‘REPUBLICANIZING’ KANT'S REPUBLIC: MAKING POLITICS‘ TRIBUTE TO MORALITY COUNT

This article explores the relationship between Kant's political and moral thought. I argue that the “homage” Kant claims politics should pay to morality, if it is to be authentic, cannot be understood as the mere establishment of a system of public justice (Recht). While public justice ensures that the external freedom or capacity for choice of each is harmonized with the same freedom in all—a moral concern—it necessarily remains indifferent to the quality of will that under girds this liberal order. Similarly, Kant s attempt in the Critique of Judgment to link politics to morality via “culture”—a virtue‐oriented Bildung resting securely on the foundation of a “civil community”—proves, by Kant's own standards, to be flawed. However, lying dormant in Kant's philosophy is another avenue connecting politics and morality—participatory democracy. Although this alternative was not advocated by Kant, I demonstrate that his writings gesture toward it, that it is not inconsistent with the spirit of either his moral or political philosophy.