ABSTRACT
Kant’s criticism of democracy has been traditionally defused with the consideration that what Kant does not like is not democracy per se but direct democracy. However, what Kant says “to prevent the republican constitution from being confused with the democratic one, as commonly happens” (ZeF 8: 351) appears to count not only against direct democracy but also against conceptions of democracy closer to the ones we are accustomed to. This chapter defends a new reading of what Kant sees as the problem of democracy (direct or not) and unpacks a Kantian lesson about the limits of democracy that has gone largely unnoticed among political theorists and Kant specialists.
