My purpose is to explore Kant’s understanding of what I call ‘The Problem of Politics’, taking as my starting point Kant’s own declaration of it as “the most difficult and the last to be solved by the human race”. I address this by means of two questions: what was the problem of politics for Kant, and how does the understanding of politics as dealing with a sphere of conflict and antagonism mark the nature of his political thought? My conjectures on these issues are three:
First, that politics is a persistent concern for Kant, as one involving the presence of opposing elements in need of reconciliation. This reading is supported by Kant’s own engagement with politics as a problem throughout his political writings. The problem is basically sketched as the setting out of a state, in order to submit our “unrestrained freedom” to the limits of coercion. In this sense, the problem of politics is defined as the reconciliation between freedom and order.
Second, that we are able to trace conflict as the distinctive mark of the problem of politics for Kant, is reinforced by the systematic treatment he gives of the issue in his Doctrine of Right. According to Kant, I argue, the manifestation of conflict at the individual level is that of opposing interests, at the collective level it is the conflict of power, and finally at the nation-state level conflict is represented by war between states.
Third, as a consequence of this general outlook of politics, Kant acknowledges that the “highest political good” is thus not the summum bonum in the manner of the Classical tradition of political philosophy, but the notion of “perpetual peace”. We thus see how Kant identifies “perpetual peace” as the end to which all states should progress towards as a distinctively political end, i.e., “the highest political good”.
We read in Perpetual Peace that: “[I]f we consider it absolutely necessary to couple the concept of right with politics, or even to make it a limiting condition of politics, it must be conceded that the two are compatible”. Thus, in the manner of Machiavelli and Hobbes, Kant combined his idealism with “an anti-idealistic view, if not of the whole, at any rate of the origins of mankind or of civil society”, adding in my view a distinctively Kantian value to the notion of peace as the on going eradication of conflict.
