Progress in Kant

Kant explains in his work “On the Common Saying: This May be True in Theory but it does not Apply in Practice” that without the idea that humanity is progressing we would not have continued to analyze human events from the viewpoint of the spectator, the viewpoint of one who is not called upon to act; for we would have tired of watching the passage of human life and the organization of societies, if all that was expected was the endless repetition of human failure and there was no hope for improvement (Kant, AA 8). This is a rather unconvincing defense of the assumption of progress. It is not surprising that the Kantian reliance on progress has drawn the ire of such a wide variety of 20th Century European figures, from Foucault, to Adorno, to Arendt. And it is that latter, whose thematization of totalitarianism in the first half of the 20th Century offers a fitting rejoinder to the assumption that the Enlightenment unleashed an era marked by the progress of humankind. And yet, it is also true that all three continued to return to Kant to buttress their political concerns, be it Adorno’s dependence on Kantian autonomy, Foucault’s emphasis on Kantian critique, or Arendt’s on Kant’s conception of reflective judgment. In this paper I will investigate such uses of Kant’s political thought in order to uncover the role of the Kantian conception of progress that is implicit in the varied uses of his political work. In this way I will not offer a defense of the Kantian assumption of progress, but I will argue that without it one could not remain in any sense a Kantian in the area of political thought.