Susan Meld Shell

Kant's Theory of Property

Kant’s own writings reveal his early and enthusiastic familiarity with Adam Smith and the Physiocrats long before they were read widely in Germany. A self-proclaimed world trader in ideas, Kant was no businessman. Forced to support himself and a host of relatives on the precarious stipend of a Privatdozent, he was also no stranger to the pangs of financial instability. Although the economic ferment of Konigsberg did not enrich Kant materially, it may well have contributed to the economic model which (as few critics have noted) informs his early philosophic enterprise. Kant began his academic career as a philosopher of nature. Schooled

Kant on Just War and ‘Unjust Enemies’: Reflections on a ‘Pleonasm’

The following remarks are intended to help clarify Kants position on international right and, specifically, the so-called ‘right of war’. They are part of a more general study of Kants politics; but I also make them here in the hope that Kants view of international law (or right) can furnish us with some much-needed practical help and guidance. More specifically, I will try to show that Kant is less averse to the use of force, including resort to pre-emptive war, and far more attuned to possibilities for political catastrophe, than he is often taken to be. A greater appreciation for Kants actual position can, I hope, make a small contribution toward mending the growing rift between so-called ‘Kantians’ who underrate the need for force, and self-styled ‘Hobbesians’ who underestimate the power of moral principle.

Gerhard Krüger and Leo Strauss: The Kant Motif

One of the persistent puzzles of Strauss scholarship is the absence in any of his published works of a thematic treatment of Immanuel Kant (The sole exception is his early dissertation on Jacobi, which includes an extensive treatment of Kant from the perspective of Jacobi’s critique. See Strauss, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der philosophischen Lehre Fr. H. Jacobis (1921)). This absence is all the more striking given Kant’s importance in shaping the intellectual milieu in which the younger Strauss was educated and against which he, along with many of his early intellectual companions, including Gerhard Kruger, Jacob Klein, Gerschom Scholem, and others, rebelled more or less explicitly. And it gives the two seminars that he dedicated to Kant, in 1958 and 1967, respectively (an additional seminar, given in the early 1950s, was evidently not recorded), (with the sole exception of his early dissertation on Jacobi) special importance for anyone wishing to better grasp Strauss’s understanding and appraisal of Kant’s thought, including the meaning of that relative public silence.

Civic Dignity in the Age of Donald Trump: A Kantian Perspective

If there is one generally acknowledged “take away” from the election of Trump, it may well be that the old divisions between right and left no longer hold. Trump supporters were seemingly moved less by traditional conservative appeals to free markets and small government than by anger against perceived condescension and indifference on the part of the cultural elite to their own deeply held moral beliefs and sense of personal dignity. Kant offers both insight into and potential remedies for the dilemmas growing out of our present situation. This is particularly true in matters of economic policy and civic engagement, where “top down” solutions have often left their would-be beneficiaries feeling ever more powerless and disrespected. By addressing these concerns in the name of common citizenship, Kant’s thought helps restore the meaning of the core constitutional principles of freedom, equality, and civic dignity that Trump’s presidency increasingly puts in question.

Kant on Citizenship, Society, and Redistributive Justice

Scholars have long been divided on the redistributive implications of Kant’s theory of justice. On the one hand, there is a prominent “libertarian” reading (including that of von Humboldt, Hayek and Nozick, among others), according to which the function of the state is mainly to defend and maintain private market outcomes. On the other hand, Kant’s work has also inspired, almost from its inception, a more “socially democratic” reading (such as that of Fichte and Hermann Cohen). I will argue that both readings ignore Kant’s actual justification of the state’s duty to tax the wealthy to relieve the poor: namely the “end,” on the part of the “general will of the people,” to “unite into a society that is to maintain itself perpetually” [6: 326]. In what follows, I will attempt to spell out the meaning of this phrase, with a view to providing an alternative (limited) defense of contemporary liberal-democratic welfare policies. I will also consider the larger question of what, according to Kant, it means to be a full-fledged member of the political community: that is, an “active citizen” as distinguished from a mere, if still vitally necessary, “participant,” and what, if anything, governments should do to facilitate such membership.

On The Responsibility of Reason

Abstract Ralph Hancock has written a superb book— comprehensive in scope, elegant in argument, and animated by a sustained and powerful vision. Each chapter reflects deep and searching reflection on thinkers whose ongoing significance for we liberal democrats can hardly be overstated. The hero of the book is Tocqueville; and not least of the books charms, a claim to originality, rests on what Hobbes might have called “the magnification” of that hero to a level comparable to that of Leo Strauss and Martin Heidegger to whom Tocqueville is here compared to his own advantage. Questions posed by this article include: Hancocks exploitation of the term “moral analogy,” the adequacy of his vertical/horizontal metaphor, and whether he does full justice to Strausss treatment of the moral life.

‘Nachschrift eines Freundes’: Kant on Language, Friendship and the Concept of a People

Kants brief ‘Postscript of a Friend’ serves as a peculiar coda to his life work. The last of Kants writing to be published during his lifetime, it is both a friendly endorsement of Christian Gottlieb Mielckes newly competed Lithuanian–German and German–Lithuanian Dictionary and a plea in Kants own name for the preservation of minority languages, Lithuanian in particular. This support for minority languages has no visible precedent in his earlier writings, in which national, civic and linguistic identities and associated loyalties tend to overlap. Indeed, Kants understanding of the commonwealth as nation-state seems predicated on the fact or myth of ethnic and linguistic unity and homogeneity. The same apparent lack of precedent also applies to the Nachschrift s singling out as a people of peculiar civic merit of the Lithuanians, who are not otherwise mentioned in any of Kants published or unpublished writings. The work thus raises an obvious question: why does Kant devote his last published work (and declining powers) to a topic and cause in which he does not seem to have taken much earlier interest?

Review Essay: Rereading Kant: Three New Approaches

The three books under review are, in their breadth of focus, a useful reminder of the continuing relevance of Kant beyond the limits staked out by John Rawls and some of his followers. Kant remains an enduring source of inspiration and perturbation across a wide variety of approaches to the study of political theory. Together, these books are a useful guide to the parameters of Kant’s current influence and interest; that is, in what ways he seems especially to matter now. Howard Williams’s clear and analytically acute comparison of Kant and Hobbes forcefully brings home the affinities and disaffinities between these seminal contributions to the liberal tradition. Williams lays out impressively both Kant’s self-conscious debt to Hobbes, and his crucial, if sometimes subtle, disagreements with him. The volume has the added strength of situating Kant in his larger political milieu, with a view more to clarifying his argument than to “contextualizing” it historically. The book is organized around Kant’s 1793 essay “On the Saying: While It May Be True in Theory, It Does Not Apply in Practice,” which is explicitly directed against Christian Garve, Thomas Hobbes, and Moses Mendelssohn. Among the most useful elements of the study is its comprehensive weighing of the significance of Garve for Kant. Garve was both a preeminent representative of “popular philosophy”—an eclectic movement of the German Enlightenment—and, as Williams argues, a stalking horse for Hobbes himself, the true target, in the 1790s, of Kant’s increasingly embattled discourse