13 - Social Demands: Kant and the Possibility of Community

Summary

Theoretically, the tendency to the tyrannical can be detected in almost all great thinkers. (Kant is the great exception.)

Hannah Arendt, Letters 1925–1975, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger

Virtually every account of the history of Western political philosophy accords Immanuel Kant a prominent place among the thinkers responsible for our conceptions of liberty, justice, and the social contract. Although best known as a metaphysician or aesthetician, Kant remains at least as central to ongoing debates about rights and equality as Locke, Rousseau, or Mill. His commitment to deontological ethics and to a substantive link between morality and reason, his insistence on treating people as ends rather than means, and his affirmation of individual autonomy as a key to understanding human praxis are all widely accepted positions that seem to fit comfortably into the paradigms of self-interested agency prevalent in contemporary liberal democratic theory and neoclassical economics.

The legacy of Kant's political thought is somewhat complicated by the fact that he is frequently cited as an authority by critics undertaking a wholesale reevaluation of his positions. Nowhere is this tendency to celebrate Kant's work by transforming it more in evidence than in the perceived need to revise our characterizations of social dynamics by unsettling the preeminence he accords the autonomous individual.