Kant's Critique of Economic Reason: Between Social Domination and the Construction of a Good Life

Abstract

Speaker: Nuria Sánchez Madrid, Complutense University of Madrid This lecture aims to offer a broad reading of the somewhat tacit presence of the various axes that constitute economic rationality in Kant’s work—basically the household, the market, and the state (Brosch 2024; Williams 2025). Although Kant did not witness most of the forms of domination generated by late capitalism -specially the impersonal ones, which Marx mainly focuses in the "Grundrisse" and "The Capital", nonetheless this author provides conceptual tools that allow us to respond to what Agnes Heller identified as one of capitalism’s main contradictions: the production of needs whose satisfaction is structurally impeded by the hegemonic frameworks of production, circulation, and consumption of goods. First, I will highlight several points of inequality that Kant assumes to be inevitable in his writings on legal and political philosophy (concerning women, dependent workers, colonialist market and racialized subjects), insofar as they represent non-ideal elements that any updating of his legacy must critically confront. Second, I will explore the Kantian framework that prevents the collapse of the structure of needs that Heller characterizes as “radical” in the face of the excesses typical of capitalist exploitation. Here I aim to highlight Kant's functionalist approach to economic activity, engaging into a dialogue with Williams' account of corporations (2025) in Kant's writings. Third, I will argue for the hermeneutic benefits of focusing attention on the individual social agent in order to identify the processes that oppress and reify them, while still taking into account the impersonal logics of domination that characterize neoliberal capitalism. Thus I argue that Kant's focus on the individual agent can counteract the determinist accounts often devoted in recent times to capitalist exploitation and domination. I conclude in this wake that Heller’s interpretative strategy underscores the functional value of the Kantian notion of 'limit' in providing the economic sphere with a rationality that serves social reproduction rather than endangering it.