ABSTRACT
I. Public Reason Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) had, unlike Jean-Jacques Rousseau, great admiration for the Enlightenment. Why was this experience so important to Kant? An answer to this question can be gleaned from Kant’s demand for protecting, as in Benedict Spinoza, intellectual freedom against those whose values threatened such freedom. Kant would complement the work of Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, who each sought to predicate human life on the basis of the truth made possible by reason. And the central truth upon which to base life for each of these writers was the need to secure freedom for each individual. Indeed, a civil society for Kant as well as for Hobbes and Locke was a rule of law setting designed to achieve equal freedom for each individual. Necessarily, for Kant as for Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke, then, traditions needed to be assessed in terms of how well they promoted the progress of reason, of truth, and of freedom.
