September 19
10:00-10:15 Introduction: Reidar Maliks
Chair: Reidar Maliks
10:15-11:30 Rainer Forst (Goethe University Frankfurt): “Kantian Republicanism and the Grounds of Democracy” (Keynote)
11:30-12:15 Japa Pallikkathayil (University of Pittsburgh): “Constitutional Protections in the Kantian State”
12:15-13:15 Lunch break
Chair: Michael Kryluk
13:15-14:00 Paul Guyer (Brown University/University of Pennsylvania): "Forma imperii and Forma regiminis: The Form and the Spirit of Republican Government."
14:00-14:45 Marie Newhouse (University of Surrey): "Kantian Equality as a Hohfeldian Immunity"
30 minutes break
Chair: Zsolt Kristóf Kapelner
15:15-16:00 Michael Kryluk “Kant and Populism”
16:00-16:45 Elisabeth Widmer (University of Oslo): "Kant’s Republican Account of Citizenship"
September 20
Chair: Sven Arntzen
10:00-11:15 Arthur Ripstein (University of Toronto): "Giving Laws to Ourselves" (Key note)
11:15-12:00 Michael Gregory (University of Edinburgh): "Kantian Democracy and Administrative Discretion"
12:00-13:00 Lunch break
Chair: Elisabeth Widmer
13:00-13:45 Jakob Huber (Freie Universität Berlin): “Kant and democratic hope”
13:45-14:30 Nicholas Vrousalis (Erasmus University Rotterdam): "Kant and Economic Democracy"
14:30-15:15 Kjartan Koch Mikalsen (Norwegian University of Science and Technology): “Kant’s Rousseauvian Defense of Representative Government”
15:15- Conclusion
Abstracts are below
Would you like to attend? Please register here.
Even though Kant did not use the word democracy to describe his ideal of a rightful association, he was committed to the view that “the legislative authority can belong only to the united will of the people” (6:313), that citizens must have the right to vote, and that every constitution must be republican. Yet essential components of Kant’s commitment to popular sovereignty are not well understood.
This conference opens for contributions on numerous topics. Some questions concern the significance of consent for freedom: What difference does the democratic process make to the justice of law? How should we think of concepts like legitimacy, authority, and obligation in light of a Kantian theory of democracy? Other questions have to do with equality and inclusiveness: Who should be included as a citizen with the right to vote and on what grounds? How are the national boundaries of the demos justified? Further questions concern the institutional components of Kant’s account, including the nature and purpose of voting, representation, the separation of powers, and the connection of the democratic process to the public sphere. Questions of rights and duties in the transitions to democracy (and away from democracy) are also highly relevant. The conference investigates these questions and more, and attention will be paid to situating Kant’s view in the context of eighteenth century philosophy.
In 2024 some of the world’s largest democracies go to elections in the midst of numerous challenges: Populism, voter apathy, disinformation, distrust, economic inequality, unregulated use of money in politics, executive and judiciary overreach, insurrections, nationalism, and war. The time is right to think carefully about the nature and justification of democracy that can be found in Kant’s philosophy.
The conference is part of the project KanDem – Kantian Foundations of Democracy, funded by The Research Council of Norway and devoted to analyzing the democratic theory of the Kantian School in Germany in the 1790s.
Abstracts
Mike Gregory, "Kantian Democracy and Administrative Discretion"
Kant takes the republic to have two necessary features: that the legislative power lies wholly and exclusively with the people and that the legislative and the executive power remain separate but not equal (where the executive is dependent on the legislative). These two pillars are meant to support each other insofar as the legislative power, vested in the people, is the only entity capable of willing omnilaterally. The executive can only legitimately will under or within the omnilateral will of the legislative, but never beyond it. I argue that this Kantian picture is at odds with the current administrative state where the executive performs quasi-legislative roles which cannot be reduced to legislative declarations, nor understood as good faith interpretations of legislative statutes. This issue is further exasperated by the fact that administrative decision making (ADM) is often arbitrary, opaque and lacks due process protections. If this is true, how should the Kantian democratic republic respond to the fact of administrative quasi-legislative power? I argue that one recent attempt by Chiara Cordelli fails to give a convincing answer for how to account for ADM. The Kantian, it seems, has two options, either radically scale back the amount of administrative decision making in the modern state, or adopt a new understanding of the separation of powers and democratic legitimacy which can better account for ADM.
Jakob Huber, "Kant on democratic hope"
The aim of this talk is to ask whether Kant’s account of hope is a useful guide for thinking about political hope. Two kinds of hope matter in democratic politics: fundamental hopes – say, the hope to make a difference – are subject to minimal epistemic constraints, while concrete hopes – say, the hope for a particular political outcome – require a complex trade-off between epistemic and practical considerations. I argue that Kant is able to make sense of the former but not the latter, given that he overemphasises the motivational value of hope at the expense of its opportunity costs. Specifically, I problematize that in transferring his model of hope from ethics into politics, he immunizes it against the evidence. Without the ability to critically reflect on an end at which it is directed, Kantian hope is always on the verge of turning into fixation.
Michael Kryluk, "Kant and Populism"
The rise of anti-establishment political movements in recent years has placed populism at the centre of discussions about the legitimacy and durability of liberal democracy in the 21st century. In this paper, I will argue that Kant has a unique conception of populism that can help us to better understand and evaluate this phenomenon. Although many competing definitions of ‘populism’ exist, I loosely follow Ernesto Laclau in using the term to refer to the process of generating demands for social and legal transformation that are made in the name of ‘the people’ and addressed to the state and its representatives. Of course, Kant is not a straightforward advocate for populism—for instance, his restrictions on the franchise and unconditional opposition to rebellion are firmly anti-populist. Yet Kant also holds that the criterion for the legitimate exercise of public coercion is the idea of the general will of the people. Citizens can appeal to the ideal standard of the general will to test whether a given law is legitimate and openly criticize potential injustices in the public sphere. For Kant, politics is the site of the tension between the unachievable norm of complete popular sovereignty and the arbitrary use of public force at work in current states and institutions. This tension is the motor of political progress that should lead those in power to gradually reform the state and its laws according to the unachievable paradigm of a perfectly self-legislating republic. A populist antagonism between the idea of the general will and existing forms of state coercion is thus an indispensable component of Kant’s argument for the realization of his rational legal principles in experience. These aspects of Kant’s thought, I submit, amount to a model of populist political change that avoids common objections to populism like extremism and illiberalism.
Kjartan Koch Mikalsen, "Kant’s Rousseauvian Defense of Representative Government"
In his writings on law and politics, Kant repeatedly links the idea of republican government to the idea of a people giving laws to themselves. Still, many commentators deny that Kant’s republican ideal implies democratic lawmaking. Emphasising Kant’s claims that monarchs or autocrats can rule according to republican principles and that possible consent is the criterion for legitimate external laws, they conclude that Kant either plays down the importance of political self-legislation or that he is a Hobbesian autocrat. In contrast to such readings, I argue that both textual evidence and central ideas in Kant’s theory weighs in favour of interpreting his writings on law and politics as a strong defence of popular sovereignty. Even if non-democratic lawmaking procedures need not undermine political legitimacy (i.e., the right to rule), they necessarily fall short of the republican ideal, which every ruler is obliged to approximate as far as possible. I further argue that the close link between republican government and what Kant calls “the representative system” does not imply rejection of direct participation in democratic lawmaking. The defining trait of the representative system is separation of executive and legislative power, which Kant seems to defend on grounds fully congruent with Rousseau’s argument in The Social Contract, namely that in addition to formal constraints on the content of laws, republican lawmaking is subject to procedural constraints denying lawmakers the right to judge individual cases. Unlike Rousseau, Kant was certainly open to democratic lawmaking via elected representatives, but representative democracy does not seem to be a direct implication of a priori principles of right. Instead, political self-legislation via representatives is the solution to the problem of how such principles can apply to large societies.
Japa Pallikkathayil, "Constitutional Protections in the Kantian State"
I examine the apparent example of a constitutional protection given in Kant’s discussion of freedom of the pen in On the Common Saying. I develop this into an account of the source and structure of constitutional protections in the Kantian state. I then use this account to scaffold an argument for a constitutional guarantee of universal suffrage.
Arthur Ripstein, "Giving Laws to Ourselves"
Kant’s political philosophy rests on the idea that under rightful institutions, no person is subject to the private choice of another. Public institutions can only act through individual natural persons, and the decisions that they make will inevitably depend on particular features of those charged with making those decisions. I begin by explaining the conditions under which such contingent decisions can nonetheless count as consistent with everyone’s freedom. I will then make the stronger claim that when democratic institutions are properly implemented, the law can be thought of as self-imposed by those who are subject to them.
Nicholas Vrousalis, "Kant and Economic Democracy"
According to an influential interpretation of Kant’s political philosophy, the Kantian objection to economic dependence is fundamentally about poverty. Eliminate poverty—read: propertylessness—and you have eliminated economic dependence. So Kant’s political economy of independence just is the dialectic of property and propertylessness under the modern state. This paper argues that crucial passages in the Doctrine of Right presuppose an account of Kantian economic dependence broader than mere propertylessness. Economic independence, for Kant, is co-extensive with self-standing (selbstständig) production for a competitive market—that is, independent commodity production. Kant’s political economy of independence is therefore not just about property and propertylessness, as the orthodox interpretation holds, but also about the independent exercise of the productive purposivenesses of free and equal people.
Elisabeth Widmer, "Kant’s Republican Account of Citizenship"
One of the major challenges in contemporary efforts to revive Kant as a neo-republican lies in his conception of citizenship. Whereas neo-republicans have made substantial efforts to distance themselves from the traditional view that restricted voting rights to mainstream white males, Kant’s distinction between “active” and “passive” citizens still reflects aspects of this traditional perspective. Without dismissing the sexist and classist stereotypes involved, I argue that Kant’s notion of citizenship still provides a valuable framework for understanding citizens as a driving force in the promotion of non-domination. By placing his concept of citizenship within the context of his broader republican project, I aim to show that Kant is primarily concerned with a republic governed by laws that serve the public interest. I argue that this focus explains why Kant takes issue with the moral character of citizens and their capacity to critically engage with politics and actively “contest” dominating powers—a concern he shares with neo-republicans.
Participants
Rainer Forst is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy Department of Political Science and Department of Philosophy, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main. He is the author of among other books The right to justification: Elements of a constructivist theory of justice (Columbia University Press, 2012), Toleration in Conflict: Past and Present (CUP 2013), and The Noumenal Republic: Critical Constructivism After Kant (Polity Press, 2024).
Mike Gregory is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of Edinburgh School of Law and Affiliated Researcher at Edinburgh Futures Insititute. He was awarded his PhD with highest distinction by University of Groningen for his thesis “The Kantian Republic”. His work has appeared most recently in Ratio "Does the Kantian Republic Dominate? Freedom and Majoritarian Rule" and "Kant's Hylomorphic Formulation of Right and the Necessity of the State in Kant-Studien. His current project is “Democracy, Rights and the Rule of Law in a Data Driven Society” where he writes on legal and political impacts of emerging technologies.
Paul Guyer is the Jonathan Nelson Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Philosophy at Brown University. He is the author of thirteen books on Kant, including Kant and the Claims of Taste and Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (1987), and Reason and Experience in Mendelssohn and Kant (2020). He is the co-translator of the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of the Power of Judgment, and Notes and Fragments in the Cambridge Edition of Kant, of which he was General Co-Editor from 1986 to 2016.
Jakob Huber is Principal Investigator of the "Democratic Hope“ Research Group at the Institute of Philosophy, Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of Kant’s Grounded Cosmopolitanism (OUP 2022) and currently writing a book on the political philosophy of hope.
Michael Kryluk is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Philosophy at the University of Oslo. He received his PhD in philosophy from Stony Brook University in 2022.
Kjartan Koch Mikalsen is associate professor in philosophy at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His research interests include democratic theory, distributive justice, political legitimacy, public use of reason, and sovereignty.
Japa Pallikkathayil is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on issues at the intersection of moral and political philosophy, including work on coercion, consent, and rights.
Marie Newhouse is an Associate Professor (Reader) in Law, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the University of Surrey. Her research focuses on legal philosophy, especially Kantian accounts of legal obligation, the nature and limits of the state's legislative authority, and criminal wrongdoing. She also sometimes writes about institutional corruption. She holds a B.A. in political science from the University of Washington, a J.D. from the University of Washington School of Law, and a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard University.
Arthur Ripstein is University Professor in the Faculty of Law and Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of among other books Kant and the Law of War (Oxford 2021), Rules for Wrongdoers (Oxford 2021), and Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (Harvard 2009)
Nicholas Vrousalis is Associate Professor in Practical Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Vrousalis read economics at Cambridge and got his doctorate in philosophy at Oxford. He has since taught moral and political philosophy, economic ethics, and the history of philosophy at the universities of Cambridge, Leiden, and Leuven. Vrousalis has held fellowships at Aarhus, Princeton, and Harvard. His second monograph, Exploitation as Domination, was published by Oxford University Press in 2023.
Elisabeth Widmer is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo and a visiting researcher at the London School of Economics. Her research interests include political, legal, and economic philosophy, particularly in Kant, post-Kantianism, and neo-Kantianism.
Organizer: KanDem, with additional support from The Norwegian Kant Society. Contact: Reidar.maliks@ifikk.uio.no