Kant: A Republican Conception of Public Justice

Abstract

Kantian political philosophy has been —for several years now— a first-level protagonist in the debates on justice, property, and poverty. This renaissance came from the work of several philosophers and legal scholars who, fortunately, have departed from the unfortunate nicknames Kant received in the second half of the last century: “The moralist politician,” “the liberal,” “the defender of exclusive private property.” After almost two centuries, the “republican” Kant has returned with renewed and growing interest. In this paper, I do not intend to review the abundant bibliography of these two interpretive periods —that of the liberal Kant and that of the republican Kant. My main objective, instead, is to recover some aspects of the republican Kant considering the historical republican tradition that begins with Aristotle and reappears with renewed strength in some modern representatives of natural law theory, Kant among them. I begin with a review of what I judge to be the most influential contemporary interpretation of Kant’s conception of justice, that of John Rawls. Then, I offer some ideas about the value of Kant’s conception of public justice, understood as the essential institutional correlate of the right to innate freedom, the only inalienable natural right.