Chapter Four: Kant and Hegel

KANT

Kant lived in Konigsberg in East Prussia from his birth in 1724 until his death in 1804. The fragmentary condition of the patchwork of German states at this time, without a metropolitan culture and political centre were, as Reiss points out, ‘not conducive to the rise of lively political discussion’ and provided ‘virtually no opportunities for … intellectuals to take part in politics’ (Reiss 1997a, 7). Kant argued against the patriarchal ‘benevolent despotism’ or ‘enlightened autocracy’ of the Prussian king, Frederick the Great (while admiring his enlightened attitudes) and disagreed even more with the subsequent and more repressive regime of Frederick William II.

Kant’s political theory is not found in a single work but in a number of scattered writings from the later part of his career, in the period around and immediately after the American Revolution of 1776. Reiss makes a strong case (1997a, 4) that Kant’s political views were already formed well before the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 and cannot be regarded, therefore, as a response to those events. Kant’s political works were therefore published about twenty-five years after Rousseau’s Social Contract, whose moral aspect Kant admired. Kant’s political theory, as a dynamic form of progressive rational self-emancipation, was also developed against the intellectual background of the Enlightenment movement, and his criticisms of it. His political writings appeared after his philosophical perspective and reputation were already well-established. The most significant source as far as Kant’s conception of sovereignty is concerned is The Metaphysics of Morals of 1797. Perpetual Peace of 1795, Theory and Practice of 1792 and What is Enlightenment? of 1784 are also important. Unless otherwise stated, references are to The Metaphysics of Morals. Hegel’s most notable political writing is the Philosophy of Right of 1821, though his great interest in political matters was also expressed in pamphlets and newspaper articles.

Kant’s and Hegel’s conceptions of sovereignty pose a useful comparison. Kant and Hegel were both explicitly concerned with the notion of sovereignty in the context of the Rechtstaat. This crucial concept refers not just to the rule of law, but to the idea of the rule of law in a constitutional state as a moral principle governing social and political order. Amorphous nationalism and cultural Germanicism are both rejected in the Rechtstaat ideal. In contrast with some of the other writers studied here, for both Kant and Hegel the conception of external sovereignty (now taking on its modern form, with internal sovereignty as identified in the context of the modern state form) was a significant part of their political concerns. In some respects both Kant and Hegel, working in the tradition of German philosophy and political theory, were exercised by contextual factors such as the power of nation-states in Europe, notably in France and England, by the dominance of Prussia amongst the German states, and by the absence of a unified German state. However, this contextualisation does not provide grounds for a deterministic interpretation, in simply reading off their political theories as simple responses to issues in the politics of the day. This caution is especially pertinent here, since both were thinkers whose philosophical precepts deeply affected their approach to and conclusions about political theory and practice. Nevertheless it is clear that both philosophers were keen to bring (in different, though overlapping ways) a philosophical perspective to bear on the nature of politics in the context of an emerging system of nation states. In this way there is a direct connection with the prominence of a concern with external sovereignty in their works. With our familiarity of living in nation states and an international order of nation states, it is not easy to capture the genesis and contingency of that formation and how it appeared to Kant and Hegel.

In both writers the specific meaning of law, deriving from a metaphysics of morals, and the value placed on it meant that a strong conception of state sovereignty had to accompany it. With Kant and Hegel, for the first time unequivocally in this book, the modern state—as a moral and political agent—is an inherent part of what it means to conceptualise sovereignty. In both writers, in different ways, a robust form of sovereignty explicitly attached to the state, necessarily followed from the power, scope and reach of law as ordering the lives of individuals. This rule of law contains a cluster of features—publicly-known laws (rather than sheer power, customary privilege, or particular interest) governing the relations between persons, law as a civilising influence, the rule of law as a moral norm, law as the intermediary translating moral principles to apply to concrete cases, the state as a law-giving state, and law articulating right (justice and rightness). The pre-eminence and wide coverage of such law in their sense demands the political form of a Rechtstaat and this idea of the constitutional state demands a sturdy and vigorous state sovereignty. Law, state and sovereignty are all absolute in the same way.

In terms of their responses to the issue of external sovereignty, Kant and Hegel took radically opposed positions. Kant mostly but not always draws cosmopolitan conclusions (although, as we shall see, his position was a complex one) about the importance of inter-state harmony between likeminded republics as a means to ensure global peace and mediate to seek to prevent wars between nations. Hegel has a communitarian temperament that emphasises the importance of developing a political identity and patriotism within the framework of a nation state. Indeed Kant is best known for arguing that the nature of freedom for persons requires peace and cannot co-exist with a condition of war, while Hegel argues that individuals can only achieve real freedom within the identity of a state that has experienced war.

Both Kant and Hegel are concerned, like Rousseau, with the problem of establishing the conditions for legitimate government, founded on right rather than power. In this way, Kant and Hegel, along with Rousseau, Spinoza and even Hobbes, also wanted to see sovereignty as beneficial to citizens, setting out the conditions of political life in which individuals (and for some of these writers, the collective) could flourish. In addition, society is a civilising influence for Kant and Hegel, as it was for Hobbes and Rousseau. In articulating the idea of legitimate government being founded on right rather than power, the views of Kant and Hegel are influential in the development of the powerful notion of the specifically German Rechtstaat or state governed by moral right. Both were concerned with how right could be translated into law, with how moral principles could be implemented in the state through a system of law.

What is most distinctive about Kant’s conception of sovereignty is the tension in his theory around the sovereign state. According to Kant the logic of politics as a metaphysics of morals requires that the sovereign state and its laws is the locus for the realisation of individual freedom. At the same time Kant is attracted to extrapolating his logic, which includes the recognition of politics as a realm of practical and contingent activity in which principles can guide but not dictate, into the international realm. However, he is prevented from fully doing so by the obstacle of the sovereign state he has constructed. The relationship between morality and politics leads for Kant to two contradictory conclusions—the sovereignty of the state as the focus for right and law, and the sovereignty of moral principle in the international sphere leading to peace—and for Kant it is ultimately but not at all satisfactorily the first that must take priority.

Four aspects of Kant’s philosophical framework are crucial to the meaning of his political theory. The first is the importance of the individual’s capacity for reason, morality and freedom, from which the categorical imperative derives. The second is the significance of deontological obligations—of duty. The priority of duty over self-interest is central to Kant, even if duty is directly against self-interest or leads to unpalatable consequences. From these first two aspects it follows for Kant that the object of politics is not to promote happiness, and he strongly disapproves of utilitarian theories of politics. This view is confirmed by Kant by another argument about the subjective nature of individual happiness. In Theory and Practice he maintains that ‘[m]en have different views on the empirical end of happiness and what it consists of’. Articulating what later became a key liberal principle, Kant says that ‘[n]o-one can compel me to be happy in accordance with his conception of the welfare of others’ (Kant 1997, 73, 74). The third aspect is the key distinction Kant draws between theoretical knowledge, which is universal, and empirical knowledge, gained from experience and always particular. The fourth aspect is a paradox Kant perceived, namely the tension between duty, which is universal, and the demands arising from the messy, particular, and contingent world of politics.

Kant saw his political theory as an extension of his moral philosophy. As Franceschet explains, politics ‘cannot be (entirely) sovereign for Kant’, because ‘the political world is essentially one of contingent, not formaluniversal, causes’. Within ‘the mechanism of nature and the political relations that emerge from it, there is no inherent respect for humanity’ (Franceschet 2002, 32). For Kant, the distinctive ground of moral philosophy was, in turn, aimed at specifying a space protected from the new scientific temper and empiricist approach to knowledge, which regarded human beings as simply part of nature. Franceschet underlines the radical and innovative step that Kant took in proposing that the autonomy of morality is an autonomy ‘from nature and animal instinct’ (Franceschet 2002, 20). Kant posits a form of subjectivity that provides for freedom from nature and for human dignity, based on an autonomous morality rather than (as previous thinkers had done) on our capacity to know the world or to ‘will upon maxims of expediency’ (Franceschet 2002, 22). However, the dualism that Kant thereby instantiated, along with the unresolved tension in his thinking that followed from it, together with the varied and dispersed character of his political writings, without a single definitive text, results in a very wide interpretive openness that invites commentators to draw conclusions from selective readings. Kant has thus been seen as both subversive and authoritarian, both moralistic and Machiavellian.

Kant’s view of philosophy as explicating the nature of morality, dictates that philosophy must be used to understand politics, and that the same logic must be used to understand international relations. According to Kant, we are all citizens of a single moral order. This is because of our shared rationality. Kant’s view of philosophy, and so his approach to politics, is agent-centred, places emphasis on moral motives, and allows principles to trump considerations of consequences. The way to evaluate an act, says Kant, is to examine the motive. Kant distinguished sharply between acts merely done in accordance with obligation and those done for the sake of obligation. It is only the second kind that have moral worth. To act because something is the right thing to do, even if it against one’s self-interest, and regardless of the likely consequences of the action, is to act according to reason, to be free, to be moral. This is his deontological moral theory. Franceschet identifies the importance of duty for Kant when he notes that it ‘is only because the subject is so divided by his rational capacity to obey laws and his natural inclinations to make an exception for his self that duty is a meaningful moral concept’. Moreover, duty separates human beings from both God and animals—the former is exempt because God is not subject to instinct while the latter ‘lack a rational will that could intervene with and subordinate inclinations’ (Franceschet 2002, 20).

Reason, according to Kant, is ‘our innate capacity … to transcend human nature and obey formal causes and universal laws’ (Franceschet 2002, 64). It is also the faculty that discovers moral principles, for Kant. Reason, not inclination or interests (including state interests) certifies right action. It follows, as Nussbaum makes clear, that Kant ‘defended a politics based upon reason rather than patriotism or group sentiment, a politics that was truly universal rather than communitarian’ (Nussbaum 1997, 27). When reason guides action, the behaviour is motivated by duty. Reason is the faculty that seeks the unconditional, that which has no further cause or explanation. But reason cannot find the unconditional in theoretical reflection, because reason there is always doomed to seek a further cause or explanation. Reason can find the unconditional in practical activity. The essence of acting morally for Kant lies in responding to a demand of reason—not in achieving self-interest (even when it is ‘enlightened self-interest’ or national interest), nor as Aristotle believed in actualising human potential. This demand, of responding to reason, is the categorical imperative. It requires that we treat others not as a means to our ends, but as ends in themselves, as rational agents.

Kersting highlights the significance of reason for Kant, and sets out well the train of argument that leads, for Kant, to the view that ‘[w]e are subject to the laws of reason alone’. Kersting notes that in the previous history of practical philosophy, of which politics is a part, ‘foundations and first principles were sought in objective ideas, in a normative constitution of the cosmos, in the will of God, in the nature of man, or in prudence in the service of self-interest’. Kant, however, ‘was convinced that these startingpoints were without exception inadequate for the foundation of unconditional practical laws’. For Kant, human reason alone could ‘concede absolute practical necessity and obligatoriness to norms that arose from its own legislation’. Kersting concludes that with ‘this recognition Kant frees us from the domination of theological absolutism and the bonds of teleological natural law, and likewise elevates us above the prosaic banalities of the doctrine of prudence’. It follows for Kant that human beings ‘may and must obey only their own reason; in that lies their dignity as well as their exacting and burdensome moral vocation’ (Kersting 1992, 342).

At the same time, as Onora O’Neill cautions, Kant’s critique of the inflated claims for reason made by previous thinkers means that he ‘rejects the rationalist claim that the principles of reason can provide a unique and integrated answer to all possible questions’. Indeed, O’Neill explains, ‘any view of principles of reason as divinely inscribed axioms or rules of thought, that correspond to reality, leads to contradictions’, as far as Kant is concerned. For him, ‘human reason is quite simply incompetent for these illusory tasks’ (O’Neill 1992, 283). It follows for Kant that no form of arbitrary power, whether it be ‘state, church, majority, tradition, or dictator’ could be accepted as a source of reason (O’Neill 1992, 305). The basis of Kant’s critique of reason was a distinction between understanding and reason. As he says in the Critique of Pure Reason, understanding is ‘the faculty which secures the unity of appearances by means of rules’, whereas reason is ‘the faculty which secures the unity of rules of understanding under principles’. The key point for Kant is that ‘reason never applies itself directly to experience or to any object, but to understanding’ (cited in O’Neill 1992, 282–3).

Kant’s approach to politics, then, follows from his approach to all forms of enquiry, that, in Reiss’s words, it is ‘necessary to start … not from objects of experience, but from the mind’. According to Kant, Reiss notes, we ‘can never explain the world as it appears to us merely by reference to experience; to do so we need necessary principles logically prior to and independent of experience’ (Reiss 1997a, 17). Thus for Kant there are two very different sources of knowledge—a priori knowledge that is the product of rational reflection and is not dependent on experience or the senses, and a posteriori knowledge that comes from experience. A priori knowledge is philosophical knowledge, because it is necessary, timeless and of universal application. As Ameriks observes of Kant’s thinking, ‘a priori concepts … [are] pure concepts of reason, or transcendental ideas’ (Ameriks 1992, 251). According to Kant the way the world is cannot be used to derive the way it ought to be. Put the other way around, as Franceschet sums up, it ‘is because the human is the only creature that can set ends undetermined by the natural, phenomenal world and its material causes that he or she is capable of morality’ (Franceschet 2002, 31). The categorical imperative, which is the essence of rational morality to choose to act in accordance with universal moral duty rather than in conformity with desire, and to treat others as ends in themselves rather than as a means to an end, is said by Kant to be a priori, and to contain no a posteriori or empirical elements.

A metaphysics of morals precisely sets out, for Kant, the relevant a priori principles of reason for that field of enquiry, and the study of politics belongs within the realm of moral action and conduct, not towards oneself (as in ethics) but to others. But as soon as the categorical imperative is applied to a practical context, Kant grants that empirical considerations come into play. This is because it is part of what it is to be human, to have purposes and aims that are particular. Kant’s moral theory from the start implies a politics that puts law at centre stage, as the means to maximise freedom and moral choice, and highlights inter-personal relations on a basis of equality. It also presupposes within it a universalism across different individuals, but also right across different cultures and societies.

As far as politics and international relations are concerned, the concept of ‘right’ is central. By ‘right’ Kant means a moral right based on universal reason, translated into law, rather than our modern notions of ‘justice’ or ‘human rights’. Kant argues that the connection between freedom, law, and right is as follows: ‘[e]very action which by itself or by its maxim enables the freedom of each individual’s will to co-exist with the freedom of everyone else in accordance with a universal law is right’ (Kant 1997, 133). At the same time, Kant’s theory commits him to the position that whatever existing cooperation there is between people and between countries, considered as an empirical matter, is largely irrelevant for framing the responsibility of political and international actors. The basis of international morality must remain for Kant what it is for domestic morality: the moral demand of reason. Morality justifies cooperation, not the reverse. While international cooperation, as an empirical matter, may make it possible to createa league of nations, the reasons why we wanta league must derive from our a priori concepts of morality. Kantian cosmopolitanism affirms for him the existence of cross-cultural moral truth.

For Kant, the way to think about international morality must be based not on any empirical fact or probability, but simply on the authority of the categorical imperative, the demand of practical reason that informs the activity of all rational agents. Whether or not a global moral consensus or cooperation actually emerges, Kant would defend the existence of international obligations. Even if there were no possibility of realising the outcomes prescribed by the categorical imperative, practical reason demands that we must act as if there were. Kant’s theoretical radicalism must not be understated—for him the ideal cannot be dismissed simply by pointing out that it cannot be achieved at present.

Kant’s political theory is in part a response to the problem he perceived, that an external fulfilment of the ends of reason is not a genuine fulfilment. If the realm of right is one that deals with the sometimes self-interested will, then how can it be part of a metaphysics of morals? Kant gives three answers throughout his political writings, and commentators vary in their judgments about how successful Kant was in drawing together the realms of the legal and the moral. First, in the doctrine of ‘right’, the answer involves the deduction of pure principles of right from practical reason itself, so that the non-virtuous realm of legality is itself legitimated by reference to the moral law. Another answer is given in Kant’s view of international relations, in which inter-state harmony may approximate more and more closely to the ideal of a kingdom of ends. Then, in Kant’s writings on the kind of judgment that deserves publicity, a third answer is given, in which the philosopher’s assessment of the course of history helps to steer the realm of right towards the realm of virtue. In all three answers, however, there are grounds for holding that the tension as Kant saw it between legality and morality is not fully resolved, and that the basis of the connection between right and reality is never genuinely secure and remains open. A strong case can be made that Kant is caught between an abstract principle that must condemn all actual practices as inadequate on the one hand, and the defence of the actual status quo on the faith that it instantiates the moral law on the other. In sovereignty, for Kant, an attempt is made to provide a location for both sides of this dilemma.

Having set out the four aspects of Kant’s philosophical framework that inform his view of politics, we turn to sovereignty. The important concepts in Kant’s theory of sovereignty are right, international relations, publicity, law, and representation. After looking at each in turn, some conclusions about his theory of sovereignty itself will be made.

Kant begins his enquiry into politics with the conception of the autonomous individual, that is, one who is self-governing and not acting on the basis of the natural inclinations and desires of the phenomenal self. Kant’s logic dictates that we must start with autonomy, since without autonomy, morality would be impossible (Franceschet 2002, 30). The notion of ‘right’ is then introduced, which is his key principle for politics. At the end of Theory and Practice Kant says of his method, ‘I put my trust in the theory of what the relationships between men and states ought to be according to the principle of right’ (Kant 1997, 92). However, right conflicts with individual autonomy. Right is the capacity to obligate someone to a duty to respect the freedom of others, or the freedom of others to make choices that do not conflict with universal laws. In this way ‘right’ in general terms governs the translation from the internal freedom we all have, into the public world of being able to make claims on the external world, to interact with the external world, the world outside our own minds. With the idea of ‘right’ Kant seeks to negotiate the paradox, the tension between absolute, universal, theoretically-correct duty, and the demands of contingency, history, circumstances, interests and consequences. Moreover, it is important to remember that right sanctions both freedom and coercion. As Kersting puts it, the ‘authorization of coercion as permission for the defense of universally compatible domains of freedom is a constituent of the concept of right’ (Kersting 1992, 346).

Freedom is expressed in terms of power over something or someone. ‘Right’ guarantees that possession in theory. Men have inalienable equal rights to freedom in the state of nature. But the state of nature is not a state of innocence for Kant, and he regards society as a civilising construction. This view ties in with the priority Kant gives, as noted earlier, to the autonomy of morality over nature and animal instinct. So in practical terms, a social contract is needed, to guarantee that possession of freedom in practice. But the social contract is a necessary hypothesis, not a historical event. The social contract is thus the hypothetical but particular act of a group of people, the original universal validating act of will on the part of a particular group of people. The social contract discriminates between the state of nature, in which possessions can only be held provisionally, and the civil condition in which possessions can be guaranteed. Thus for Kant (as for Hegel) the necessity of politics, the contractual basis of politics and the role of law, as well as deriving from the primary moral argument, all come also in a secondary argument from the fact of private property, and private property is derived from the nature of freedom and the moral will. Private right depends upon public right.

In the ‘rightful’ civil condition, persons are related juridically with each other. In the move from the state of nature to the state, says Kant, ‘we cannot say that men … have sacrificed a part of their inborn external freedom for a specific purpose; they have in fact completely abandoned their wild and lawless freedom’. They have given up this disorderly freedom, ‘in order to find again their entire and undiminished freedom in a state of lawful dependence (that is in a state of right), for this dependence is created by their own legislative will (Kant 1997, 140). Reiss affirms that for Kant, political freedom refers to ‘those restraints which the individual must accept in order to avoid conflict with others so that he may enjoy the freedom of moral action’ (Reiss 1997a, 39). Thus ‘the state’ is this condition of juridical relationship between persons, viewed as a whole in relation to its members. The purpose of the state is not to make people happy. Kant argues that ‘[o]n the contrary, the welfare of the state should be seen as that condition in which the constitution most closely approximates to the principles of right; and reason, by a categorical imperative, obliges us to strive for its realisation’ (Kant 1997, 143). For Kant, legislative authority is only legitimate when it follows the universal principle of right.

Kant does not require that the sovereign body of the state take on any particular form, but insists that it should be in accord with the spirit of republicanism. Republics are defined as states that guarantee the separation of the legislative, executive and judicial powers in different hands. All other states, which do not separate powers, are despotic. The value that Kant places on republicanism is analogous to the value that we place on ‘democracy’ as the only legitimate form of political community. As we shall see Kant did not approve of democracy and this is why the relationship is only analogous. But the significance Kant placed on the separation of powers closely resembles a key part of what democracy symbolises for us. The differentiation of judicial power, legislative power and executive power, and a legally-sanctioned flourishing internal pluralism and public sphere are important to Kant. Other central aspects of democratic politics for us such as competing parties and especially the authenticity of political rule stemming from universal suffrage, are anathema for Kant. For him it is the separation of powers that preserves the formal legitimacy of sovereignty, which is always both inviolable and absolute. As Kant puts it, ‘the universally united will is made up of three separate persons’ (Kant 1997, 138).

Thus with Kant we move a step closer to the American system of a republican separation of powers, though Kant’s system lacks the democratic impulse of the American system, and the role of the universal law of reason is taken on, in the US system, by the American Constitution. But in both the legislator, ruler (executive) and judiciary are in separate hands, and a separate court of law or jury is appointed to interpret the law. This is a long way from Hobbes, for whom the separation of powers necessarily registered the dissolution of sovereignty, but is a self-conscious development of Rousseau’s notion of sovereignty. However, Kant agreed with Hobbes that democracies were dreadful, though for Hobbes this was because they were chaotic and lacking a location for sovereignty, whereas for Kant it was because they did not properly differentiate between branches of power.

Kant holds the view that whether citizens are active participants in legislation or not (and only those independent of another’s control are allowed to be active citizens, and therefore to vote. This, in his schema, rules out everyone apart from self-employed men), all citizens do ground the law and are absolutely bound by it. This view is demonstrated in his approach to punishment—because the criminal as citizen is responsible for the law, he has the right to be punished by it. The way in which for Kant all citizens ground the law and are bound by it is also indicated in his attitude to revolution. Revolution can never be right, legally or morally, because there can be no legitimate contesting of the source of legitimacy and all legislative authority must be perceived as derived from that source. Citizens in revolution are a self-contradiction. Kant’s view on revolution brings out clearly the absolutism of sovereign power for him, for the sovereign is the law. Change can only rightfully stem from the sovereign body itself, reforming the law in accordance with the demands of right. Again the problem arises with this conception in that it involvesa tension between the legitimating power of the theoretical and abstract, and the legitimating power of actual practice. In this way, Kant’s theory of ‘right’ is in serious danger of being caught between the originating power of pure practical reason, which is beyond comprehension, and a juridical ideal in which right is realised, but which is beyond attainment.

International relations is the next of Kant’s key concepts. The role of sovereignty is to be the focus of legitimate public law. Any legislative authority that upholds intelligible possession must be treated as if it were legitimate. The notion of right depends on the existence of absolute sovereign authority in relation to a group of citizens. It follows from Kant’s argument that any law is preferable to no law, since the demands of practical reason compel an end to the state of nature. But in relation to each other, states are in a lawless condition. They are in a state of nature with each other which is, he says, ‘a condition of constant war’ (Kant 1997, 165), even if actual fighting is not taking place.

A very significant feature of Kant’s view of the relation between internal and external sovereignty is that Kant applies his logic directly from the domestic to the international stage, and regards a state ‘as a moral person’ (Kant 1997, 165) in the same sense as is an individual. He disregards the idea that any factor, such as the nature of particular communities, or the autonomy of international politics as a separate sphere of action or field of inquiry, might modify this direct application. It follows for Kant then (because the logic of the domestic is mapped onto the international), that internal sovereignty is superior to and dictates the terms of external sovereignty. The logic of Kant’s internal prescription for the gradual approximation towards a republican state, leads also to his argument for states to work towards perpetual peace with each other. Moreover the analogy between moral persons and moral states is extended in that Kant’s theory of sovereignty also significantly follows from his theory of modern subjectivity. The relationship between internal and external sovereignty in important respects mirrors that between the realms of morality (internal, within a person) and right (concerning the external effects of inter-subjective relations) with, as Franceschet appositely puts it, ‘the sovereignty of morality over the political’ (Franceschet 2002, 31) in both. Kant’s conception of sovereignty is very much a part of his critical project which, as Franceschet observes, ‘is at root designed to provide the principles by which individuals become truly sovereign and dignified by limiting and overriding the natural causality within’ (Franceschet 2002, 20).

Indeed, Franceschet makes a strong case that the powerful analogy between individual and state in Kant’s theory of sovereignty is underpinned by his basic commitment to the individual (and their freedom), rather than the state, as the primary subject of international justice (Franceschet 2002, 55). The consequence of the priority given to the individual is the limits of the mapping of the logic of internal sovereignty onto its external counterpart. As Ellis observes, ‘the imperative to leave the state of nature cannot apply to states’ because ‘the need of individuals for a rule-governed sphere of action’ is already fulfilled in the state (Ellis 2005, 91). This is a crucial step in the argument. It follows for Kant that the achieved autonomy of the individual corresponds to the achievement of state sovereignty, in contrast with the violent lawlessness of the state of nature. Moreover, the starting point of the autonomy (self-determining positive liberty) and freedom (to act independent of constraints from other wills, in negative liberty) of the modern subject corresponds, for Kant, to the internal and external sovereignty of the state (Franceschet 2002, 30). In his politics, in a crucial example of what we can recognise as a distinctive feature of liberal thinking, Kant takes his (specific cultural) notion of internal sovereignty to be abstract and universal, and extends it to apply both to relations with other states and the principles of relations between states.

The priority of individual freedom and limits of the analogy between individual and state, however, run counter to the logic of the demand of ‘right’, which moves from public domestic law to the necessity for an overarching authority to ensure perpetual peace between states. The universality of the demand of ‘right’ is only possible if war is abolished as a means of politics. Kant also regards war as invalid on the grounds that states must not, in this way, treat citizens as means for their own ends, namely the continued existence of the state. However, the analogy between individual and state that Kant employs in the logic of ‘right’ is apparent in the following quotation. He says, ‘if a state believes that it has been injured by another state, it is entitled to resort to violence, for it cannot in the state of nature gain satisfaction through legal proceedings, [which is] the only means of settling disputes in a state governed by right’ (Kant 1997, 167).

However, Kant also produces an argument in The Critique of Judgement of 1790, not only condoning the inevitability of war but also suggesting the utility of war in creating larger political units and other benefits. This is another example of the interpretive openness of Kant’s political writings and leads again to the caution about too-selective readings of Kant. He makes the case that in the absence of a cosmopolitan ‘system of all states’, and taking into account the obstacles to such a system afforded by ‘ambition, love of power, and avarice, especially on the part of those who hold the reins of authority’, then ‘war is inevitable’. While war is the ‘thoughtless’ produce of ‘unbridled passion’, it can also have the positive effect ‘to prepare the way for a rule of law governing the freedom of states, and thus bring about their unity in a system established on a moral basis’. Indeed, says Kant, war ‘is one further spur for developing to the highest pitch all talents that minister to culture’ (Kant 1952, 96).

Franceschet also draws attention to the key role of sovereignty in placing limits on the analogical argument in Kant’s political theory. He observes convincingly that, while Kant has been appropriated by the liberal tradition and his Perpetual Peace has been invoked as a foundational text for (the ultimately flawed project of) liberal internationalism seeking cosmopolitan solutions to the problem of war in international politics, the priority that Kant gives to state sovereignty as the touchstone for justice, frustrates attempts to use Kant’s work as the basis of reform of the modern state system. Franceschet makes a strong case that Kant’s ‘dogmatic commitment to sovereignty’ sets up ‘the crippling limitations that his theory of justice imposes upon his relevance as an intellectual foundation’. More broadly he takes the view that Kant’s ‘legacy has been central and yet ambiguous within the context of an evolving liberal internationalist tradition’, since ‘contemporary liberals are divided on the very same political and ethical conundrums on which Kant’s texts are … unable to render decisive judgements’. He argues clearly that Kant’s ideas on international relations ‘cannot be viewed independently of his larger “critical” system’, whose ‘paradoxes and dualities … do not necessarily cohere with existing approaches and paradigms in International Relations’ (Franceschet 2002, ix–x). Ellis is allied to another, but less persuasive, interpretive position of Kant’s theory when she follows the line of reasoning that, for Kant, ‘to exercise any real sovereignty, that is, any real self-rule, states must embed themselves in a context of international security’, and that ‘since agents necessarily interact with one a nother, they must regulate these interactions if they are to enjoy any rights at all’ (Ellis 2005, 87).

It is thus a distinctive feature of Kant’s theory of sovereignty that he did not distinguish fundamentally between the moral agency of individuals and of states. States, like individuals must recognise specific moral problems and moral precepts. For him, the universalisable, timelessly valid and objective imperatives that rationality imposes remain the same for states as for individuals. This feature of the theory can be seen as either a strength or a weakness. It is a strength if one agrees that states are responsible for their actions in the same way as individuals are. It is a weakness if one holds that Kant is making a category mistake, on the grounds that states are not like individuals but are artificial constructs without any necessary moral character.

Kant presents two views on ‘perpetual peace’. The logic of his metaphysics of morals for international politics leads to the formal ideal of enduring peace as ultimately an ideal of world government instituting a global harmony substantively regulated by international law, thus overcoming the tension between internal and external sovereignty from both the internal and external directions. But his theory of sovereignty leads to a very different and much more limited and conditional outcome, of a gradual, mutual and reciprocal working toward agreement over international laws that in no way undermines the sovereignty of any of the parties to the agreement. This more complex and indeed more prominent conclusion comes from not just relying on Kant’s call for international reform in Perpetual Peace (the primary text for those engaged in the project of ‘Kantian cosmopolitanism’ (G W Brown 2005) in both its world government and ‘Kantian federation’ versions), but from also giving due weight to the theory of sovereignty in The Metaphysics of Morals (written two years later) and other writings. As Franceschet puts it, for Kant states are more likely—however imperfect—vehicles of international reform than a world state would be (Franceschet 2002, 45). Moreover, Kant says bluntly that ‘perpetual peace … is an idea incapable of realisation’. However, he holds that ‘the political principles which … encourage the formation of international alliances designed to approach the idea itself by a continual process, are not impracticable’ (Kant 1997, 171). The line of argument that Kant traces in Theory and Practice is that states might well be led, ‘even against their will’ to ‘enter into a cosmopolitan constitution’ by the distress accompanying constant wars ‘in which states try to subjugate or engulf each other’. But this ‘state of universal peace’, Kant underlines, can result in the ‘most fearful despotism’ that is ‘even more dangerous to freedom’. The conclusion that this line of argument reaches is the desirability, instead, to form ‘a lawful federation under a commonly accepted international right’, rather than ‘a cosmopolitan commonwealth under a single ruler’ (Kant 1997, 90). It is a federation of states which are opposed to war.

Kant underlines his meaning of ‘peace’ at the beginning of Perpetual Peace when he remarks that it is not ‘a mere truce, a suspension of hostilities’ but ‘an end to all hostilities’ such that the term ‘perpetual’ is ‘suspiciously close to pleonasm’ or tautology (Kant 1997, 93). Bohman and Lutz-Bachmann note that the practical impetus for the writing of Perpetual Peace was the 1795 Treaty of Basel between Prussia and revolutionary France, by which Prussia gave up to France its territory west of the Rhine but gained the right to take part in the partition of Poland along with Russia and Austria. As Bohman and Lutz-Bachmann observe, it was ‘just this sort of strategic treaty that Kant condemns as illegitimate’ (1997, 1). The telling point about a real peace, for Kant, is that ‘rights cannot be decided by military victory’. Reason sets up peace, and striving towards a ‘pacific federation’—which ‘does not aim to acquire any power like that of a state, but merely to preserve and secure the freedom of each state in itself’—is an ‘immediate duty’ (Kant 1997, 104). He adds that the ‘concept of international right becomes meaningless if interpreted as a right to go to war’. Kant’s reasoning is that ‘[j]ust like individual men’, states ‘must renounce their savage and lawless freedom, adapt themselves to public coercive laws, and thus form an international state’. But because this ‘positive idea of a world republic cannot be realised’, we must settle for ‘a negative substitute in the shape of an enduring and gradually expanding federation likely to prevent war’ (Kant 1997, 105).

The significance of the idea of federation is, as Kant puts it, that ‘this association must not embody a sovereign power as in a civil constitution, but only a partnership or confederation … an alliance which can be terminated at any time … renewed periodically’ (Kant 1997, 165). Not only would states not want to relinquish their sovereignty—they are innately unable to do so. In Perpetual Peace Kant underlines this view when he says that this federation ‘would not be the same thing as an international state. For the idea of an international state is contradictory’ (Kant 1997, 102). But the urgency, for Kant, of seeking to move towards enduring and perpetual peace is that ‘rightful government’ in any one state is jeopardised by threats from other states. As Reiss maintains, right ‘cannot prevail among men within a state if their freedom is threatened by the action of other states’. Indeed, the ‘law can prevail only if the rule of law prevails in all states and in international relations’ (Reiss 1997a, 33).

With the idea of working towards an international federation of peaceful republics in mind, it perhaps strikes the reader as odd that Habermas should make the judgment that ‘Kant was satisfied with a purely negative conception of peace’ (Habermas 1997, 133). However, the assessment makes sense in the light of Habermas’s much more muscular sense of cosmopolitanism. Habermas calls for consensus in three areas—‘a historical consciousness shared by all members concerning the nonsimultaneity of the societies simultaneously related by peaceful coexistence; a normative agreement concerning human rights, the interpretation of which remains disputed between the Europeans and the Asians and Africans; and a shared understanding concerning the meaning of the goal of peace’ (Habermas 1997, 132–3).

Kant’s prioritisation of peace over any other aim, such as the eradication of poverty, the end of slavery, or equality in gender relations (as proposed by Mary Wollstonecraft at around this time), indicates both the conservative element in Kant’s political viewpoint and the extent to which his framework for thinking about politics is dominated by the importance of international relations.

Kant has a distinctive teleological view of history that is very important for his political theory and theory of sovereignty. Indeed, Franceschet uses Kant’s theory of history to argue to good effect that it ‘serves to bridge the sharp chasms between nature and moral freedom that he first posits’, by showing that for Kant moral principles are not only regulative ideals but also have a material basis. Franceschet argues that the ‘material principle of enlightenment is, most generally, that reason is promoted and advanced in the political world’ (Franceschet 2002, 39). Whether or not this claim can be sustained, Kant does outline a story of progress proceeding from the ‘unsocial sociability’ of individuals, that is, their incapacity and yet need for coexistence with others. For Kant moreover, as Reiss puts it, ‘the purpose of nature is to realise man’s essence’, that is his reason, and to ‘advance the spread of rationality is a moral obligation’ (Reiss 1997a, 36, 37). As well as his idea of international reform working through the intentional agency of sovereign states, Kant puts forward the view that, in terms of politics, the historical process can itself work towards the instantiation of the moral character of man in legal arrangements, in a republican constitution, and in a confederation of such states. Kant argues in Theory and Practice that ‘since the human race is constantly progressing in cultural matters (in keeping with its natural purpose), it is also engaged in progressive improvement in relation to the moral end of its existence’. He is adamant that ‘[t]his progress may at times be interrupted but never broken off’ (Kant 1997, 88). Progress is delivered initially through war (Kant 1997, 47), trade and culture, and potentially to the end of international law.

The third of Kant’s key concepts is the complex notion of publicity, whose limit is the denial of a right of resistance. One important meaning of publicity for Kant is that all laws must be public laws, all citizens are equal under the law, and justice arises from the public character of laws. The origin of this view is the universal character of reason and its outcomes, for Kant. As he says in Theory and Practice, ‘a public law which defines for everyone that which is permitted and prohibited by right, is the act of a public will, from which all right proceeds and which must not therefore itself be able to do an injustice to any one’ (Kant 1997, 77). Another, not unrelated, meaning derives from the great emphasis Kant puts on the idea of enlightenment, which he defines as the courage to use your own reason. He argues for the desirability of freedom of thought as the essential prerequisite of a fully enlightened age. Kant is aware, however, that there are dangers in a blanket encouragement of independence of thought in a people used to close guardianship. Sudden access to freedom may result only in the embracing of a new range of prejudices. For Kant, private uses of reason, for instance when resulting in the disobedience of servants of the state such as government employees or soldiers, must not be allowed. Given the status accorded to legislative authority in all actual states, it is clear that Kant cannot endorse the direct contradiction of this authority through the use of private reason. All change must come from above.

However, Kant argues in What is Enlightenment? that private uses of reason can be distinguished from public uses, in informed public debate about political issues (Kant 1997, 55). As Reiss puts is (1997a 32), obedience does not have to mean silence. Scholarly, rational public debate is essential to the possibility of enlightenment in a way that civil disobedience is not, because the former can influence the government to reform existing legislation more into accord with the principles of right. Kant contends that the example of an enlightened head of state such as Frederick the Great shows that ‘there is no danger even to his legislation if he allows his subjects to make public use of their own reason and to put before the public their thoughts on better ways of drawing up laws, even if this entails forthright criticism of the current legislation’ (Kant 1997, 59). Kant’s principle of publicity therefore implies a notion of tolerance—that all views which tolerate other views should be allowed a public hearing, that all views which do not attempt to subvert the constitution should be open to informed and rational public debate. It also follows for Kant that a republican constitution should guarantee the right to criticise in public, so long as that criticism is not designed to overthrow the constitution (Reiss 1997a, 32).

We can observe here two clear signs of Kant’s Enlightenment optimism about a progressive rationality. Kant assumes that the principles of right do become progressively more enunciated over time (although states can also regress), and in Perpetual Peace that philosophers know best. Despite the intellectual status given to philosophers, however, Kant then argues that philosophers should not become kings because ‘the possession of power inevitably corrupts the free judgment of reason’ (Kant 1997, 115). His reasoning is that political judgment is a kind of reflective judgment and can only be genuinely exercised when uncontaminated by empirical interest. Thus the influence of the public use of reason is always dependent on the attitude of the sovereign. A second political role for the philosopher’s judgment lies in keeping the ends of reason before the eyes of the public (for instance by interpreting events in history through the progressive morals that can be drawn from them) and thereby inspiring people to the possibility of their fulfilment.

We noted above Kant’s view that citizens in revolution would necessarily be a contradiction. He advances a related argument when, because of his reliance on the idea of the primacy of law, Kant is adamant that no right of resistance, rebellion or revolution can exist. In a line of argument articulated in Theory and Practice, and spelling out the consequences of his notion of sovereignty as absolute, Kant maintains that a constitution setting up conditions under which citizens could rightfully rebel and depose the sovereign, would thereby set up a second sovereign. This confusion would then require a third sovereign to arbitrate, all of which is an absurd upset to the system of laws which the sovereign safeguards (Kant 1997, 84). Indeed, says Kant, the execution of a monarch, as in the cases of Charles I and Louis XVI, ‘is an act of suicide by the state’. For such an act ‘amounts to making the people, who owe their existence purely to the legislation of the sovereign, into rulers over the sovereign, thereby brazenly adopting violence as a deliberate principle and exalting it above the most sacred canons of right’ (Kant 1997, 146).

Holtman regards Kant’s prohibition on rebellion as quite distinct from that of Hobbes’s, despite their initial similarity. She argues that for Hobbes, ‘revolution is a threat to stability because it risks undermining the peace that only the state can secure’ (Holtman 2002, 222). For Kant, however, most importantly ‘we require the state in order to honour moral equality’. Holtman contends that since ‘the demands of justice are inevitably underdetermined’, because many significant disputes cannot be resolved by argument alone, it follows for Kant that ‘we need some designated authority to settle on one just option’ (Holtman 2002, 225). The state has a much more explicitly moral purpose for Kant than it did for Hobbes.

How does Kant’s enthusiasm for the American Revolution and the French Revolution square with his denial of any right of resistance or revolution? On the one hand those events constituted, as Reiss puts it ‘an open break with the political past’, with which Kant did not sympathise. Kant’s conservative disposition and his argument that rebelling against legitimate law was tantamount to rebelling against oneself, conflicted with the revolutionaries’ Enlightenment belief in reconstructing political institutions on a rational basis. His scepticism about authority, as far as political arrangements were concerned, was not unlimited. But on the other hand the attraction of those events to Kant was that their proponents had appealed to ‘a secular natural order and to the political rights of individuals’ (Reiss 1997a, 4), as well as to a notion of progress—all principles in line with Kant’s thinking. While Kant held that legal government could not legitimately be challenged, he also held that if a revolution takes place, then citizens are morally required to obey the new legal order. Kant may also have approved of the American Revolution on the grounds that the British colonial government had been despotic. He argued controversially, as well, that in the French case there was not, strictly speaking, a revolution for the king renounced his power to the Estates General. Moreover, Kant’s view of the French Revolution was that, whatever illegal acts and atrocities were committed, the reflection by philosophers upon it had led to a valuable elucidation of the principles of enlightenment. Kant’s enthusiasm for events in America and France may also have been due to a perception on his part of the limits to the revolutionary character of those events. As Reiss points out, the American revolution ‘was essentially a revolution of landowners’ and the French revolution was ‘a revolution of the bourgeoisie’ (Reiss 1997a, 27).

Law is the next key concept in Kant’s theory of sovereignty and its immense importance in Kant’s politics is described by Reiss in that, for Kant ‘a theory of politics … amounts in the main to a metaphysics of law’ as ‘part of a metaphysics of morality’ (Reiss 1997a, 20). The a priori principles of reason for law set out the necessary hypotheses and universal framework within which politics ought to be conducted. Moreover, whereas morality is concerned with subjective motives, law inhabits the world of ‘objective facts’. The value of law is, in part, that while ‘[m]oral actions can thus only be commanded; legal actions … can be enforced’ (Reiss 1997a 21), thus bridging the realms of moral theory and political practice. Reiss reinforces that the principles of politics are, for Kant, ‘substantially the principles of right (Recht)’. The role of the philosophical enquiry into politics must, therefore, ‘establish which political actions are just or unjust’. Justice, however, must ‘be universal, but only law can bring it about’. It follows for Kant that, in a strong sense, a ‘coherent political order must then be a legal order’. The logic for Kant is that, just as in ethics, ‘actions ought to be based on maxims capable of being formulated as universal laws, so in politics political arrangements ought to be organised according to universally valid laws’. It is in this sense, then, as Reiss sums up, that ‘Kant’s principles of politics are normative. They are applications of principles of right to experience’ (Reiss 1997a, 21).

With respect to law, Kant presents himself with a paradox—man’s freedom can be safeguarded only by his submitting to coercion (for law presupposes coercion), and thus to an infringement of the individual’s freedom. Kant wants to overcome this paradox through a notion of ‘legitimate law’. According to legitimate law, we submit only to coercion that is legally exercised, on the basis of public law given by the sovereign authority. As Reiss notes, if ‘coercion is exercised according to a universal principle, it is law … Legality is therefore the decisive principle in the sphere of politics’ (Reiss 1997a, 21–2). Kant’s sovereign is therefore not above the law as Hobbes’s was. The universal law of reason encompasses the sovereign as well as citizens. A comparison with Rousseau is also prompted here. For Rousseau the general will expresses the unity, the sovereignty of the people. While the general will can be misguided, it is the only possible basis for general laws, upon which government depends in order to administer and execute those laws. For Kant, in contrast, the universal law of reason, which is behind the act of social contract that establishes sovereignty, is therefore one step of abstraction removed from Rousseau’s notion of the general will.

A fundamental feature of sovereignty for Kant is a respect for law. Sovereignty rests with the agent that has sole (and therefore absolute) legislative power, and the sovereign safeguards the operation of the system of law. In reflecting upon the activity of politics, Kant is caught between an abstract principle that must condemn all actual practices as inadequate, and the defence of the actual status quo on the faith that it instantiates the moral law. As already mentioned, his conception of sovereignty is crucial in his attempt to resolve the tension between the two, but is also decisive in demonstrating this tension. That is, in his notion of sovereignty, Kant attempts to provide the locus of the abstract principle of right and law, and the location of actual sovereigns who deserve to be acknowledged as legitimate.

Law is fundamental to Kant’s notion of sovereignty but, moving on to the last of the key concepts in his theory of sovereignty, the idea of representation is also very important, though in a sense which is different from twenty-first century terms. The representative relationship between citizens and sovereign is central to the meaning of sovereignty for Kant, because it offers the conditions for individual freedom in a way that, for instance, a global state could not do. Kant does not believe in direct democracy but for the right of citizens (at least those who are economically independent, thus excepting women, servants, employees, criminals and the insane) to participate in government indirectly, through electing representatives to an assembly where rational debate can take place. At a deeper level Kant argues, in effect, that authority is granted in a one-way non-reversible process, from the people to their sovereign representative, who makes law and sets up a juridical relationship that cannot be challenged. For Kant, like Hobbes, this is the basis of the absolute nature of sovereignty. The value Kant places on the idea of representation is found in that he argues strongly that any form of government that ‘is not representative is essentially an anomaly’, on the grounds that ‘one and the same person cannot at the same time be both the legislator and the executor of his own will’ (Kant 1997, 191). According to Kant, the ‘head of state (the sovereign) is only an abstraction (representing the entire people) so long as there is no physical person to represent the highest power in the state and to make this idea influence the will of the people’ (Kant 1997, 161). Again he says, ‘[a]ny true republic … is and cannot be anything other than a representative system of the people whereby the people’s rights are looked after on their behalf by deputies who represent the united will of the citizens’. However, he holds that ‘as soon as a head of state in person (whether this head of state be a king, a nobility, or the whole populace as a democratic association) also allows himself to be represented, the united people then does not merely represent the sovereign, but actually is the sovereign itself’ (Kant 1997, 161).

Kant’s argument here rests on the view that ‘the supreme power originally rests with the people, and all the rights of individuals as mere subjects … must be derived from this supreme power’. It follows, for Kant, and here we see Kant’s crucial difference from the right of resistance given by Locke, that ‘[o]nce it has been established, the republic will therefore no longer need to release the reins of government from its own hands and to give them back to those who previously held them, for they then destroy all the new institutions again by their absolute and arbitrary will’ (Kant 1997, 163). Kant reinforces in the appendix to the Metaphysics of Morals that ‘even if the organisation of a state should be faulty by itself, no subordinate authority in it may actively resist its legislative supreme authority; the defects attached to it must instead by gradually removed by reforms the state itself carries out’ (Kant 1999, 505). He goes on that to ‘permit any resistance to this absolute power … would be self-contradictory’ (Kant 1999, 506). In this way, the idea of popular sovereignty plays a very small role in Kant’s theory. Kant’s philosophical position, that both individual freedom and that of states is best defended through a ‘metaphysics of morals’ and so through the principles of right and law, thus dovetails with his political preference for a narrow and limited role for representation and popular sovereignty. Furthermore, Kant contends, ‘[t]he right of the supreme legislation in the commonwealth is not alienable … Whoever possesses it can only exercise control over the people through the people’s collective will, but not over the collective will itself, the original foundation of all public contracts’ (Kant 1997, 164).

For Kant, republican government has the opportunity to be ‘rightful government’, organised around a workable civil constitution. Republican government (grounded in a separation of powers) is counterposed by Kant in Perpetual Peace to despotic rule, and this distinction between forms of government is different from that between the three possible forms of sovereignty (monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic). Forms of government is thus quite distinct from ‘the different persons who exercise supreme authority’ (Kant 1997, 100–1). Kant is here seeing two things as unconnected in a way that is quite foreign to our approach to politics. In Perpetual Peace, moreover, Kant holds that democracy ‘is necessarily a despotism’, on the grounds that it ‘establishes an executive power through which all the citizens may make decisions about (and indeed against) the single individual without his consent, so that decisions are made by all the people and yet not by all the people’. Kant’s logic is that ‘this means that the general will is in contradiction with itself, and thus also with freedom’ (Kant 1997, 101). While Kant was never a populist, as Reiss notes, he holds that representatives are less likely to be swayed (than are the people as a whole) by ‘demagogy, empty rhetoric and zealotry, let alone fanaticism, all of which Kant abhorred as the rule of unreason’ (Reiss 1997b, 260).

This process of representation therefore makes sense, at least to some extent, of the rather confusing way in which Kant in different places refers to sovereignty as the abstract unity of the people, and as the actual legislative agent. That is, Kant sometimes identifies sovereignty as the ‘universal sovereign (who, if considered in the light of laws of freedom, can be none other than the united people itself)’ (Kant 1997, 140). At other times he sees sovereignty as the primary, legislative branch of power, ‘the ruling power (or sovereignty) … the person of the legislator’ (Kant 1997, 138). In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant regards morality as that which ‘gives authority and absolute sovereignty to the law’ (quoted in Franceschet 2002, 37). He also refers to ‘the sovereignty of the people (the legislator)’ (Kant 1997, 141). A further consequence of this dual usage is that when Kant discusses the confusion between competing sovereigns that would result from an authorised right of resistance (Kant 1997, 145), it is again clear that he holds a conception of popular sovereignty of only the most abstract and tenuous kind. Here he regards the legislator’s law-making powers as the crucial and inviolate mark of sovereignty. Kant’s dual usage in some ways recalls Locke’s similar ambiguity, and the liberal solution—of distinguishing between the residual constitutive power of the people and ordinary, legislative, power—offers a way of presenting both theories as coherent.

Kersting helps to clarify the attenuated popular sovereignty in Kant’s theory by pointing to the severely qualified role played by the social contract in his political theory. For Kant the social contract can operate only as an idea and only to trigger the implementation of right, with the establishment of an ethical politics and the juridical state. Moreover, as Kersting notes, the ‘application of the norm of a contract requires nothing more than a thought-experiment that is a variant of the test of universalizability’ (Kersting 1992, 355). The voluntaristic element of social contract that is found in Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, has no place in Kant’s thinking because he cannot allow that any other motives—consequentalist, prudential, utilitarian, or self-interested—other than the deontological one can play a role in a politics governed by right, in ‘the form of the rational state’ (Kersting 1992, 354). The tenuous nature of popular sovereignty for Kant is not substantially improved by his argument that, as Kersting puts it, every actual ‘legislator is bound by the contract of rational right: He must consider himself to be and behave as a representative of the subject of the contract, the universally united will of all’. To support this view, Kersting cites Kant’s line of reasoning in Theory and Practice that the legislator ‘must give his law as if it could have arisen from the united will of an entire people’ (Kersting 1992, 355).

Reiss makes two interesting, related, observations about Kant’s interest in sovereignty. He notes that the ‘problem of sovereignty … greatly occupied Kant; for he reverts to it again and again in his unpublished notes’. At the same time his consideration of sovereignty does register ambiguity and contradiction, and does indicate someone ‘wrestling with a problem’ that ‘he had not solved entirely’. On the one hand Kant was clear that sovereignty ‘originates with the people which ought to possess legislative power’. He also held that ‘a monarch could possess it as a representative of the people in a derivative form’. But on the other hand Kant ‘appears convinced that if the monarch is to exercise this power together with executive powers, his rule is despotic’ (Reiss 1997a, 24–5).

However, having considered the key concepts for Kant’s theory of sovereignty—right, international relations, publicity, law, and representation—the shape of Kant’s conception of sovereignty, including its ambiguities, can be discerned. It is clear that the meaning of sovereignty for Kant resides in an abstract perspective, but it originates ultimately in the people who ought to possess (if only notionally and if only to grant to representatives) legislative power. In practice, and leaving open an interesting indeterminacy, sovereignty rests with whoever acts as the agent exercising the legislative power. In this way, a monarch could legitimately possess sovereignty as a representative of the people in a derivative form, so long as the monarch was not also the ruler, the executive. It is also the sovereign’s moral duty to promulgate laws that are just and to introduce constitutional reforms so that a republican constitution is maintained. But this is a moral rather than a legal duty and citizens cannot resist or punish a sovereign who fails to follow up the duty. It is also an important feature of all the key concepts involved in Kant’s theory of sovereignty with the exception of right, that Kant seeks to combine but more properly vacillates between positing the ‘a priori necessity for an absolute sovereign agent that is beyond questioning’ (Franceschet 2002, 46), and recognising a role for the agency of individuals, citizens, and an agent above sovereign states.

The key general features of sovereignty that are found in Kant are its moral character, the agency of the state as the locus of sovereignty, and the derivation of the external from the internal form. For Kant there is the potential to bring politics and international relations under the rule of morality and law. What this means depends in part, as we have seen, on the politics of interpretation of Kant’s texts. This part of the chapter, in focusing on sovereignty, has given important weight to The Metaphysics of Morals and other texts, and not just to Perpetual Peace. Indeed, it needs to be remembered that Kant’s commitment to the state as the locus of sovereignty takes place in the context provided by what Franceschet calls ‘the sovereignty of the moral law’ (Franceschet 2002, 10). Political action ‘cannot have its own autonomous logic’ as Machiavelli held, but ‘must be subordinated to the requirements of morality’ (Franceschet 2002, 12). The importance of the state is shown in the unconditional statement Kant makes in Perpetual Peace that ‘states as such are not subject to a common external constraint’ (Kant 1997, 103). The power to declare war and make peace is an urgent concern for Kant, as is the role of the sovereign in instituting political arrangements governed by right rather than by force, interest, expediency, or utilitarian motives. Franceschet underlines the importance of sovereignty—in the important sense of the moral and political agency of states—in Kant’s thinking when he notes that ‘sovereignty is the key mechanism of political reform’ for Kant. It represents the means by which ‘politics can be domesticated to approximate the formal principles of morality’ (Franceschet 2002, 43). The derivation of external sovereignty from the internal form is the third key feature. For Franceschet it is precisely here that Kant’s theory falters, on the grounds that the very need for ‘international reform is a product of the problematic role that sovereignty plays within realising justice’, for Kant (Franceschet 2002, 43). Thus, while sovereignty is ‘a necessary cause of justice’, it also presents Kant with ‘a profound set of moral difficulties’ and is a ‘major cause of injustice’ (Franceschet 2002, 43).

In assessing the strengths of Kant’s system, it is clear that the strong moral framework that it sets out for political action can look attractive, and that its incrementalism—aiming towards peace and harmony in world politics in a gradualist manner—can look appealing. At least on Kersting’s reading, Kant’s deduction that politics takes places against the ideal of the ‘rightful’ state, is supplemented by a ‘philosophy of compromise and reform’ (Kersting 1992, 359). Kant’s highlighting of the value of publicity and republicanism in politics can also be regarded as a strength. It opens up a space for politics as contestation and reasoned debate in a spirit of citizen participation, and reinforces Kant’s fundamental belief that political issues should not be settled by force.

In addition, while many commentators regard Kant as setting up a gap between theory and practice that cannot be bridged in his system, Ellis makes a case for a distinction in Kant’s work between provisional and conclusive right, as a means of overcoming contradictions in his work. Provisional right ‘always leave[s] open the possibility of entering into a rightful condition’ (Ellis 2005, 144). She highlights, for instance, Kant’s view of property rights acquired before the civil condition has been established as requiring provisional respect, even though the ideal would call for the dissolution of all property rights at this point (Ellis 2005, 92). Ellis argues that the same logic applies for Kant at the international level, and that this ‘provisional system includes the so-called right of nations … the concept of sovereignty, which though it can be understood broadly as a people’s right to determine the actions of their state independent of foreign interference, is perhaps best measured by and most widely understood to mean independence in the decision to go to war’ (Ellis 2005, 93).

The major weakness of Kant’s system is that it universalises from a culturally-specific set of preferences about reason, the individual, freedom and autonomy, and politics as a form of ethics, and does not recognise that there are substantial drawbacks in doing so. The history of Western colonialism and imperial power that developed on this basis, while not attributable to Kant (and indeed Kant censures European states for their treatment of other peoples (Wood 1999, xxix)), can be seen to have rendered many peoples in a condition of subjection. Kersting also picks up on another weakness when he makes the point that, while Kant’s abstract and universalising political theory can be a force for self-empowerment, these qualities also indicate how it can discriminate against the needy. Kersting observes that Kant’s concept of right concerns only ‘the external sphere of the freedom of action’, the internal sphere being that of morality. This means that only the ‘effects of actions on the freedom of action of others are of interest to it’. Thus, inner ‘intentions and convictions are excluded from the sphere of justice just like interests and needs’. It is only the ‘formal compatibility of the external freedom of one person with that of others’ that is important to Kant’s notion of right. The consequence of Kant’s reasoning is that ‘no claims of right can arise from one’s neediness. Right does not help powerless needs’. It follows that for Kant, ‘a community of right is not a community of solidarity among the needy, but a community for self-protection among those who have the power to act’ (Kersting 1992, 345). The sense of ‘a community of solidarity’ as a necessary dimension of politics, is alien to Kant’s thinking.

Another weakness is that the highly abstract and formal injunctions of moral law, given the gulf between morality and the messy and contingent world of politics, cannot necessarily tell us very much about how to operate in political practice. Kant’s theory cannot easily bridge the gap between those very general prescriptions and the political world of competing claims, entrenched inequalities and cultural differences, any more than can subsequent theories based on his approach, for instance by Habermas and Rawls. Relatedly, Kant is not necessarily convincing in his belief in the power of moral principle and precept by themselves to persuade people to subordinate other motives. Franceschet identifies how Kant’s solution to Machiavelli’s separation of politics and ethics, was to ‘do much the same thing’, to set out a ‘depiction of subjectivity [that] separates (the pure, unconditioned realm of) morality and (the corrupted, conditioned realm of) politics’ (Franceschet 2002, 10). Similarly, the progressive potential of Kant’s theory is limited as well as enhanced by its debt to a strong philosophical framing. Kersting notes that ‘the principle of right [can] make every politically inequitable distribution of freedom recognizable as not right’. However, if one seeks to discover from the principle of right itself ‘how the domain of mutually compatible individual spheres of freedom is to be determined a priori, then Kant’s principle is an unclear criterion’ (Kersting 1992, 346).

As a conception of sovereignty the major and important strength of Kant’s theory is that it pinpoints why the ‘domestic analogy’ cannot stand. Kant identifies sovereignty as the concept that prevents relations within a polity simply being mapped onto relations between states, and identifies international relations as a distinctive realm. Other strengths of Kant’s construction are that it focuses on the Rechtstaat and explicitly sees interpersonal relations as mediated through impartial law. As Franceschet puts it, Kant’s theory of sovereignty is ‘an attempt to reconcile politics with what he views as the only plausibly solid ground of the modern subject: an autonomous morality’ (Franceschet 2002, 6). Also, on the reading of Kant preferred here, it is a strength that it is by the terms of sovereignty that, for Kant, on the one hand domestic interests are solidly prioritised over international ones, and on the other that relations between states should be based on a commitment to peace and to a confederation of peaceful republics.

The primary weakness is that, as Franceschet argues, Kant’s conception of sovereignty is strongly implicated in his ‘quest to domesticate politics through formal principles derived from morality’ (Franceschet 2002, 7). The scope of politics is heavily qualified, for Kant. Moreover, the absolute separation Kant draws between knowledge from abstract and trans-historical principles of reason and knowledge from empirical inquiry, and the priority of the first over the second, issues in a severely truncated notion of popular sovereignty, an overly-trusting view of the value of law, and no effective means of resistance to tyrannical government. Another repercussion of this separation, this ‘peculiarly Kantian alienation of politics and ethics’ (Franceschet 2002, 10), is that it has given a licence to a subsequent mode of liberal theorising that concentrates on lofty prescriptions which fail to engage sufficiently with power and with actual inequalities in class, gender, ethnicity, and with indigenous populations, a point recognised and analysed well by Tully (2002). While Reiss defends Kant’s view, holding that for Kant, ‘[p]ower cannot be ignored, but the real problem of politics is to ensure right, that is law and justice’ (Reiss 1997a, 39), the tradition that has developed from Kant has tended to focus on the latter and overlook the former. Franceschet goes so far as to argue that it is a failing of Kant’s theory of sovereignty that it is ‘fundamentally dualistic because of the bifurcated structure upon which justice depends’—caught between ‘a “dogmatic” and a priori formal justification’ and attempts to reform political practice (Franceschet 2002, 44).

A further weakness of Kant’s conception of sovereignty is that, by extrapolating from the domestic to the international sphere, Kant does not adequately address the differences between the two spheres and politics in them, and so licences a naïve and moralistic cosmopolitanism. The idea of constructing a principled confederation of like-minded peaceful republics that acts as a moral rather than political force for peace, and does so without coercion, is so unrealistic that it is problematic even as an aspiration. The superiority that such a confederation would obviously have in economic and political, let alone military, resources (given the Western character of Kant’s thinking and location), together with the dominant position in terms of international power politics that such a confederation would gain, militate against the operation of the purely moral purpose that is Kant’s stated motive for such an alliance. Such a confederation would also automatically create an ‘other’ of states unwilling, for whatever reason, to join it. Kant’s attempt to pacify the anarchy of the international realm by the imposition of moral principles is unsuccessful because it underrates the importance of political and power considerations.

HEGEL

Hegel was born in 1770 and died in 1831 of cholera. He grew up in the Duchy of Wurtemberg, one of the most constitutional of the German states, where his father was a civil servant. He took a great interest in politics, public administration, and political developments in the German states and elsewhere in Europe throughout his life, and was fascinated by the figure of Napoleon. In the late eighteenth century the extent of the fragmentation of the German states under the Holy Roman Empire meant that there were, as Plant notes, ‘some 300 separate territories … with badly defined boundaries and without clearly delineated areas of authority … virtually sovereign states … each pursuing its own particular and isolated interests … with no real political centre of gravity’ (Plant 1973, 25). Napoleon made Hegel’s home state of Wurtenberg into a kingdom in 1806 (Knox 1964, 246n). According to Pelczynski the turbulent series of events, portrayed by Hegel as ‘tremendous political experiments’ and ‘colossal spectacles’, of the French Revolution and its aftermath ‘dominated Hegel’s formative years’. In the Phenomenology Hegel criticised the French Revolution as an abstract and thus destructive force of freedom. Hegel witnessed ‘the destruction of the ancient regime, the restoration and the second overthrow of the Bourbons; the foundation of the Republic and its degeneration into the Terror; the rise, apogee, and fall of Napoleon; the collapse and reconstruction of Prussia; the death of the Holy Roman Empire and the German Nation’ (Pelczynski 1964, 9), and the Congress of Vienna.

Hegel’s first published work (1798) was a commentary in a political booklet, remonstrating against the oligarchy of the Swiss canton of Berne for its treatment of the area of Vaud, and championing constitutional government. This was quickly followed by an examination of the inadequacy of the constitution of Wurtemberg and the urgent need for political reform, and a critique in the light of political reconstruction in western Europe of the constitution of the crumbling German Empire. Further examples of political writing included a long article in 1817 commenting on the turbulent proceedings of the Diet of Wurtemberg, and an essay in 1831 critical of the English Reform Bill.

In later years Hegel ‘enjoyed the confidence’ (Pelczynski 1964, 6) of one of the Prussian reforming ministers, but on the whole kept away from direct involvement in politics himself. Pelczynski describes the importance of German, French and British Enlightenment writings to Hegel, but also Hegel’s debt to Ancient Greek and Roman authors. He notes that the ‘concept of the state as an integral part of the ethical life of a people Hegel owes to the classical studies of his youth, as to some extent he does his belief in government by an intellectual elite or politics as education’ (Pelczynski 1964, 8).

Whereas Kant turned to political matters only after explicating his philosophical system, Hegel exhibited a keen interest in politics and political and constitutional reform from early on. However, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right of 1821, in which he outlines his theory of politics, follows in the tradition of Kant in examining politics through the lense of philosophical principle (although see Tunick (1992, 5–12) for the debate on the role of self-censureship in accounting for the differences between the Philosophy of Right and the lecture notes). His approach to politics takes as its starting-point that which is least concrete and most abstract. Hegel’s political thought also owes much to Kant in working outward from what is significant about the individual person to what can be said about the possibility of an ethical politics. Both Kant and Hegel are systematic in the philosophical sense, in that there is a necessary line of logical development in the argument. Hegel is also indebted to Kant in seeing human freedom in moral terms as the exercise of the will in conformity with reason. There are also many differences between Kant’s and Hegel’s political theories, not the least of which are that Kant’s abstraction is more abstract than Hegel’s since the latter’s contained a profound understanding of human reason as embedded in history and concrete social practices, and that Hegel’s is a closely-argued theory in a single coherent text while Kant’s is reconstructed from a set of different writings. Furthermore, while Hegel’s thinking on politics follows in the Kantian tradition in being self-consciously regarded as part of a metaphysics of ethics, Hegel’s political writings are shot through with that metaphysical edifice in a way that Kant’s were not.

What is distinctive about Hegel’s conception of sovereignty is the centrality of the state and the consistency between the role of the state in internal and external sovereignty, a consistency underpinned by a strong sense of groundedness in community. It is on this basis, moreover, that Hegel notably challenges liberal tenets, including the mechanism of the social contract, the natural rights tradition, and mechanistic relations between people. For Hegel individuals are not pre-formed but are in an important sense moulded by sovereignty. Also striking is Hegel’s conception of sovereignty as uniquely expressing the ‘whole’ of the political community as an ethical substance, and his articulation of that abstract ‘whole’ in the concrete figure of the monarch.

The key concepts in Hegel’s idea of sovereignty are the state, the constitution, the Crown, sovereignty at home, sovereignty in relation to foreign states, and war. The meaning of these concepts is framed by Hegel’s specific understandings of the terms ‘rational’ and Recht (right or law). Pelczynski argues that Hegel’s phrase, ‘What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational’, was intended to ‘differentiate his political philosophy from the traditional a priori approach of his … predecessors like … Kant’. Rather than offering an ideal or utopia, Hegel sought to ‘make men understand the ethical world to which they belonged’ (Pelczynski 1964, 113). ‘Actuality’ referred to ‘the whole complex of beliefs and ideals embodied in conventional religion and morality, social customs and institutions, as well as civil laws and political arrangements’. Reason for Hegel was ‘concrete’, and was distinguished from understanding—analytical reflection on general categories that was independent of empirical features. For example, for the understanding monarchy meant ‘rule by one man’, whereas ‘the rational concept of “monarchy” means the form of government typical of early nineteenth-century Western Europe, ie constitutional monarchy with representative institutions, local autonomy, civil equality, etc’ (Pelczynski 1964, 114). The convergence of the actual and the rational also means for Hegel that reason and sociality are inherently mediated. Truth is found in the whole and the meaning of the parts is enriched by their place in the whole. To align reason and sociality is the task of self-consciousness, and politics and the constitution are the practical expression of the mediation between them.

At the same time, however, the convergence of the rational and the actual did not lead Hegel into an unthinking conservatism, underwriting the status quo. Here the role of the philosopher is vital. As Pelczynski describes, for Hegel, if ‘serfdom, slavery, and “the subjection of women”, have been accepted in a society for centuries, the ordinary folk tend to see nothing wrong in them’. But they are not rational concepts, and the philosopher ‘may more easily perceive that they are basically incompatible with the ideals of equality or freedom which the society professes and which pervade all the other aspects of ethical life’. Indeed, neither history nor utility are, for Hegel, strong grounds on which to justify old institutions (Pelczynski 1964, 115).

Hegel distinguishes between formal and material positive right or law (Recht). Knox notes that, for Hegel, Recht refers to ‘not only civil law, but also morality, ethical life, and world history’ (Knox 1967, vi). A law is positive in the formal sense by its authority within a particular legal system, but is positive in content, or materially, when it refers or applies to specific features of a particular country or through particular court judgments. The core of a positive system of law, as Pelczynski puts it, ‘consists of rational, universally valid principles of justice’, and it is the sign of a civilised country that law is codified with this rational character and is not simply customary or governed by the sentiment or interest of a ruling group. For Hegel it is crucial that law should be guided by clear and open principle rather than by vague, ambiguous, or implicit convention. A clearly-organised and well-formulated legal system that is transparent to the public is one of the greatest benefits a ruler can bestow, and reforming the positive law also has the advantage of resulting in greater fairness by disclosing ‘outdated privileges, legal discriminations, and other irrationalities’ (Pelczynski 1964, 116).

The Philosophy of Right is structured in three parts. The first part, entitled ‘Abstract Right’ concerns individuals as they interact with the outside world through the exercise of their will, freedom and right. The major ways in which this interaction takes place, according to Hegel, are through property, through contract, and through crime and punishment. The second part of the book introduces particularity and particular interests and explores the notion of morality in a social context. The third part, the real focus of the text, is entitled ‘Ethical Life’ and examines three ascending spheres of ethical life, in the family, in civil society and in the state, under the principle of universality. The character of civil society, an aspect of the distinctively modern state, allows individuals to pursue three aims with a degree of autonomy. As Pelczynski sums up, this realm ‘secures its citizens an area of independent activity’, and ‘enables them to pursue subjective ends and seek happiness as they see it’. It also ‘gives them the opportunity of the ethical, intellectual, and practical training which they need in order to be members of the state’ (Pelczynski 1964, 120). Civil society contains three kinds of institution—courts of law, the police in the broad sense of all kinds of regulating authorities, and corporations (including municipal and religious bodies as well as trade and professional associations).

However, it is only in the highest of the three spheres of ethical life, the state, according to Hegel, that the individual can have not only the experience of natural relationships in the family, and can exercise self-interest in the competitive world of civil society, but can also identify with the common good of all citizens together. One of the meanings, for Hegel, of the state as the focus of ethical life lies in his metaphysical categories, aligning the expressiveness of political life with spirituality. As Houlgate observes, a rational state for Hegel is one that fosters the ‘sense of freedom in its citizens and which so ensures that the rights which it enshrines in law are also laid claim to by the people themselves’ (Houlgate 1991, 89). Another meaning rests in Hegel’s search, as Dickey notes (1999 xiv), to delineate a form of state between ‘machine states’ of which Prussian absolutism was a contemporary example and the violent freedom expressed in the French Revolution. However the state had other meanings for Hegel too. For instance, patriotism is due towards the state, not on the basis of shared communal blood, history or glory, but on the pragmatic grounds that the state maintains the framework within which we can all pursue our own self-interest (Hegel 1967, 189). Likewise, Heiman points to one of the ways that Hegel cashes out his notion of the ‘universality of the state’. He notes that this ‘is attained by the individual not by virtue of his being a singular per se, but … by this very individual’s involvement in corporate and group affairs and thereby becoming legally and politically identifiable’ (Heiman 1971, 129). This line of argument by Hegel cuts short an interpretation that seeks to see his state as monolithic. As Heiman registers, Hegel’s ‘state enters the field not as an absolute power but as the legal authority which maintains the orderly relationship between its constituent groups’. Such a state ‘cannot act tyrannically against them, for its power depends upon the recognition by these diverse elements that their interests are protected by it’ (Heiman 1971, 129).

Tunick remarks (1992, 94) that, in an earlier work Hegel defined the state as ‘the society of people legally related in which each counts as a person; the immediate concern of the state is not to promote morality, religion or welfare, but to guarantee and actualize formal or abstract rights to person and property’. It was only in the Philosophy of Right that Hegel conceptualised the state as a normative ‘ethical substance that is more than a mere collection of legally respected persons, and as the bearer of a right that is understood in a much broader sense than abstract Roman-law rights of personality’, a ‘whole’. Tunick also points to evidence that these two uses of the term ‘state’ reflected an ambiguity about the word in Hegel’s day. The word ‘state’ was ‘used often as a metaphor for a machine, or something external; but some used it as a moral concept of value’ (Tunick 1992, 94). It is clear though, that in the Philosophy of Right Hegel is not jettisoning the first meaning for the second (although he would reject a mechanistic notion of the relations between people), for the sense of citizens as persons related juridically with each other, and of property as a concrete stake in the state expressed in representation as a legitimate ‘interest’, remain important to him.

Houlgate highlights another aspect of the meaning of the state for Hegel when he notes that a ‘state, for Hegel, is a body of people held together by consciously willed general laws, rather than mere force or natural association’. He goes on that, in Hegel’s view, states ‘may be created by the forceful unification of people, but they must be sustained by some commonly acknowledged conscious purpose or identity if they are to count as true states’ (Houlgate 1991, 31).

It is only in the state, the supreme public authority, says Hegel in the Philosophy of Right, that individuals can fully exercise and experience freedom and right and self-consciousness. The state is the highest ethical unity, grounded in the will of its members. Dickey refers to Schmitt’s accurate grasp of what the ethical nature of the state meant for Hegel, namely that Hegel ‘approaches the political sphere with the idea of promoting membership of a political association rather than with that of buttressing the sovereignty of the state’. Dickey notes that ‘Carl Schmitt argues that, for Hegel, Sittlichkeit [ethical life] has less to do with abolishing individual morality for the sake of strengthening the sovereignty of the state than with creating within the political sphere an association in which citizens can think in common about the purpose and direction of public life’ (Dickey 1999, xxxii). Moreover, while there is a strong parallel between the individual and the state, for Hegel, he is also keen to note the limits of that analogy. The ‘welfare of the state has claims to recognition totally different from those of the welfare of the individual’, he says. This is because, in contrast with the individual, the state ‘has its determinate being, ie its right, directly embodied in something existent’. The being of the state is concrete where the being of the individual is abstract, with the consequence that the ‘principle’ of the state’s ‘conduct and behaviour’ can only be this concrete content. The point of this distinction between individual and state, for Hegel, is that while the claim that politics should be subordinated to morality was at one time ‘much canvassed’, this concrete content of the state raises the status of politics as the appropriate form of activity in relation to states (Hegel 1967, 215).

It is in the third part of the Philosophy of Right that Hegel outlines his view of sovereignty, and he regards it as having two ‘sides’ (Hegel 1967, 180). He explicitly discusses the concept in two places. He considers the notion of ‘sovereignty at home’, or internal sovereignty in the section on ‘The Crown’. The Crown is identified as one of the three aspects of the constitution, the other two being the executive and the legislative. And Hegel considers external sovereignty in a separate section entitled ‘Sovereignty vis-a-vis foreign states’. We will look at the ideas he develops in these two places, but also at the complex relationship that Hegel envisaged as operating between these two ‘sides’ of sovereignty.

In terms of ‘sovereignty at home’, Hegel’s line of argument begins with the view that a ‘nation does not begin by being a state’ (Hegel 1967, 218). For Hegel, ‘[s]o long as it lacks objective law and an explicitly established rational constitution, its autonomy is formal only and is not sovereignty’ (Hegel 1967, 219). He goes on by way of illustration, that ‘[i]t would be contrary even to commonplace ideas to call patriarchal conditions a “constitution” or a people under patriarchal government a “state” or its independence “sovereignty”’ (Hegel 1967, 219). For Hegel, a sense of membership of the state, along with representation, and the people’s sense of fulfilling their obligations freely, are all part of what is meant by the public interest. Political rights are in this way different from rights accruing from belonging to the family and civil society, and make sense only in the context of the state.

According to Hegel’s scheme, a key institution in government is the legislature. The upper chamber contains hereditary peers (and mediates in disputes between the lower chamber and the government) and the lower chamber contains representatives of the burgher class (and mediates between the nation and the government, expressing the views and grievances of the population and educating citizens in the law and government policy). For Hegel it is important and deliberate that the lower chamber expresses a political role in terms of representation rather than in terms of direct participation. The job of the lower chamber is facilitated by the public nature of its proceedings and by the operation of the press. Hegel was opposed to universal suffrage because of the arbitrariness and contingency in government that would result from democratic rule. In the Philosophy of History, in his theory of progress and historical change, Hegel rejected the historical models of democracy and republicanism for modern nineteenth-century nations, on the grounds that, as Pelczynski observes, ‘modern nations are too large, heterogeneous, and individualistic to guarantee the sort of spontaneous self-identification of the citizen with the state which existed in ancient Greece and republican Rome’ (Pelczynski 1964, 128–9).

Given Hegel’s view that the state is the highest form of political society, the constitution plays a key role, for in the constitution the state can ‘realise’ (put into the real world) its rationality. For Hegel the term ‘constitution’ covers not just the legal framework for the political society as a whole (this supreme public authority of the state), but also the branches of executive government and the rational bureaucracy of the civil service, representative assembly and the Crown, the principle of positive law, transparent codification, and the progressive intent common to modern constitutionalism. All the features of a constitution should have rational form, embodying universal principles through, as Pelczynski puts it (1964, 118) the ‘deeply rooted ideals, social conditions, and established institutions’ of the country. It follows for Hegel that the Crown stands for the individual ‘moment’, the executive for particularity, and the legislative for universality, corresponding to the three sections of the third part of the Philosophy of Right. The best constitution is that headed by a constitutional monarch. As Hegel puts it, ‘[i]t is only as a person, the monarch, that the personality of the state is actual’. His reasoning is that ‘[p]ersonality expresses the concept as such; but the person enshrines the actuality of the concept, and only when the concept is determined as person is it the Idea or truth’. According to Hegel, the monarch, being a real person, exemplifies the sovereignty of the state much better than any ‘artificial person’ (such as Hobbes constructed in the figure of the Leviathan) could do, because an artificial person ‘contains personality only abstractly, as one moment of itself’ (Hegel 1967, 182). In Brod’s words, for Hegel, ‘[s]overeignty requires that all the autonomous power centres of a society converge toward a single point of public authority’ (Brod 1992, 151–2).

Monarchy represents for Hegel the best form of an effective common public authority. As he had argued in his early critique on the German Empire, in Pelczynski’s words (1964, 16), ‘true civil and political freedom lies in such organization and not in the independence of the “estates”’, that is, in representative assemblies. According to Suter, for Hegel the sovereignty of the monarchy ‘meant that a single monarch was legitimate only in so far as he respected the “public freedom” of which the nation was the real holder’ (Suter 1971, 64). Indeed, Hegel argues that hereditary monarchy best expresses the role it plays as solid embodiment of the state, and also avoids the problem of conflicting factions around the throne at the death of a monarch. However, as Suter highlights, Hegel’s advocacy of monarchy is not based on a nostalgia for the traditional rights and privileges of feudal monarchy, but in its appropriateness or ‘fit’with the ‘rationality of the constitution’ (Suter 1971, 64).

The power of the crown contains three elements. The first is the universality of the constitution and the laws, and it is because of this that, for instance, only the monarch as sovereign has the right to grant pardons to criminals, so ‘wiping out a crime by forgiving and forgetting it (Hegel 1967, 186). The second is the advisory capacity of council (this council and above it the monarch, form the apex of the levels of the civil service that constitute the executive branch), by which the universal is related to particular issues. The third element of the power of the crown is the decision-making function (as part of the legislative branch) in which the Crown is self-determining. Hegel puts great weight on the role of the Crown in promulgating law, arguing that ‘by saying “I will” makes its decision and so inaugurates all activity and actuality’ (Hegel 1967, 181), in contrast with the ancient world where law was seen as coming from a divine, extra-human source. It is this independence of the Crown from other powers of decision-making that is the distinctive principle of the power of the Crown, says Hegel.

The Crown is thus both chief executive, head of state in relation to the constitution and law-making (though in stable states this amounts only to rubber stamping the decisions of lower authorities), and in charge of foreign policy. Internal sovereignty is constituted by the first and second of these elements, that is in that the Crown is the touchstone for the universality of the constitution and legal structure, and is the living embodiment of the relation of the universal to specific issues through council. Hegel expresses an important element of his theory when he contends that ‘sovereignty depends on the fact that the particular functions and powers of the state are not self-subsistent … but have their roots ultimately in the unity of the state as their single self’ (Hegel 1967, 179–80).

As well as conceiving of the Crown as the concrete incarnation of sovereignty, Hegel addresses the intangibility of sovereignty—that it is an idea rather than an existing thing—and accounts for it through an analogy between the state and an animal organism. In this sense sovereignty lies in the state rather than in any of its parts (Crown, estates, civil service). Sovereignty, says Hegel, ‘is the same characteristic as that in accordance with which the so-called “parts” of an animal organism are not parts but members, moments in an organic whole’ (Hegel 1967, 180). In the same way, the sovereignty of the state is the idea ‘of all particular authorities within it’ (Hegel 1967, 180). It represents and expresses legal, constitutional government. Sovereignty ‘brings it about that each of these spheres [and functions of government] is not something independent, selfsubsistent in its aims and modes of working, something immersed solely in itself, but that instead, even in these aims and modes of working, each is determined by and dependent on the aim of the whole (the aim which has been denominated in general terms by the rather vague expression “welfare of the state”)’ (Hegel 1967, 180). Moreover, Hegel has in mind a specific sense in which the parts relate to the whole. As Pelczynski explains, for Hegel, ‘the only genuine unity is not an aggregate but a syllogism, ie a unity of differences, or of extremes united by the mediation of a middle term’. In Hegel’s view (and underlining the significance of the mediating role performed by the lower chamber described above), a ‘constitution becomes a rational unity … only if the Crown on the one hand and its subjects on the other are united by the Estates Assembly as a mediating organ … between the two’ (Knox 1964, 249).

Hegel’s conception of the intangibility of sovereignty as an idea, and as that which expressed the ‘whole’ of the state, does important work in his theory of politics, not least because, as Ilting notes, Hegel’s theory deliberately lacks a social contract element found in other theories of the sovereignty of the modern state. Brod confirms this when he notes that for Hegel the ‘state enters world history as one state among others’ (Brod 1992, 156). Ilting describes how in other modern theories of the state, ‘the doctrine of the social contract occurs at the point in the structure of the argument where it must be stated who has the right of the final decision and who is the source of all political and legal authority’. He observes that ‘[t]his doctrine Hegel explicitly rejected, and replaced it by the idea of a historically continuous political community which the individual finds already in existence’. Ilting also identifies that at the point where ‘older theories proceeded from the state of nature to “civil society” (the state), Hegel inserted his doctrine of morality as a necessary condition of the state’. The significance of this (and attention to the structure of the text bears this out) is that Hegel defers his treatment of the idea of sovereignty until he discusses the different powers of the state, rather than considering it earlier in relation to his distinction between civil society and the state (Ilting 1971, 105). For Hegel, there is a moral rather than a contractual transition (whether historical or hypothetical) from civil society to the state. The moral rather than contractual basis of this transition in the argument is crucial to Hegel’s conception of the state as an ‘ethical substance’.

Hegel contrasts the modern state and the specific form of unity that is expressed in its internal sovereignty with societies in feudal times which, he argues, lacked the character associated with that form. He comes to the interesting conclusion that, under feudalism, external sovereignty was a feature of relations between political communities, but that ‘at home however, not only was the monarch not sovereign at all, but the state itself was not sovereign either’. Hegel offers two arguments to substantiate his view. He contends that under feudalism ‘the particular functions and powers of the state and civil society were arranged … into independent Corporations and societies, so that the state as a whole was rather an aggregate than an organism’. Moreover, he holds that ‘office was the private property of individuals’, such that ‘what they were to do in their public capacity was left to their own opinion and caprice’ (Hegel 1967, 180).

Further explicating the meaning of sovereignty, Hegel rebuts the notion that ‘“sovereignty” is a synonym for “despotism”’. Despotism refers to a situation in which ‘law has disappeared and where the particular will … whether ofa monarch ora mob … counts as law or rather takes the place of law’. By contrast, Hegel holds, ‘it is precisely in legal, constitutional government that sovereignty is to be found as the moment of ideality—the ideality of the particular spheres and functions’. In times of peace, according to Hegel, the parts work normally. But in both domestic and foreign crises, ‘the organism of which these particular spheres are members fuses into the single concept of sovereignty’ (Hegel 1967, 181), and sovereignty as an idea becomes ‘actualised’ in real work for the sovereign authority. At times of crisis, it is up to the sovereign to seek the state’s salvation.

On the question of popular sovereignty, of whether there is a popular basis for sovereignty, Hegel gives four answers. His first answer is that, commonsensically, all sovereignty is popular because it is to the state that sovereignty belongs, and the state is made up of an identifiable group of people. ‘Any people whatever’, says Hegel, ‘is self-subsistent vis-à-vis other peoples, and constitutes a state of its own’. For example, he says, the ‘sovereignty of the people’ exists in the British people, because they constitute a state of their own. But then the peoples of England, Scotland or Ireland ‘are not sovereign peoples at all now that they have ceased to have rulers or supreme governments of their own’ (Hegel 1967, 182). In his second answer Hegel maintains, however, that if the sovereignty of the people is meant in opposition to the sovereignty of the monarch, then it ‘is one of the confused notions based on the wild idea of the “people”’ (Hegel 1967, 182–3). Monarchy is critical to the formation of sovereignty, Hegel argues. ‘Taken without its monarch and the articulation of the whole which is the indispensable and direct concomitant of monarchy, the people is a formless mass and no longer a state’ (Hegel, 1967, 183). Later Hegel argues that while the will of the many ‘tries to count’ as the ‘first thing in civil society’, it is ‘not the guiding principle of the family, still less of the state, and in short it stands opposed to the Idea of ethical life’ (Hegel 1967, 186).

As a third answer, Hegel dismisses the notion of the ‘sovereignty of the people’ referring to a republican or democratic form of government. He argues that the benefits of democracy can be achieved in a constitutional monarchy without its drawbacks. It is here that Suter’s comment is relevant, that for Hegel, to ‘invest an undefined, amorphous mass with sovereignty is to surrender the state unconditionally to the discretion of private interests’ (Suter 1971, 62). In the fourth answer Hegel contends that if the people are living ‘instead as an inwardly developed, genuinely organic, totality, then sovereignty is there as the personality of the whole, and this personality is there, in the real existence adequate to its concept, as the person of the monarch’ (Hegel 1967, 183). Hegel argues that self-consciousness, the sign of a mature state, must be experienced by actual people in order to be ‘realised’, in order to exist, and so the monarch as an actual person is best suited to express the sovereignty of the people. In this fourth answer, the concrete sovereignty of the monarch is fused with the intangibility of sovereignty expressed in the rational idea of the state. In sum, then, Hegel’s first and fourth answers acknowledge indirect popular sovereignty, and his second and third answers reject direct popular sovereignty.

Looking more closely at Hegel’s acceptance of the idea of indirect popular sovereignty, Brod makes the interesting point that links Hegel’s understanding of popular sovereignty, public opinion, and the metaphysical dimension of Hegel’s state. Brod’s answer to the question of whether Hegel’s citizens need to be Hegelian philosophers is that ‘these principles are embodied in the institutions that constitute the Hegelian state’, and that ‘these institutions are structured with an eye toward the creation of a rational sphere of public opinion open to all’. For a ‘key criterion of Hegel’s evaluation of all Hegelian political institutions is their effect on the consciousness of those who participate in them’ (Brod 1992, 136). In this way, indirect popular sovereignty operates in Hegel’s system as a channel to nourish, define, and renew the rationality of the institutions of the Hegelian state and keep that state invigorated. Dickey also supports this view, observing that even in his earliest political works, ‘Hegel proposes to revitalise public life in Wurttemberg in a relatively new and progressive way: by politicising citizens through “publicity”’ (Dickey 1999, xi).

There is a lively debate among commentators on Hegel’s conception of internal sovereignty that centres on the role Hegel assigns to the crown which is worth rehearsing here for the interpretative play it illustrates in Hegel’s work. Pelczynski and Berki object to the role of the crown as an obstacle to the play of popular sovereignty. For Pelczynski (1971, 230) Hegel is guilty of rationalising existing practice as a philosophically timeless idea, while Berki agrees with Marx that monarchy and popular sovereignty are conflated by Hegel, and that there is a circularity in Hegel’s mistrust of ‘the people’. Ilting sees the crown as contingent in Hegel’s system, whereas Smith argues that, in his own terms, Hegel’s identification of the crown with internal sovereignty is reasonable.

Pelczynski challenges Hegel’s notion of internal sovereignty, developing two objections to the role Hegel designed for the monarch. For Pelczynski, Hegel is led by an excessive fear of collective sovereignty to internal contradictions in his thinking. He takes issue with Hegel’s view ‘that the different organs of “the state as a political entity” must be seen as branches of a single public authority, and must be prevented by the constitution from becoming “self-subsistent”, that is, functioning with excessive independence’. Internal sovereignty for Hegel is located in this ‘unified character of the public authority’. Pelczynski argues that this logic should lead Hegel to think that ‘the constitutional power of the monarch is limited by the equally legitimate powers of the other organs (the executive, the legislature, the electorate and the lower public authorities) which together with the crown form the “organism” or the constitution of the political and civil state’. Pelczynski contends that, according to Hegel’s argument, the crown, notwithstanding its importance and power, ‘as an institution is only one of the elements of the whole differentiated constitutional structure, which is logically prior and legally superior to him’. In sum, Pelczynski maintains that only the constitution as a whole, and not the crown, ‘is able to “actualise” sovereignty in the Hegelian sense’ (Pelczynski 1971, 230).

Pelczynski’s second objection to the role of the monarch in Hegel’s internal sovereignty, aims to demonstrate an internal incompatibility in Hegel’s theory, rendering the monarch both absolutist and constitutional. Pelczynski argues that the role of the monarch in Hegel conception ‘changes radically when Hegel begins discussing sovereignty in a conventional sense as the ultimate source of the validity of all legal acts and rules in a state, as the basis of a particular, positive legal system’. Here, says Pelczynski, in contrast with Hegel’s misplaced attempt to identify the crown rather than the constitution as ‘actualising’ sovereignty, ‘sovereignty seems to Hegel to be necessarily vested in one part of the constitutional system’, namely the crown. In consequence, it would seem that all the other constitutional organs of the state ‘are inferior to the crown, derive their power from it, and may be deprived of their power in certain circumstances’. Pelczynski reasons that ‘Hegel thus seems to arrive at a doctrine of monarchical absolutism which is contrary to his belief that the rational form of the modern state is a constitutional monarchy’. Moreover, says Pelczynski, the problem is not solved by the reasonable self-limiting agency of the crown. Hegel’s inconsistency here is ‘modified only partially by Hegel’s expectation that modern monarchs will in normal circumstances play a limited constitutional role and increasingly restrict their personal political influence’ (Pelczynski 1971, 230–1).

Berki also raises objections to Hegel’s theory of sovereignty when he argues that ‘Hegel’s argument is lumbered with metaphysical ballast and the two vital aspects of the question, that is, the necessity of structured unity in the state, and the individual monarch as the necessary expression of this unity, are conflated’ (Berki 1971, 208). He quotes Marx’s critique of Hegel’s conception of internal sovereignty, ‘here we are concerned with two entirely opposed concepts of sovereignty, of which one is such that it can come to existence only in a monarch, the other only in a people’ (Berki 1971, 209, quoting Marx).

Berki also endorses Marx’s further judgment that Hegel’s argument that popular sovereignty is a ‘wild’ and ‘confused’ notion, is tautological. Hegel had argued that the ‘people, taken without its monarch and without the structuring of the whole … is a formless mass, no longer a state’. But Marx points out the circularity involved in the line of reasoning that ‘[i]f the community is organised as a monarchy, which monarchical institutions, then to abstract these institutions from this community yields us indeed a people that is nothing but a formless mass’ (Berki 1971, 209).

According to Ilting the role of the monarch is interchangeable, in Hegel’s system, with an elected head of state, without loss of meaning. He maintains that whether the ‘representative of the sovereignty of the state was a monarch who possessed the trust of the citizens, or an elected head of state, would have had no special importance in the framework of Hegel’s political philosophy’ (Ilting 1971, 106). Subsequently Ilting took the view that Hegel’s continued commitment to the key role of the crown was a tactical and pragmatic ploy to assuage current dictatorial regimes (Ilting 1974).

Smith argues that some of the criticisms of the role Hegel specifies for monarchy are misplaced. He holds that the position of the monarch is reasonable, given Hegel’s understanding of a ‘rational constitution’ and the way the organic analogy ‘attempts to answer a real political problem, namely, how to guarantee the unity and integrity of the state’ (Smith 1989, 154). The rationality of the constitution, for Hegel, is not a matter of deduction but, in Smith’s words, ‘depends on the historical development of a people’s laws, moral sentiments, and manners. What is rational for some may not be rational for others’ (Smith 1989, 152). What matters for Hegel is that ‘a constitution is rational if it functions as an organic whole’. Smith makes the case that an ‘organic whole’ in the context of politics meant something quite specific and important for Hegel. This notion is far removed from the conservative notion of justifying ‘social differentiation and hierarchy’ but does draw on the sense of the need to adapt to the ‘contingencies of experience’. For Hegel, says Smith, the rationality of the constitution ‘is tied to his conception of the separation and division of powers’, which has a specific meaning for Hegel in terms of his theory of inward differentiation. For Hegel the necessary division of powers guarantees public freedom, but he rejects the current notion of separation of powers on the grounds that it attributes a false ‘absolute autonomy and independence to each of the powers’ (Smith 1989, 153), and also leads to a ‘general paralysis and the self-destruction of the state’ (Smith 1989, 154).

For Hegel the organic whole of the rational constitution means that the powers are ‘mutually supporting aspects of the same totality’. Smith quotes Hegel’s explanation, that ‘each of these powers is in itself the totality of the constitution, because each contains the other moments and has them effective in itself’. Smith argues that Hegel’s notion of the organic amounts to an ‘expressive totality’, such that ‘Hegel’s point is not simply that every complex phenomenon consists of parts which get their meaning or function from their place within the whole’. Rather, Hegel’s point is ‘the stronger one that each part is somehow expressive of the nature of the entire organism’ (Smith 1989, 153). Furthermore, the parts are ‘internally related to one another in a way that makes the whole not a mere aggregation but a structured whole’. For Hegel, Smith argues, while the executive and legislative ‘may have an important degree of de jure separation, the ‘sovereignty of the state … is guaranteed by the interdependence of the three main branches of government’. At the same time the monarch is the ‘rational apex’ because it is the ‘tangible expression of all the features of the constitution’. The popular will, for instance in an American-type president or elected head of state, would not fulfil the same role since the popular will, for Hegel, is ‘only one part of the constitution’ and the monarch ‘must embody in his person the entire constitution, and not just a part’ (Smith 1989, 154). As Brod makes clear, Hegel’s conception of sovereignty ‘required that political authority be self-grounded rather than being derived from the spheres of morality, religion, or any other source (Brod 1992, 173).

Smith gives credit to Hegel for attempting to solve the dilemma facing all theories of sovereignty, ‘the very real juridical [problem] of finding a place where sovereignty resides’. Hegel rejects popular sovereignty on the grounds that ‘the people’ is only an abstraction. For Smith, Hegel’s answer makes sense in the light of his understanding of the constitution as registering a community in a strong sense. The constitution for Hegel is ‘more than a mere formal arrangement of offices’, and more like ‘the entire way of life of a people’, the ‘form or soul of a regime’, a ‘political culture’. It follows (and this addresses one of Marx’s criticisms) that there ‘is no people, but only peoples formed by the constitution of which they are a part’ (Smith 1989, 155). Hegel does not subscribe to the liberal view of pre-political rational, free, autonomous and rights-bearing individuals. For Hegel, persons are crucially shaped by the societies and cultures they live in.

Smith also mounts a defence of another aspect of the role of the monarch for Hegel by stressing its symbolic function. He highlights that for Hegel, ‘the sovereignty of the state is guaranteed, not by the person, but by the office of the monarch’. Hegel’s monarch need not have determinate characteristics as in other systems, such as wisdom or virtue, but only needs to bring to the role ‘a sense of the dignity of the office’ and as Hegel puts it, ‘to say “yes” and dot the “i”’. Smith maintains that more recent heads of state ‘retain their sovereign majesty without the institution of monarchy’ and so fulfil exactly this function, because ‘any government requires some ceremonial power to confer dignity on it’ (Smith 1989, 155).

Smith also answers the ‘accusation that Hegel merely rationalises, and hence legitimises, certain contingent historical institutions, thus conferring a purportedly timeless validity on them’, by coming back to what rationality means to Hegel. He points out that charges concerning the inadequate deduction of hereditary monarchy by Hegel are misconceived because they assume that Hegel used a deductive logic, strictly applying the categories of his dialectic method, in the Philosophy of Right. Smith argues convincingly that ‘Hegel’s method of analysis is not deductive’. Hegel’s method is not to work from some ‘ideal theory’, but to ‘bring out the rationality that is already there within existing institutions and forms of life, including the monarchy’. Rationality, for Hegel, ‘is not something that we the philosophical onlookers are required to bring with us to the evaluation process, but is to varying degrees already realised within the world we inhabit’ (Smith 1989, 156).

One of the valuable aspects of Smith’s interpretation is that it brings together Hegel’s own understanding of the metaphysical framework for understanding politics, with the more accessible pragmatic aspect of his work. This gives Smith’s interpretation a richer feel and takes into account a wider range of Hegel’s work, in contrast with the dismissal of Hegel’s ‘obscure metaphysical argument’ by Pelczynski (1971 231) and ‘metaphysical ballast’ by Berki.

We come now to sovereignty vis-a-vis foreign states, the second of the two ‘sides’ of sovereignty that together explicitly form Hegel’s conception of sovereignty. Hegel argues for the Crown as the embodiment of external sovereignty, and his reasoning is that because of the way mind and its ideas work, ‘the state has individuality, and individuality is in essence an individual, and in the sovereign an actual, immediate individual’ (Hegel 1967, 208). Sovereignty is necessarily mediated—by the crown—because the world and thought are mediated. Furthermore says Hegel, developing the analogy between a person and a state, ‘[i]ndividuality is awareness of one’s existence as a unit in sharp distinction from others’. So states see themselves as autonomous from each other. He argues that ‘[t]his autonomy embodies mind’s actual awareness of itself as a unit and hence it is the most fundamental freedom which a people possesses as well as its highest dignity’ (Hegel 1967, 208). Avineri usefully points to the role of recognition in this individuality of states. He argues that, for Hegel, while ‘sovereignty is absolute, a state’s sovereignty needs recognition as such, just as a person’s recognition as an individual and an independent being ultimately rests upon recognition by another’. Hence, he argues, ‘even in war there are a number of norms which should be preserved, the foremost among them being that ultimately war is to be seen as something transient’ (Avineri 1972, 204–5). However the limit of the analogy between the individual and state is reached when we realise that there is no corresponding groundedness in community and no sociality between states in the way there are between individuals, and so no potential for an ethical state writ large nor an elaborated system of law at the international level.

In consequence Hegel is dismissive of those who have cosmopolitan aims. Such people, he says, ‘have very little knowledge of the nature of a collection or of the feeling of selfhood which a nation possesses in its independence’ (Hegel 1967, 208). Thus while a state sees events that confirm its opposition to other states as contingent, as just happening by chance, that awareness of its opposition to other states is in fact characteristic of what it is to be a state, a moment when the state is most supremely its own, a moment when it expresses its Idea. It rises above its humdrum substance, above its finiteness and recognises itself as infinite. This is the absolute individuality of the state, rather than the contingent and unstable individuality that is perceived ordinarily (Hegel 1967, 209).

It follows for Hegel that citizens have a duty to promote this image of the state, even at the sacrifice of property and life. In this way the state is much more than ‘a mere civil society and … its final end … only the security of individual life and property’ (Hegel 1967, 209). Hegel, outlining one of his most controversial arguments, continues that war, therefore, as well as being an evil, an accident, requiring a substantive justification, a breakdown of international laws, and an activity whose scope should be limited (Hegel 1967, 215), is also an ‘ethical moment’ for the state. Looked at from the point of view of concrete existence, ‘everything is mortal and transient’ and the individual loss of property and life in war is a terrible accident. But from the point of view of the state as the ‘ethical substance’, the loss of property and life in war becomes recognised asa necessity, ‘exalted to be the work of freedom, to be something ethical’ (Hegel 1967, 209). Indeed Hegel argues that ‘if the state as such, if its autonomy, is in jeopardy, all its citizens are in duty bound to answer the summons to its defence’ (Hegel 1967, 210–11). The ‘ethical moment in war’ demonstrates that citizens value their state sufficiently to risk losing their property, lives and their settled and ordered way of life.

Commitment to war is also a way for citizens to reaffirm the internal domestic sovereignty of their state. Hegel draws a strong parallel here between internal sovereignty expressed in the sense of the state as whole greater than the sum of its parts, and external sovereignty expressed in the moment of war. He argues that the ‘ideality which is in evidence in war, ie in an accidental relation of a state to a foreign state, is the same as the ideality in accordance with which the domestic powers of the state are organic moments in a whole’. An example of this direct parallel that Hegel provides is that ‘successful wars have checked domestic unrest and consolidated the power of the state at home’ (Hegel 1967, 210).

Smith makes a case that the idea of war offers Hegel’s system a clear sense of ‘what is, conceptually speaking, involved in statehood’, as well as challenging the liberal tradition’s elevation of the ‘market model of politics’ (Smith 1989, 160), in civil society, individualism, and the free play of self-interest. The proximity in Hegel’s text of his condemnation of ‘regarding the state as a mere civil society’ with ‘its final end as only the security of individual life and property’ (a clear swipe at the liberal viewpoint) and his statement immediately afterwards that the ‘ethical moment in war is implied in what has been said in this Paragraph’ (Hegel 1967, 209) provides strong evidence for Smith’s argument. Smith argues that, against the ‘conceptual confusion between civil society and the state’ of liberal theory (Smith 1989, 157), Hegel posed the state as an ethical community as a ‘mode of relating which stresses shared values and common sacrifice at the expense of individual interests’. In liberal theory there is ‘nothing specifically political’ about our obligation to the state, for we only have privately incurred obligations, to property, family, and friends in civil society, and the state’s role is simply to defend these things (Smith 1989, 157). Brod (1992 82) underlines the crucial difference for Hegel between civil society and the state, when he observes a parallel between Hegel’s use of the two terms and Rousseau’s distinction between government (‘the collective will of the body politic considered as the compilation of all the individual wills of the society, as the will of all’) and sovereignty (‘this collective will considered as the truly universal general will’).

The state in the liberal schema, as Smith notes, is only ‘an instrument for the achievement of material satisfactions’ (Smith 1989, 158). For Hegel, however, ‘the individual is what he is only by virtue of his participation in some totality wider than himself’, and one’s obligation to the state derives from its being ‘a community of persons united around some shared conception of the good life’, around ‘shared standards and principles’, rather than because the state represents a superior force or the power to coerce (Smith 1989, 158). For Hegel, the weakness of the liberal theory of political obligation is that, if the state is an ‘institution for the protection of private rights alone, then it is not clear why the citizen should ever obey the state’s command to risk his life in time of war’ (Smith 1989, 157).

As Smith clarifies, the ethical significance of war, for Hegel, then, is that it raises ‘us above the level of mere civil association’ and ‘transcends attachment to things by uniting men for the purpose of a common ideal’ (Smith 1989, 159), and so is an ‘integral part of the life of the state’ (Smith 1989, 163). Smith contends that Hegel articulated a notion of statehood between the ‘market model of politics’ and the idea of ‘the state as controlling the monopoly of violence’ expressed later by Weber. War ‘becomes … a type of school for the civil education of the modern bourgeois’, a ‘means of promoting certain types of civic virtues for citizens who in normal times are used to consulting only their private interests’ (Smith 1989, 160). War is ‘the means whereby state sovereignty is expressed, as well as where the “ethical health” of a people, their sense of community and political solidarity, is put to the test’. But as well as these things, war for Hegel also has a ‘philosophical function’. It ‘prevents an excessive rootedness in an attachment to the more mundane interests of civil association’, and it is the means whereby the ‘state and the specifically political form of obligation can come to assert themselves over the cacophony of private rights engendered by civil society’ (Smith 1989, 163). It follows for Hegel that the courage to go to war is not ‘for the sake of personal honour’ but ‘in the service of something impersonal, the state’ (Smith 1989, 161).

Smith also notes two other factors that should mediate our repugnance towards Hegel’s sanctioning of war. Hegel predicted that the mechanisation of modern warfare would render it ‘more humane and less barbaric’, and he did not anticipate the ‘slide into total war’ of modern warfare (Smith 1989, 161). In addition, Hegel’s philosophy of history envisaged an end of history whereby the ‘growing rationalisation or Westernisation of humanity’ would result in a ‘mutual respect for persons’ as well as ‘the homogenisation’ of humanity, leading to an ‘increased agreement over all the fundamental aims of life’. The ‘triumph of reason’ would mean, according to Hegel, ‘the elimination of the grounds of war and conflict, because there will be nothing left to fight about’ (Smith 1989, 164). The effect of these two factors is to disclose the extent to which we tend to read back into Hegel our knowledge of wars since the mid-nineteenth century as well as different associations with and changed values towards war.

We can see that Hegel’s view of sovereignty leads him to be very much opposed to the kind of cosmopolitanism that Kant sometimes advocates. Hegel refers explicitly to Kant’s Perpetual Peace, and gives at least five reasons for rejecting its cosmopolitan argument, ranging from the pragmatic to the philosophical. Hegel says that ‘the phrase “perpetual peace” … must in the very nature of things be understood as carrying the proviso: until one party is attacked or treated like an enemy’. Hegel’s line of argument is that ‘[n]o state can bind itself to let itself be attacked or treated as an enemy and yet not to arm itself but to keep the peace’ (Hegel 1964, 208). Furthermore, Kant’s proposal would ‘always depend ultimately on a particular sovereign will and for that reason would remain infected with contingency’ (Hegel 1967, 214). In addition Hegel argues that ‘corruption in nations would be the product of prolonged, let alone “perpetual” peace’ (Hegel 1967, 210).

Fourthly, a state must be allowed to defend its multiple interests and its welfare, since its ‘infinity and honour’ might be at stake (Hegel 1967, 214). Finally, as noted above in describing the meaning of the state for Hegel, there are strong limits on the analogy between the individual and the state, with the outcome that while morality is the relevant form of activity for analysing individuals, politics is the appropriate form for discussing states. Hegel’s perspective is that state sovereignty is ultimate, and he is very clear that any higher commitment would infringe that sovereignty. While Kant stood by the sovereignty of the state in the face of the attractions of cosmopolitanism, Hegel’s commitment to sovereignty is much more unequivocal, based as it is on a primary conviction that the state is the necessary focus of ethical life. The nation state, Hegel maintains, ‘is therefore the absolute power on earth … every state is sovereign and autonomous against its neighbours’ (Hegel 1967, 212). In addition, while Hegel is positioned as a communitarian in contrast to Kant, it is clear that it is a potentially aggressive community that he promotes.

Smith notes that Hegel was ‘especially critical of Kant’ and that Hegel ‘would have been critical of all Enlightenment liberals up to and including Woodrow Wilson, for believing that the reeducation of humanity through the spread of enlightenment or the rearrangement of political institutions will solve once and for all the problem of war’ (Smith 1989, 162). For Hegel, it is precisely this kind of sacrifice by citizens that is ‘the substantial tie between the state and all its members and so is a universal duty’ (Hegel 1967, 210). Moreover, what effects this link is courage, a key part of the meaning of sovereignty. As Hegel puts it, ‘[t]he intrinsic worth of courage as a disposition of mind is to be found in the genuine, absolute, final end, the sovereignty of the state. The work of courage is to actualize this final end, and the means to this end is the sacrifice of personal actuality’ (Hegel 1967, 211). In other words, giving your life for your state is the ultimate affirmation of its sovereignty. It follows for Hegel that because the monarch represents the sovereignty, the unity, the individuality of the state, the monarch must be the commander of the armed forces, and conduct foreign affairs through ambassadors, make war and peace and conclude treaties.

The central principle governing international law, for Hegel, is that it ‘springs from the relations between autonomous states’ (Hegel 1967, 212). Smith notes that Hegel’s scepticism towards international law arose from his sense that ‘the causes of war are sown deep in human nature’ in a way that Enlightenment reason cannot alter (Smith 1989, 162). This scepticism adds to Hegel’s argument that it is ‘as particular entities that states enter into relations with one another’, such that the differences in their histories and cultures are as important as what they have in common as states. Relations between states are thus characterised by ‘external contingency’ and ‘inner particularity’ (Hegel 1967, 215). These two aspects of the relationship between states limit the scope of international law, since such law depends upon the different wills of each sovereign state, and can not ever rule over a higher purpose. As Hegel puts it, ‘what is absolute in it [international law] retains the form of an ought-to-be’, since the nation state is ‘the absolute power on earth’. However, Hegel adds, ‘[w]hether a state is in fact something absolute’ hinges on two things—it ‘depends on its content, ie on its constitution and general situation’, and also upon recognition, which ‘is conditional on the neighbouring state’s judgment and will’ (Hegel 1967, 212). The sovereign authority of each state ‘receives its full and final legitimation through its recognition by other states’ (Hegel 1967, 213). This recognition consists of reciprocal respect for the autonomy of other states. Nevertheless, says Hegel, the ‘fundamental proposition of international law’, in the sense of what is general, regardless of the content of specific treaties and contracts, ‘is that treaties, as the ground of obligations between states, ought to be kept’ (Hegel 1967, 213).

In addition to this rather weak qualification, the only other check that Hegel offers to the authority of states to make their own judgments is the perspective gained retrospectively in history. His argument that ‘[w]orld history is a court of judgment’ (Hegel 1967, 216), is an important feature of his philosophy of history but does not carry much weight as an effective means to curb a ruler’s or a state’s unjust actions. In sum, then, Hegel’s approach to international politics, working out the ramifications of the state-as-the-locus-of-ethical-life or ‘ethical substance’ in its relations with other states, is thus very different from Kant’s more extensive mapping of the moral nature of the state onto the international realm which has been so influential in the contemporary debate.

While Hegel states clearly that his conception of sovereignty contains two ‘sides’, he does not address in any great detail the nature of the connections between them. But Brod raises an interesting point in this regard when he notes that, for Hegel, ‘[e]very state must speak with only one voice to other states, not primarily to avoid chaos in international affairs but to cement unity at home’. In other words, the role of the monarch, which Hegel discusses under the heading of ‘sovereignty at home’, has important repercussions for external sovereignty. As Brod observes, and thereby shows how the monarch straddles the two ‘sides’ of sovereignty for Hegel, the ‘main reason the conduct of foreign affairs falls to the monarch is for internal rather than external considerations, because the complexity of international relations must not be allowed to shatter the internal unity of the state’ (Brod 1992, 156). In this way we can see that, for Hegel, internal sovereignty looks outward as well as inward, and that the monarchy, as Brod puts it, is the key player in ‘the transition from internal to external sovereignty’ (Brod 1992, 157). Another connection that Hegel touches upon, and the example he gives is of feudal societies, is the possibility of a political society possessing external but not internal sovereignty. Hegel here lays open the idea that the two ‘sides’ of sovereignty are not always necessarily conjoint.

What Hegel does present clearly, in terms of the relation between internal and external sovereignty in his theory, is that external sovereignty is dependent on the internal ‘side’, for the justification of relations with other states lies in reaffirming the internal sovereignty of the state. As Brod notes, the ‘logical priority of internal over external sovereignty is Hegel’s most systematic way’ of expressing his sense that ‘a constitution cannot be imposed on a people externally but must grow out of the historical experiences of that people’ (Brod 1992, 156). On the other hand, Hegel considers that war with another state is the highest way in which to realise the state and affirm its sovereignty. So whereas all the other theorists of sovereignty we have discussed so far regard external sovereignty as an extension of a predominant internal sovereignty, in a important sense for Hegel internal and external sovereignty are interdependent. Hegel’s theory of the state accounts in large measure for this condition.

The key general features of sovereignty in Hegel’s conception are a very strong identification of sovereignty with the state, and a further reduction of the role of popular sovereignty. For Hegel the sovereignty of the state means both the role of the monarch as the visible embodiment of sovereignty, and the introduction of the idea of sovereignty as expressing the organic ‘whole’ of the state that is greater than the collection of its members or the sum of its parts. The sovereignty of the state also imposes a clear limit on the possibility of international collaboration, and envisages international politics as necessarily a matter dominated by relations between states formally recognised as equals.

One of the strengths of Hegel’s conception of sovereignty is his clear sense of the historical and cultural groundedness of particular states, and the value of this is reinforced by the absence of a social contract in Hegel’s political thinking. In consequence Hegel is able to move away from the depoliticised individualism and supposedly ‘neutral’ state inaugurated by the liberal social contract tradition. The groundedness of states is also valuable because it means for him that differences between states are things to be respected, and such differences are not overridden by universal principles, duties or commitments. For Hegel, in contrast with Kant, the metaphysical framework around politics does not overshadow the need to acknowledge that particularity, context, and circumstance all play a vital role. Hegel’s sense of the need for mutual respect between incommensurable cultures and societies is translated by him into his view of international politics.

The primary weakness of Hegel’s conception of sovereignty for modern readers is the argument that leads to him identifying war as the ethical moment of the state. His conception of the state and of relations between states has enough other strong arguments supporting it and does not need to rest on this celebration of war. The same argument can be applied to Hegel’s advocacy of monarchy and his antipathy to universal suffrage. Another weakness is Hegel’s lack of attention to a seeming contradiction in his text, between his use of empirical arguments, for instance to reject popular sovereignty and to endorse the use of war by the state, and his conviction that empirical evidence has no place in philosophical reasoning. Berki defends the importance Hegel places on institutions to concretise political society, and criticises Marx’s reluctance to specify such institutions in his discussion of democracy and, later, communism. Nevertheless, the contradiction in Hegel remains.

Finally, what kind of politics does this conception allow? In one sense Hegel provides a vigorous defence of politics, in that he is at pains to identify a field of politics, in the state, distinct from the field of the social and civil society (Hegel 1967, 198). Indeed, there is an important expressive dimension of politics, for Hegel, such that political activity is indicative and demonstrative of a particular kind of sociality. It is also clear that it was Hegel’s self-conscious aim to carve out a sphere for politics in the context of the state form. Knox says that ‘Hegel lived in a country where most citizens were simply “subjects”, without participation in the work of government, and where, therefore, a political life and tradition, like the English, was almost wholly lacking’. Knox characterises the Philosophy of Right as ‘an attempt to educate Germans beyond “civil” to “political” life’ (Knox 1967, 376). Dickey makes a similar point, linking Hegel’s aim to reinvigorate the idea of the political with the political context in which he was writing. Dickey claims that ‘in Hegel’s judgment, the boundaries of the political sphere were becoming so narrowly drawn in his own age that citizens were on the verge of becoming depoliticised’. In this ‘context, he wished from the 1790s on to recall citizens to public life and civic engagement by identifying the political sphere’ (Dickey 1999, ix). But in another sense Hegel severely restricts the scope of politics—through the very reduced role for popular sovereignty, through his strictures against democracy and a wide franchise, and because his notion of representation sharply limits the accountability of representatives to their constituents.

This chapter has sought to demonstrate once again a pair of thinkers whose conceptions of sovereignty are utterly distinctive. While sharing commonalities and self-consciously contributing to a tradition of thinking, each of the two theories is made up of a particular and tightly inter-related set of specific features. The two conceptions of sovereignty cannot be reduced without violent loss and misrepresentation to a single model of the concept. The following chapter outlines two further conceptions.