Republicanizing Leviathan: Kant's Cosmopolitan Synthesis of Hobbes and Rousseau

ABSTRACT

Kant’s thought from the 1750s onward can usefully be understood as a series of efforts to overcome the challenge posed in Machiavelli’s Prince: namely, to reconcile our idea of justice with what is actually possible given human nature as it is, rather than as reason tells us that it “should” be. Especially following his reading of Rousseau, this effort took the form of successive translations of the metaphysical concept of a world into the juridical language of world-citizenship, which transformed a rational and physical cosmology into moral and historical cosmopolitanism. The thought of both Hobbes and Rousseau proved instrumental to those efforts. Initially, Kant thought human history oscillated between Hobbesian and Rousseauian conceptions of civil order—i.e., between orders that guarantee, respectively, security and freedom. In his later works, Kant suggested that history progressed from Hobbes to Rousseau, but he hesitated to declare that a transformation from prudence-based security to virtue-based civil independence was completable even in principle. Speaking generally, Kant sought to reconcile a kind of historical providentialism with the sovereign authority of reason. This reconciliation blurs the distinction between, on the one hand, the metaphysical and/or religious and, on the other hand, the secular—a distinction on which Michael Rosen’s perspicuous intellectual history tends to focus. That this earliest version of Kant’s rational providentialism makes reward of effort morally central also suggests that it is ultimately even more important to Kant than the punitive theme on which Rosen himself focusses.

Keywords:

• Hobbes
• Kant
• Michael Rosen
• Rousseau
• cosmological idea
• equality
• freedom
• justice
• philosophy of history
• political theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This relatively late addition also owes something to the influence of Montesquieu. In citing Kant, I mention, first, the year of publication and, after the comma, the volume number and, after the colon, the page number, to the Academy Edition of Kant’s work. In the case of the first Critique, I refer to the A and B editions of the work. And when a year is unavailable or unknown (such as in Kant’s Remarks), I direct the reader to the Akademieausgabe (“Kant 1968”).

2 For a fuller discussion of this dimension of Kant’s practical thought, see Shell 2012. On Kant’s concept of a world, see Watkins 2019.

3 For an acknowledgment on Kant’s part of that challenge, see, for example, Kant 1781, A316/B372.

4 For a late statement, see Kant 1797a, 6:232.

5 Although Kant does not directly say what this “hidden law” is, it presumably has something to do with the rule of equality. As the Remarks elsewhere states: “the idea of equality regulates everything” (Kant 1968, 20:54).

6 I place (Rousseau) in parentheses here, owing to his suggestion that natural freedom (or independence alone, be it that of a “savage” or of a “solitary walker”) may ultimately be preferable to civil freedom (or independence through participation in a legislative general will).