Kant on Duty to Oneself and Resistance to Political Authority

Abstract

Kant on Duty to Oneself and Resistance to Political Authority SVEN ARNTZEN in ms DOCTRI~tE OF Law and related writings? Kant denies the subject's right to resist political authority in the strongest terms. His argumentation to support this denial is conceptual in character. The denial of a right of resistance follows from the relevant legal concepts of civil society, of the people as subject , of the head of state as the supreme power in civil society, as having only rights but no duties that he may be coerced to fulfill, and of a right as an authorization to use coercion. Civil society is the coexistence of persons as subject to a central authority, a supreme power, which is not itself subject to some other coercive authority. For the people as subject (or a member thereof) to have a right to resist the supreme power in civil society would be for it to have an authorization to use coercion to restrain that power, which would not, then, be the supreme power. In other words, a people's right to resist the supreme power would imply that the power is both supreme and not ' By Kant's Doctrineof Law I mean his Die metaphysischeAnfangsgriindederRechtslehre,the first part ofD/e MetaphysikderSitten, hereafter MdS (trans. Mary Gregor, TheMetaphysicsofMorals[New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991]). The other available translation of the DoctrineofLaw is by John Ladd, and is rendered as The MetaphysicalElementsofJustice (Indianapolis: The BobbsMerrill Company, a965). I will refer to the second part of MdS, DiemetaphysischeAnfangsgriindeder Tugendlehre,as the Doctrineof Virtue. The other main sources I will use are: "Uber den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht fiir die Praxis," hereafter T&P (trans. Ted Humphrey, "On the Proverb: 'This May Be True in Theory, but It Does Not Apply in Practice'," in I. Kant, Perpetual Peaceand OtherEssays[Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983]); Grundlegungzur Metaphysik der S/tten, hereafter GMS (trans. James w. Ellington, Groundingfor theMetaphysicsofMorals [Indianapolis : Hackett Publishing Co., x983]); KritikderpraktischenVernunft, hereafter KpV (trans. L. W. Beck, CritiqueofPracticalReason [Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1965]). Page references for Kant's works are given in parentheses in the text by volume and page (e.g., V 34) of the Academy Edition: KantsgesammelteSchriflen(Berlin, 19lo- ). I have used available English translations when quoting from Kant's works. In some cases I have made modifications that I find appropriate. Where official translations are not available, the translations from Kantian sources are mine. [409] 41o JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:3 JULY 1996 supreme, and that the people is both subject and not subject to political authority . Thus, according to Kant, the notion of a people's right of resistance, or the statement that the people has such a right, involves a contradiction (VI 3182o ). ~ Furthermore, Kant argued that the formation (and preservation) of civil society is necessary, according to practical reason (VI 255-56, 3o7). It follows that the subject has a duty--a duty he may be coerced to fulfill--to obey political authority, even in the case of "what is declared to be an unbearable abuse of supreme authority" (VI 32o) or where the head of state exercises the oppressive power of a tyrant (VIII 382). These and similar assertions by Kant seem to be at odds with his view that civil society preserves, or at least ought to preserve, the freedom and equality of persons. By denying a right of resistance even where civil society fails short of the ideal civil society, he maintains that one has a duty to act according to a will which is not one's own and thereby seems to betray the person's autonomy and dignity that he has so strongly asserted in GMS and KpV.s Because of such tension, many commentators on this aspect of Kant's philosophy of law share the view that his denial of a right of resistance must be limited in scope. However, there is no general agreement concerning the conditions under which the subject may disobey or somehow resist political authority for Kant. According to Werner Haensel in his classical study on Kant's theory of resistance, Kant's conceptual argumentation can only...

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