In this paper I defend the view that Kant understood conflict as the animating force of politics. Plenty of passages support my defence of the centrality of conflict. Kant speaks at times of “the resistance that constantly threatens to break up this society.” This quarrel, he explains, is intensified by a predisposition to “gain worth in the opinion of others,” and “an unjust desire to acquire superiority for oneself” over them. Such “wild lawlessness” thereby results in a fundamental incompatibility. Human beings, Kant concludes, seek “to arrange the conflict of their un-peaceable dispositions”, albeit with very little success.
This approach to politics, however, poses a serious problem for Kant, because it challenges the ordering and resolving of the antagonistic nature of human relations by means of a lawful and non-arbitrary solution. To address this challenge, we must be able to distinguish political conflict from other kinds of conflict, more importantly, moral conflict. The upshot of my analysis is to show that Kant understood the antagonistic frictions of human relations as essentially political root. Two aspects make conflict political in nature: its inter-personal and external character. The inter-personal aspect is evidenced by the fact that the disagreement underlying our political lives would not arise we lived in isolation from other human beings. The externality of political conflict, by contrast, has to do with the various non-moral motivations that underscore our attempts to, simply, get along. The reasons we have to equally share the sphere of the earth with others, establish lawful constitutions, or design a cosmopolitan arrangement between states may well be moral reasons, but they do not have to be so.
In conclusion, my reading allows us to view Kant as adopting a position where conflict is not only deemed central to our philosophical inquiries, but also calls for a kind of resolution. This allows us to distinguish Kant’s view from, to take an example, Hobbes’s account of conflict. For Hobbes, conflict is surely central, lending the fuel for the individuals’ self-interested nature. Nevertheless, conflict’s assumed centrality does not make it radically solvable: conflict for Hobbes can be bracketed within the strict boundaries of state coercion, but it is never fully eradicated due to our proneness to war and violence. In contrast to this picture, Kant’s approach to conflict as both inherent and solvable commits him to a particular view of political life, demanding the intervening agency of reason to harness and order its conflictive character. This positions Kant’s political philosophy in a close and intimate relation to his theory of the will, one that is particularly distinctive within the history of political thought.
