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Many key aspects of Kant’s Groundwork, from the Categorical Imperative to his conception of autonomy and freedom of the will, have long been the subject of heated debates. One resource for understanding the Groundwork has thus far gone virtually unused, however: the transcript of Kant’s lectures on legal and political philosophy from the very months in which he was writing the Groundwork. In this paper, I argue that the ‘republican’ features of the political theory that Kant defends in these lectures shed important new light both on Kant’s conception of the supreme moral principle and on his understanding of freedom and autonomy.
Pauline Kleingeld is Professor of Philosophy at University of Groningen, focusing on ethics and political philosophy. She has published influential essays and books on Kant, focusing on cosmopolitanism, race, colonialism, and progress in history. She is the author of Kant and cosmopolitanism: The philosophical ideal of world citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Fortschritt und Vernunft: Zur Geschichtsphilosophie Kants (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1995). In 2020 she received the Spinoza prize of the Dutch Research Council. Faculty bio.