Kant’s Political Philosophy as a Theory of Non-Ideal Normativity

Kant-Studien ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 107 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Horn

Abstract:Kant’s political philosophy confronts its interpreters with a crucial difficulty: it is far from clear if (or how) Kant, in his political theory, makes use of the Categorical Imperative (CI). It is notoriously demanding to clarify the relationship that exists between his political thought on the one hand and the ethics of the

1956 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 475-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Eckstein

The issues which arose during the discussions of the conference fall fairly conveniently into three compartments.First, we obviously had to settle, with reasonable clarity, what we were talking about: what “political philosophy” is, what “political science” is, and whether they are really distinguishable. The basic issue of the conference was to determine the relevance of the one to the study of the other, and if we had decided that they were really the same thing, there would simply have been no problems for us to discuss. On the whole, we felt that a valid, if not necessarily sharp, distinction was to be made between the “philosophical” and the “scientific” approaches to the study of politics and that we were not discussing absurd or tautological issues. We agreed, however, that all types of political inquiry involve the construction of theory, implicit or explicit, and that the title “political theory” has been unjustifiably appropriated by the historians of political thought.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Matthew Dinan

Abstract Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling has traditionally attracted interest from scholars of political theory for its apparent hostility to political philosophy, and more recently for its compatibility with Marxism. This paper argues for a reconsideration of Kierkegaard's potential contributions to political theory by suggesting that the work's shortcomings belong to its pseudonymous author, Johannes de Silentio, and are in fact intended by Kierkegaard. Attentiveness to the literary development of the pseudonym allows us to see a Kierkegaard who is a deeper and more direct critic of Hegel's political philosophy than is usually presumed. By creating a pseudonym whose argument ultimately fails, Kierkegaard employs Socratic irony in order to point readers to the need to recover Socratic political philosophy as the appropriate adjunct to the faith of Abraham, and as an alternative to Hegelian, and post-Hegelian, political thought.


2018 ◽  
Vol 91 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Nelson

Most scholarship on the ideology of the American Revolution asks the question: “What did American patriots think about politics”? But The Ideological Origins asks instead: “ How did patriots think about politics”? At issue here is the distinction between political theory and political consciousness. Once we get this distinction properly into view, we can rethink the relationship between two great, and apparently rivalrous, historiographies on early American political thought.


Author(s):  
Simon J. G. Burton

Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex remains a source of perennial fascination for historians of political thought. Written in 1644 in the heat of the Civil Wars it constitutes an intellectual and theological justification of the entire Covenanting movement and a landmark in the development of Protestant political theory. Rutherford’s argument in the Lex Rex was deeply indebted to scholastic and Conciliarist sources, and this chapter examines the way he deployed these, especially the political philosophy of John Mair and Jacques Almain, in order to construct a covenantal model of kingship undergirded by an interwoven framework of individual and communal rights. In doing so it shows the ongoing influence of the Conciliarist tradition on Scottish political discourse and also highlights unexpected connections between Rutherford’s Covenanting and his Augustinian and Scotistic theology of grace and freedom.


Author(s):  
Nathan Widder

This chapter examines Friedrich Nietzsche's political philosophy, first by focusing on his claim that the ‘death of God’ inaugurates modern nihilism. It then explains Nietzsche's significance for political theory by situating him, on the one hand, against the Platonist and Christian traditions that dominate political philosophy and, on the other hand, with contemporary attempts to develop a new political theory of difference. The chapter also considers Nietzsche's genealogical method and proceeds by analysing the three essays of On the Genealogy of Morals, along with his views on good and bad, good and evil, slave morality, the ascetic ideal, and the nihilism of modern secularism. Finally, it reviews contemporary interpretations of Nietzsche's relation and relevance to political theory and how his philosophy has inspired a broader set of trends that has come to be known as ‘the ontological turn in political theory’.


Author(s):  
Duncan Kelly

This chapter reconstructs the intellectual-historical background to Carl Schmitt’s well-known analysis of the problem of dictatorship and the powers of the Reichspräsident under the Weimar Constitution. The analysis focuses both on Schmitt’s wartime propaganda work, concerning a distinction between the state of siege and dictatorship, as well as on his more general analysis of modern German liberalism. It demonstrates why Schmitt attempted to produce a critical history of the history of modern political thought with the concept of dictatorship at its heart and how he came to distinguish between commissarial and sovereign forms of dictatorship to attack liberalism and liberal democracy. The chapter also focuses on the conceptual reworking of the relationship between legitimacy and dictatorship that Schmitt produced by interweaving the political thought of the Abbé Sieyès and the French Revolution into his basic rejection of contemporary liberal and socialist forms of politics.


2001 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANTONIO FRANCESCHET

This article explores a fundamental division among contemporary liberal internationalists regarding the relationship between state sovereignty and the goal of freedom. The article suggests that, in spite of his popular status among a wide variety of contemporary liberal international theorists, Immanuel Kant's political philosophy is an extraordinarily ambiguous ‘legacy’ because of the dualistic doctrine of state sovereignty to which he subscribed. Kant's thought is committed to state sovereignty while providing the grounds for a profound critique of its existence. The reason that sovereignty is ambiguous in Kant's political theory is that it is justified by his bifurcated understanding of human freedom.


2005 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul E. Sigmund

The title, God, Locke, and Equality, as well as its controversial thesis about the necessity of a theological foundation for equality are designed to startle and provoke. Yet those who have kept up with Locke scholarship (not an easy job since there are 5–10 new books on Locke each year, and over 9000 articles have been published about his work) will recognize that in recent years, its topic, the relation of Locke's religious beliefs to his politics, has become an important theme in the interpretation of Locke's political philosophy. This article will attempt to place the book in the context of this literature and evaluate its contribution to the growing number of studies.In the early years of what John Pocock once called “the Locke industry,” Locke's religious beliefs did not get much attention. The two most influential interpretations of his political thought portrayed him either as a crypto-Hobbesian hedonist, or an apologist for capitalist exploitation, ignoring or explaining away his commitment to Christianity. It is true that John Dunn in his book on Locke's political theory made much (perhaps too much) of Locke's Calvinist upbringing, only to dismiss his political thought as so dominated by a religious worldview that it is irrelevant today.


2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 135-146
Author(s):  
Ivan Mladenovic

In this paper I will explore the importance of making the difference between the reasonable and the rational for normative political theory. The starting point of my analysis is Rawls?s distinction between the rational and the reasonable in his later political philosophy. For Rawls one of the main characteristics of reasonable persons is that they are able to offer the justifications for their actions, but also for fair principles of cooperation, in terms of reasons that all can accept. There are many criticisms of this view of reasonable persons and its role within normative political theory. My main concern, however, is whether the presupposition of reasonableness is necessary if one already assumes that all individuals are rational. I will argue that not only the reasonable, but the relationship between the reasonable and the rational is crucially important for normative political theory.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 49-58
Author(s):  
Irene Viparelli

Why transdisciplinary theory seems to be indifferent to political thought; focusing mainly on the domains of epistemology, ethics and education? Searching a response, we will divided the analyse into three fundamental moments: first, we will try to clarify what’s “transdisciplinarity”. Then, we will explore the relationship between transdisciplinarity and disciplinary knowledge, focusing on the specific relationship between transdisciplinarity and political science. Finally, we will advance two hypotheses: on the one hand, we’ll demonstrate that “politics” is “the removed” of transdisciplinarity, on the other hand, we’ll suggest the need of a “politicization” of transdisciplinary theory to achieve its main objective: being a theory involved in the transformation of the world Resumo O questionamento em torno das condições de possibilidade e das consequências duma abordagem transdisciplinar da política embate logo no problema da essencial indiferença da transdisciplinaridade face ao pensamento político; a reflexão transdisciplinar focando-se até agora principalmente nos domínios da epistemologia, da ética, da educação. A nossa análise dividir-se-á em três momentos fundamentais: em primeiro lugar, e de forma preliminar, cuidaremos de esclarecer o que é para intender com “transdisciplinaridade”. Em seguida, especificando a nossa investigação, levaremos a cabo uma análise da relação entre transdisciplinaridade e saberes disciplinares, focando o olhar quer na relação geral entre transdisciplinaridade e ciências humanas quer na específica entre a transdisciplinaridade e a ciência política. Por fim, avançaremos duas hipóteses fundamentais, estritamente ligadas entre elas: por um lado a de que o “político” representa o “removido” da transdisciplinaridade, por outro, e por conseguinte, a de que apenas uma “politização” do dispositivo teórico transdisciplinar lhe permitiria alcançar o seu principal objetivo: tornar-se uma teoria capaz de desempenhar um papel ativo na transformação do mundo.


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