reasonably be expected to share. I argue that we find a similar way of thinking about political legitimacy and justification in Immanuel Kant. Thus I defend the thesis that Kant s conception of right can be interpreted as a form of political liberalism. This goes against Rawls s own verdict as well as much Kant scholarship, where it is often argued that Kant s principles of right are derived from the ethical principle of the Categorical Imperative, or that Kant s view of political justification is not in fact liberal and democratic. The defense of my heterodox thesis hinges mainly on two arguments. First, I argue that Kant s principles of right are tailor-made for the essentially political problem of enabling reciprocal relations of external freedom, and are not derived from or based on his broader ethical theory. Second, I argue that Kant s claim that laws are justified only if all citizens could consent to them, taken together with his account of popular sovereignty, can be seen to express an idea of public reason similar to Rawls s. These claims support the conclusion that Kant s view is both liberal and political; in some ways even more liberal and political than Rawls s. On the background of that conclusion, I consider the distinctive features of Kant s political liberalism and its merits. I show that whereas Kant sets out to justify the institutions of the liberal state, Rawls takes them as given starting points for political justification. With respect to this, I conclude that Rawls leaves the question of authority unanswered, and that Kant s theory therefore secures an important advantage.