Kant's Unselfish Partisans as Democratic Citizens

Jeffrey Lomonaco

There are few concepts as important in democratic politics as citizenship, and there are both many meanings of citizenship—including meanings that vary historically and across political space—and several ways of inquiring into the concept.1 In concentrating on citizenship as an activity, the aim of this essay is to begin to articulate a major component of a model of what democratic politics, and in particular democratic political argument, is about. More specifically, this essay seeks to articulate a conception of citizenship as political agency in a representative democratic society that is both more realistic about the rough-and-tumble, part-time character of politics than much contemporary theorizing about democracy and citizenship acknowledges and yet does not capitulate to a picture of politics as nothing more than bargaining between interests and preferences and of citizens as virtually indistinguishable from passive, acquiescent subjects.2 To do so, I turn to what at first glance might seem a surprising resource, some of Immanuel Kant’s later work. The main text is the now-famous second part of Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), in which Kant treats the unselfish yet partisan sympathy—what he calls “enthusiasm”—of spectators in response to the French Revolution.3 I claim that Kant’s spectators can, with some justifiable modification, be taken to model democratic citizens, in the first instance because how they think about highly visible political dramas is more important than those dramas themselves, and also because Kant’s characterization of the affective, partial, but public thinking of spectators in response to the French Revolution captures some of the essential features of what democratic citizens do.

My reading of Kant goes against the grain of standard interpretations insofar as I argue that, in The Conflict of the Faculties’s discussion of the French Revolution and republican politics, the moral law and the human reason that responds to it are conditioned by human subjectivity and, more particularly, subjective feeling. Kant requires that we heed the moral law before and apart from any other incentive, but the enthusiasm of political spectators—which Kant shares—in fact precedes and grounds the moral-political claims they make, rather than merely attaching to a pure moral ideal. At the same time, my interpretation differs from those of the many other contemporary thinkers who have turned to this text of Kant’s, frequently in conjunction with the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), to find a political philosophy of judgment that forgoes the robust universalism of Kant’s moral philosophy without lapsing into subjectivism. One powerful line of interpretation (best represented by Hannah Arendt) holds that Kant, in The Conflict of the Faculties, establishes a categorical separation between political actors and spectators and that it is only on condition of their disinterested nonparticipation that spectators perform their politically significant act of thoughtful understanding.4 On my reading, there is no such separation of actors and spectators, or of thinking and acting, and no disinterested nonparticipation on the part of spectators. On the contrary, Kant’s spectators are involved affectively in the events to which they respond.

I begin by interpreting the second part of The Conflict of the Faculties, highlighting certain frequently overlooked features of the text. In the partial—partisan and subjective—responses of spectators to the French Revolution and its inspiring republican politics, Kant finds a moral cause and the proof of improvement in human affairs. These responses are responses of thinking that remain affective and subjective even as they lay claim to the agreement of all concerned, in the sense of demanding and expecting that everyone should agree with them. In other words, they are fundamentally public claims. I next show how this text can be used as a model for democratic politics and citizenship that has both empirical power to describe what citizens actually do and normative, even inspiring, force to advance the cause of a more democratic politics. The point of departure for my use of Kant’s text is the basic claim that citizens, like Kant’s spectators, and in contrast to the players in official politics, are only indirectly involved, yet despite this relative uninvolvement, their views have greater significance than the actions of those players. What these citizens do is react and respond to the great political spectacle and, affectively inspired by a vision of the good—often involving a claim about what democracy demands—that has no objective guarantee, they make claims as to the direction in which political and moral improvement lie. Such claims seek and fully expect the agreement of everyone else, while the citizens who make such claims never for an instant actually assume that all others will, in fact, agree.

I conclude by pursuing this last point, briefly suggesting that there is a tension between what Kant says he is doing and what he does in offering his enthusiastic response to the French Revolution, embodied in two understandings of the universal character of the spectators’ response to the Revolution that constitutes, according to Kant, the sign of progress among humanity. Kant himself wants this universality to derive entirely from the moral law and its unconditional “ought.” But in fact, Kant can only claim that others should agree with his enthusiastic assessment of the Revolution and its commitment to republican government, in precisely the same way that citizens in a democracy think everyone else should agree with their political claims, even though those claims are based on nothing more than subjective feeling.

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Notes

1. See Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 1–15.
2. For representative examples, see John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), especially the new introduction and the “Reply to Habermas”; Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996); and Russell Hardin, Liberalism, Constitutionalism, and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
3. Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. by Mary J. Gregor (1798; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 155.
4. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).