Reading Questions: Kant’s Political Thought

Text: Immanuel Kant, Kant: Political Writings. Edited by Hans Reiss. Translated by H.B.
Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Passage for close reading:

“The god of morality does not yield to Jupiter, the custodian of violence, for even Jupiter is still
subject to fate.” (Perpetual Peace, p. 116)

A. “What is Enlightenment?” (pp. 54-60)

1. What does Kant mean by “immaturity”? Is this an individual or a collective

phenomenon? Are the remedies to collective immaturity dangerous to society?
2. What are the similarities between “the entire fair sex” and “the largest part of mankind”?
What do you think Kant is saying here about the differences between men and women?
3. What is a public, according to Kant?
4. What is the relationship between freedom and enlightenment?
5. What is the difference between the public as contrasted with the private use of reason?
(Note that Kant’s use of the term “private” is idiosyncratic in this essay.) Why is it
permissible, according to Kant, to restrict the private but not the public use of reason?
6. How should participants in public exchanges of reason imagine themselves?
7. What is the criterion for judging whether a particular measure should be promulgated as
binding law? How is Kant’s criterion different from Rousseau’s?
8. What is the difference between an “enlightened age” and an “age of enlightenment”?
9. What is the relationship between religious toleration and enlightenment?
10. How logically coherent is Kant’s dictum, “Argue as much as you want and about
whatever you want, but obey!”?
11. What is the relationship between civil freedom and intellectual freedom?
12. What do you think that Kant means when he writes that man is “more than a machine”?
What hints do we get in this essay as to his views about the sources of human dignity?
13. What is the “hard shell” within which the “germ” of humans’ inclination to think freely
develops?

B. “On the Common Saying: ‘This May be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in
Practice,’” (Introduction and Part II, pp. 61-63, 73-87)

Introduction
1. What is the middle term that mediates between theory and practice?
2. What is the difference between theories that concern abstract concepts and theories that
concern objects of perception? On which side of this distinction does a theory based on
the concept of duty fall? What role should experience play in the formation of theories
concerning moral and legal duty?
3. What are the three points of view from which Kant builds up his view of the relationship
between theory and practice?

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 Part II: Political Right

4. What sort of social contract is an end in itself? How is it different from other social
contracts?
5. What does Kant mean by “external relationships”? How does this connect to the idea of
right (Recht)? What is right? (See discussion on pp. 75-76 as well as on p. 73.) What is
public right?
6. What is a civil constitution? How do the coercive laws that this constitution imposes
upon individuals differ from coercion based on the arbitrary will of another?
7. What does Kant mean when he says that pure reason legislates a priori?
8. What are the three principles on which the civil state is based? In what sense are they a
priori principles?
9. What is freedom, for Kant? Who is the bearer of freedom?
10. What is the difference between paternal and patriotic government? What is the
relationship between the head of state and the people in a patriotic as contrasted with a
paternal government?
11. What is equality? Who is the bearer of equality?
12. Is the head of state subject to coercive law? Why or why not?
13. How much inequality of wealth is compatible with the equality of subjects within a state?
What inequalities, besides those of wealth, exist in the civil state?
14. What is the general will, according to Kant. Is it different from Rousseau’s general will?
15. What sort of inequality is impermissible in a legitimate state? What sort of equality is
required?
16. What is Kant’s critique of hereditary privilege? Does this critique extend to property?
17. How can an individual forfeit the right to equality?
18. What can justify social inequalities?
19. What is independence? Who is the bearer of independence?
20. In what sense the citizen a co-legislator of the laws? Who is entitled to participate as a
co-legislator?
21. What is a public will? Who can legislate for the commonwealth?
22. What are the qualifications of citizenship? What is the relationship between property and
citizenship? Sex and citizenship?
23. What does Kant mean when he writes that the original contract is “merely an idea of
reason, which nonetheless has undoubted practical reality”?
24. What is the test of the rightfulness of a particular law?
25. What is the status of the doctrine, salus publica suprema civitatis lex est, in Kant’s
account of political right?
26. How should a head of state decide in cases of public emergency?
27. Under what circumstances, if any, are subjects justified in resisting the state? What is
Kant’s assessment of revolutions in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Great Britan, and
France?
28. What rights do the people have against the head of state?
29. What is the ultimate standard of legislation? What role does reason play in this standard?

C. “Perpetual Peace” (pp. 93-130)

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 1. What is Kant’s message to the “practical politician”? How does it relate to what he
argued in “What is Enlightenment?” and “Theory and Practice”?

First Section: Preliminary Articles of Perpetual Peace (pp. 93-97)

2. Why can’t states acquire each other by purchase, gift, or any other exchange?
3. Why can’t a state borrow from other countries to support its military?
4. Why can’t states interfere in each others’ governments?
5. What laws must states observe during wartime?
6. Into what two categories can the preliminary articles of peace be divided?

Second Section: Definitive Articles of Perpetual Peace (pp. 98-115)

7. What is the relationship between the state of peace, the state of nature, and the state of
war?
8. Read carefully the second note on p. 98 and the accompanying text. What is a “lawful
state”? What sort of duties do we have toward it when we are in a state of nature? Why?
9. (p. 98, note, cont’d) What is the difference between civil right, international right, and
cosmopolitan right, according to Kant? Consider Rousseau’s taxonomy of the different
types of law and the relationships that they regulate. What are the different relationships
regulated by these three concepts of right in Kant’s view?
10. What is a republican constitution, according to Kant? Contrast his account here with his
account in “Theory and Practice”: what work are the concepts of “independence” and
“dependence” doing in these two accounts of legitimate political order at the domestic
scale? Are these positions consistent?
11. Read carefully the note that begins on p. 99. How does Kant define “external and rightful
freedom”? In what sense is the freedom of which he speaks “external”? Is there an
“internal” conception of freedom that is also important to Kant’s political philosophy? If
so, where do we find it? What does Kant mean when he suggests that we can consider
ourselves as “citizen[s] of a transcendental world”? Why is God the only being for whom
the concept of duty is invalid?
12. What is Kant’s view of hereditary rank?
13. What is republicanism, according to Kant? Does his definition conform to Rousseau’s
conception of legitimate political order?
14. What is Kant’s view of representation? Is it different from Rousseau’s?
15. Why does Kant think that perpetual peace would be served by a federation of republican
states?
16. Are the moral deficiencies of “savage” people greater or less than those of “civilized
peoples,” on Kant’s view? Is Kant’s distinction between the savage and the civilized
different from Rousseau’s?
17. Why are men living in a lawless condition obliged to abandon it, whereas the same is not
true of states?
18. Why should republican states seek federation? What are the parallels between
individuals’ forming a social compact and the federation of states? Why the form of
international right be federation rather than a world republic?

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 19. Why do peace treaties require atonement as well as thanksgiving (see p. 105, note)?
20. What is hospitality, and is its place in Kant’s account of cosmopolitan right? How is
cosmopolitan right different from international right?
21. What is the moral foundation of cosmopolitan right? What are the limits to the right of
strangers?
22. Why does Kant think that civilized states are “inhospitable”? How did imperial European
ventures violate cosmopolitan right? What is Kant’s view of slavery?

First Supplement (pp. 108-114)

23. What is Kant’s account of the relationship between nature and human history in this
section? How does it compare with Rousseau’s account of human history in the Second
Discourse?
24. How does nature advance the human interest in progression toward perpetual peace? Is
nature different from providence?
25. Why does Kant invoke the idea of history as a “spectacle”? What are the similarities and
differences between Kant’s account of the sweep of human history and Rousseau’s? How
should we understand our role as spectators of history? What has been the role of war in
the unfolding of human history?
26. Why should the problem of setting up a state be framed for a “nation of devils”? What is
the task of constitutional and institutional design, given the current state of human
nature?
27. Why does nature will the emergence of distinct and separate nations? What means does it
deploy to maintain the separateness of nations?
28. How does the spirit of commerce serve the goal of perpetual peace?

Second Supplement (pp. 114-115)

29. What is the “secret article” of perpetual peace? How does it relate to the relationship
between power and reason?

Appendix (pp. 116-130)

1. What does Kant mean when he proposes as the counsel of politics, “Be ye therefore wise
as serpents … and harmless as doves”?
2. Does Kant’s figure of the “moral politician” comport with his prohibition on revolution
in “Theory and Practice”? What does he see as the relationship between considerations of
political expediency and those of moral duty? Can lawful orders arise by unlawful
means? Is it ever justifiable for a state to impose an order of lawful government on
another state?
3. What are the precepts of international domination? Do you see any of these precepts
operating in contemporary politics?
4. Read carefully the note that begins on p. 120. How does moral hypocrisy play out
differently in domestic as contrasted with international politics, according to Kant?

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 5. Why does Kant invoke the proverb, fiat Justitia, pereat mundus? What is he saying here
about the relationship between judgments of expedience and judgments of moral duty?
Does the proverb hold equally in matters of civil and international right?
6. In what sense can there be conflicts between morality and politics? What rights must
never be sacrificed, regardless of the consequences?
7. What work does the “formal attribute of publicness” (p. 125) do in Kant’s political
philosophy? Compare the role of the formal attribute of generality in Rousseau’s theory.
Consider, as well, his account of the public in “What is Enlightenment?”
8. How does the principle of publicness relate to Kant’s view of the justifiability of
revolution?
9. How does the principle of publicity serve progress toward perpetual peace?