ABSTRACT
Kant’s essay ‘On the Common Saying: “this may be true in theory, but it does not apply in practice”’ was first published in the Berliner Monatsschrift issue 22 in September 1793. 2 As is well known, it is concerned with a number of questions of relevance to Kant’s overall ethical and political outlook and in the course of it he engages with a number of his predecessors and contemporaries, most especially Christian Garve, Hobbes and – my subject here – Moses Mendelssohn. The essay has, however, received much less attention in the recent revival of Kantian moral and political theory than some other late essays, perhaps most especially the essays ‘Perpetual Peace’ and ‘What is Enlightenment?’. As this whole symposium is designed to demonstrate, this relative neglect is a mistake. The essay is both an important window on Kant’s mature political and ethical thought and also, I suggest, important in its own right in terms of the topics with which it is concerned.
