This project brings together two areas of Kant’s thought which have often been viewed as separate from each other, his legal philosophy on the one hand and his philosophy of history on the other. In his Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Right (1797) Kant develops the a priori principles of right for an ideal republican state as well as for morally legitimate international and cosmopolitan relations. However, he there provides little discussion of how these metaphysical principles are supposed to apply to real life. Kant’s shorter writings on political philosophy and the philosophy of history on the other discuss a whole range of real-life political affairs, but with little reference to deeper theoretical concerns.

Even though Kant’s legal philosophy and his writings on history derive from the same period, these texts are rarely analyzed together. By interpreting Kant’s principles of right as giving rise to norms for historical transformation, the project seeks to do just that. The project will pay particular attention to the various analogies on which Kant draws in explaining the nature of the state, in particular: the state as akin to a biological organism, the establishment of a civil condition as comparable to a contract, and the relations among states as resembling the state of nature between individuals living outside of a civil condition, all of which present legal normativity as guiding the transformation of norms. Our main hypothesis is that for Kant these analogies represent ideas that are meant to rationally drive theoretical and practical progress across history. The project thereby aims to show how these “ideas of reason” make possible the realization of a priori principles of right by way of a progressive historical development.

Our central concept in making that interpretive case will be that of normative transformation. By normative transformation we mean the idea that the creation and revision of positive legal statutes might be understood as proceeding under the guidance of the ideas of reason contained in Kant’s various analogies for the state, so that over time these statutes come to approximate the ideal of freedom under right ever more closely. The project thus aims to understand what exactly these ideas of reason entail and how exactly they might serve their purpose as normative guides. The project thereby follows recent work on the place of ideas of reason in Kant’s philosophy more generally but expands the scope of that work by arguing that these ideas govern not only theoretical inquiry and the like but also real-life legal and political processes.

Our interpretation of Kant’s legal and political philosophy builds on his remark in the preface of the Doctrine of Right that “we shall often have to take as our object the particular nature of human beings, which is cognized only by experience, in order to show in it what can be inferred from universal moral principles… A metaphysics of morals cannot be based upon anthropology but can still be applied to it.” The project aims to understand how exactly to make good on Kant’s suggestion here that a priori principles of right may be applied to empirical conditions.