The sensus communis: Civic discourse in Kant's republicanism

The Sensus Communis: Civic discourse and progress toward perpetual peace Panel: "Kant's Republicanism and the Highest Political Good" True to his Enlightenment roots, Kant is committed to the idea of progress. For him, specifically, the telos of the progress of the human being is what he names Perpetual Peace—a moral world achieved through the enactment of just, stable political orders, and the existence of ethical communities. Under the auspices of perpetual peace, there is no international strife, a condition that allows for internal flourishing within states. More concretely, Kant outlines what he takes to be requisite for perpetual peace with respect to individual nation states, namely, a republican constitution. These states, he argues, are less likely to go to war. His republicanism is, in most respects, typical for those who form a part of the social contract tradition—a division of powers and a representative government. It is only in the context of republicanism that the laws a state enacts can best approximate the form of universality, or, justice. What is truly distinctive about Kant’s republicanism, I contend, is what drives it forward toward perfection and the attainment of the highest political good. Free speech, for Kant, is a necessary part of how republican governments can do the very thing they are meant to with respect to law. It is principally through the exercise of free speech that laws are subject to the measure of universality; public critique offers the means by which defects in law can be discerned, articulated, and submitted for change. Perhaps even more notable, however, is that Kant associates the sensus communis—an aesthetic category—with the very Enlightenment goals under which a republican government is articulated. In this essay, I will take up how Kant’s notion of the sensus communis as developed in the Critique of Judgment can play a central role in Kant’s political theory. The sensus communis can give us real insight into how free speech may actually take shape. While the ultimate measure of a law is its universal (i.e., moral) form, and free speech must aim at this, Kant gives no indication of how such necessary and integral civic discourse is to be enacted. His notion of the sensus commnunis as it is conceived in the context of beauty, however, offers a more concrete delineation of what the exercise of free speech under a republican government might look like. The sensus communis serves as such a delineation not only because of its embodiment of enlightenment ideals of a universal standpoint, etc., but because of the ability judgments made based on it have to expand our concepts. This is the same expansive quality that Kant associates with progress in moral judgments. The sensus communis, then, emerges as a key resource for understanding how republicanism can succeed in realizing its aims of creating and enacting just laws, and ultimately reaching the perpetual peace for which it is destined.