In this paper, I present and defend Kant's non-voluntarist conception of political obligations. I argue that civil society is not primarily a prudential requirement for justice; it is not merely a necessary evil or a moral response to combat our corrupting nature or our tendency to act viciously, thoughtlessly or in a biased manner. Rather, civil society is constitutive of rightful relations among persons because only in civil society can we interact in ways reconcilable with each person's innate right to freedom. Civil society is the means through which we can rightfully interact even on the ideal assumption that no one ever succumbs to immoral temptation. Kant's account, therefore, provides ideal reasons to support the claim that voluntarism cannot be the liberal ideal of political obligations.

Kant is categorical about the relation between virtue and the controlling of inclinations:

Since virtue is based on inner freedom it contains a positive command to a human being, namely to bring all his capacities and inclinations under his reason's control and so to rule over himself. (MS, 6: 410)

Virtue presupposes apathy, in the sense of absence of affects. Kant revives the stoic ideal of tranquilitas as a necessary condition for virtue: ‘The true strength of virtue is a tranquil mind’ (MS, 6: 409). In the Anthropology and the Doctrine of Virtue, apathy is taken in the sense of freedom from affects. In these texts, Kant maintains that we must strive toward a state in which affects are absent.

Consider the following objection of Bennett to Kant:

The least swallowable part of Kant's whole theory of freedom is the claim that the causality of freedom is not in time. This follows from Kant's doctrine that time is an appearance, and anyway the theory of freedom needs it: it is because the noumenal cause of an event is not in time, and thus is not itself an event, that it escapes the causality of nature. Kant is unembarrassed: ‘Inasmuch as it is noumenon, nothing happens in it; there can be no change requiring dynamical determination in time, and therefore no causal dependence upon appearances … No action begins in this active being itself; but we may yet quite correctly say that the active being of itself begins its effects in the sensible world’ [KrV, A541=B569]. That is indefensible. Something in which ‘nothing happens’ cannot be ‘active’ or ‘begin’ a train of events. (Bennett 1974: 226)

According to Kant, the opacity of human motivation takes two distinct forms – a psychological form: man ‘can never, even by the most strenuous self-examination, get entirely behind [his] covert incentives’ – and a social form: ‘everyone in our race finds it advisable to be on his guard, and not to reveal himself completely’. In other words, first, men's ‘interior’ (i.e. their intentions, motives, thoughts, etc.) cannot be entirely revealed to themselves and, second, they tend not to reveal their ‘interior’ to others. A number of Kant scholars have acknowledged the importance of the first form of opacity in Kant's thought and have attempted to draw out from it implications for moral deliberation and ethics in general. The aim of this paper is to examine the second, social form of opacity and draw out its anthropological implications, an issue that has been overlooked in the literature. To do so, I focus on Kant's contrast between men and beings that I would like to call ‘sincere aliens’. These sincere aliens are beings who have the opposite features of man's opacity, namely beings who cannot but reveal their ‘interior’ both to others and to themselves.

It is generally acknowledged that Kant's political philosophy stands on a par with the great works of the Western liberal tradition. It is also a matter of agreement that the rational principles on which it rests represent an adequate philosophical expression of the progressive agenda that was inaugurated by the Enlightenment and fulfilled, with varying degrees of success, by the French Revolution. Yet Kant's philosophical position is ambiguous when it comes to evaluating that momentous event in modern history. We know, from anecdotal evidence, some surviving letters, several cryptic references in his published works, as well as a number of posthumously published reflections, that Kant was enthusiastic about and strongly approved of the changes that were taking place in France at the time. He certainly condemned, in strong and unequivocal terms, the execution of Louis XVI. But this did not translate into a repudiation of his support for the revolution. And he seems to have found even in this case mitigating circumstances that explained the revolutionaries' decision to execute the monarch, thus in fact excusing their action. Moreover, he argued that all post-revolutionary governments ought to command the same kind of loyalty from their subjects as the ones they replaced, which appears to justify Kant's contention in the Idea for a Universal History that political violence can be a vehicle of progress. Furthermore, in the Contest of Faculties Kant went so far as to identify in the enthusiastic response of the ‘spectators’ to the French Revolution a clear sign of the moral disposition of humankind (CF 182/7: 85).