Politics and Morals

Neither foes nor friends missed the moralistic character of Kant's dialogue with the French Revolution. His political theory indeed displayed the peregrinations of practical reason in the Revolution. In an immediate sense,

Kant's attention was focused on the morality of the political actor . Kant in fact elaborated a consistent theory of the relationship between politics and morals. Politics without morals , Kant contended, was based on the ugly vice of contempt for humans, and it internally bolstered the practice of despotism.

However, there is a perverse way of relating morals to politics, that of the "political moralist," a type that is worse than the mere political pragmatist or "political technocrat." Kant carefully lists the three evil maxims of the political moralist, the worst of which is "justify everything."^[34] It can come as no surprise for the readers of Kant that the "political moralist" appeared in his typology as an infinitely worse type of the political actor than the (hypocritically or misanthropically) pragmatic one precisely because of his evil maxims . By contrast, the moral politician makes the moral law the maxim of his politics, and he sees his task as the reconciliation of raison d'état with the moral law as much as possible. His principles are practical reason and justice.^[35]

Kant was fully aware of the enormous difficulty of reconciling the moral maxim with the practical exigencies of a given political task, the traps that lie in wait on the moral politican's thorny path. He even assumed that his favorite actor could at some point degrade himself into a despotic moralist . (And we can have hardly any doubt that he had in mind the Jacobin politician in general, perhaps even Robespierre in particular.)^[36] A despotic moralist contaminates the political atmosphere around himself and becomes the founding father of a despotic republic . However, Kant assumed that the "moral politician" could mend his ways and return to the correct path. We are already familiar with the absolute Kantian precondition of this kind of moral reform: truthfulness even in the despotic, therefore evil act; respect for the good maxim instead of choosing the evil maxim in defense of an aberration. This is why Kant defended the right of Louis XVI against the Convention. This is why he demanded, to the point of absurdity, obedience to even despotic (republican or monarchic) laws. This is why, in an aside in his Anthropology , speaking of "political fantasy," he appreciated even the "fantasies" or the fiction of the high rank and equality of the people, which were solemnly announced by the French Convention and never taken seriously by those despotic legislators.^[37] For it was the good maxim alone that stood between the republic and the abyss: the relapse into barbarism.

However, Kant was incomparably more concerned with the moral character of the republic than with the morality of its statesmen . To a degree, he was prepared to subscribe to the principle of the "moral politician" (despite the danger that the latter had the penchant to degrade into a despotic moralist): the republic, Kant contended in unison with Robespierre, cannot exist without virtues . And in the formal respect, Kant accepted the model of the ancient republics which he otherwise severely criticized as the unfree rule of demos .

At the same time, the two material principles Kant integrated into his "doctrine of virtue," one's obligation to one's own perfection and one's

obligation to the (morally approved) goals of others, were sufficiently updated and substantively defined to represent the spirit of modernity in Kant's moral and political philosophy. The first was the principle of physical and materal culture, Bildung in the proper sense of the Goethe period, a principle juxtaposed to our phenomenal existence, which, in Schiller's authentically Kantian description, appeared as self-fragmentation and self-degradation. The second substantive principle, one's obligation to the other's (morally acceptable) goals, was the principle of association . This provided as much space for "happiness" (or the social question) as possible within Kant's theory. For Kant was not an ideologue of unlimited wealth. On the contrary, one can infer from one of his remarks that he regarded extreme inequality as a serious error (and "injustice") of the government.^[38] He simply did not believe, here in unison with Saint-Just's attitude toward economics, that positive legislation on happiness was possible. However, the introduction of the second material principle, that of association, at least provided a public space within the republic to address the issue of happiness, the celebrated social question.

One would find tremendous difficulties with a clear-cut classification of Kant's political philosophy as consistently either liberal or radical. And this is not meant as a criticism, rather as a compliment. The critique of political reason, which was accomplished under the guidance of practical reason, yielded a completely new, dialogical type of political theory whose issues remain on the agenda of the present.