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7 J. Value Inquiry 81 (1973)
Kant and the radical regrounding of the norms of politics

handle is hein.journals/jrnlvi7 and id is 81 raw text is: 81 KANT AND THE RADICAL REGROUNDING OF THE NORMS OF POLITICS ROBERT GOEDECKE The basic polemical thesis of this essay is that German idealistic political thought starts with Kant's logical revision of Rousseau's thesis about con- sciousness and freedom, and moves on to Marx's attack on individualism, property, religion, and all past law and politics. Political and legal thought is given a new beginning with the conception of the kingdom of ends in Kant's Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. The kingdom of ends is a realm of totally and unconditionally free persons living in civilized harmony with one another. The central principal of this political realm is the conception of freedom as an idea capable of realization in human society. Kant so isolates this realm of free beings, in order to guarantee its self-creative independence, that the realm has nothing to do with pre- vious basic considerations in law and politics, such as the human family, property, the divine law, power politics, imperialism, nationalism, individ- ualism, the whole Roman Law, and finally even the actual events of time and history. Kant may re-introduce them in other writings, indeed he does so quite firmly, but they no longer have the ultimacy or the sacredness they once possessed. These earlier foundations are now derivative, adjecti- val and relative. Thus although Kant did not believe they should be dis- pensed with, such thinking became possible with the Kantian regroundings, and then actual (on the verbal level) with Marx's revolutionary exhortations. In the present day it is quite fashionable to trace Marx's thought back to Hegel, as can be instanced in the work of Rotenstreich, Avineri, Lichtheim, Kojeve, Hippolyte, and even Hook. But Marx's early criticisms of Hegel were in terms of demands for an unconditioned and full freedom for so- ciety as a whole, where Hegel had insisted that practical freedom meant freedom which accepted conditions, external authority, and alienation as the price of its realization. Marx used the idea of total and social uncon- ditioned freedom found in Kant's Grundlagen to attack Hegelian notions of right and law. Marx would make such unconditioned freedom historical. As the result of capitalism, man had alienated himself from his natural origins, for Marx. The work of capitalism allowed man to introduce into human history actions which would be impossible if man were totally subservient to nature. Alienation served a function for Marx; it allowed man to stand out of nature and to create his own being. He could then become unconditionally free within his own self-created history. Now none of this is in Kant. History is always the realm of the exter- nally caused, the conditioned, the heteronomous for Kant. The realm of unconditioned social freedom is an idea of social practice which is always beyond history. But the idea of a society of free men becomes the absolute

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