The Originality of Kant's Social Contract Theory

Abstract

It is a well-known fact that Kant’s doctrine of the original social contract is so complex that it has prompted many different, sometimes opposing interpretations of his political philosophy. A simple enumeration of some of the central tenets of Kant’s ideal social contract theory suffices to let us see the reasons for that complexity. On the one hand (a) Kant claims that leaving the state of nature is a categorical duty (albeit moral in a juridical, not ethical, sense), and consequently (b) he relies on neither instrumental arguments nor individuals’ subjective motivations to prove the practical necessity to leave the state of nature. Ever since his so-called precritical period, and especially in his definitive work on political philosophy, the Doctrine of Right, 1 (c) Kant holds that the social contract is to be considered exclusively as a norm, a regulative principle to be used as a normative criterion to establish the ideal Staatsrecht and to critically evaluate the legitimacy of existing states, rather than as a descriptive explanation of the origin of the state aiming at legitimizing its empirical exercise of the monopoly of coercion. Given these three theses, (d) the idea that juridicalpolitical obligations have their origin in individual and unilateral choices, a central tenet of the social contract tradition2 that markedly pervades contemporary democratic liberal political thought,3 no longer seems to be extant in Kant’s Doctrine of Right. Kant even states that in the state of nature ‘each may impel the other by force to leave this state and enter into a rightful condition’ (RL §44, 6:312, my emphasis)...