A thorough reading of the Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, The Conflict of the Faculties, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Perpetual Peace shows that Kant embraces two distinct and opposing views on the historical-teleological sequence of establishing peace. According to the first view, the establishment of a political community anticipates the realization of peace, which in turn precedes the formation of an ethical commonwealth. However, according to the second view, the establishment of an ethical commonwealth assures the realization of peace. These opposite views can be reconciled by distinguishing three stages. First, a just political community secures a provisional legal peace that coercively guarantees external freedom and right. Secondly, legal peace in a political community makes it possible for man to realize his moral progress and to respect his moral maxims so that an ethical community is established. Finally, an ethical community upgrades merely legal peace into a moral - and truly perpetual - peace that is no longer based on mere self-interest in external freedom and right, but on communal moral dispositions concerned with inner freedom and virtue.
Immanuel Kant’s language and concept of foedus pacificum (league of peace) combined with his call for a spirit of trade promised a prescription for world peace-“seeking to end all wars forever.” Nation-state level cooperation between liberal democracies has borne out Kant’s analysis to some effect. A consequence of the twin pursuits of foedus pacificum and spirit of trade has ironically resulted in the exploitation of society. Today’s international corporations adversely affect public policies ostensibly designed to protect citizens through an anti-democratic market-based ideology within the State-as seen through the lenses of Foucauldian post-structural theory and Debord’s society of the spectacle. The author proposes that globalist-corporatist control of governing apparatuses is now exposed for its authoritarian tendencies. This action could result in the ultimate destruction of the representative democratic state with the onset of neoliberalism and authoritarianism.
Commentators who lament that Kant offers no concrete guidelines for how to set up an ethical community typically neglect Kant’s claim in Religion that the ethical state of nature can transform into an ethical community only by becoming a people of God—i.e., a religious community, or “church.” Kant’s argument culminates by positing four categorial precepts for church organization. The book’s next four sections can be read as elaborating further on each precept, respectively. Kant repeatedly warns against using religious norms to control people. Accordingly, he explicitly forbids the true church from adopting any standard form of political governance; it must aim to be radically non-political. Nevertheless, churches organized according to Kant’s non-coercive theocratic model contribute something essential to the ultimate political goal of achieving perpetual peace and an end to war: by approaching the ultimate ethical goal (the highest good), the true church offers an antidote to normative fragmentation.
This essay examines the appearance of distrust, disinterest and aversion to politics and political participation in today’s democracies by taking the Kantian concept of a republican state into account. The goal is to find out reasons for the lack of interest in politics by investigating certain aspects in today’s democracies that might be not in compliance with the Kantian understanding of republicanism. The essay will start with an examination of the republican state and why it is mostly referred to as being much as the parliamentary democracy we know today. Then, these results will be compared with modern democracies (USA, Switzerland and Germany) in order to find the underlying reasons for the lack of interest in politics and how it might be possible to overcome it.
Статия сосредоточивает свое внимание на вопросы политическые в философии Канта, выраженые прежде всего в его такназываемых малых проезвидениях. Кант статей представен как практический мыслитель, который незанимается политикой толко теоретично, предоставляет реалистические оцены, в этом числе политических поступков и решений, которые по своей сути совсем не близки его идеи вечного мира. Кант воспринимает политику как исполнительную юридическую науку. Статия обесняет идеи Канта о сосуществовании политики и морали в правовом состоянии основаном на свободе, равенстве и самостоятельности каждого члена поли-тического общества.
EN
The paper focuses on the political themes in Kant’s philosophy, presented predominantly in his short writings, and presents Kant as a practical thinker who does not consider politics only in a theoretical form, but offers it a realistic assessment, including political practices that are far from his idea of perpetual peace. Kant understands politics as a legal doctrine, and the paper attempts to clarify Kant’s understanding of coexistence of politics and morality in a legal establishment based on the principles of freedom, equality and autonomy of each member of the political commonwealth.
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