Social Contract & Legal Freedom in Kant’s Philosophy
Social Contract in Contractarian Theories
In different contractarian theories, the social contract refers to the expression of a covenant, agreement, or contract by which people hypothetically decided to create a civil, social, peaceful state out of a semi-wild state of nature. It’s supposed that we lived in this state of nature before the social contract.
For Kant, the social contract is a regulative idea of practical reason. It’s only an idea, but with undoubted practical reality. It links the legislature to act and make laws as if they could have sprung from the united will of the entire population. It sees subjects as individuals who have voluntarily consented to be citizens.
Therefore, the contract is neither a historical hypothesis nor a hypothetical consensus of the members. Instead, it serves as a regulatory benchmark to legitimize or delegitimize actual political practices. The laws that could have been dictated by the general will are fair; those that do not exceed the test are not. If it proves impossible for the people to consent to a law, it would not be legitimate. However, if it is possible for the people to agree with a law, it should be taken as fair.
Kant speaks of a universal right for everyone, not just the majority.
Cosmopolitan Law
For Kant, the law seeks to reconcile the freedoms of all people, i.e., co-release. The end state is to ensure the effectiveness of law and, therefore, also co-release. Public law prevails in the civil state and is the set of positive laws publicly sanctioned by a governing state or group of states.
Public law, for Kant, is divided into:
- Political rights
- International law
- Cosmopolitan law
Cosmopolitan law is the set of laws that should govern relations between states and citizens of other states, but as members of a global human community. According to Kant, the cosmopolitan right should be limited to conditions of universal hospitality. That is, everyone has the right to visit any place in the world and not be mistreated due to their foreign status. This is also called the right of access or movement worldwide.
The sense of it is that the land belongs to all humanity. This is the basis of the law of world citizenship, in line with enlightened cosmopolitanism. Whoever violates the right is the one who harasses from outside, who is inhospitable to strangers. The relationships between individuals and states as members of a world community give us the right of world citizenship.
Legal Freedom
Legal freedom, together with equality and independence, is an essential feature of the citizen of a state. The concept of freedom in Kant has two dimensions:
- Negative freedom (absence of disability or constraint)
- Positive freedom (freedom to, the ability to act)
For Kant, freedom is not just the right to pursue happiness as one sees fit, provided they do not cause damage to the freedom of others. Freedom also means the right not to obey any foreign law unless one could give consent to it. The legal concept of freedom does not express civil disobedience, since Kant did not defend it at the time, despite what might seem implied by the very definition of the word.
Copernican Revolution
The Copernican Revolution is Kant’s proposal to understand how knowledge is possible. Kant explains the change in philosophy as a conception of knowledge based on an analogy with the Copernican revolution in astronomy.
Copernicus realized that he could not understand the motion of celestial objects with the theory that the earth is at the center of the universe and the sun and other celestial objects revolve around it. He saw that to understand the movement of celestial objects, it was necessary to change the relationship by putting the sun at the center and assuming that the earth is round.
Kant believes that philosophy should undergo a similar revolution. In philosophy, the problem is to explain synthetic a priori knowledge. Philosophy before Kant supposed that the experience of knowing the knower is passive. The object known influences the subject and results in a true representation. With this explanation, we can understand empirical knowledge, but not a priori knowledge, through which we can know something before experiencing things, i.e., before they can influence our minds.
Kant does not accept that we submit ourselves to things, but rather that things are subject to us. Before we know an object, that object must be subject to the conditions of possibility of all possible experience, i.e., the formal, a priori structure imposed by our cognitive faculties: pure intuitions (space and time) and the pure concepts or categories.