Conflict in Transition

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of conflict in Kant’s understanding of the transition from the state of nature to civil society. In Ideas for a Universal History of Mankind, Kant tells us that ‘the achievement of a universal civic society which administers law among men’ is yet the most difficult problem and ‘the last to be solved by the human race’. Kant explains this problematic transition by appealing to the notion of ‘unsocial sociability’, thus revealing the social traits of the human race in its tendency towards civility and sociability on the one hand, and the competing drive to remain our own masters ‘in a state of wild freedom’, on the other. However, it remains unclear whether the inherently conflictive character of human nature Kant is here identifying must be wholly eradicated once we move to the precinct of the juridical condition, or if there is a role to be played by these animating forces in the development and stability of the civic union. To tackle the role of conflict in this early political writing, I will focus on the notions of ‘needs’, ‘passions’, ‘vainglory’, ‘lust for power’, and ‘avarice’, in order to question the positive and negative aspects of the conflicting mechanisms of social interaction. My thesis is that Kant’s approach to the workings of antagonism both in Ideas and later in Perpetual Peace is a key to understand why conflict remains active in the precinct of the civic condition as the mark of politics.