Kant's Political Philosophy

Matt Qvortrup explains how the Enlightenment's leading philosopher went looking for a bit of peace.

- Matt Qvortrup

The newspaper Gothanische gelernte Zeitungen was slightly sarcastic when it wrote about Immanuel Kant in 1784, "It is a favourite idea of Herr Professor Kant that the ultimate goal of the human race is the establishment of a perfect constitution." But in fairness, Kant did get rather carried away when he wrote about politics. "It is so sweet to dream up state constitutions that meet the demands of reason," he wrote almost wistfully (Conflict of the Faculties, 1794, p.159).

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was clearly obsessed with politics, especially in the later stage of his life. Yet for most students of philosophy, he is not seen as a political philosopher. Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was not alone in opining that, "Unlike so many other philosophers - Plato, Aristotle, Thomas [Aquinas], Spinoza, Hegel, and others - he never wrote a political philosophy" (Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 1982, p.7). This assessment is not quite fair. In fact, Kant's books The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Towards Perpetual Peace (1795), and the shorter essay The Idea of Universal History (1784) are all works of political theory. And elsewhere in his Werke there are references that are overtly political and some that certainly fall under the heading of social commentary. For starters, few philosophers have written more famous political lines than "It is the spirit of trade [der Handelsgeist], which cannot coexist with war, which will sooner or later take hold of every people" (Towards Perpetual Peace, p.65).