Kant’s Early Followers in Political Philosophy
Product details
- ISBN 9781032851907
- Weight: 630g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 26 Jun 2025
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Immanuel Kant influenced a large and productive group of political philosophers in the 1790s. This volume argues that they brought out more fully the egalitarian principles of Kantian republicanism.
“The Kantian school” featured young philosophers including Saul Ascher, Johann Adam Bergk, Johann Benjamin Erhard, Johann Ludwig Ewald, the early Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schlegel, and Johann Heinrich Tieftrunk. The chapters in this volume analyze their work in relation to Kant and their wider philosophical and political context. They advance three main theses. First, the Kantians defended popular sovereignty and several of them supported the extension of the right to vote to workers and women. Second, several of them developed a political perfectionism, the view that equal political rights are justified for their effects on cultivating moral character. Third, they developed sophisticated theories of state legitimacy and collective action, defending a people’s right to change their constitution, either through reform or through revolution.
Kant’s Early Followers in Political Philosophy offers a systematic view into a neglected group of thinkers at a foundational moment for modern political thought. It will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working on Kant, eighteenth- century philosophy, political philosophy, and the history of early modern German political thought.
Reidar Maliks is a professor of philosophy at the University of Oslo. Among his publications are Kant’s Politics in Context (2014) and Kant and the French Revolution (2022).
Elisabeth Theresia Widmer is a postdoctoral researcher at the London School of Economics. She has published several articles on left-Kantian thinkers, and a monograph titled Left-Kantianism in the Marburg School (2023).
