ABSTRACT
The preceding chapters of this book have been concerned with examining the politics of Kantian critique in Kant's own work and as it re-surfaces in different ways in the ideas of contemporary thinkers drawing on Kant's work. In the first two chapters of this book it became clear that the politics of Kantian critique were both complex and contradictory. The presumptions of both reason's limitation and its legislative power created a problem of authority for the critic from the beginning. In conceiving his critical project initially as a matter of securing those territories to which reason has legitimate claim given reason's inherent limitation, Kant institutes a series of splits between transcendental and empirical realms, the faculties of reason, understanding and judgement. The difficulty for the critic is that his work depends on a capacity to transcend the divisions on which critique is premised. Critique becomes the exploration of its simultaneous possibility and impossibility, an exploration which is characterized politically in the variety of roles that the critic plays. The Kantian critic acts at different points as legislator, warrior, warmonger, peacemaker and judge in an effort to establish the authority of critique. At no point, however, are the diremptions of reason overcome and each effort of the critic is undermined and unsettled by the terms of its own institution. The complexities of the politics of critique are nowhere better illustrated than in Kant's conception of perpetual peace. The concept of perpetual peace has both a theoretical and political significance within Kant's work. In the first critique, perpetual peace is the aim of the critical philosopher in arbitrating between the warring parties of speculation and scepticism. The critic seeks to bring about the peace of a legal order, which will mediate between the despotism of dogmatic rationalism and the anarchy of sceptical empiricism. In Kant's political philosophy, the concept of perpetual peace is introduced to underwrite the power of right within the state by mediating between the despotism of world government and the violence of war. However, the meaning of the concept of perpetual peace in either of these contexts is a paradoxical one. It always involves the tension between sovereign authorities (theoretically those of the faculties of reason, politically those of autonomous states) and the difficulties of demarcating and policing the legitimate boundaries between them. It is always shadowed by the threat of war, chaos and anarchy (theoretically in the sense of critique's tendency to reopen the battles of reason that are supposed to have been 110transcended, politically in that Kantian perpetual peace depends on the threat of war). And it always involves a promise of transcendence (theoretically in the capacity of the critic to legislate for reason, politically in the orientation of history towards the moral law to which the judgement of the critic bears witness). The options of despotism and anarchy are repeated rather than resolved in the ways in which the critic attempts to make peace through law, war and judgement in both theory and practice.
