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KATRIN FLIKSCHUH

Reason, Right, and


Revolution: Kant and Locke

i. introduction
Current readers often bring implicitly Lockean intuitions to bear in their
reaction to Kant on revolution: they assume that individuals are entitled
to protect themselves, by violent means if necessary, against abuses of its
coercive authority by their government. Underlying this assumption is a
broader commitment to natural rights morality that many readers
attribute to Locke and Kant alike. On this basis Kant is often charged with
inconsistency: for one committed to pre-civil individual rights, the
denial of a right to resist a rights-violating government seems contradictory. It is, however, also often suggested that Kants no-right to revolution is marginal to his practical philosophy overall, constituting an
unfortunate philosophical slipup that is at odds with his support for the
French Revolution and explicable in terms of his excessively legalistic
understanding of constitutionalism and outdated conception of sovereignty. These supposed anachronisms within Kants philosophy of Right
are said to warrant a turn to his ethical writings from which an alternative basis for a right to revolution is derived via appeal to the Kantian

Earlier versions of this article were given at a conference on Kants Doctrine of Right in
Jena during the summer of 2007; at the political philosophy seminar at the University of
Edinburgh, the philosophy seminar at the University of Bristol, and the political theory
workshop at the LSE. My thanks to participants at these events for their helpful comments
and suggestions, including Chris Bertram, Sharon Byrd, Thomas Christiano, Philip Cook,
Cecile Fabre, Tim Hayward, Joachim Hruschka, Chandran Kukathas, Jens Kulenkampff,
Hannes Leitgeb, Bernd Ludwig, and Leif Wenar. I am especially grateful to Paul Kelly for his
generous guidance on Locke; to Christian List for fascinating exchanges on collective and
group agency, and to Arthur Ripstein for sustained and always enjoyable discussion on
Kant. Many thanks, finally, to the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs for their helpful
suggestions for revision of the penultimate draft.
2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Philosophy & Public Affairs 36, no. 4

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enjoinder to treat the humanity in persons as an end in itselfan ethical


precept patently violated by rights-abusing governments.1
The first and principal aim of this article is to show that there is no
inconsistency in Kants denial of a right to revolution. Kant does not
share Lockes natural rights morality according to which individuals
devolve their pre-civil enforcement powers upon a government collectively appointed for that purpose. In Kants pre-civil condition individuals have valid claims to Right (Recht)2 but lack relevant enforcement
powers. Legitimate enforcement of pre-civil right claims is possible only
in the civil condition. Kants is a public, not a natural morality of Right,
and the denial of a right to revolution is a corollary of the public character of Kantian Right. One may retort that the consistency of Kants position is hardly sufficient to commend it: what matters ultimately is the
morality of the revolution argument. I concede that Kants no-right to
1. Earlier studies of Kants position on revolution tend to focus on the apparent inconsistency between his denial of a right to revolution and his endorsement of the French
Revolution. See Dieter Henrich, Kant ber die Revolution, in Materialien zu Kants
Rechtsphilosophie, ed. Zwi Batscha (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), pp. 35965; L. W. Beck,
Kant and the Right of Revolution, Journal of the History of Ideas 32 (1971): 41122. More
recent approaches detect inconsistencies between Kants juridical and his ethical position.
See Thomas Hill, A Kantian Perspective on Political Violence, in his Respect, Pluralism
and Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 200237; Sarah Williams Holtman,
Revolution, Contradiction, and Kantian Citizenship, in Kants Metaphysics of Morals:
Interpretive Essays, ed. Mark Timmons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 20931;
Christine Korsgaard, Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Kant on the Right to Revolution, in Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls, ed. Andrews Reath et al.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 297328. Others find fault not with Kant
but with his readers who mistakenly take the no-right to revolution to apply to political
regimes in general rather than, as Kant intended, to constitutional regimes only. See
Sharon Byrd and Joachim Hruschka, The Natural Law Duty to Recognise Private Property
of Ownership: Kants Theory of Property Rights in His Doctrine of Right, University of
Toronto Law Journal 56 (2006): 21782, esp. pp. 24144; Kenneth Westphal, Kant on the
State, Law, and Obedience to Authority in the Alleged Anti-revolutionary Writings, Journal
of Philosophical Research 17 (1992): 383425.
2. I here retain Mary Gregors originally suggested convention of rendering Recht as
capitalized Right in order to indicate the difference in connotation between Roman-law
inspired German Recht and common-law English terms of rights, law, justice. (See Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor [Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991], pp. xxii.) Unfortunately the 1996 edition omits this useful convention, translating Recht as either right or rights. Unless otherwise stated, all citations from Kants
texts below are taken from the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant: Practical
Philosophy Vol. IV (1996), ed. Mary Gregor and Allen Wood. Page references are to the
Prussian Academy volumes and pagination.

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revolution is morally problematic in certain respects. Nonetheless, it is


not without merit morally. This becomes clear once we consider an
aspect of the Lockean position that is usually taken for granted, namely
its presumption of revolution as a public act. Although liberal defenders
of revolution usually invoke some version of Lockes natural rights premises, they do not usually think of the exercise of the right to revolution
as the mere aggregate of individuals private judgments on the matter.
To the contrary, Lockean revolution tends to be thought of as the united
action of citizens collectively engaged against their government in behalf
of civil society as a whole: despite individualist natural rights premises, it
is the presumed public nature of the act that accounts for the continuing
approbation of Lockean revolution. From a Kantian perspective, the
question is whether the Lockean has the theoretical resources by
means of which to transform individually held natural rights into a
collectively exercised public right. This is the second, subsidiary
concern of this article: can the Lockean consistently underwrite the idea
of revolution as a public act by appeal to individually grounded natural
rights to self-defense?
Interest in this debate need not be seen as confined to card-carrying
Kantians and confirmed Lockeans respectively. Lockean and Kantian
influences deeply pervade current liberal thinking, with the more recent
Kant-inspired preoccupation with public reasoning supplementing the
longer-standing Lockean commitment to individually held natural
rights. Their noticeable distance from one another on the issue of revolution may be one indication of the philosophical and political gulf that
separates these two thinkers more generally. This may in turn redound
on our conception of the cohesiveness of much current liberal political
thinking. But the substantive issue of revolution itself continues to
remain of interest also. Although todays mature liberal societies are not
generally threatened by the prospect of internal rebellion, closely related
questions over the legitimate use of political violence to further supposed moral ends remain salient domestically as well as globally, as is
attested by recent arguments in favor of exporting liberal revolution.3
This article is written from a Kantian perspective. It makes no pretense at comparative philosophical analysis but employs the Lockean
3. For a recent argument along these lines, see Arthur Isak Applbaum, Forcing a
People to Be Free, Philosophy & Public Affairs 35 (2007): 359400, esp. pp. 39196.

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position as an intuitive point of contrast with the less familiar and to


many highly counterintuitive nature of Kants approach. In raising a
possible difficulty with the Lockean position as it is generally understood
today, my intention is not to defend Kant by way of discrediting Locke,
but to indicate ways in which taking Kant seriously on his own terms can
serve to reveal morally problematic dimensions within a position the
moral self-evidence of which is generally taken for granted. Section II
juxtaposes Lockean and Kantian intuitions over a supposed right to
revolution. Section III sets out the public character of Kants morality of
Right. Section IV shows how Kants no-right to revolution follows as a
corollary from his public morality of Right. Section V turns to Locke,
asking whether Lockes affirmation of individuals natural rights in the
pre-civil condition coherently translates into the peoples right in the
civil condition. I shall suggest that while the Lockean position is consistent on at least one possible construal of what it is to constitute a people,
this construal is too thin for the Kantian. Throughout, I shall be concerned with the idea of a right to revolution, not with the occurrence of
revolutions as social events.4 Since there is no inconsistency in acknowledging that revolutions can happen and denying a right to the same,
nothing I shall say about Kants position on the no-right to revolution
implies anything at all about his positive assessment of the progressive
character of the French Revolution as a world-historic event.
ii. lockean and kantian revolutionary intuitions
According to Locke as he is conventionally read today, individuals have
naturally held entitlements to determinate, largely materially specified
powers and goods that are fully enforceable by them in the pre-civil
condition: rights to life, liberty, property. Individuals consent to the move
from the natural to the civil condition for reasons of convenience:
although in the state of nature each is entitled to judge in his or her own
and in others behalf consistently with the laws of nature, differences in
natural law interpretation as well as natural biases make it more efficient
to have standing laws known by all and enforced by a central judicial
authority. Upon entrance into civil society individuals cede their unilateral legislative and executive powers to the collective, which in turn
4. Cf. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France,
Russia and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

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appoints a government entrusted to take on these functions in its behalf.


Yet while each member of civil society consents to accept the finality of
the governments juridical pronouncements even where his or her private
judgments diverge from public juridical pronouncements, the legitimacy
of coercive public institutions remains tied to standards of natural law
knowable by all through their natural powers of reason. Where the government systematically abuses its coercive authority, it forfeits the trust
bestowed upon it by the people, who may legitimately remove the offending government and replace it with a rights-respecting one.
There is an arresting shift in Locke from an individual right to self(and other) defense in the pre-civil condition to the peoples right to
revolution in the civil society. It is not clear how Locke performs this
shift; I shall return to this issue in Section V. Despite this ambiguity, and
given his general assumptions concerning the grounds and limits of
legitimate government, a Lockean right to revolution looks intuitively
self-evident to most and has enjoyed the support of liberals of different
persuasions across the centuries. Of course, liberals nowadays do not
usually subscribe to the metaphysically demanding idea of naturally
held, let alone God-given, rights; nor do they accept the natural law
doctrine that provides the background to Lockean rights. Many invoke
the notion of rights-grounding basic interests instead. Not the violation
of naturally held rights so much as the violation of basic interests as the
legitimate ground of socially protected rights justifies the forcible
removal of an unjust, that is basic interestsviolating government.5 Similarly, few nowadays would embrace Lockes theory of actual and voluntary consent, emphasizing that individuals are born into societies whose
governmental structures they are subject to independently of their
actual consent.6 Still, the basic Lockean idea of individuals pre-civil
rights as providing nonnegotiable constraints on governmental authority continues to resonate within current liberalisms commitment to
5. For skepticism over the ease with which current accounts move from a theologically
to a nontheologically grounded natural rights conception, see John Dunn, What Is Living
and What Is Dead in John Locke? in Dunn, Interpreting Political Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 925.
6. For a defense of the abiding actuality of Locke on consent, see A. John Simmons,
Denisons and Aliens: Lockes Problem of Political Consent, in Simmons, Justification
and Legitimacy: Essays on Rights and Obligations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), pp. 15878.

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moral individualism and corresponding limitations on the legitimate


exercise of governmental powers. From these (modified) Lockean
assumptions, Kants denial of a right to revolution looks dubious.
Kants position on the no-right to revolution is remarkably unchanging across his published writings, though his individual arguments do
not always take the same form. Following L. W. Beck, one can distinguish
between ethical, teleological, and juridical strands of argumentation.7 I
here focus on Kants juridical argument, a version of which is given in the
following well-known passage from the Doctrine of Right:
The reason a people has a duty to put up with even what is held to be
an unbearable abuse of supreme authority is that its resistance to the
highest legislator can never be regarded as other than contrary to law,
and indeed as abolishing the entire legal constitution. For a people to
be authorized to resist, there would have to be a public law permitting
it to resist, that is, the highest legislation would have to contain a
provision that it is not the highest and that makes the people, as
subject, by one and the same judgement sovereign over him to whom
it is subject. This is self-contradictory, and the contradiction is evident
as soon as one asks who is to be judge in this dispute between people
and sovereign. For it is then apparent that the people wants to be the
judge in its own suit (VI 320).
Like Locke, Kant speaks of the people as undertaking the public act
of revolution, not of individual revolutionaries as taking the law into
their own hands.8 The principal issue raised in the juridical argument is
whether there can be a constitutional, i.e., public, right to rebellion
against a tyrannical government. Kant denies this: the highest legislation would have to contain a provision that it is not the highest and that
makes the people, as subject, by one and the same judgement sovereign
over him to whom it is subject. The objection diagnoses a twofold contradiction in the idea of a constitutional right to revolution: in proclaiming itself less than the highest, the highest legislation makes the people as
7. Cf. Beck, Right of Revolution. An instance of the teleological strand can be found in
On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, but It Is of No Use in Practice,
where Kant reasons that since citizens happiness is not the end of politics, subjects dissatisfaction with their government is no legitimate ground for rebellion against it (VIII
297). An instance of the moral argument is given in Perpetual Peace, where Kant rejects as
unlawful a non-universalizable maxim of rebellion (VIII 381).
8. Cf. Korsgaard, Taking the Law into Ones Own Hands, especially pp. 31621.

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subject sovereign over the sovereign. Commentators often find the first
half of this supposed contradiction easier to concede than the second. If
by highest legislation Kant means a constitutional document, and if by
a right to revolution he has in mind the legal act of suspending the
constitution, there may indeed be something contradictory about the
thought of a constitutions containing a provision authorizing the suspension of its authority. A constitutional right to suspend the constitution seems self-contradictory in the sense of being constitutionally
unenforceable. But even if the first part of Kants argument is valid so far
as it goes, many deem it excessively legalistic. A constitution is not
merely the highest legal document among relevantly similar legal documents but constitutes a public declaration that serves as moral foundation to all positive lawmaking. Such a founding document can contain a
suprapositive right to rebelliona Lockean natural right, in effectthe
constitutional function of which is to uphold and protect the moral basis
of positive lawmaking. Kants position is said to be legalistic in that
it fails to acknowledge the suprapositive function of a constitutional
right to revolution.9
With this response to the first part of Kants objection in hand, it is
easy to dispose of the second half also. Again, it may be true, logically,
that if A is subject to B, A cannot simultaneously be sovereign over B. But
it is not obvious that, constitutionally, the people is subordinate to its
government. For Locke, the people is constitutionally sovereign, making
the government subject to the will of the people. Granted, the government is not subject to the will of the people in an everyday legal context;
in an everyday context, the people must obey the positive directives
issued by government so long as government legislates in accordance
with constitutional law. Nonetheless, constitutionally, the governments
subordination of the people under its coercive authority is legitimate
only so long as the government abides by the moral founding principles
of the legal system. In sum, critics respond to Kant by retorting that even
though he may be correct in point of positive law, he is nonetheless
in moral error with regard to both aspects of his argument from
9. Cf. Beck, Right of Revolution, p. 413: In this argument, we see Kants formalism in
extremis. Likewise Hill, Political Violence, p. 210: Neither Kants special definition [of
justice and rights] nor the limited conclusion that follows implies that it is always immoral,
or even unjust (in a non-technical sense) to try to destroy the de facto legal system
in ones country.

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contradiction. Constitutionally, the people is sovereign over its government, and the peoples sovereignty is grounded in the suprapositive
rights of each, the protection and promotion of which must form the
basis of all just lawmaking.
One problem with these Lockean rejoinders is that Kant follows
Hobbes and Rousseau in thinking that there cannot be a people without
a sovereign. Civil society does not, as in Locke, precede state formation,
but becomes possible through it. Prior to the state there is but a multitude: a state (civitas) is a union of a multitude of human beings under
laws of Right (VI 313). The unifying principle is the head of the civil union
under the idea of the general united will. The people may be sovereign:
but there is no people without a head to represent its united general will.
Kant also dissents from the first Lockean claim concerning natural
rights: absent a condition of public Right there are no individual rights.
Kant does not fail to acknowledge the moral foundation of legal rights in
natural rights. To the contrary, his juridical argument against a possible
right to revolution is a moral argument. Revolution, conceived as the
deliberate act of violent resistance against the sovereign as necessary
head of the civil union, is morally wrong because the existence of
the civil condition under the idea of the general united will is a necessary condition of any possible rights.10 Instead of dismissing Kants
juridical argument as legalistic on Lockean grounds, we should
ask in virtue of which features of his own morality of Right a right to
revolution is repudiated.

iii. kants public morality of right


I suggested that, for Kant, a people is a people only when it has a head to
represent the idea of its unity. I also suggested that there are no natural
rights in Kants pre-civil condition. In Section IV I shall elaborate on the
first claim. Here I want to show that the public character of Kantian Right
precludes the ascription to him of a Lockean natural rights morality. I
shall proceed in two steps, arguing, first, that a Kantian entitlement
claim differs from a Lockean entitlement claim with regard to its content,
10. This does not mean that the existence of a civil union is a sufficient condition for
having rights. A sufficient condition would be a civil union that constitutes a Rechtsstaat.
But civil union is a necessary condition of any possible development towards a Rechtsstaat.

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and second, that the distinctive content of a Kantian entitlement claim


renders its unilateral enforcement in the pre-civil condition conceptually and morally impossible.
A. The General Concept of Right and the Innate Right to Freedom of Each
To say that there are no natural rights in the Kantian pre-civil condition
is not to say that there are no morally valid claims to Right in that condition.11 Nor is it to deny that individuals obligation to enter into the civil
condition is a function of the valid claims to Right they each raise in the
pre-civil condition. Kant is not a positivist about rights: there are morally
valid pre-civil claims to Right and the obligation to enter into the civil
condition is grounded in the acknowledgment that these claims can be
vindicated only in that condition.12 Nonetheless, the contention that
there are morally valid pre-civil claims to Right is significantly weaker
than the Lockean affirmation of fully established natural rights that are
operative in the pre-civil condition. By a fully established natural right
I mean the idea that individuals are pre-socially entitled to certain
specified powers and goods which, when once in a social condition,
they have the authority to defend against transgressions by others.
By pre-social I do not mean pre-civil: the Lockean state of nature
is a pre-civil, yet social condition in which pre-socially held rights
entitlements are enforceable by their claimants against those they come
into contact with.
In examining the contrast between Kant and Locke, it helps to think of
a rights claim in general as comprised of two jointly necessary, functionally separable components: an entitlement claim and an enforcement
claim.13 The entitlement claim specifies what a person has a right to; the
enforcement claim specifies whom the right is held against, and how. On
11. By a claim to Right I mean a justified claim to being in a condition in which it is
possible to have rights.
12. Jeremy Waldron offers a positivist reading of Kant in The Dignity of Legislation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 3662. Joachim Hruschka rejects this
positivist reading in Die Notwehr im Zusammenhang von Kants Rechtslehre, Zeitschrift
fur die gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft 115 (2003): 20123.
13. In saying that entitlement claims and enforcements claims are jointly necessary
components of a rights claim, I mean that an entitlement claim without a related enforcement claim would not be a rights entitlement. I nonetheless believe that one can coherently distinguish, within any given rights claim, between the distinct functions of
entitlement and enforcement components.

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the Lockean account, persons pre-social entitlements derive from their


duties of self-preservation, as well as from their powers of rational
control over their own life. In this sense, Lockean entitlement claims are
specifiable self-referentially, i.e., independently of conditions of coexistence with others. The validity of a Lockean enforcement claim follows
from the validity of its related entitlement claim: a persons authority to
sanction acts of transgression by others depends on the validity of his or
her entitlement claim, not on his or her coexistence with these others.
Hence, although they are operative only in a social conditionrights
need defending only in that conditionLockean natural rights are based
on criteria that regard coexistence with others as incidental, not as
essential to their specification.14 By contrast, the content of a Kantian
entitlement claim is conceived relationally, so cannot be specified independently of conditions of coexistence. Given their relational content,
the authority to act on related enforcement claims cannot take the form
of the unilateral imposition of sanctions.
Given these differences in general rights conception, what accounts
for the widespread tendency nonetheless to attribute to Kant a natural
rights conception along Lockean lines? A large part of the answer is force
of habit: the tendency is a reflection of the abiding prevalence of the
Lockean position. Admittedly, the Doctrine of Right contains an important class of Rightthe innate right to freedom of eachwhich is often
thought to have the status of an individually held natural right. Kant
14. According to John Simmons, the sources of Lockean rights are several and include,
aside from individually held interests and powers of self-control, duties owed to self or God
as well as duties owed to others: we have rights to the fulfilment of our duties to others. See
Simmons, A Lockean Theory of Rights (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp.
6894. The last category is potentially problematic for the interpretation here sketched:
rights deriving from duties towards others surely presuppose right holders acknowledgment of their coexistence with those to whom they owe the relevant duty (although I
personally find the idea of a right to fulfilment of my duty morally excessive). Indeed, one
might reasonably protest that all Lockean rights are grounded in a conjunct of individuals
pre-socially given interests or powers and their coexistence with others: Locke says that the
pre-civil social state of nature has a law of nature which governs relations between men.
Lockean natural rights derive from Lockean natural law which, like any law, is relational.
Although I find this a plausible reading of Locke, this is not how he is usually interpreted by
those who reject the idea of natural law, yet for whom the moral force of Lockean natural
rights lies precisely in the idea of their pre-social origin, such that no one can deny or take
away a persons rights entitlements even while committing gross rights-violations against
that person. This view of rights seems to me to depend on the idea of self-referentially
specifiable entitlement claims.

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asserts of the innate right that we each have it by nature, by which he


means that we have it independently of any act that would establish a
right (VI 237). It is often assumed both that the innate right is a Lockean
natural right and that the entire weight of the argument in the Doctrine of
Right rests on it as its basic premise. Yet a cursory look at the text shows
that Kant begins not with the innate right but with what he calls the
moral concept of Right. This designation immediately indicates the relational structure of Kantian rights.
In general, for Kant, concepts are not names we give to classes of
objects that would exist independently of our categorizing them as such:
we do not acquire concepts of objects by pointing to the objects these
concepts denote. Kantian concepts are constructs out of sensible intuition in conjunction with (a priori) rules of understanding. Concepts
represent the world mediatelythrough the filter of our rational understanding of it. A conceptual understanding of the world is possible only
for and between rational beings: concepts are the currency of a type of
exchange only rational beings are capable of.15 We operate with a range
of different types of concepts: empirical concepts, such as the concept of
a chair, by means of which we identify and distinguish objects in the
world; pure concepts, such as the concept of God, the content of which
is wholly nonempirical (consisting of notions of omnipotence, omniscience, moral perfection, which we associate with the idea of God);
practical concepts, which pertain to our agency in the world. In the
Critique of Pure Reason, a concept of practical reason is said to resemble
a concept of pure reason in similarly having no sensible intuitions corresponding to it. However, practical concepts are not wholly pure concepts of reason in so far as they are connected with something that is
empirical (desire or aversion).16 Kant cites happiness as one such
concept, which, though it does not correspond with any particular sensible intuition, nonetheless has sensibly conditioned desire attached to
it. In the Critique of Practical Reason practical concepts are further
15. This idea of our conceptually mediated knowledge of the world presupposes Kants
much-contested distinction between the world as it is in itself and the world as it necessarily appears to us. The best analysis and interpretation of Kants transcendental idealism as epistemological thesis remains Henry Allison, Kants Transcendental Idealism: An
Interpretation and Defense (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 63130.
16. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan,
1992), B 384.

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differentiated, like theoretical concepts, into empirical and pure concepts. Empirical practical concepts, now associated with instrumental
practical reason, maintain a connection to something that is empirical.
By contrast, concepts of pure practical reason pertain to our conception
of ourselves and others merely as moral agents.17 In Groundwork Kant
speaks of the concept of duty as a pure practical concept. We are conscious of our obligations towards ourselves and others merely in virtue of
our status as rational agents, not because of sentiments of kinship or
sympathy we may feel towards others. The Doctrine of Right similarly
asserts that we stand under obligations of Right vis--vis one another
merely in virtue of each our rational capacity for freedom of choice and
action, not because we are creatures of need, or vie one another with
Hobbesian distrust, or aspire to the good life with one another.18
For Kant, then, the content of all moral conceptsethical and juridical alikeis specified by our practical standing towards one another as
coexisting and interacting rational agents, and makes no reference to our
physical or psychological needs and capacities. As Joachim Hruschka
has shown, a centrally distinguishing feature of the morality of Right is its
strictly interpersonal character. Virtue has an intrapersonal dimension:
Robinson Crusoe owes himself duties of virtue even while alone on his
island. The ethical demand to treat the humanity in my own person never
merely as a means but always at the same time as an end in itself remains
in force even under solitary conditions. By contrast, duties of Right
become relevant only with the arrival of Friday: So long as Robinson
remains alone on his island, a Doctrine of Right is superfluous. With
Fridays arrival, a Doctrine of Right becomes morally necessary.19 In one
sense Hruschkas point is perfectly general: Locke would agree that individuals rights become practically relevant on Robinsons island only
with Fridays arrival. Nonetheless, conceptually, Robinson and Friday
have rights even before they make contact with one another. When Robinson and Friday encounter one another, the status of each as independent rights holder restricts the type of relations they may permissibly
enter into with one another: it is at this point that their respective
17. Cf. Critique of Practical Reason, V: 9n.
18. Cf. Bernd Ludwig, Whence Public Right? The Role of Theoretical and Practical
Reasoning in Kants Doctrine of Right, in Kants Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretative
Essays, ed. Mark Timmons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 15984.
19. Hruschka, Die Notwehr, p. 205.

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enforcement authority against one another becomes practically relevant. The arresting feature of Kants position lies in the thought that
until Fridays arrival the concept of Right is morally meaningless on
Crusoes island: absent the presence of others, the concept of Right has
no content.20 Right, in Kant, consists in the morally requisite form of
external relations between two or more persons with regard to the
capacity for freedom of choice and action of each:
The concept of Right, insofar as it is related to an obligation corresponding to it (i.e., the moral concept of Right), has to do, first, only
with the external and indeed practical relation of one person to
another, insofar as their actions, as facts, can have (direct or indirect)
influence on each other. But, second, it does not signify the relation of
ones choice to the mere wish of the other, as in actions of beneficence
or callousness, but only a relation to the others choice. Third, in this
reciprocal relation of choice no account at all is taken of the matter of
choice, that is, of the end each has in mind with the objects he wants.
. . . All that is in question is the form in the relation of choice on the
part of both, insofar as choice is regarded merely as free (VI 230).
To raise a Kantian entitlement claim is to raise a claim to being treated
by others in morally requisite ways in virtue of ones capacity for external
freedom. Unlike Lockean entitlement claims, Kantian entitlement
claims cannot intelligibly be raised in the absence of coexistence with
others. Of course, to say that they cannot intelligibly be raised in the
pre-social condition is not to say that they cannot intelligibly be raised in
the pre-civil condition. As for Locke, so for Kant the pre-civil condition is
a social condition. When Friday and Robinson encounter one another on
the island, they find themselves in a pre-civil social condition. In this
condition, and consonant with each their conception of themselves as
beings capable of external freedom, Friday and Robinson will each raise
entitlement to freedom of choice and action claims against one another;
they will each claim morally requisite forms of action-restraint from the
other. Their joint problem will be that neither possesses the authority to
enforce these claims against the other.
I shall consider the problem of rights enforcement immediately
below. Here I want briefly to clarify the status of the innate right in
20. I should point out that my extrapolations from his island example diverge from
those drawn by Hruschka, for whom Kant follows Achenwalls natural rights theory.

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relation to the general concept of Right. The innate right is introduced


subsequent to the analysis of the general concept of Right in a section
entitled Division of the Doctrine of Right. Kant there distinguishes
between innate and acquired rights: an innate right is that which
belongs to everyone by nature, independently of any act that would
establish a right; an acquired right is that for which such an act is
required (VI 237). The innate right is held independently of the commission of acts, not of coexistence. More specifically,
Freedom (independence from being constrained by anothers choice),
insofar as it can coexist with the freedom of every other in accordance
with a universal law, is the only original right belonging to every man
by virtue of his humanity. This principle of innate freedom already
involves the following authorizations which are not really distinct
from it . . . : innate equality, that is, independence from being bound
to others to more than he can in turn bind them; hence a mans
quality of being his own master (sui iuris), as well as being a man
beyond reproach (iusti) . . . ; and finally, his being authorized to do to
others anything that does not in itself diminish what is theirs (VI 238).
As with the general concept of Right, the content of the innate right is
specified relationally, so cannot intelligibly be held independently of
coexistence. According to Reinhard Brandt, Kants distinction between
innate and acquired rights tracks the Roman-law distinction between
inner and their outer suum.21 The innate right specifies entitlements to
requisite forms of interaction pertaining to individuals as moral persons:
merely in virtue of their humanity.22 Acquired rights specify relational
entitlements that follow from the commission of actions, more specifically, from claims to the exclusive use of external objects. Innate and
acquired rights thus constitute distinct subdivisions within the general
concept of Right.23 To assign a naturalized innate right preeminence
over the general concept of Right is to detract from the distinctively
21. Cf. Reinhard Brandt, Das Erlaubnisgesetz, oder: Vernunft und Geschichte in Kants
Rechtslehre, in Rechtsphilosophien der Aufklrung, ed. Brandt (Berlin: de Gruyter,
1982), pp. 23375.
22. A detailed analysis of the distinct interpersonal entitlements under the innate right
can be found in Peter Niesen, Kants Theorie der Redefreiheit (Nomos, 2005), pp. 33127.
23. The relation between innate right and acquired rights remains a matter of interpretative dispute, but is of no consequence in the present context.

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relational content of Kantian entitlement claims. As we


shall see, this has repercussions on ones understanding of Kantian
enforcement claims.
B. Unilateral Versus Omnilateral Rights Enforcement
I suggested that Lockean rights are specifiable independently of conditions of coexistence. Lockean entitlement claims derive from individuals pre-socially given interests and powers; related enforcement
authority derives from the validity of entitlement claims. Though fully
operable only in the social condition, individuals have these rights independently of that condition. By contrast, Kantian entitlement claims are
not specifiable independently of coexistence. In consequence, related
enforcement authority cannot be coherently conceived in unilateral
terms. Consider Kants much-criticized contention that the concept of
Right contains the concept of coercion by the principle of contradiction
(VI 231).24 The idea is that when we think the concept of Right, we
simultaneously think the concept of coercion.25 It is tempting to take
Kant to be making the same point as Locke: from our valid entitlement
claims, our authority to sanction transgressions against them follows. In
fact, Kants contention is more radical: rights claims are intrinsically
coercive in that the claim to coercive authority over others is made independently of whether others have committed any acts of transgression.
Recall that Kantian entitlement claims are reciprocally relational: I
raise a claim to rightful freedom-treatment against you as you raise such
a claim against me. The universal principle of Right accordingly makes
others freedom the criterion of the rightness of my action: any action is
right if it can coexist with everyones freedom in accordance with a
universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of choice of each can
coexist with everyones freedom in accordance with a universal law
24. For criticisms of Kants analyticity argument, see Allen Wood, The Final Form of
Kants Practical Philosophy, and Paul Guyer, Kants Deductions of Right, both in Kants
Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretative Essays, ed. Mark Timmons (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), pp. 120, esp. pp. 510, and pp. 2364, esp. pp. 4654, respectively. For an
excellent analysis and defense of the analyticity argument, including discussion of its
distinctiveness from sanction-based approaches, see Arthur Ripstein, Authority and
Coercion, Philosophy & Public Affairs 32 (2004): 235.
25. On Kantian analyticity, see L. W. Beck, Kants Theory of Definition, Philosophical
Review (1956): 17991.

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(VI 230). While the universal principle of Right includes a reference


to maxims, the narrower universal law of Right delimits juridical
from ethical obligation:
The universal law of Right, so act externally that the free use of your
choice can coexist with the freedom of everyone in accordance with a
universal law, is indeed a law that lays an obligation on me, but it does
not at all expect, far less demand, that I myself should limit my
freedom to those conditions just for the sake of this obligation; instead
reason says only that freedom is limited to those conditions in conformity with the idea of it and that it may also be actively limited by
others (VI 231).26
The exclusion of reference to agents maxims signals Kants shift from
self-obligation to other-obligation. In contrast to ethical obligation,
where I obligate myself to act in accordance with moral laws, juridical
obligation is not self-imposed. Since the ground of my juridical obligation is others equal freedom entitlement, I am juridically obliged
whether or not I will acknowledgment of my obligation as my maxim.
Indeed, others are entitled to limit my freedom in accordance with the
universal law of Right. As Arthur Ripstein has shown, Kants claim is not
that others are entitled to apply coercive sanctions against me in the
event of my nonperformance in relation to their rights.27 To the contrary,
I may limit your freedom and you may limit mine whether or not either of
us has acted wrongly against the other. Rights claims are intrinsically
coercive in that they raise reciprocal claims to the justified limitation of
others power of will even against others consent and independently of
any acts on their part. When Robinson meets Friday, Robinson will claim
a just entitlement to restrict Fridays external freedom even against
Fridays will; Friday will do likewise.
Kants formal definition of rightful coercion as a hindering of a hindrance to freedom (VI 231) is naturally read as a sanction-based argument. If any action is right that accords with others freedom under
universal laws, any action is wrong that does not so accord. Similarly, any
action undertaken by one designed to prevent the action of another is
26. For a careful analysis of the difference between universal principle and universal
law of Right, see Dieter Scheffel, Kants kritische Verwerfung des Revolutionsrechts, in
Rechtsphilosophien, ed. Reinhard Brandt, pp. 178213, at pp. 19698.
27. Ripstein, Authority and Coercion.

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coercive insofar as it nonconsensually intrudes upon the latters power


of choice. Any such action that does not accord with the universal law of
Right is illegitimately coercive; any such action that does accord with the
universal law of Right is legitimately coercive. When Kant defines legitimate coercion as a hindrance of a hindrance of freedom he seems to
have in mind the rightful hindrance of a wrongful hindrance of freedom:
the connotation is of a legitimately coercive rectification of an unjust
action. However, the paragraph immediately following shows that the
coercion argument is not essentially sanction-bound:
Strict Right can be represented as the possibility of a fully reciprocal
use of coercion that is consistent with everyones freedom in accordance with universal laws. This proposition says, in effect, that right
should not be conceived as made up of two elements, namely an
obligation in accordance with a law and an authorization of him who
by his choice puts another under obligation to coerce him to fulfil it.
Instead one can locate the concept of Right directly in the possibility
of connecting universal reciprocal coercion with the freedom of
everyone (VI 232).
This amounts to a repudiation of sanction-based enforcement arguments. In Kant, given the relational content of entitlements claims,
enforcement claims are constitutive of entitlement claims rather than, as
in Locke, following from them. But if so, must we not say that anyone
who raises a valid entitlement claim against others raises a valid enforcement claim against them? And does this not mean that anyone who has
a valid entitlement claim has the authority to enforce it against others? It
is true that insofar as the enforcement claim is contained in the entitlement claim, anyone who raises a valid entitlement claim raises a valid
enforcement claim. But from the fact that a person raises a valid enforcement claim it does not follow that he or she has the authority to enforce
it. Consider two conditions of rightful enforcement that can be extrapolated from the foregoing analysis: first, any rights relation is reciprocally
coercible, which is to say that my freedom claim against you is as good as
yours is against me. Second, the legitimacy of any coercible freedom
claim is a function of its according with the universal law of Right.
Whether or not I am entitled to coerce you depends on the legitimacy of
my freedom claim relative to the universal law of Right. The same holds
for your claim against me. But under conditions of reciprocal coercion,

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which of us has authority to judge whose claim meets the legitimacy


condition? Kants argument is that, given the reciprocity of coercion
within any entitlement relation, no constituent member of such a
relation can legitimately enforce his or her entitlement claim against
the other party:
A unilateral will cannot serve as a coercive law for everyone . . . , since
that would infringe upon freedom in accordance with universal laws.
So it is only a will putting everyone under obligation, hence only a
collective general (common) and powerful will, that can provide
everyone this assurance [of lawful freedom]. But the condition of
being under a general external (i.e., public) lawgiving accompanied
with power is the civil condition (VI 256).
No individual person within a given rights relation has authority to
pronounce binding judgments in respect of that relation. This is not a
variation of the Lockean argument from natural bias: the thought is not
that if natural biases could be eliminated, individual persons unilateral
wills could make valid coercive law for everyone. Kants problem with
unilateral rights pronouncements is that they are private pronouncements. It is impossible in principle for a private person to act as legitimate enforcer of coercive universal laws. This follows from the
conception of Right as specifying reciprocally coercive freedom relations
under universal law. Since no one who coercively imposes law upon
others can at the same time be subject to that laws coercive authority,
private persons who impose coercive laws upon others place themselves
beyond the coercibility of those laws. In so doing they place themselves
outside the rights relation from within which their claim was raised. It
follows that no private rights claimant, in raising a valid entitlement
claim against others, can legitimately enforce this claim against them
while remaining a constituent member of the rights relation. Only an
omnilateral public willa will that is itself party to no rights relations
can act as authoritative enforcer of coercive universal law in relation to
all claimants simultaneously. In imposing coercive universal law equally
upon all, such a public law enforcer does not violate the reciprocity of
coercion that characterizes rights relations internally. Nor, on the other
hand, is such an enforcement authority itself subject to the coercive
authority of the laws it imposes.

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iv. the sovereign representative of the general united will


and the no-right to revolution
In Kants pre-civil social condition, persons unavoidably raise valid
entitlement claims against one another. Given their reciprocally coercive
character, these claims cannot permissibly be enforced against one
another in that condition. Only an omnilateral will has authority to
enforce reciprocally coercive entitlement claims against all. This omnilateral will is the idea of the collective general (common) and powerful
will (VI 256). Despite its Rousseauean inspiration, Kants collective will
does not represent the idea of popular sovereigntythe thought is not
that each subjects himself only to laws which he has co-authored with all
others.28 The general united will represents the idea of a public juridical
authority as necessary condition of the possible vindication of the valid
but privately unenforceable entitlement claims of each. We saw Kant
assert in connection with the coercible character of Right that insofar as
others freedom is the ground of my juridical obligation against them they
can actively limit my freedom in accordance with the universal law of
Right. Further onnow in the context of the property argumentKant
says that I am entitled to compel others to join into the civil condition
with me: If it must be possible, in terms of rights, to have an external
object as ones own, the subject must also be permitted to constrain
everyone else with whom he comes into conflict about whether an external object is his or anothers to enter along with him into a civil condition (VI 256). The two claims are equivalent in meaning: the authority to
limit others freedom in accordance with the universal law of Right is not
the authority unilaterally to enforce rights claims against them. It is the
authority to compel others to join into the civil condition with one. The
civil condition is not established through an act of consensual selfconstitution by its members but results from morally necessary subordination by members under a head:

28. But see Andrews Reath, Legislating for a Realm of Ends: The Social Dimension of
Autonomy, in Reclaiming the History of Ethics, ed. A. Reath, pp. 21440. For criticism of this
position, see my Kants Kingdom of Ends: Metaphysical, not Political, in A Critical Guide
to the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Jens Timmermann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

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[B]etween the commander (imperans) and the subject (subditus) there


is no partnership. They are not fellow-members: one is subordinated
to, not coordinated with the other; and those who are coordinate with
one another must for this very reason consider themselves equals
since they are subject to common laws (VI 307).
The relation between head and members is asymmetrical: while the
members are subject to the coercive will of the head, the head is not
subject to the coercive wills of the members. The reason for this should be
obvious by now: the head represents a public, not a private will. It is this
insight into the distinctively public character of the institution of sovereignty that grounds Kants resistance against the idea of a right to revolution. Importantly, the very same insight motivates his rejection of
Hobbesian sovereignty. Critics of Kants no-right to revolution often
depict his conception of the coercive sovereign as on a par with that of
Hobbes: it is because Kant shares Hobbess sovereignty conception that
he rejects a right to revolution. This objection gets things backwards: for
Kant, the people have no right to revolution against the sovereign because
the sovereign represents the idea of its general united will. But precisely
because the sovereign represents the idea of the general united will Kant
repudiates any view of the sovereign as merely the strongest unilateral will
around. What is wrong with the Hobbesian lawgiver is the private character of his lawgiving. A public lawgiver enforces binding laws of external
freedom not in accordance with his private will but in accordance with the
idea of the general united will. Hence not any law decreed by the sovereign is just merely in virtue of having emanated from that source. The
sovereign, who ought to make public law in accordance with the idea of
the general united will, can fail to do so. It is in the context of his denial of
a right to revolution that Kant introduces his freedom of the pen argument to repudiate Hobbess contention regarding the sovereigns morally
unlimited coercive authority. While Kant agrees with Hobbes that
members of the civil condition cannot have coercive rights against the
sovereign, the public character of the sovereigns lawgiving demands that
the non-recalcitrant subject must be able to assume that his ruler does
not want to do him any wrong. A subject must have with the approval of
the sovereign himself, the authorization to make known publicly his
opinion about what it is in the rulers arrangements that seems to him to
be a wrong against the commonwealth (VIII 304).

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It is the non-recalcitrant subject who has a morally justified claim to


the sovereigns public ear: again, freedom of the pen is not a pre-civil
individual right to free speech but derives as public counterweight
from subjects acknowledgment of the sovereigns legitimate coercive
authority over them. Where the sovereign is assured of subjects nonrecalcitrance, he ought to acknowledge their contribution to the public
political process. He ought to acknowledge his personal fallibility in his
role as public lawmaker and ought to listen to subjects reasoned criticisms and proposals for reform. The sovereign need not always be
responsive to these criticisms and proposals: ultimate responsibility for
judging public right and wrong rests with him as representative head of
the union. The envisaged dynamic of reasoned exchange between
sovereign and subjects nonetheless indicates the essentially reformative character of the Kantian conception of the gradual emergence of the Rechtsstaat from its unavoidable beginnings in more or
less despotic contexts.29
A sovereign may, then, be unjust in the sense of passing unjust laws:
so long as he acknowledges subjects justified claim to freedom of the
pen as a necessary public counterweight to his coercive authority, the
unjust sovereign is not illegitimate even where he fails to respond positively to interjections from the public but merely tolerates reasoned
expressions of dissent. Where the sovereign denies subjects freedom of
the pen his rule may be illegitimate. However, this is by no means a
foregone conclusion.30 The intolerant sovereign may retain legitimacy
merely in virtue of being the sole possible representative of the idea of
the general united will. If, as Kant appears to think, acting as representative of the idea of the general united will is a sufficient condition of
legitimacy (if not of justice), and if, as he patently does think, the head of
the civil union is the only possible such representative, the latters legitimacy cannot legitimately be challenged by alternative contenders to
that position. The tyrannical sovereign may possess legitimacy merely
insofar as it is not possible for anyone else to represent the idea of the
general united will. This does not mean that it is impossible for the civil
29. I discuss Kants argument for reform over revolution in more detail in my Sidestepping Morality: Korsgaard on Kants No-right to Revolution, Jahrbuch fr Recht und
Ethik 14 (2008), forthcoming.
30. For excellent discussion of this problematic situation, see Scheffel, Kants kritische
Verwerfung, pp. 20511.

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union ever to dissolve itself. Lewis White Beck draws attention to a


passage in which Kant speaks of revolution as a call of nature for fundamental reforms.31 Where oppression has reached a level of intensity
so as to become literally unbearable, social violence may finally erupt
and dissolution result. However, far from constituting a right of the
united people against its head, violent dissolution signals the complete
breakdown of subjects and sovereigns respective attempts at establishing relations of Right. Such failures of state happennature (in current
parlance, circumstance) lends a helping hand, enabling those involved
to attempt the civil union anew. Kant does not deny the possibility of
revolution as social event; nor does he deny the possible progressive
political consequences of such events. He denies only that there can be
a right to revolution. The elementary reason for this denial lies in his
conception of the public character of Right and in the consequent constitutive unfitness of unilateral as private wills to take public law into
their own hands.

v. kantian worries over a lockean right to revolution


Kants emphasis on the public morality of Right has entered mainstream
liberal thinking. At the same time, his denial of a right to revolution
strains against deeply held liberal commitments to the Lockean idea of
naturally held individual rights, including related notions of individual
sovereignty. The tension between these two commitments is evident in
the standard response to Kants freedom of the pen argument against
Hobbes: the proposal that reasoned dissent may efficaciously confront
coercive power seems politically laughable to most. Bemusement turns
to incredulity at the point of Kants denial of a right to revolution where
the sovereign repudiates even this solealbeit laughablepalladium of
the people (VIII 304). Kants view of revolution as signalling a complete
breakdown in political relationsrevolution as social eventprovides
insufficient appeasement.32 Revolution understood as a conscientiously
undertaken, legitimate political act, hence a right to revolution is
31. Kant (VIII 373n) cited in L. W. Beck, Right of Revolution, p. 418.
32. Revolution as a call of nature may anticipate the Marxist conception of revolution
as resulting from a confluence of determining social and economic conditions. Cf.
Skocpol, Social Revolutions.

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demanded. It is typically at this point that disappointed Kantians turn to


Locke for revolutionary succor.
For most liberal defenders of a right to revolution the idea of such
action as securing individuals naturally held rights against their governments is foremost on their minds. The underlying view of revolution is
not, however, of an aggregate of individuals making common cause each
in defense of their particular rights. The dominant view is of revolution
as a public act undertaken by the united citizenry in behalf of the people
as a whole. Yet it is not clear whether a Lockean individually held natural
right to self-defense can support the idea of revolution as a united public
act. The suspicion arises that in much current revolutionary parlance a
(broadly) Lockean natural rights argument is conjoined with a (broadly)
Kantian conception of the people as unified public agent. It is against the
background of this suspicion that I want to consider the subsidiary question flagged at the outset of this article: can Locke move consistently
from an affirmation of individually held natural rights to self-defense in
the pre-civil condition to an affirmation of the peoples civil right to
revolution in the civil condition? While I believe that he can do so under
at least one description of what constitutes a people, that description is
too thin for the Kantian.
To see this, it will be useful to distinguish between two distinct conceptions of a people: the eliminativist view and the emergentist view.33
For the eliminativist, a people as a morally significant entity distinct
from the sum of its constituent members does not exist: the people and
its interests and actions are reducible to the aggregate of its individual
members. By contrast, on the emergentist view, a distinctive type of
agent does emerge from the unification of a multitude into a people. A
people consists of more than the sum of its constituent members: the
act of unification brings into existence a public agent whose interests
and actions are relatively autonomous of those of its constituent
individual members.34 Locke is standardly seen as a representative of the
33. I borrow this terminology from Christian List and Philip Pettit, who employ it to
differentiate between two distinct approaches to collective and group agency respectively
in their Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, forthcoming), chapter 3. List and Pettit do not fully endorse either
approach, but seek to develop a third alternative account halfway between the two.
34. This need not mean, as is often assumed, that under the eliminativist view individuals interests and agency are simply subsumed under the whole: this is certainly not

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eliminativist view. Society is constituted through acts of consent by any


number of individuals who join together for the purpose of efficient
rights protection. Decision making is by majority rule: since it is necessary to that which is one Body to move one way, it is necessary the Body
should move that way whither the greater force carries it, which is the
consent of the majority (II 96).35 The individual judgments of the greater
number determine the movement of the whole body. This contrasts with
Kants view, according to which an aggregate of unilateral judgments,
however numerous, cannot add up to a public judgment. For Kant, a
people results from the unification of a multitude under the idea of a
united general will. The idea of a public judgment is conceptually distinct from that of an aggregate of private judgments and pertains to the
relatively autonomous interests and actions of society conceived as a
distinct, unitary agent. Kant can plausibly be read as a representative of
the emergentist view.
Traditionally, liberals have eyed the emergentist view with suspicion.
They have aligned themselves with the eliminativist view, regarding it
the more attractive or at any rate safer conception given the reducibility
of collective interests and actions to constituent individual ones. But if
the eliminativist view gets by with a thin conception of collective power,
it also affords no more than a thin conception of collective responsibility.
Consider a passage from chapter 18 of Lockes second Treatise, On
Tyranny, in which he discusses the response open to an individual
member of civil society whose rights have manifestly been violated by
a public official:
Whosoever in Authority exceeds the Power given him by the Law, and
makes use of the Force he has under his Command, to compass that
upon the Subject which the Law allows not, ceases in that to be a
Magistrate, and acting without Authority, may be opposed as any
other Man, who by force invades the Right of another (II 202).
The official who acts contrary to the law declares war upon the
affected individual and in so doing forfeits his official status: he is no
the case under the Kantian variant of this view. The essential point here is simply the
relative autonomy of public agency from private agency, i.e., the nonreducibility of public
to private agency.
35. Quotes are from Lockes Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994); arabic numerals refer to individual paragraphs.

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different from a robber or a pirate (II 228) whose transgressions against


others rights are punishable by natural law. Yet although Locke affirms
the aggrieved individuals natural right to self-defense against this official, he also thinks it unlikely that society will come to his aid:
If such acts of abuse reach no farther than some private Mens Cases,
though they have a right to defend themselves, and to recover by force
what by unlawful force is taken from them; yet the Right to do so will
not easily ingage them in a Contest, wherein they are sure to perish; it
being as impossible for the one or a few oppressed Men to disturb the
Government, where the Body of the People do not think themselves
concerned in it (II 208).
So long as rights abuses do not affect the majority of individuals in
civil society, they are unlikely to come to the aggrieved partys assistance.
Lockes diagnosis of the situation is consistent with his account of naturally rights-holding individuals consensual entrance into civil society.
For the aggrieved individual effectively to defend his rights (the violation
of which no one contests), he must arouse the support of the majority.
Where the majority judges that they have no interest in this dispute, he
may in this instance be less able to secure his rights than he might have
been under an analogous scenario in the pre-civil condition. Yet this is
what he signed up to when consenting to majority rule upon entrance
into the civil condition. Many current liberal defenders of a right to
revolution will find this unsatisfactory. Should only those have their
rights violations redressed who successfully rouse the majority in their
support? What about the weak and the vulnerable: should society not
defend the rights of those least able to fend for themselves?36 The idea
that the rights of each should be the concern of the whole points beyond
the eliminativist view to one that is closer to the emergentist one. But
where the defense of individuals rights is seen as a matter of distinctly
public concern, the move from individuals natural rights of self-defense
in the pre-civil condition to the peoples civil right of revolution in
36. Considerations of this type motivate Robert C. Gradys criticisms of Locke in Obligation, Consent, and Lockes Right to Revolution: Who Is to Judge? Canadian Journal of
Political Science 9 (1976): 27792. John Simmonss response that individuals have both a
contractual and a natural law duty to come to the aid of the aggrieved party, although
consistent with the eliminativist perspective, may not entirely satisfy Gradys demands for
societal action. Cf. A. John Simmons, On the Edge of Anarchy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1993), pp. 17892.

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the political condition may not be that straightforward: the relative


autonomy of the public good now enters to complicate the argument.37
Locke himself sometimes invokes some idea of the public good as
relatively autonomous of the aggregate of individuals naturally held
rights.38 There are passages that imply that the reason why the majority is
slow to rise is not individual disinterest in particular rights disputes but
concern to preserve the good of governmentrule by public lawin
general. Indeed, Lockes defense of the peoples right to revolution may
be at its strongest where not individual rights violations but governors
corruption of government is at issue. In chapter 19 of the second Treatise,
On the Dissolution of Government, Locke distinguishes between external and internal dissolution. External dissolution happens through conquest, internal dissolution through corruption within executive or
legislative branches of government. Locke thinks of the legislative
in particular, rather than government in general, as representative
of the people:
Tis in their Legislative, that the Members of a Commonwealth are
united, and combined together into one coherent Body. This is the
Soul that gives Form, Life, and Unity to the Commonwealth. For the
Essence and Union of the Society consisting in having one Will,
the Legislative, when once established by the Majority, has the declaring, and as it were the keeping of that Will. The Constitution of the
Legislative is the first and fundamental Act of Society, whereby provision is made for the Continuation of their Union (II 212).
The act of establishing the legislative, not mere entrance into civil
society, gives the Commonwealth its unity, enabling it to have one Will.
This is not as strong as the Kantian requirement of submission under the
idea of a general united will: in contrast to Kants sovereign head, Lockes
executive entertains a peculiarly adversarial relationship with the legislative and seems on the whole not to be thought of as representative of
the peoples unity. The establishment of the legislative as a branch of
government nonetheless introduces a unity of will where a mere aggregate of individual wills was available before: the move from civil to
37. For example, the public may take an interest in the rights violation in question even
when the aggrieved party does not. Alternatively, the public may judge the rights violation
insignificant even when the aggrieved party manages to arouse a majority in his support.
38. Cf. II, 200; 225; 229; 239.

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political society represents a move from the commonality of individual


interests to the (relative) unity of the public interest.
In chapter 19 it is primarily the prince whose various misdeeds effect
the corruption of the legislative, either by usurping its lawmaking functions, or by preventing it from meeting, or by changing its electorate.39
Similarly, it is the prince who corrupts the executive branch when he
neglects and abandons that charge, so that the Laws already made can
no longer be put into execution (II 219). When either legislative or executive branches of government, or both, have been corrupted through
internal governmental abuse, the Government visibly ceases, and the
People become a confused Multitude, without Order or Connexion (II
219).40 The established unity of political society is destroyed. Once government has run itself into the ground, the peoplesurprisingly, now a
confused Multitude rather than, as one might expect, an aggregate of
commonly consenting willsare at liberty to provide for themselves by
erecting a new Legislative (II 220). Locke believes that no one disputes
this. But if no one disputes that a multitude whose government has
self-destructed is at liberty to appoint itself a new one, no one can reasonably dispute the right of a people whose government is still in the
process of self-destructing to rid itself of it before the event:
To tell a people they may provide for themselves, by erecting a new
Legislative, when by Oppression, Artifice, or being delivered over to a
Foreign Power, their old one is gone, is only to tell them they may
expect Relief, when it is too late, and the evil is past Cure. . . . This is
rather Mockery than Relief; and men can never be secure from
Tyranny, if there be no means to escape it, till they are perfectly under
it: And therefore it is, that they have not only a Right to get out of it but
to prevent it (II 220).
I do not see how the right to rid oneself of a bad government does
follow from the liberty to establish a new one, but Lockes is at this point
a powerful rhetorical argument, which is followed up in the succeeding pages by a discussion of government in trust, and it is there,
39. Cf II, 21214.
40. This is a remarkable claim on Lockes part given his insistence in many other
passages upon the viability of civil society in the absence of government. For an enjoyable
discussion of this puzzle, see Nathan Turcov, Lockes Second Treatise and The Best Fence
against Rebellion, Review of Politics 43 (1981): 198217.

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interestingly, that Locke also discusses cases in which the legislative


itselfnot merely the executiveabuses the trust bestowed upon it by
the people. There is no space for detailed discussion here: but to speak of
government as held in trust is to invoke the idea of responsible
governmentit is to invoke the idea of the governments authority to
speak in behalf of the majority in relative independence from the latters
actual pronouncements on the grounds that only government (or its
legislative branch), as unified agent, has decision-making competence
for those areas of interest and concern that arise from the distinct act of
political establishment itself.41 If this is plausible, then the meaning of
the people operative in chapter 19 may not be of a piece with the
meaning dominant in the cited passages from chapter 18. There, the
people may be no more than an aggregate of individual wills who reach
common decisions by majority rule. Here a more unified notion of the
people is in play whose concern is to preserve the public good of government. Under the first conception a relatively straightforward connection obtains between individuals natural right to self-defense and their
civil right to revolution, subject to majority support, but the idea of the
peoples public agency is quite thin. Under the second conception, there
is a much stronger sense of the peoples right to preserve the public good
of government, but the connection between this public right and individuals natural right to self-defense is not self-evident.42
vi. conclusion
My argument in the last section has not been that in moving from a more
eliminativist to a more emergentist conception of a people, Locke in
effect endorses Kantian submission under the idea of a general united
will. I have suggested only that Lockes second argument for revolution,
which operates with a more unitary conception of the people than the
41. Cf. John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). One particular such area of necessarily common decision making
that Dunn identifies is the running of the national economy. According to Dunn,
it is the introduction of money into natural trade relations that necessitates establishment of a common system of governance even apart from individuals concern for
efficient rights protection.
42. Although the fact that Locke defends both individuals and the peoples right to
resistance is widely acknowledged in the Locke literature, the corresponding conceptual
shifts that seem to be involved at the level of the people seem to go largely unnoticed.

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Reason, Right, and Revolution:


Kant and Locke

first, presupposes more than mere appeal to individuals natural rights.


Minimally, additional premises come into playpremises to do with the
independent public good of government, which may supply reasons for
or against revolution that are distinct from arguments about individuals
rights and may even conflict with them. While this second Lockean conception of the people should not be conflated with Kants account, the
Kantian emphasis on the public morality of Right draws attention to the
relative autonomy of public agency from (an aggregate of) private
agency, and to the consequent difficulty in conceiving of the peoples
right to revolution as a self-evident extrapolation from an aggregate of
individuals natural rights to self-defense.
The principal aim of this article has been to defend Kant against
charges of philosophical inconsistency by disappointed Kantians who
would like him to endorse a right to revolution. Given the absence of
natural rights in Kant, and given his conception of the public morality
of Right, it would be highly inconsistent of Kant to endorse the moral
validity of a claim to destroy the necessary condition of any possible
rights when the going gets tough. Even when the going gets very tough
there cannot consistently be, for Kant, a right to revolution, although
state dissolution through internal turmoil can, of course, occur. I have
not, in defending Kant, sought to discredit the Lockean position. I
have acknowledged that from at least one perspectivethe eliminativist oneLockes position, too, is consistent, though it is too thin
a conception of the public for a Kantian. Inconsistencies are most
likely to arise where attempts are made to supplement Kant with
Locke, or Locke with Kant: one will either end up weakening the idea
of the public morality of Right, or undermine the thought of governmental legitimacy as based on individual consent and protection
of natural rights.
This does not mean that one cannot productively think about the
issues here raised across these two thinkers. The idea of revolution is
widely embraced morally and politically, yet little analyzed philosophically. Among liberals in particular it is often deemed the perhaps quintessential expression of concerted public action: yet the stance is often
romantic, not analytical. Recent work on collective rationality and decision making distinguishes between aggregative and unitary models of
public agency, analyzing the conditions of each, and assessing the
appropriateness of either model in relation to distinct areas of public

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decision making.43 If the argument of the preceding discussion is sound


that eliminativist and emergentist conceptions of a people may identify
rather different bases and objects of legitimate revolutionary action, this
literature may be relevant to the question as to whether we can coherently derive a public right to revolution from individuals natural
rights to self-defense.
The contrasting Kantian idea of public reasoning and of the public
morality of Right (or justice) is similarly widely embraced. As his freedom
of the pen argument in the context of his no-right to revolution illustrates,
Kants commitment to the idea of public reason is very deep. The depth of
this commitment is a consequence of Kants abandonment of natural law
thinking, including natural rights, which leaves public reasoning as the
only alternative method by which to solve disputes even between sovereign and subject. In contrast to Kant, the current liberal commitment to
public reason remains in many respects quite superficial. This is borne
out by the striking neglect of Kants argument for reasoned reform as an
alternative to violent resistance in the relevant Kant literature.44 It further
manifests itself in the steadily growing literature on coercive interventionism on humanitarian grounds, and on the forceful imposition of
democracy upon peoples unable or unwilling to do it themselves. Often
this literature appeals to Kant as one who surely would have endorsed
resort of political violence for the sake of Right in the international context
even though he so infamously repudiated it in the domestic context.45
These trends belie an especially crusading conflation of public reason
with political violence often, ironically, in the name of Kant. Instead of
continuing to berate Kant for his unwillingness to follow us on the right to
revolution, it may be time to begin to reflect on the reasons for our
unwillingness to follow him down the route of public reasoning to the
point at which its moral demandingness upon us really does begin to bite.

43. For example, Christian List, The Discursive Dilemma and Public Reason, Ethics
116 (2006): 362402; Philip Pettit and David Schweikard, Joint Action and Group Agency,
Philosophy of the Social Sciences 36 (2006): 1839; Philip Pettit, Responsibility Incorporated, Ethics 117 (2007): 171201.
44. Public reason in Kant is widely discussed, but rarely in the context of his
no-right to revolution.
45. Cf. Applbaum, Forcing a People to Be Free. Applbaum both rejects Kants denial
of a right to revolution and enlists his putative support for coercive imposition of democratic government upon unwilling distant others.

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