Progress Towards Perpetual Peace

Kant’s political teleology (as most famously encapsulated in the “guarantee” of perpetual peace) has puzzled interpreters ever since. Many have tended to ignore or at least deflate the relevant passages, given that they seem to preclude meaningful voluntary action, thus threatening the normative dimension of Kant’s politics: the creation of a specific set of institutions that brings about a peaceful world, they insist, should be fully within the bounds of human practical possibility. Others have taken the political teleology as evidence that Kant considers the political domain as a whole as instrumental to ethical perfection, likening his appeal to nature’s assistance to the “postulates of pure practical reason”: political institutions should be conceived as conducive to our pursuit of the highest good. In this paper, I try to make headway on this puzzle by introducing the vital distinction between constitutive and regulative politics as two separate levels with distinct sets of norms, which prescribe the creation of a legal order on the one hand, and its perfection on the other hand. Locating Kant’s political teleology within the latter domain makes it possible not only to take it seriously without ethicising the domain of right. It also lays bare an intriguing vision of political progress, according to which the path to justice necessarily leads through the creation of unavoidably deficient (though authoritative) institutions which are gradually improved in line with their own internal standards.