Year 2024 was a historic year for democracy. It is estimated that over 4 billion people—that is, roughly half of humanity—voted in national elections last year. The results were at times dramatic. In France, a coalition of left-wing parties revived the Popular Front model of the 1930s to stave off the ascendance of Marie Le Pen’s revanchist, far-right National Rally party. Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump captured the White House with a convincing victory over Kamala Harris in spite of the accusation from a member of his first administration that he is a fascist.
Meanwhile, 2024 was also the tercentenary of the birth of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), an occasion that spawned a miniature culture industry of conferences, books, op-eds, and even art exhibitions. The fact that Kant’s 300th birthday coincided with the so-called “year of democracy” is fitting given the liberal-democratic orientation of most contemporary Kantian political theorists and philosophers. As one scholar commenting on Kant’s legacy for democracy put it, “Kant was a deeply democratic personality” whose “thinking is even more clearly democratic.”
Yet Kant is an unusual and potentially unsatisfactory ally of democracy. In his 1795 essay “On Perpetual Peace,” Kant equates democracy with despotism and expresses his support for autocratic governance. (Though not wholly uncritical of the absolutist Prussian monarchy, Kant famously calls the age of Enlightenment “the century of Frederick” the Great). Kant also holds certain positions that, while not completely unusual for his time, are inconsistent with modern democratic values. For instance, Kant defends: (1) a restricted franchise (limited, as in the French Constitution of 1791, to “active citizens”, i.e. males of a certain economic standing); and (2) an unconditional prohibition on rebellion against the state (which seems to apply even in cases of tyranny). This is to say nothing of the intensely debated topic of Kant’s views on race, gender, and colonialism. If, as some scholars maintain, Kant does not regard women and non-Europeans as full rational agents capable of self-government, it is questionable whether his political philosophy is particularly helpful for thinking through the challenges facing pluralist democracies in the 21st century. It seems, then, that the prospects for the 300-year-old sage of Königsberg to provide us with a rousing philosophical defense of democracy in the wake of his année de fête are rather grim.
Despite the anti-democratic dimensions of Kant’s thought, it is hardly an accident that Kant inspired two of the most influential democratic theorists of the post-WWII era, John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. And research on Kant’s contribution to our understanding of democracy continues. What basis is there for taking Kant seriously as a philosopher of democracy? The most obvious and influential resources come not from Kant’s political philosophy, but from his moral philosophy. At the core of Kant’s moral philosophy is the unconditional dignity of each rational being as a universally self-legislating member of a “kingdom of ends.” The notion that freedom consists in giving oneself universal laws that could also be willed by all others in a community of equals certainly seems like a promising start for a philosophical account of democracy. But how does Kant’s model of moral agency translate into politics? And why, given his emphasis on the equal worth of moral agents as rational self-legislators, is Kant not a straightforward—or even a radical—advocate for democracy?
To answer these questions, let’s return to Kant’s views on democracy. To start, the conventional view among scholars is that Kant’s claim that democracy is necessarily despotic applies only to democracy “in the strict sense”, that is, to small-scale, direct democracies like that of ancient Athens. According to Kant, direct democracies lack the two main features of republican government, which for him is the only legitimate type of government for free and equal human beings. These two features of republicanism are: (1) the separation of powers, i.e. the separation of the executive, legislative, and judicial functions of the state; and (2) “representative” government that reflects the general will of the people. In the Doctrine of Right (1797), Kant seems to depart from his earlier defense of autocracy in “Perpetual Peace” by suggesting that (1) and (2) are best obtained in a state with elected parliamentary representatives. “Any true republic”, as he puts it, “is and can only be a system representing the people, in order to protect its rights in its name, by all the citizens united and acting through their delegates (deputies).” So while Kant is clearly critical of direct democracy, his considered view appears to be that representative democracy is the form of government best suited to his conception of a just, republican state.
This conclusion is reinforced by the following testimony about Kant’s views on the French Revolution. According to one acquaintance, “in spite of all the terror, he [i.e. Kant] held on to his hopes” for the Revolution, “so much that, when he heard the declaration of the republic, he called out with excitement: ‘Now let your servant go in peace to his grave, for I have seen the glory of the world’” (cf. Luke 2:29–32). “He loved the task of the French with all his soul,” reports another contemporary, “and all the outbreaks of immorality did not make him doubt that the ‘representative system’ was the best.” Although Kant opposed revolutionary violence and criticized the excesses of Jacobin radicalism, he supported the French Revolution as a momentous experiment in republican self-government that harbingered the future course of political progress for humanity.
And so, do Kant’s arguments in favor of representative government and his attachment to the fledgling French republic make him a proponent of modern democracy? The answer is complicated. In my view, Kant’s peculiar understanding of political representation gets to the heart of the matter. On the one hand, Kant adopts Rousseau’s claim that free, rational human beings should only obey laws that they have given to themselves; the alternative is to be subject to arbitrary and dominating coercion imposed by another. Although the precise relationship between Kant’s moral and political theories is debated, this Rousseauian emphasis on collective self-legislation accords with the universalism of Kant’s moral philosophy, and thus seems to deliver the democratism that we would expect from a Kantian political philosophy. “The legislative authority,” Kant says, “can only belong to the united will of the people”; accordingly, “the touchstone of whatever can be decided upon as law for a people lies in the question: whether a people could impose such a law upon itself.”
On the other hand, Kant departs from Rousseau—and the mainline republican tradition—by arguing that the state can “represent” the general will without the people exercising actual self-governance. How so? Kant’s reasoning is complex, but the basic point is as follows. For Kant, the general will is a strictly counterfactual norm that refers to the possible consent of the mere idea of a people united by law, and not to the actual consent of an existing population. Anyone can test the legitimacy of a particular law or public institution by simply considering whether it could be the object of the people’s omnilateral agreement. In other words, the coercive limitation of freedom by law is fully justified if everyone subject to the law could in principle agree to it for a specific reason—namely, because the purpose of the law is to enable equal freedom for each (and not, for instance, to maximize happiness or to express the “authentic voice” of the people, however defined). The key point is that “the people” is understood here in an entirely abstract, legal sense as a unity constituted for the sole aim of securing freedom for each under law. Unlike in Rousseau, then, there is no need to engage in actual political procedures—i.e. public deliberation or voting—to ascertain or ratify the general will. The result is that even an absolute monarch like Frederick the Great can “represent” the will of the people by governing in a republican manner, that is, governing as if all those subject to the force of law were also its co-legislators. While Kant argues that a representative democracy is more conducive to a republican state than an autocracy or aristocracy, it remains the case that for him the question of who and how many govern is less important than the way that the coercive authority of the state is used—i.e. for the sake of everyone’s equally lawful freedom, or for the sake of the private ends of those in power.
There is more to say about Kant’s distinctive conception of popular sovereignty, but I will conclude by noting an important implication of his view for modern democracies. By divorcing the norm of the general will from the actual views and choices of a potentially restive public, Kant ensures that the republican (and democratic) criterion of self-given law cannot be used to justify unduly destabilizing or violent political change. If governed in the right way, even Hohenzollern Prussia can sufficiently resemble a republican state, and so the masses need not march on Sanssouci to live in a polity in which they are treated, to some degree, as if they were both sovereign and subject. On the one hand, Kant’s position seems like a concession to the conservative reactionaries of his day horrified by revolutionary France. After all, American conservatives today insist that the United States is not a democracy, but a republic in order to defend the minoritarian features of their political system like the Electoral College. On the other hand, Kant’s political theory yields a rather demanding, if stridently reformist, model of political progress. Because the general will is a purely counterfactual principle that can never be entirely fulfilled in reality, the demand for laws and institutions that better approximate the ideal of a wholly self-legislating citizenry is a permanent feature of politics for Kant. Politicians are forever obligated to reform the state in accordance with the standard of the general will, while citizens can use the latter to formulate lawful grievances to the government in the public sphere.
In this sense, Kant is less a theorist of democracy per se than democratization, understood as the continuous, open-ended process of bringing existing states and institutions into closer conformity with reason’s requirement that free human beings ought to be only subject to self-given laws. As Kant recognized, this course of democratization would be uneven and unpredictable. Moreover, it would necessarily extend well beyond his lifetime (and, we might add, entail going beyond his personal prejudices). It is still ongoing today—over 300 years after Kant’s birth.
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