Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was a German philosopher of enormous influence in every area of philosophical, political and moral thought. In political terms he is especially important as a writer in the Enlightenment tradition and as a successor to Rousseau and an influence on Hegel. No very specific political doctrine can be derived from Kant, but without his intellectual groundbreaking many modern political philosophies, including not only Marxism but also existentialism, would be poorer. In his own times, and in terms of his own orientation, we should probably see Kant as a liberal, but the complexity and power of his thought is relevant to a far wider range of theories.
Two of Kant’s arguments are especially significant. One is that all moral and political judgements should be ‘universal’, that is, made according to general moral or policy rules rather than solely with regard to the particulars of an individual case.
This is the element of liberalism, supporting as it does the idea of the rule of law. Another is that he was acutely aware of the way our concepts and categories determine our social thought, and even the categories into which we distinguish the world. This suggestion that our social perception is not autonomous observation of what actually exists in absolute terms, but is conditioned by what we think exists, has deeply influenced the development of the theory of ideology, especially Marx’s reinterpretation of Hegel and the thinking of Marxists such as Mannheim. Kant wrote relatively little on practical politics, but a major exception is his essay on international relations (IR), Perpetual Peace (1795). In this he argues for a form of international society, and introduces for the first time the idea that international justice requires a more or less democratic form of government inside each participating society. It remains extremely influential in the rather small body of theoretical works concerning international relations. Indeed a major tenet of modern IR theory, that democracies do not make war on each other, can be traced directly to this essay.
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