Kant and Gallie on Politics

Abstract

I want to lead into the substance of Professor Gallie's paper, 'Kant's View of Reason in Politics' (Philosophy, January I979), by picking on two sets of expressions (in themselves of secondary importance, slipped into the main current of the paper), not, I hope, by reason of perverse pedantry, but because they serve well to open up Gallie's reflections upon Kant, and the general theme of theoretical and practical reasoning. On p. zi, Gallie notes that while Hegel owed so much to Plato and Aristotle, Kant derived much from the Stoics. This is not a clear denial that Kant drew from the same sources as Hegel, but there is a strong negative suggestion. Against it, I would make two propositions: First, that there are distinct elements of Platonism in Kant. The pervasive motif of a rationally structured world is unmistakably Platonist in origin, while the technical distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal worlds reverberates with the old doctrine of a bifurcated universe, transcendental essences or forms versus mundane appearances. As a true philosopher, Kant is of course interested in the noumenal world. But he also manifests an authentic interest in the phenomenal scene, and indeed writes about it more in its own terms than do other comparable philosophers, e.g. Hegel, Rousseau and Hobbes. These rather turn everything they touch into philosophy, every contingent observation and advice into an instance of a general principle. But when Kant enumerates the causes of war, he does so in categories which a diplomat would understand. If we compare Hobbes's 'convenient article of peace' between individuals, buried deep in the motives of fear of death and desire of commodious living, with Kant's extremely close-to-the-ground list of articles for international peace -no national debts, reduction of standing armies, and the concrete proposal for a congress to promulgate peace-we are struck by the absence of generalizing interest. The tone is practical, even utilitarian. And one of his key political ideas, the notion of publicity, is simply a genus which he specifies in detail-known laws, press freedom, disapproval of secret societies. Any temptation he might have felt to derive the political principle of publicity from the higher doctrine of universalizability is firmly resisted. Second, Kant extensively uses Aristotelian categories, albeit in modified fashion. The classification of constitutions offered in Perpetual Peace follows that of Aristotle's Politics-but with an interesting variation. The scheme is the same, a two-dimensional classification. But one dimension classifies 'Forms of Sovereignty' as government by one, by several and by all (instead