Political Autonomy and Ethical Independence: Kant’s Normative Political Realism

The discussion about political realism can perhaps best be described as an attempt to define the position and contrast it to other views within the realm of the political. The complexity of this arena certainly plays a big role in establishing a variety of different brands of realism. One essential common feature seems to be the insistence on the autonomy of the political from the ethical. There is, however, an entire spectrum of views ranging from complete dissociation of ethics from politics, to including ethical considerations while maintaining the primacy of the political. One important issue that has developed in recent years has been the exact domain of the domain of the autonomy of the political. Namely, the problem was to what degree, if at all, ethics can figure in politics. As Erman (2018) suggests, there are two horns of the dilemma for any political realist who wants to include ethics – either their view is then still reducible to ethics, making realist aspect of the theory redundant, or ethics figures in an uninteresting way, making it empty. In this paper, I will try to show that one can formulate a distinctively normative political position which would retain autonomy over ethics and not be in any way non-ethical or anti-ethical. My key point will be that Kant’s political position is one example of an autonomous normative system of the political, and that as such it bears relevance for today’s political theory and practice, while also, on interpretive level, introducing a re-examination of commonly accepted views about the relationship between ethics and politics in Kant’s philosophy. The paper will consist of four parts. First, I will explore how political realism is contrasted with its main alternatives in literature. Second, I will revisit Kant’s key political texts and discuss interpretations according to which Kant is a paradigmatic political moralist or idealist. I will first criticize these interpretations and, by relying on some of Kant’s claims in his political and practical writings, try to establish that it is not as easy to subscribe it under the heading of moralism or idealism. Although there are several, though not many, attempts to cast Kant as a political realist (Nardin 2017, Pinheiro Walla 2017), in the third part of the paper, I will explore the shortcomings of their attributions of realism to Kant and try to show that there are better arguments we can formulate in favour of interpreting one significant aspect of Kant’s political thinking as being at least realist. In the fourth part I will put forward the interpretation that is based on Kant’s own words. In conclusion, I will try to establish that in order for politics to be compatible with ethics, for Kant (and in general) it first has to be wholly and interestingly outlined as independent of it, while still not reducing itself to what we term realpolitik and what Kant would surely find as an unacceptable position.