Abstract
For Kant, sovereignty is the key mechanism of political reform. It is the way in which politics can be domesticated to approximate the formal principles of morality. However, state sovereignty also presents Kant with a profound set of moral difficulties that ultimately threatens the realization of justice too. For, although sovereignly is a necessary cause of justice, it is also, paradoxically, a major cause of injustice both domestically and internationally. In this chapter I demonstrate that Kant’s advocacy of international reform is consistent with, and a crucial part of, his general attempt to articulate the conditions of justice as a means by which individuals are empowered to eliminate if not reduce the large discrepancy between morality and politics.
It is arguable that Kant accepts too much sovereignty for one who is arguing against Hobbes.
—Patrick Riley1
To Kant, the sovereignty of man is a political tragedy.
—Jens Bartelson2
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Notes
Patrick Riley, Kant’s Political Philosophy (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983), 117.
Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 214.
See Laberge, “Kant on Justice and the Law of Nations,” in International Society: Diverse Ethical Perspectives, ed. David R. Mapel and Terry Nardin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 82.
F. H. Hinsley, Sovereignty, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 158.
Cf. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1977), 8.
Cf. Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1988), 34–35.
See Peter Nicholson, “Kant on the Duty Never to Resist the Sovereign,” Ethics 86, 3 (1976): 214–230.
See Pogge for the charge of “dogmatism,” in “Kant’s Theory of Justice,” Kant-Studien 79, 4 (1988): 431–433
Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty,” Ethics 103, 1 (1992): 59.
Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1986), 313.
For an argument concerning Hobbesian ideas in Kant’s philosophy, see Richard Tuck, The Rights of Reason: Political Thought and International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 207–225.
I am using Riley’s slightly altered translation of this paragraph, in “Elements of Kant’s Political Philosophy,” in Kant and Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner and William James Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 20.
See Williams, Kant’s Political Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993), ix.
Thomas W. Pogge, “Is Kant’s Rechtslehre Comprehensive?” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 36, Supplement (1997): 177.
Martin Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?” in Diplomatic Investigations, ed. Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966), 21–28.
Cf. F. H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations Among States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 6.
The idea of the “domestic analogy” is analyzed with care in Hidemi Suganami, “Reflections on the Domestic Analogy: The Case of Bull, Beitz and Linklater,” Review of International Studies 12, 2 (1986): 145–158
Hidemi Suganami, The Domestic Analogy in World Order Proposals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
See for example Carl Joachim Friedrich, Inevitable Peace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), 30–33.
Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, The Republican Legacy in International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
See Michael W. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism and Socialism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), 205–206.
Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 14.
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© 2002 Antonio Franceschet
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Franceschet, A. (2002). Kant, State Sovereignty, and International Reform. In: Kant and Liberal Internationalism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07853-7_4
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