Between Revolution and Reaction: The Political Significance of Kant’s Doctrine of the Idea

1 Introduction

Kant’s political theory is hard to pin down. His supposedly final and most systematic statement on legal and political philosophy, the Doctrine of Right (1797–1798), has a longstanding reputation of frustrating and disappointing its readers.^[1] Kant’s response to the most important political phenomenon of his day, the French Revolution, involves a perplexing combination of enthusiastic support for its republican principles with a staunch opposition to the right of resistance. Given this ambiguity, it is unsurprising that aspects of Kant’s political thought have been characterized as everything from proto-Marxist^[2] to liberal^[3] and conservative.^[4]

In this essay, I aim to shed light on the matter by focusing on two features of Kant’s account of practical ideas of reason in the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason that continue to play a crucial role in his mature political philosophy. The first feature is Kant’s appropriation of the idea of the Platonic republic as the a priori paradigm of a perfectly rightful state that can and should guide the development of existing regimes. The second feature is the strictly regulative function Kant attributes to ideas of practical perfection such as the republic, which allows him to solve a conflict between dogmatic and skeptical conceptions of a priori norms.

In the first Critique, Kant’s presents Plato’s idea of the perfect republic as a mean between dogmatism and skepticism in metaphysics. Similarly, in the 1790s, Kant positions his call for the gradual reform of existing states in accordance with the a priori norm of a fully self-legislating republic as a mean between radical Jacobinism and reactionary conservatism during the French Revolution. This parallel is not accidental. As I will argue, Kant sees a correspondence between the conflicting standpoints of the dogmatists and the skeptics and that of revolutionaries and conservatives. That is, while neither the dogmatist/Jacobin revolutionary nor the skeptic/conservative are completely correct, both raise claims against the other party that Kant integrates into his own view, thus overcoming their respective limitations.^[5] As a result, Kant’s political theory can be founded upon pure, rational principles that avoid both uncompromising revolutionary enthusiasm for abstract ideals and conservative doubts about the applicability of a priori norms to experience.

This essay draws on two approaches to Kant’s political philosophy in the scholarship. First, unlike most commentators, Günter Zöller has emphasized the relevance of Kant’s interpretation of Plato’s Republic in the first Critique to his political thought.^[6] Second, Reidar Maliks has presented Kant’s political views in the 1790s as a centrist standpoint relative to his contemporaries on the left and the right, all of whom were assessing the divisive implications of the French Revolution.^[7] This paper brings these interpretive strands together by arguing that Kant’s appropriation of the Platonic idea of the republic in the first Critique is not only crucial to understanding his later political theory, but also serves as the pivot by which Kant distinguishes his views from those of his political opponents. The consequence of this analysis is a better appreciation for a key point of continuity in Kant’s thinking—his Platonism in politics—and its position in the political debates of his day.^[8]

My argument will proceed as follows. I will start by outlining Kant’s account of the Platonic republic in the Critique (Section 2) and its relationship to his dismissal of dogmatism and skepticism in metaphysics (Section 3). Next, I will move on to Kant’s first dedicated statement on politics after 1789, i. e., Part Two of the “Theory and Practice” essay (Sections 4–6). In Section 4, I argue that Kant’s unpublished drafts for “Theory and Practice” indicate that, building on the first Critique, he seeks to rebut the political ramifications of dogmatic and skeptical conceptions of practical ideas. Yet Kant now targets a different version of anti-Platonic skepticism, namely, the arguments of the dissident Kantian A. W. Rehberg against the allegedly violent, metaphysical fanaticism of the French revolutionaries. In Sections 5 and 6, I show how Kant replies to Rehberg in “Theory and Practice.” Here, my focus will be on Kant’s extension of his doctrine of the idea to the social contract and its criterion of political legitimacy, the general will. I argue that Kant’s insistence on the status of the original contract as a regulative idea allows him to respond to Rehberg’s anti-revolutionary skepticism while distinguishing his political views from the dogmatic zeal for abstract principles supposedly animating Jacobinism.

2 The Idea of the Platonic Republic in the Critique of Pure Reason

It is easy to overlook that the first intimations of Kant’s political philosophy among his published writings are found neither in the 1784 essays on enlightenment and the philosophy of history nor in the Groundwork, but in the excursus on Plato in the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason, titled “On the Ideas in General” (KrV, A 312–20/B 368–377).^[9]

Kant’s main concern in this section is to retrieve the original, Platonic meaning of ‘idea’ and appropriate it as a technical term for the critical philosophy. Kant’s notion of the ‘idea’ differs from the prevailing conception in two regards. On the one hand, Kant departs from philosophers such as Descartes and Locke who use the word ‘idea’ to denote all types of representation and thus do not discriminate between their origins and functions in human cognition (KrV, A 320/B 377).^[10] On the other hand, Kant presents the idea as a unique product of the faculty of reason that is distinct from both the a priori forms of intuition and the pure categories of the understanding. Ideas are purely intellectual models of unconditioned, maximal perfection for which there can be no corresponding object in experience (KrV, A 313–314/B 370–371). For Kant, the Platonic idea clearly exceeds the parameters of human knowledge established in the Transcendental Aesthetic and Analytic. The bulk of the Dialectic is thus devoted to exposing the illusory character of the transcendental ideas of the soul, the world, and God engendered by pure reason in its speculative use.

Despite the overwhelmingly negative aim of the Dialectic, Kant’s comments on Plato contain a positive appraisal of certain ideas that “nonetheless have their reality and are by no means mere figments of the brain (Hirngespinste)” (KrV, A 314/B 371). According to Kant, while Plato posited the existence of ideas in the theoretical domains of mathematics and the philosophy of nature, he “found his ideas preeminently (vorzüglich) in everything that is practical, i. e., in what rests on freedom” (KrV, A 314/B 371; cf. A 471–472/B 499–500; MSI, 2:396). Though not the chief focus of the Dialectic, the notion of an idea of practical perfection that is possible through freedom, supposedly inherited from Plato, is of crucial importance to Kant.

Kant gives two examples of practical ideas: virtue and the Platonic republic, both of which he sets out to defend against the charge of fantasy and impracticability. It is with the second example that the political import of the Dialectic comes in. Now, Kant does not defend any specific features of the Platonic kallipolis, about which he shows a limited understanding.^[11] Instead, he defines the idea of the republic in a novel way as a “constitution providing for the greatest human freedom according to laws that permit the freedom of each to exist together with that of others” (KrV, A 316/B 373). This definition bears little resemblance to anything put forward in Plato’s Republic. On the contrary, it introduces the principle of reciprocally lawful freedom that will become the hallmark of Kant’s Doctrine of Right (MS, 6:230–231). But Kant hardly disguises his lack of fidelity to Plato. Openly disavowing a “literary investigation” into Plato’s writings, Kant says that when considering the position of an author, “it is not at all unusual to find that we understand him even better than he understood himself,” with the result that he “sometimes spoke, or even thought, contrary to his own intention” (KrV, A 313–314/B 370). So while Kant is indebted to Plato for proposing that there is an a priori idea of the perfect republic, the details of Plato’s version of the archetype of the state do not really concern him.

It might seem as if Kant’s digression on Plato and the idea of the republic is a curious but inessential feature of the Dialectic, but this would be a mistake. In the “Universal History” essay of 1784, Kant rebrands his definition of the Platonic republic from the Critique as “a perfectly just civil constitution” (IaG, 8:22). Though it cannot be fully attained in experience, Kant construes the perfect polity as a morally obligatory aim of humanity towards which we are unknowingly driven by the “hidden plan of nature” revealed by his idea of history (IaG, 8:27). Similarly, the Doctrine of Right refers to the a priori norm by which to measure the rightfulness of actual civil unions as “the state in the idea” or the “form of a state as such” (MS, 6:313).^[12] This norm is also described as a “pure republic” that fully aligns with the idea of the original contract, the advent of which is “the final end” of public right that ought to guide the legislation of current regimes (MS, 6:340–341).

The ‘Platonic’ provenance of this idea of the republic is re-affirmed in The Conflict of the Faculties (1798). Kant calls a political community that completely harmonizes with the rational idea of a constitution in which citizens are obedient solely to self-given laws a Platonic ideal (ein platonisches Ideal), or respublica noumenon (SF, 7:90–91). In line with the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant insists that this Platonic ideal “is not an empty figment of the brain (Hirngespinnst), but rather the eternal norm for all civil organization.”^[13] Accordingly, rulers have a duty to bring the existing polity, or respublica phaenomenon, into conformity with the Platonic ideal, even if the former will necessarily remain an imperfect representation of the latter.

Kant’s appropriation of the idea of the Platonic republic in the first Critique thus introduces a theme that runs throughout his political writings. In the next section, we will see that Kant’s emphasis on the strictly regulative function of practical ideas involves political implications that Kant will continue to draw on in the 1790s.

3 Between Dogmatism and Skepticism: The Political Dimension of Regulative Ideas of Practical Reason

Kant often presents the critical endeavor as a third approach to metaphysics that resolves the stalemate between dogmatism and skepticism.^[14] This is evident throughout the Transcendental Dialectic, including in his treatment of the Platonic idea.

Both the dogmatist and the skeptic, Kant argues, make the mistake of assuming that practical ideas of reason refer to objects of human freedom that can be fully realized in experience. The dogmatist affirms this proposition, while the skeptic doubts it. Kant’s strategy is to broker a compromise. Practical ideas have a strictly regulative function in that they promulgate models of perfection that are unattainable in experience, but still possible as products of unconditioned, rational freedom (KrV, A 314–315/B 371, A 317–319/B 374–375). On this view, the idea of moral perfection exemplified by the Stoic sage is, as the skeptic would argue, found “merely in thoughts” and therefore lacks “objective reality (existence).” Nonetheless, as the dogmatist would argue, such ideas are not “mere figments of the brain (Hirngespinste),” but “have practical power” as principles “grounding the possibility of the perfection of certain actions” through freedom (KrV, A 569/B 597).^[15] Understood as regulative principles of practical reason, ideas obtain their validity by commanding human beings to engage in an open-ended process of approaching an unachievable end of moral perfection.^[16] Both the dogmatist and the skeptic are thus given their partial due in Kant’s ‘preeminently practical’ reconstruction of the Platonic idea. If he is right, the dogmatist and the skeptic should be able to drop their dispute and recognize the merits and mistakes of both of their positions revealed by transcendental idealism.

The same logic is at work in Kant’s conception of another practical idea, namely, the republic. Kant’s chief focus in the passage on Plato’s Republic in the first Critique is skepticism. According to Kant, the skeptic rightly stresses that ideas transcend the boundaries of experience, yet wrongly concludes that the a priori model of the perfect polity is useless. This skeptical brand of anti-Platonism in politics was apparently commonplace, for Kant presents the Platonic republic as a proverbial instance (Sprichwort) of the vacuity of the philosophical imagination (KrV, A 316/B 372).

Yet Kant also mentions the particular repudiation of the Republic by Johann Jakob Brucker in his Historia critica philosophiae. The Historia is often described as the main source for Kant’s knowledge of Plato.^[17] Interestingly, Brucker has little to say about the Republic, which might explain Kant’s lack of familiarity with its details.^[18] According to Brucker, the Republic is not a work of serious political philosophy, but just another manifestation of the “philosophical enthusiasm (enthusiasmo philosophico)” that infects the entirety of Platonism by virtue of its unifying, systematic principle, i. e., the doctrine of ideas (1:695, 726). Though Brucker’s treatment of the latter is complex and rather idiosyncratic, his basic criticism is that ideas are obscure, mystical entities whose philosophical meaning was incomprehensible to even Plato himself (1:663–664). On his account, by arguing that the kallipolis consists in the rule of philosophers, who are distinguished from others precisely by their insight into the ideas, Plato compounded absurdity with absurdity in the Republic (1:670, 672n, 701). As Brucker sums up, “the whole republic, along with all of its laws, is the work of the most fanatical of men, and so government is left to those who seek the common good through the metaphysical games and trifles of their minds” (1:726).^[19]

Kant replies to skeptical dismissals of the Platonic republic by Brucker et al. by claiming that if one excludes a priori standards of perfection from politics, then the only remaining evaluative standpoint is the vulgar (pöbelhaft) measure of experience (KrV, 316/B 373). This invites two dangers, both of which Kant will continue to criticize throughout the 1790s.

First, Kant argues that appeals to the absolute authority of experience in political theory are nothing more than capitulations to an arbitrary status quo designed to arrest all progress. The supposed inefficacy of ideas in the political sphere does not arise from the recalcitrant limitations of human nature, but from “neglect of the true ideas in the giving of laws,” which “frustrat[es] all good intentions by using crude concepts in place of ideas, just because these concepts were drawn from experience” (KrV, A 316–17/B 373). “[I]t is most reprehensible,” Kant goes on, “to derive the laws concerning what I ought to do from what is done, or to want to limit it to that,” since “it is freedom that can go beyond every proposed boundary” (KrV, A 318–19/B 375, A 317/B 374).

Second, Kant distinguishes his political stance from a prominent alternative, the paternalistic politics of the Wolffian tradition, which can in principle excuse despotism by invoking a higher, empirical justification for the state, namely, eudaimonism. Whereas the Wolffians defined the perfect polity by the prerogative of its ruler to bring about “the greatest happiness” of her subjects, Kant, as mentioned above, argues that the perfect polity establishes the maximal co-existence of lawful freedom for each person (KrV, A 316/B 373). Rather than making the empirical standard of happiness the aim of the exercise of political authority, Kant claims that happiness “would follow of itself” from a constitution that enshrines the greatest possible degree of rightful freedom for all.

In the Dialectic, Kant mostly defends what he presents as the practical dimension of Platonism. The proper dignity (eigentümliche Würde) of philosophy, he says, consists in upholding the practical ‘ought’ of the idea over the ‘is’ of empirical standards (KrV, A 318/B 375). Yet Kant’s support for Plato is far from unqualified, which brings us to the analysis of dogmatism in the Dialectic that will reappear in Kant’s political writings.

According to Kant, Plato was not only the progenitor of ideas of reason, but also a dogmatic metaphysician who professed insight into a supersensible realm of objects. Plato “abandoned the world of the senses because it set such narrow limits for the understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of the pure understanding” (KrV, A 5/B 9).^[20] Yet Plato “did not notice that he made no headway by his efforts” in the supersensible ether, for, as a dogmatic metaphysician, “he had no resistance, no support” (KrV, A 5/B 9) from “an antecedent examination of the capacity or incapacity of reason for such a great undertaking” (KrV, A 3/B 7). Accordingly, in the Dialectic, Kant contrasts his “milder interpretation” of the ideas as strictly regulative principles to Plato’s “mystical deduction” of them and “the exaggerated way in which he hypostatized them” (KrV, A 314n/B 371n). Likewise, in the Prolegomena, Kant imputes a fantastical or enthusiastic (schwärmerisch) character to Platonic idealism since it uncritically asserts the possibility of a priori cognition through intellectual intuition (Prol, 4:375n).^[21] This dogmatic claim that ideas are fully accessible to the human mind renders Plato “the father of all enthusiasm (Schwärmerei) by way of philosophy” (VT, 8:398; cf. KU, 5:363–364).

As these passages suggest, Kant does not entirely disregard Brucker’s charge of enthusiasmo philosophico. Indeed, in a pair of unpublished notes dated to the 1780s, Kant phrases his typical critique of Platonic metaphysics in terms of its “philosophical enthusiasm” (R 6050–6051, 18:434–448). “The origin of all philosophical enthusiasm (Schwärmerey),” as he puts it, “lies in Plato’s original divine intuitions […] of the ideas” (R 6051, 18:437).^[22] Despite Kant’s appeal to Platonism for his conception of ideas of reason, Plato the dogmatist fails to observe the central conclusion of the Dialectic: transcendental idealism requires that a priori ideas are merely regulative and not constitutive. In this sense, Kant agrees with Brucker that Plato is plagued by a delusive belief in the complete reality and knowability of ideas.

For Kant, the dogmatic enthusiasm that led Plato to insist that ideas are fully cognizable is not just an error in the theoretical domain, but in the moral domain as well. While the ideal of virtue serves as a model of moral perfection by which to orient and assess human conduct, Kant cautions that the attempt to completely realize the ideal in a concrete example, like “the sage in a novel,” is not only unfeasible, but counters “what is good in the idea […] by making it similar to a mere fiction” (KrV, A 570/B 598). In a similar passage in the second Critique, Kant labels the “overstepping of the bounds that practical pure reason sets to humanity” through the invention of “fancied moral perfections” moral enthusiasm (Schwärmerei), which he associates with the Stoics.^[23]

Kant often criticizes Plato’s conception of the highest good, understood as a mystical union of the soul with the divine, in comparable terms. According to a transcript of Kant’s ethics lectures, the Platonic highest good “is an ideal that cannot be reached. Plato made this ideal a reality. This ethics can also be called the fantastical and enthusiastic (schwärmerisch) ethics” (V-Mo/Collins, 27:305; cf. 250).^[24] Here, Kant again follows Brucker by applying the allegation of enthusiasm for the supersensible to Plato’s ethics. Brucker presented the Platonic summum bonum as the liberation of the rational part of the soul from the fetters of the body and its union with God through the intellectual intuition of the ideas. For Brucker, Plato’s conception of the highest good is a Pythagorean perversion of Socratic moral philosophy and another example of his “philosophical enthusiasm.”^[25]

In sum, Kant’s appropriation of the Platonic idea to refer to regulative norms of practical reason involves a synthesis of the seemingly irreconcilable standpoints of the dogmatist and the skeptic. While dogmatists correctly recognize the practical import of the idea, and thus elevate the principles of morality and politics to the standard of pure reason, they wrongly affirm that human beings can fully achieve a priori models of practical perfection, a symptom of unchecked philosophical enthusiasm for the reality of speculative abstractions. Conversely, while the doubts of the skeptic rightly chasten human reason for its unfounded excursions into the supersensible, the skeptic errs in completely rejecting the applicability of ideas to reality, and so confines moral and political norms to the impoverished domain of experience.

In what follows, I argue that Kant’s analysis of dogmatism and skepticism in the Dialectic informs his response to his political adversaries in the 1790s. A key change is that the charge of outsized enthusiasm for unrealizable ideals that Kant levies against Plato becomes a prominent conservative argument against the French revolutionaries voiced by A. W. Rehberg. In articulating a theory of rational political principles after 1789, Kant will now have to rebut the accusation of radical Schwärmerei. This defense, we will see, entails a renewed vindication of the regulative role of ideas in politics.

4 The Origins of the “Theory and Practice” Essay: Kant vs. Kästner and Rehberg

Kant was an ardent, if circumspect, supporter of the French Revolution.^[26] Yet it took until September 1793, over four years after many of the most dramatic episodes of 1789, for Kant to publish a statement on politics as Part Two of “Theory and Practice.” Earlier that year, he had turned down the invitation to issue an updated version of the 1784 “Universal History” essay “with addenda directed to current affairs,” citing the delicate political climate (Br, 11:416–417). What might have motivated Kant, then, to overcome his hesitancy and finally weigh in on controversial political matters?^[27] A clue can be found in Kant’s unpublished drafts for “Theory and Practice.”

In one passage, Kant considers the recent reactions to the Revolution by A. G. Kästner and A. W. Rehberg (VATP, 23:127).^[28] Kant first mentions a “professor of mathematics” who defends “science” against the accusation of playing a role in revolutions.^[29] Commentators have taken this remark as a reference to Kästner’s 1793 pamphlet Gedanken über das Unvermögen der Schriftsteller Empörungen zu bewirken.^[30] Kästner was a professor at Göttingen whose work in mathematics Kant knew and respected.^[31] Kästner’s aim in the Gedanken is to refute the notion that the doctrines of famed philosophers are responsible for the outbreaks of popular insurrections during the French Revolution.^[32] His key example is Rousseau, who was alleged to be the radical “teacher of freedom and equality” animating the Revolution (Kästner 1793, 16). According to Kästner, the poor, ignorant masses behind the popular revolts in France are not ruled by their heads, but by their hearts and stomachs. They are unable and unwilling to devote themselves to reading and understanding complex philosophical texts. No sans-culottes stormed the Bastille because they mastered Montesquieu or Rousseau (20–21); the Revolution is thus “not the work of philosophical writers” (18). Rather, the upheaval in France is the product of a mindless, discontented rabble, whose wanton violence against the king and the aristocracy has shown that it is not fit to rule, but only to obey (31–32).

Kästner also mocks “German writers” who believe that their publications on fashionable topics like “pedagogy, enlightenment, critical philosophy, [and] human rights” can “disrupt (kippeln) the state of affairs in their fatherland” (24–25). Although Kant is not mentioned by name and had yet to weigh in on the Revolution, the implication is that the critical philosophy is no more a vehicle for popular agitation and political change than The Social Contract.^[33] For Kästner, then, ‘critical philosophers’ belong among the feckless Aufklärer who “rolled their empty barrels, though not entirely like Diogenes, for whom it was satire, since they believed themselves to be doing something serious” (25). In Kästner’s judgment, these writers were ultimately uninterested in challenging the status quo, for many of them “sang of freedom, decorated themselves with the liberty cap (Pariser Kappe), and admonished the princes, all the while allowing themselves to take the bread that the princes gave to them.” Kästner thus rejects what was already a common view for many young radicals in Germany, namely, that Kant’s critical philosophy could provide moral and intellectual support for the revolutionary cause in France.^[34]

In the passage cited above, Kant alludes to “the recent but unanswered accusation against metaphysics that it could be the cause of political revolutions (Staatsrevolutionen)” (VATP, 23:127).^[35] Here, Kant seems to have in mind his younger follower A. W. Rehberg, author of Untersuchungen über die Französische Revolution (1793).^[36] In contrast to Kästner, Rehberg argues that “metaphysical speculations” dealing with politics cannot be dismissed as laughable reveries (Träumereien) that do not impact the real world (Rehberg 1793, 1:4). On the contrary, he holds that “metaphysics has smashed the French monarchy to pieces and brought about a revolution, the like of which has never been seen before” (1:5). By ‘metaphysics,’ Rehberg means theories that apply the a priori norm of a self-given moral law to the political domain (1:2–3). The chief example of such theories is Rousseau’s Social Contract, which transforms the moral standard of rational self-determination into the claim that no one, including the state, may rightfully “compel [another] to do anything that is not prescribed to him by his own reason” (1:6). Accordingly, Rousseau argues that the general will is the sole foundation of legitimate political authority, for it is only in a state in which citizens are subject solely to self-given laws that “each one, while uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before,” that is, as in the state of nature.^[37] For Rehberg, the task of bringing about a commonwealth that accords with Rousseau’s formula is “the problem of a perfect civil constitution” (1:7). On Rehberg’s view, reason thus prescribes a single paradigm for a just state that ought to be implemented everywhere, regardless of any empirical differences in the nations and peoples to which it is meant to apply (1:2).

For Rehberg, the main problem with Rousseau’s position is less its theoretical validity per se than its applicability, a shortcoming evidenced by the French revolutionaries. Both Rousseau and his radical followers in France fail to fully acknowledge that their criterion of self-legislation is an entirely abstract, formal principle that cannot be realized in experience (1:8–9). Pure reason, Rehberg insists, can only specify the general form of things, but not their particular matter or object. But “form exists nowhere without matter, and the principles of natural right, which are entirely clear and demonstrable in the abstract, are therefore unable to be fully and precisely applied to the real world in their clear, abstract purity” (1:14). Even if they are formally valid, rational norms require the aid of empirical considerations for their application to concrete situations, a provision that Rehberg says Rousseau acknowledges but does not always observe in The Social Contract (1:14).^[38] The issue with the general will is that its standard of a rational, public interest of the people divorced from all private inclination cannot be implemented among actual human beings for whom passion, and not reason, is truly sovereign. As he puts it, the “right of universal legislation” defended by Rousseau does not apply to concrete human beings, but “only to reason itself, which may well reside in each human being, but is found nowhere in its complete purity” (1:8). As such, The Social Contract outlines a system without a possible referent in experience, and so amounts to “a splendid edifice that hovers in the air and rests on soap bubbles” (1:19).

Given the insuperable cleft between Rousseau’s unachievable ideal of political autonomy and the reality of human nature, Rehberg says that a reader of sound, practical judgment like himself arrives at “a skeptical despair concerning the truth of all universal principles” in politics (1:20). But others, imbued with “heroic feelings” and a “love for universal, abstract principles and the equality of all human beings,” come to a different conclusion, namely, “to destroy everything that contradicts [their] adopted principles, and to compel humanity to submit to them” (1:21). And so, “enthusiastic (enthusiastisch) friends of humanity” (1:11) and “humanitarian fanatics (Schwärmer)” enthralled by the “metaphysical concept of freedom” (1:16) inherited from Rousseau are primarily responsible for the revolutionary conflagration in France.

The claim that even formally coherent rational principles cannot be implemented without the help of empirical influences, and that strictly a priori practical theories should therefore be treated with skepticism, would have been familiar to Kant. In his review of the Critique of Practical Reason from 1788, Rehberg had accepted the abstract validity of Kant’s moral theory while denying that pure reason could be practical through the autonomy of the will.^[39] What Kant shows to be true in the realm of ideas (Reich der Ideen), namely that the necessity and universality of the moral law requires the causality of reason through freedom, cannot be said of human beings in the real world (Rehberg 1975, 185–186). As Rehberg puts it, the “consciousness of oneself as pure reason,” upon which Kant rests the validity of transcendental freedom, “exists nowhere” (186). Likewise, Rehberg argues that respect for the moral law needs to be construed as an empirical feeling of pleasure in order to motivate human action, and so cannot be understood as a spontaneous product of reason (187–188). Most importantly, Rehberg suggests that Kant’s claim that “the law itself, but not pleasure in the law, must be the incentive of morality, is itself fanaticism (Schwärmerei)” in that it does violence to the real, sensible nature of the human being for the sake of an obscure, supersensible idea of the will (189). He even indicates that Kant engaged in a specious form of “Platonic moral science” (193). It would better accord with Kantian metaphysics, Rehberg concludes, if the objective reality given to a priori freedom in the second Critique were rescinded, and if practical reason were understood instead as the source of merely regulative principles that apply to the empirical faculty of desire (191, 195).

Rehberg summarizes his interpretation of Kant’s moral and political thought in his intellectual autobiography. Rehberg here notes that, as a skeptic, he was drawn to Kant’s philosophy because of its critical destruction of traditional metaphysics, that is, its delineation of the experiential boundaries of human knowledge, a project inherited from Hume (Rehberg 1828–1831, 1:13). Nonetheless, he could not endorse Kant’s “ideas about morality” (1:15). In this regard, Rehberg says, Kant “seemed to me to retreat to the supernatural dogmatism that he himself had dispatched with such great success.” By construing the notions of “duty, right, and virtue” as “immediate products of reason” which can determine the will independently of experience, Kant conjured ethereal entities that are ultimately indistinguishable from those put forward in pre-critical metaphysics. In brief, Rehberg understands his skepticism towards the a priori principles of Kant’s practical philosophy as a more faithful version of the critical philosophy than the one elaborated by Kant himself.

By alluding to Kästner and Rehberg in his notes for “Theory and Practice,” Kant demonstrates the awareness that his burgeoning political theory must confront a two-pronged skepticism. On the one hand, Kästner reiterates the ‘proverbial’ anti-Platonism that seeks to deflate the normative force of abstract political theories by emphasizing their inability to meaningfully impact the world. On the other hand, Rehberg marshals a distinctly Kantian-inspired skepticism for the view that practical reason alone cannot overcome the divide between theory and reality. Rehberg takes practical reason, whether in morality or politics, to command the actualization of an empirically unrealizable model of self-legislation. In doing so, reason commits itself to eternally condemning a flawed reality that will simply never align with its standards of perfection. In France, the revolutionaries used this unyielding, dogmatic stance to license the destruction of centuries-old laws and customs that necessarily fell short of their unachievable ideals.

Given Kant’s sympathy for Rousseau and the French cause, it is easy to see why Rehberg’s attack on the metaphysical presuppositions of the Revolution could be perceived as an attack on Kant himself. “The touchstone of whatever can be decided upon as law for a people,” Kant had written in 1784, “lies in the question: whether a people could impose such a law upon itself” (WA, 8:39; cf. 40). Moreover, the fact that Rehberg, described to Kant by J. B. Jachmann as “an ardent admirer” and “the finest mind among all your students” as late as October 1790 (Br, 11:225), turns the Kantian critique of metaphysics against both Kant and the French Revolution should not be understated. His Untersuchungen is nothing less than a conservative insurrection within the frontiers of Kantianism. Taken together, then, Kästner and Rehberg force Kant to face an unattractive dilemma: a priori ideas of practical reason are either useless or dangerous when applied to the domain of politics.

As in 1781, however, Kant writes in his drafts for “Theory and Practice” that if he were to concede that “the empiricists […] are the genuine possessors of wisdom about the principles of the state,” then “rationalists” like himself would be “rightly banished to their school, where they must leave the judgments entirely to whomever has power” (VATP, 23:127). Kant is thus unwilling to reduce political justice to the lens of experience and abandon the rigorous distinction between ‘ought’ and ‘is’ enshrined by transcendental idealism. “All types of government are only forms of the presentation of an idea,” he says. Whether the idea of a perfectly just state “has objective reality […] cannot [be] determine[d] from experience but only from moral principles,” for its “[o]bjective reality is secured through a command that it must be brought about” (VATP, 23:134, 136). For Kant, the authorization to legislate a priori norms in the political sphere remains an inalienable right of reason.

If the critical philosophy cannot renounce the prerogative of practical reason to give law to politics, then Kant must show that its ideas can meaningfully impact the world without turning into the violent enthusiasm for Rousseauian abstractions diagnosed by Rehberg. In other words, just as he did in the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant must supersede the opposition between skepticism and dogmatism by defending the distinctly regulative role of a priori norms. This, we will now see, is one of the central themes of Kant’s post-revolutionary political writings.

5 ‘The Worthy Gentleman’: Kant vs. the Conservatives in “Theory and Practice”

Kant frames “Theory and Practice” as a rebuttal to the so-called worthy gentleman (Ehrenmann) who denies the applicability of rational principles to the spheres of morality, politics, and the philosophy of history (TP, 8:277).^[40] Unlike the ignorant, who reduce everything to experience and so grant no role to abstract rules whatsoever (TP, 8:276), the worthy gentleman is said to accept the validity of theory, but only within the contours of the academy. Why? Even an idea that is “thought quite well and irreproachably (on the part of reason)” may prove useless or, as Rehberg had alleged, outright harmful if put into practice. And so, the worthy gentleman demands that theorists bow to his wisdom based on experience (erfahrende Weisheit) in all practical matters and restrict their speculative hypotheses to the schools. As Kant indicates later in the essay, the worthy gentleman’s aversion to theory has deleterious implications: by emphasizing the uncertainty and potential danger of putting rational political principles into practice, the worthy gentleman seeks to deprive the people of the normative resources for assessing the rightfulness of existing states, and thus to cultivate a passive deference to authority (TP, 8:305–306).

The term ‘worthy gentleman’ does not appear again in Kant’s writings, at least not in the sense it is used in “Theory and Practice.” Yet the standpoint he represents is neither new nor limited to a single essay of Kant’s. As we have seen, Kant’s vindication of the idea of the perfect republic in the first Critique is also counterposed to a supposedly shrewd empiricism that doubts the feasibility of a priori norms in politics. The position of the worthy gentleman also recurs in various guises as an argumentative foil for Kant throughout the 1790s. In the opening paragraph of “Perpetual Peace,” Kant contrasts two kinds of politician, the theoretical and the practical one. In the eyes of the latter, the theoretical politician is nothing more than a school thinker or philosopher (Schulweisen) “who, with his ideas that are empty of all content (sachleeren Ideen), poses no danger to a state, which must proceed on principles derived from experience” (ZeF, 8:343).^[41] Similarly, in the Doctrine of Right, Kant distinguishes his pure concept of right from the empirical notion employed by jurists or legal scholars (Rechtsgelehrter) (MS, 6:229). Though the jurist is well-versed in positive law and its application to concrete cases, he lacks a necessary and universal criterion of justice. Whether the law of the land is objectively right thus remains hidden from the jurist, “unless he leaves those empirical principles behind for a while and seeks the source of such judgments in reason alone, so as to establish the basis for any possible giving of laws” (MS, 6:230). Without the a priori principle of right supplied by Kant, the jurist must assume that law is nothing but the contingent result of various empirical influences such as history, custom, and raw authority. “Like the wooden head in Phaedrus’s fable,” Kant concludes, “a merely empirical doctrine of right is a head that may be beautiful but unfortunately it has no brain.”

Though the details vary based on the topic at hand, Kant’s reply to the ‘worthy gentleman’ and his various successors is essentially the same as in 1781. When it comes to the actions of rational beings, he writes, “the worth of practice rests entirely on conformity with the theory underlying it, and all is lost if […] empirical and hence contingent conditions […] are made conditions of the law itself.” Accordingly, Kant never tires of countering the misguided desire of the worthy gentleman and his various analogues “to reform reason by experience” by subordinating ‘ought’ to ‘is’ (TP, 8:277).

The contents of “Theory and Practice” suggest that Kant uses the worthy gentleman to represent the three named antagonists in the essay: Garve, Hobbes, and Mendelssohn. Several additional candidates have also been proposed, including Edmund Burke, Justus Möser, Friedrich Gentz, and Gottfried Achenwall.^[42] Kästner and Rehberg, as I have argued above, are also clearly relevant.

Although the worthy gentleman is likely a composite of several thinkers, I aim to show in the next section that Rehberg’s skepticism is of particular importance to Kant’s response to counter-revolutionary conservatism in the 1790s. As we will see, Kant’s insistence on the regulative status of the original contract is meant both to defuse Rehberg’s doubts about the applicability of the general will to experience, and to distance himself from Jacobinism and Rehberg’s claim that metaphysical Schwärmerei is responsible for the violent paroxysms of the Revolution.

6 Between Danton and Rehberg: Kant’s Idea of the Original Contract

The overall aim of this section is to show that Kant’s first dedicated statement on politics after 1789 establishes a moderate stance between the extremes of radical Jacobinism and conservative reaction to the Revolution. Though the stakes have changed, as in 1781, Kant’s position remains a product of his ‘preeminently practical’ Platonism and its defining commitment to the regulative role of the idea in politics. More specifically, I argue that Kant’s presentation of the original contract in “Theory and Practice” serves a double polemical function that turns on two interrelated aspects of the original contract: (1) its metaphysical status as a regulative idea of reason that is expressly distinguished from a fact (Factum) of experience; and (2) its criterion of legitimacy, namely, the omnilateral consent of the people (8:297). As we will see, Kant uses (1) and (2) as the conceptual basis for a twofold polemic against, on the one hand, Rehberg’s skeptical treatment of the general will and, on the other, the metaphysical assumptions behind Jacobinism exemplified by Georges Danton.

My argument will proceed in four steps. I will begin by outlining Kant’s conception of the original contract and its ideal, a priori principle of omnilateral agreement. Next, I will show how the ramifications of Kant’s view function as a response to Rehberg’s skeptical objections to the applicability of the general will in the Untersuchungen. Third, I will discuss Kant’s criticism of Danton’s employment of the original contract. Lastly, to better understand Kant’s treatment of Danton, I will consider Kant’s reflections on revolutionary enthusiasm for ideas of reason.

7 Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that Kant’s engagement with the Platonic idea of the republic in the Transcendental Dialectic introduces conceptual elements that became crucial to his mature political thought. On the one hand, the Dialectic shows Kant’s commitment to the regulative norm of a perfectly rightful, autonomous state that allows us to gauge the legitimacy of existing commonwealths and that ought to guide their future development. On the other hand, Kant’s dialectical analysis of the inverse insights and limitations of the dogmatic and skeptical approaches to practical ideas of reason anticipates the polemical dimension of his centrist political stance in the 1790s. Kant’s stress on the strictly regulative status of the idea of the original contract in “Theory and Practice” is meant to distinguish his conception of the a priori general will from its conflicting but partially correct interpretations by the figures of the dogmatist/Jacobin (Danton) and the skeptic/conservative (Rehberg). In doing so, Kant’s critical doctrine of the idea provides the normative and rhetorical foundations for his version of stable, republicanizing reform from above that is meant to avoid the extremes of revolution and reaction instigated by the overthrow of the ancien régime.^[73]

While I have mainly focused on “Theory and Practice,” the story does not end in 1793. In February 1794, Rehberg published a review of Kant’s essay that drew a direct line from the Untersuchungen to the critical philosophy: despite some differences in vocabulary, Kant’s political theory is said to perfectly cohere with The Social Contract.^[74] Even if “Theory and Practice” professes unconditional opposition to revolution, Rehberg argues that Kant’s claim that all laws that contradict the a priori criterion of collective self-legislation are unjust amounts to yet another version of reason’s fanatical demand for the destruction of existing states, all of which involve hereditary privileges. Yet Rehberg fails to acknowledge the merely regulative role Kant attributes to the general will and its implications for his reformist model of political change. It is not surprising, then, that Kant was displeased when he read the review (Br, 11:496–497). Accordingly, Kant’s next major statement on politics, “Perpetual Peace” (1795), contains his most detailed account of his template for orderly, non-violent political progress. This position is embodied by the figure of the moral politician, who is described in the First Appendix of the text, “On the Disagreement Between Morals and Politics with a View to Perpetual Peace” (8:370–380). The moral politician personifies the two features of Kant’s political theory that I have examined in this essay, namely, a commitment to the regulative standard of “the best constitution in accordance with laws of right” (ZeF, 8:372), and a moderate reformism that averts the extremes of revolutionary dogmatism and conservative skepticism.^[75]