James Farmelant wrote: >I am not sure that it is accurate to describe Kant as having been >anti-revolutionary. He was a discreet supporter of the French >Revolution, and even wrote an essay *Eternal Peace* in which he >argued that the establishment of republican regimes was to >be welcomed as a means for making world peace possible. >I think it is more accurate to say that what Kant suuported was >a bourgeois revolution and he realized that even a bourgeois >republic would be experienced by many people as oppressive. >Hence the need for maintaining religious beliefs like belief >in the existence of God and of personal immortality and of >free will. As a conservatively liberal theorist, Kant in his political philosophy was uncompromisingly hostile to rebellions--even civil disobedience--against the State; and yet, his belief in (or desire to vindicate) the idea of mankind's historical progress also led him to approve of the results of the victorious bourgeois revolutions. How did Kant reconcile these contradictory sympathies? 1 Kant's relation to the actual bourgeois revolutions was one of *spectatorship*. Both his moral and political philosophy militated against revolutionary activities, especially the fact that revolutionary violence *must dissolve* what he called "the state of right." And yet, when he gazed from afar upon the achievements of revolutions in England and France, he saw progress in Enlightenment, which he really longed for. According to Hans Reiss, Kant unconvincingly argued that the French Revolution "was not in fact a revolution at all in the legal sense; for the king had surrendered his sovereign power to the Third Estate." A dubious contention, which probably didn't persuade many besides Kant himself. 2 While Kant's legal doctrine cannot possibly incorporate the right to rebel, even against tyranny, it can accommodate a *victorious* revolution that results in the establishment of "the state of right" again. Kant wrote: "*if a revolution has succeeded and a new constitution has been established*, the unlawfulness of its origin and success cannot free the subjects from the obligation to accommodate themselves as good citizens to the new order of things, and they cannot refuse to obey in an honest way the authority now in power" (emphasis mine). However, no sympathy from Kant for either would-be or failed rebels: "The least attempt to do so [rebel] is *high treason*..., and a traitor of this kind, as one who has tried to destroy his *fatherland*..., may be punished with nothing less than death." 3 Metaphysically speaking, revolutionary violence, in the eyes of Kant, represents the Absolute Evil, for it signifies not an unprincipled deviation from the law (as in ordinary crimes), but a deliberate and principled rejection of "the authority of the law itself." And that is the Ultimate Evil that threatens to unravel one of the foundations of Kant's moral philosophy (which relies upon the idea that a rational man cannot will that a conscious + systematic defiance of the law [as in the revolutionary overthrow of the state]--in other words, the Absolute Evil--should become a universal principle. (This is most clearly expressed in one of Kant's footnotes to _The Metaphysics of Morals_ where he ponders on the "horror" of the formal execution of a dethroned monarch.) 4 In the shorter articles in which Kant wrote of his hope for historical progress in international rights, he ended up employing the idea of paradoxical utility of selfish & even evil actions (in contradiction to his vigorous opposition to utilitarianism elsewhere). In "Perpetual Peace," Kant wrote: "it [the barbaric freedom of the state in the constant state of war] checks the full development of the natural tendencies in its [humanity's] progress; but, on the other hand, *by these very evils and their consequences*, it compels our species at last to discover some law of counterbalance to the principle of antagonism between nations..." (emphasis mine). Here, victorious revolutions can find their place among those evils favored by the cunning of nature. Yoshie
