The General Will in Public Right and its Normative Idealization

Abstract

This paper analyses the argument on the apriority of the sovereignty of the will of the people in the section Public Right of the Rechtslehre. There, Kant does not put forward an absolutely original thesis, as he does in the section Private Right, where he concludes the necessity of the general lawgiving will through the concept of reciprocity. Instead, he follows Rousseau’s ideas and focuses on the account of freedom as dependence on the law one has prescribed to oneself. I will argue that, for systematical reasons, Kant carries out a normative idealization of the Rousseaunian volonté générale. Notwithstanding, the fundamental distinction between respublica noumenonand respublica phaenomenon does not imply that, from a practical perspective, the republican ideal is completely dissociated from the phenomenal realm. On the contrary, the pure republic exerts a normative force on the political praxis.