Juridical Freedom and Interactive Community in the Kantian Justification of his Republican Ideal

Abstract

The aim of this article is to offer some thoughts concerning Kant’s contractualism. It analyzes two elements that are fundamental to every contractualism insofar as they determine the way the exeundum principle and the model of state thus derived are justified: (I) The notion of freedom that is ascribed to contracting agents, and (II) the conception of the practical interaction between them. In relation to (I), the article proposes (1) that the independence between Ethics and Right in Kant suggests that the concept of freedom will receive two different kinds of applications in each realm, and that this fact allows us to say that Kant’s Doctrine of Right implies a political conception of autonomy. Concerning (II), we try to show that (2) Kant did not conceive the state of nature from an individualistic perspective, but in the terms of an interactive community.