Abstract
Human freedom is at the core of Kant’s thought. We cannot adequately explain any particular aspect of his legacy without ultimately viewing it in relation to this concept—what Kant claims is the “keystone” of his critical philosophy. The present chapter reconstructs and interprets the central place of freedom in shaping Kant’s theory of justice and thereby develops a conceptual framework. This framework will explain the place of sovereignty in Kant’s vision of justice. It is because freedom is the ground, and therefore the justification, for Kant’s vision of political reform that this mode of analysis is justified.
The concept of freedom… is the keystone of the whole architecture of the system of pure reason and even of speculative reason.
—Kant1
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Notes
Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 121, 131.
See for example John Gray, “Introduction,” in Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy, ed. Zbigniew Pelczynski and John Gray (London: The Arnione Press, 1984), 5.
Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, 4th ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993), 14–17.
Howard Williams, Kant’s Political Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 68.
Otfried Höffe, Immanuel Kant, trans. Marshall Farrier (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 174
see also Otfried Höffe, “Even a Nation of Devils Needs the State: the Dilemma of Natural Justice,” in Essays on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Howard Williams (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992), 128.
See Thomas W Pogge, “Kant’s Theory of Justice,” Kant-Studien 79, 4 (1988): 409f.
Again these terms bear a surface resemblance to those used by Berlin. Few have done more to clarify the different ways in which Kant speaks of freedom than Lewis White Beck, “Kant’s Two Concepts of the Will in Their Political Context,” in Kant and Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner and William James Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 38–49.
Bernard Carnois, The Coherence of Kant’s Doctrine of Freedom, trans. David Booth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 47.
G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 89.
also William Galston, “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Kant’s Practical Philosophy,” in Kant and Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner and William James Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 214.
Leslie Arthur Mulholland, Kant’s System of Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 3.
Allen D. Rosen, Kant’s Theory of Justice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 10
See Pierre Laberge, “Kant on Justice and the Law of Nations,” in International Society: Diverse Ethical Perspectives, ed. David R. Mapel and Terry Nardin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 87.
For Rousseau’s formulation of freedom, see The Social Contract, trans. G. D. H. Cole (London: Everyman’s Library, 1986), 195–196.
Patrick Riley, “Elements of Kant’s Practical Philosophy,” in Kant and Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner and William James Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 20.
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© 2002 Antonio Franceschet
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Franceschet, A. (2002). The Ethico-Political Ambiguity of Kantian Freedom. In: Kant and Liberal Internationalism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07853-7_3
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