Abstract In The Noumenal Republic , Rainer Forst understands democracy as a demand for justice grounded in the ‘right to justification’. This right stipulates that justificatory reasons must be (i) reciprocally and generally justifiable in their content/form and (ii) generated through procedures in which all affected figure as co-authors. Despite the numerous strengths of this theory, I argue that Forst’s account encounters a problem when addressing the justification of commonplace cases of representation: although each dimension independently provides normative space for justifying representative practices, their simultaneous application generates mutually undermining outcomes. After showing how Kant deals with this issue, I invite Forst to further elaborate on how his Kantian democratic theory plays out at an institutional level.
Abstract This article aims to show that Ingeborg Maus’s interpretation of Kant’s political philosophy re-establishes Kant as a radical thinker of democracy in the canon of democratic theory, from which Cold War liberalism had excluded him. Using the concept ‘social superego’, Maus argues that trust in elitist authorities is foreign to Kant’s republican politics. In a comparison with Arthur Ripstein, it is shown why Maus rejects the right to resistance and the right to revolution as residues of authoritarian democracy justifications. Finally, the thesis is put forward that populism is a new form of such a superego and that the theory of popular sovereignty is also an effective antidote to it.
Abstract Nietzsche repeatedly claims that Kant’s supreme moral principle, the categorical imperative, is expressive of a kind of slave morality. Paul Guyer, however, argues that a proper understanding of Kant’s conception of free agency within the boundaries of the categorical imperative reveals that Nietzsche’s criticism of slavishness misses its mark. According to Guyer, Kant, just as much as Nietzsche, rejects slavish conceptions of morality insofar as they undermine the value of self-legislation in determining ends. This paper contends that Nietzsche may in fact have a subtler conception of the categorical imperative’s slavishness in terms of the (un)realisability of our ends, which could allow his criticisms to land, and that Kantians will be responsive to.
