Ideas for a Future Right: the Logical and Temporal Shift of the Social Contract in Kant's Philosophy

Due to the solution of order that it proposes, the modern construction of the political form and of the State as the source of law tends to overshadow and neutralize the question of justice. While on the one hand the political will of the representative is the political will of each individual, on the other, through the mechanism of authorization, it nevertheless appears to be irreparably different with regard to the individuals themselves. The aim of my work is to show how the philosophical position developed by Kant highlights the aporia contained in the attempt to give the problem of justice a formal solution and how it raises a more fundamental question about justice itself. According to Kant, justice cannot and must not be the domain of arbitrariness: this implies at least a complication of the conceptuality of modern sovereignty, which is best exemplified in the Hobbesian form of sheer obedience to the law. The starting point of my paper is the positing of an anthropology different from the Hobbesian one at the basis of legal-political theory. This gives rise to two fundamental consequences: the social contract loses its epistemological self-sufficiency (it is not enough anymore, but it must be accompanied by an appropriate anthropology, which conceives man as a rational being and capable of a broad thought, i.e. capable of thinking "as if" he were another subject); the social contract also loses its foundational capacity (it is no longer the result of an arbitrary agreement, since the idea of a community of free men belongs to the human reason and, as such, is prior to the concrete formulation of the contract). With regard to the first point, this anthropological variation makes it possible to think of men as participants in an essentially communitarian aspect, i.e. in a radically intersubjective rationality (on which right is based), and not only as antagonistic actors, to be limited through coercive power. As far as the second point is concerned, the contract loses the features of a merely arbitrary and empirical agreement and is instead traced back to its rational character: not every agreement is therefore a source of right, because right arises from reason and not from the agreement itself. Kant's critical position towards democracy finds its foundation precisely in this recognition that the ontological distance between majority opinion and the general will cannot be bridged through a procedure of collective authorization. In conclusion, the proper temporality of the contract is reversed: the latter is no longer the starting point and source of law fixed in the past, but it is placed in the future, as a regulatory ideal towards which it is necessary to strive, and which will never find a complete realization of its own. Justice becomes therefore the horizon within which political activity and the production of law must move, and not the boundary within which law, due to a pre-existing legitimacy, already develops.