8 - Political obligation: property, trade, peace

Summary

Introduction

Current work on Kant's political thought tends to divide into two kinds. There is, first, the broader, longer-established, and more interdisciplinary work on Kant's cosmopolitanism; its primary focus is on aspects of Kant's well-known essay, Perpetual Peace. The second, more recently emergent and on the whole more narrowly philosophical type of research concentrates on Kant's mature work, the Doctrine of Right, published as Part I of the Metaphysics of Morals in 1797 but largely neglected, for a variety of reasons, until the 1980s (see e.g. Ludwig 1988; Flikschuh 2000; Ripstein 2009; Byrd & Hruschka 2010). In the English-speaking world, work on the Doctrine of Right did not get seriously under way much before Mary Gregor's publication in 1991 of the first complete translation. The Doctrine of Right is the less accessible of these two texts: its structure of argument is often obscure and its substantive concerns seem far less radical than those of the earlier proposal for laws of international peace. Indeed, the Doctrine of Right returns us to themes familiar from the tradition of modern social-contract theory – themes to do with property rights, political obligation, state foundation and the constitutional division of powers.