The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Editorial Staff
• Associate Editors
• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: Isaac Kramnick, English Middle-class Radicalism In the Eighteenth Century
• I: I Social and Political Thought
• Community, Individuality, and Freedom
• Rousseau's Social Thought
• A Sociological History of Utilitarianism
• Spencer and Comte In American Labor Thought
• Bureaucracy In Weber & Kafka
• Bergson's Political Doctrines
• Oakeshott's Political Theory
• Oakeshott's Political Philosophy
• Undermocratic Liberal Republicans
• Wilkes and Radical Politics
• Late Liberal Imperialism
• Kant and Reason In Politics
• II: Education, Politics, and Values
• Schools and Political Socialization
• Schooling For Imperialism
• The Political Economy of Public Schooling
• Federal Education Policy
• The Problems of Federal Education
• William James As Individualist
• Existential and Phenomenological Education
• Early Federal Educational Policy
• Education, Labor Markets, & Controlled Youth
• Government Control of Universities
• III: Economic Thought and Values
• Business and Legal History
• Schumpeter's Economic Theories
• Menger and Entrepreneurship
• Saint-simonian Economic Ideas
• The Free Market & the Third World
• Democratic Capitalism, Justice, & Religion
• Property, Law, and Economics
• The Economic Analysis of Law Vs. Values
• IV: Foreign Policy and Ideology
• The Attractiveness of War
• Walzer On International Morality
• Eduard Bernstein and Imperialism
• Roosevelt Vs. His War Critics
• American Preconceptions of Japan
• The Marshall Plan and Russia
• V: Self-knowledge, Autonomy, and Liberty
• The Self In Political Thought
• Autonomy, Self, and Will Power
• Self-knowledge: Goethe, Kant, and Hegel
• The Egoist As a “psychopath”
• The History of Social Psychology
• Psychology, Self, and Society
• Free Will, Responsibility, and Motivation
• Free Will, Purpose, and Responsibility
• Political “groupthink” and Reality
• Personal Freedom and Autonomy
• Research Fields
• Economics
• Education
• History
• Philosophy
• Political Philosophy
• Psychology
• Sociology

Kant and Reason in Politics

W.B. Gallie

• Peterhouse, Cambridge

Kant and Hegel's respective theories of politics are a study in contrasts. Whereas, Hegel is extraordinarily insightful in his discussion of the political relationships operating within a state, Kant's remarks are unduly abstract and unrealistic. On the other hand, Hegel's excessively pessimistic belief that inter-state relationships required the stern hand of a world state to dispel the possibility of international discord is the antithesis of Kant's optimistic estimate of the possibilities of international peace and accord.

These contrasts between the political writings of Kant and Hegel may be explained by referring to their opposed analyses of reason. For Hegel, reason is the tendency present in all action to realize the logical potentialities which present themselves in nature in the form of the concrete universal. The achievements of the state which seem so impressive as they manifest themselves in intrastate affairs, then are attributed to the potentiality for such achievement imminent in the state according to Hegel. Little wonder, then, that Hegel is led to assert the requirement of a supra-national state in order to resolve international differences.

By contrast, for Kant the Practical Reason is the faculty for understanding these principles which describe the necessary conditions of all social intercourse. It, therefore, grasps the reciprocity of rights and claims which make peaceful coexistence and personal moral achievement possible. Moreover, this account of the Practical Reason is consistent with and supported by Burt's philosophy of history as presented in the Idea for a Universal History. Here it is affirmed that nature's appointed role for Reason is to disclose to mankind the need for harmony between its members. This, according to Kant is “Nature's secret plan.” Thus, in contrast to the Hegelian conception of human interaction as necessarily discordant, Kant attributes to human beings the capacity in the form of the Practical Reason to resolve their differences rationally and internationally by the use of international law.

II

Education, Politics, and Values

Since Plato's Republic, Philosophers, educators, and politicians have understood the importance of education to the “political socialization process,” that is, to the formation of new generations of citizens schooled or indoctrinated in the beliefs of the politically dominant class. The following summaries deal with the interaction of educational policies with political power and ideology. In addition, we see in Boller's and Vandenberg's summaries the relationship between individualism and different educational philosophies.