Can There Be a Highest Political Good?

Kant suggests, at the end of Chapter III of the Rechtslehre, that perpetual peace is the highest political good. Such an end must be pursued, however unlikely its realisation, as long as ‘its impossibility cannot be demonstrated either’ (6:354). Earlier he is quite clear that this ‘is not a philanthropic (ethical) principle but a principle having to do with rights (6:352) The notion of the highest good is present through all of Kant’s critical works, but in different and often apparently incompatible forms. Much discussion in the literature centres on the question of whether this notion can be understood as immanent or transcendent (Beiser, 2006; Yovel, 1980; Reath, 1988; Silber, 1959; for example), whether it describes another, redeemed world or the most perfect, and humanly realisable state of this world. If the latter can be shown to be consistently supportable, a promising avenue would appear to open up towards the re- attachment of the political to the Kant’s ‘main’ moral project. In this paper, I argue that the notion of a highest political good is, in the end, incompatible with both Kant’s practical use of the term and with essential features of his political writings. 1) A highest good cannot be derivative or subsidiary; the highest political good must be not just be compatible with the highest good, tout court, but must be identical with it. 2) This good is not political, considered either as terminus or telos of our striving; it is the striving itself that is political. 3) It is not clear in Kant that the means by which we progress politically are necessarily isomorphic with the form of our end- it may be that tyranny and perpetual warfare could lead us there irrespective of our conscious intentions. With regard to 1), I will look at all the various accounts of the highest good set out in all three critiques and elsewhere. My view is that in the end, the ‘immanent’ version, the presentation of the highest good in the third Critique as ‘nature’s final purpose’ (5:432) and in the Religion as a duty ‘sui generis, not of men towards men, but of the human race towards itself’ (6:97) predicated on the possibility of realising, in the first instance, a ‘cosmopolitan whole’ and in the second instance, of an ‘ethical commonwealth’ are not compatible. With regard to 2) I argue that a consistent Kantian account of the political is compromised by the identification of an end; drawing on resources in the third Critique and in “An Old Question Raised Again”, I argue that ‘the political’ is rooted in ‘a mode of thinking [of] the spectators’ (8:85) Finally, in support of 3) and following on from 2), I suggest that a more reliable Kantian politics would hold to a certain scepticism regarding our ability as a species to set rational ends, given our finitude and would instead cleave to a functional, even agonistic, emergent rationality.