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Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was a German philosopher and a thinker of the very highest rank. He is considered by many to be the most important philosopher of the modern age.

In his so-called first critique, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and 1787), Kant sought to describe the inherent logic of the truth claims routinely made about the world. Arguing against the empiricism of Scottish philosopher David Hume, according to which all of our thoughts result from sense impressions reflected in the mind, Kant proposed a different kind of empiricism in which a priori intuitions and categories of human cognition impose an intelligible structure on the phenomenal world. He argued, further, that this logic denies reliable access to “things in themselves,” such as the metaphysical reality that is behind, beneath, or beyond the world of appearances. In his second critique, The Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Kant sought to reconstruct the inherent logic of moral reasoning. Arguing against utilitarianism, he proposed a deontic—or duty-based—theory according to which, in the formulation of the categorical imperative, an action is moral if and only if a universal law can be rationally endorsed that would prescribe or permit, for all rational agents, any action of the very same type. Such a theory emphasized the centrality of free will—an individual cannot be morally praised or blamed unless it is believed that the individual could have chosen to act otherwise. The theory also defined freedom in terms of rational self-legislation. In his third critique, The Critique of the Faculty of Judgment (1790), Kant sought to describe the logic of claims that we make about individual particulars—this is an X, that is a Y—in circumstances where there are no rules, formulas, or scientific tests for doing so. Principal examples are aesthetic claims, in which something is said to be beautiful, and functional claims, in which something should be understood in terms of the role it plays as part of a larger organic entity.

For political scientists, Kant’s epistemology has been a direct or indirect source of resistance to the perceived positivism or scientism of behaviorism. For political theorists, his ethical theory has been the fundamental source of ant consequentialist views—morality involves a concept of right that is not fully reducible to the maximization of the good—of which the Kantian constructivism of American political philosopher John Rawls is the most well-known example. Kant’s theory of judgment, in part through the work of political theorist Hannah Arendt, has been enormously influential in debates about the nature of prudence and practical wisdom.

Although Kant himself produced no systematic treatise on politics, his writings endorse a version of liberal social contract theory, and his famous essay “Perpetual Peace” (1795) argues for a worldwide federation of free republican states.

Bibliography:

Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Practical Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
The Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
The Critique of the Power of Judgment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Riley, Patrick. Kant’s Political Philosophy. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983.
Saner, Hans. Kant’s Political Thought: Its Origins and Development. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.
Shell, Susan Meld. The Rights of Reason: A Study of Kant’s Philosophy and Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980.

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