Who shall judge? Hobbes, Locke, and Kant on the construction of public reason

Abstract

This paper investigates early modern and enlightenment roots of contemporary ideas of public reason. I argue that concepts of public reason arose in answer to the question ‘who shall judge?’ The religious and moral pluralism unleashed by the reformation led first to the weakening of authoritative common forms of reasoning, this in turn and more importantly led to the question who is the final arbiter when a political community is faced with deep disagreement about political/moral questions. The rise of pluralism meant that to the question ‘what are the standards of public right?’ is added the corollary and equally important question ‘who judges when those standards are violated?’ The answer is that the public judges. Public reason thus refers to the role of the public as judge of public right and not simply to a set of reasons that an actual public happens to share. On this reading of Hobbes, Locke, and Kant, the initial contract recedes in importance while the seat of authoritative political judgment comes to the fore.

• public reason
• pluralism
• Hobbes
• Locke
• Kant

Notes

1. Gerard J. Postema, ‘Public Practical Reason: Political Practice’, in Nomos XXXVII: Theory and Practice, ed. Ian Shapiro and Judith Wagner DeCew (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 345–85; Duncan Ivison, ‘The Secret History of Public Reason: Hobbes to Rawls’, History of Political Thought 18, no. 1 (1997), 126–47; Stephan Macedo, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Jeremy Waldron, ‘Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism’, in Liberal Rights: Collected Papers 1981–1991, ed. Jeremy Waldron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 35–63.

2. It would not be possible to list all the work being done in this area at the moment. The theorists who offer the two most influential paradigms are of course John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, but there are a number of other models as well. I offer a brief list of some main contributors: Gerard J. Postema, ‘Public Practical Reason: An Archeology’, Social Philosophy and Policy 12 (1995), 43–86; David Gauthier, ‘Public Reason’, Social Philosophy and Policy 12, no. 1 (1995), 19–42; John Rawls, Political Liberalism, paperback ed. (New York: Colombia University Press, 1996); Jürgen Habermas, ‘Reconciliation through the Public Use of Reason’, Journal of Philosophy 92, no. 3 (1995), 109–131; Charles Larmore, ‘The Moral Basis of Political Liberalism’, Journal of Philosophy 96, no. 12 (1999), 599–625; Gerald F. Gaus, Justificatory Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

3. Mark Button also argues that reading Hobbes and Locke as theorists of public reason rather than contract is very rewarding. Button, however, sees the core of their views to be articulated in a theory of transformative education in which public reason is inculcated in citizens. I do not share this view. Mark E. Button, Contract, Culture, and Citizenship: Transformative Liberalism from Hobbes to Rawls (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 2008).

4. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 213.

5. Macedo, ‘Liberal Virtues’.

6. John Rawls argues that liberalism finds its most important roots in the rise of toleration in the wake of the reformation. See Rawls, Political Liberalism, xxiv–xxviii.

7. Ivison, ‘The Secret History of Public Reason: Hobbes to Rawls’; Philip Pettit, Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

8. John Gray, ‘Pluralism and Toleration in Contemporary Political Philosophy’, Political Studies 48, no. 10 (2000), 323–33; Peter Jones, ‘Toleration, Value Pluralism, and the Fact of Pluralism’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 9, no. 2 (2006), 189–210. Value-pluralism is an ethical and sometimes meta-ethical doctrine that maintains that values are irreducibly plural whether or not they are recognized as such by people in general. Value-pluralism is saying something about ‘the moral universe we inhabit’ and not something in the first instance about the social and political world we inhabit. William A. Galston, Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 48.

9. William E. Connolly, Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

10. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 128.

11. Ibid., 145.

12. Ibid., 124.

13. Pettit, Made with Words.

14. David Johnston, ‘Plato, Hobbes, and the Science of Practical Reasoning’, in Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, ed. Mary Dietz (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1990), 37–54.

15. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. W. Blanco (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 131.

16. Ibid., 131, 130.

17. Hobbes, Leviathan, 39.

18. Michael Ridge, ‘Hobbesian Public Reason’, Ethics 108 (1998), 538–68.

19. Hobbes, Leviathan, 32–33.

20. Gauthier, ‘Public Reason’, 25.

21. Hobbes, Leviathan, 223–24.

22. Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 42.

23. Richard Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Locke on Toleration’, in Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, ed. Mary Dietz (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1990), 153–71.

24. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 219–20. Locke's views on toleration changed over time. See John Wiedhoft Gough, ‘The Development of Locke's Belief in Toleration’, in A Letter Concerning Toleration in Focus, ed. John Horton and Susan Mendus (London: Routledge, 1991). In this section I only discuss the views published in his last Letter.

25. Locke, Two Treatises, 219.

26. Julian Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

27. Macedo, Liberal Virtues.

28. Duncan Ivison, Postcolonial Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

29. Gerald Postema argues that consensus on reasons should be regulative ideal, never fully achieved but always guiding the search for solutions to deep disagreements. Postema, ‘Public Practical Reason: Political Practice’, 356–61.

30. Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

31. Locke, Two Treatises, 246.

32. Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality.

33. Locke, Two Treatises, 106.

34. Ibid., 102.

35. Julian Franklin, John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

36. Locke, Two Treatises, 208.

37. Peter Laslett, ‘Introduction’, in Two Treatise of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: New American Library, 1965), 122; Richard Ashcraft, ‘Locke's Political Philosophy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Locke, ed. V. Chappell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 240.

38. Locke, Two Treatises, 101–4.

39. Ibid., 208.

40. Ibid.

41. Ian Shapiro, ‘John Locke's Democratic Theory’, in Two Treatises of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro (New York: Yale University Press, 2003), 309–40. For other answers to this questions, see Robert C. Grady II, ‘Obligation, Consent, and Locke's Right to Revolution: “Who Is to Judge?”’ Canadian Journal of Political Science 9, no. 2 (1976), 277–92; Katrin Flikschuh, ‘Reason, Right, and Revolution: Kant and Locke’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 36, no. 4 (2008), 375–404; Nathan Tarcov, ‘Locke's Second Treatise On “The Best Fence against Rebellion”’, Review of Politics 43, no. 2 (1981), 198–212.

42. Locke, Two Treatises, 199.

43. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965), A739/B767.

44. Immanuel Kant, ‘Practical Philosophy’, in Critique of Practical Reason, ed. Mary J. Gregor, vol. 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 237.

45. That human beings live on a globe and so in a limited space is, according to Arthur Ripstein, an essential postulate of the theory. In other words, if we lived in an unlimited space then the solution to the puzzle would be to just move further away from each other. For an excellent and thorough discussion of Kant's political philosophy, see Arthur Ripstein, Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

46. Ibid.

47. Kant, Practical Philosophy, vol. 8, 297.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid.

50. My reading of public and private reason follows Onora O'Neill's in many important respects. Onora O'Neill, ‘The Public Use of Reason’, Political Theory 14, no. 4 (1986), 523–51.

51. Kant, Practical Philosophy, vol. 8, 37.

52. For an excellent discussion of this topic, see Elisabeth Ellis, Kant’s Politics. Provisional Theory for an Uncertain World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), and Flikschuh, ‘Reason, Right, and Revolution’.

53. Kant, Practical Philosophy, vol. 8, 304.

54. There is a huge literature on this subject in Kant scholarship. For a review of the literature and a defense of Kant's total ban on revolution, see Flikschuh, ‘Reason, Right, and Revolution’. See also Ripstein, Force and Freedom, 325–43.

55. Locke does grant coercive power to the people, but he does it outside the constitution recognizing that a constitutional right of revolution was deeply problematic.

56. Onora O'Neill, Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant's Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

57. Ellis, Kant’s Politics, 37.

58. Locke, Two Treatises, 102.

59. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A739/B767.

60. O'Neill ‘The Public Use of Reason’, 546.