Arthur Ripstein’s Force and Freedom offers a sophisticated and insightful interpretation and defence of Kant’s political philosophy. Perhaps the most striking feature of the Kantian approach is its attempt to ground the whole of political morality in one right: the right to freedom, understood as the right to be independent of others’ choices. Is Ripstein’s defence of this ambitious Kantian project successful? In this paper, I offer some reasons for doubting that it is. In a nutshell, I suggest that there is a vicious circularity in the Kant-Ripstein (KR) treatment of freedom. On the one hand, according to the KR view, all rights individuals have under a just constitution are derivative on the innate right to freedom; on the other, freedom itself turns out to be defined by reference to individual rights. To be unfree/dependent on others is to have one’s own means or resources used by others for their, rather than one’s own, purposes. But in order to know what qualifies as one’s own, we need a prior account of persons’ rights, which is precisely what freedom is meant to deliver. Since the KR notion of freedom surreptitiously presupposes an account of justice, I conclude that it cannot be the sole ground of political morality, and offers an unsatisfactory account of the value of freedom itself.
