Hannah Arendt on Kant, Truth and Politics

Abstract

Hannah Arendt is right to give prominence to Kant's Critique of Judgment—for that work contains Kant's fullest treatment of ‘ends' and purposes, and Kantian politics (embracing universal republicanism and eternal peace) is meant to be a ‘legal’ realization of moral ends (when ‘good will’ alone is too weak to produce what ought to be). But Arendt is wrong to try to extract a ‘new’ Kantian politics from Judgment's aesthetic ideas: Kantian politics is already ‘there’, and need not be squeezed out of his theory of art. She has chosen the right work, but given it a bizarre reading.