Kant's Politics: Provisional Theory for an Uncertain World
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arise to what extent this is the hidden Lacan or the hidden Zˇizˇek. To put it another way, Lacan: The Silent Partners is more of an extension of Zˇizˇekian studies than an instigation of Lacanian paranoia. Reference Zˇizˇek, S. (1996) The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters, London and New York: Verso.
Sean Homer City College, Thessaloniki, Greece
Kant’s Politics: Provisional Theory for an Uncertain World Elisabeth Ellis Yale University Press, New Haven CN, 2005, 272pp. ISBN: 9780 30010 1201 Contemporary Political Theory (2008) 7, 111–114. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300317
Throughout his many versions of a theory of the effects of commonly held principles on collective life, and most important in his mature theory of the public sphere, Kant directs our attention to the dynamism between our world and our ideals (p. 10). In Kant’s Politics, Ellis provides a new and insightful look at Kant’s political philosophy in light of the contemporary debate surrounding deliberative democracy and its critics. Ellis argues that Kant’s work contains a priori concepts, which remain relevant to this day, and using an empirical contextual analysis — in the vein of Skinner’s recent work on Hobbes — she examines what it was Kant wanted to achieve with his work. Ellis claims to have found in Kant’s work — from his pre-critical philosophy through to his late political essays — an ‘original theory of political transition that accounts for that part of political change driven by the concrete effects of common political ideals’ (p. x). Ellis comprehensively dismisses the common mistakes made by previous attempts at reading Kant’s political theory, and provides a reading that has its application in contemporary political problems. ‘Either the reader underestimates the importance of Kant’s formal, critical philosophy to the more pragmatical political work, or a reader may apply a mistaken version of this philosophy to Kant’s politics’ (p. 3). These mistakes take the common form of Contemporary Political Theory 2008 7
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either a narrow rigoristic analysis of his ethics that lead to dogmatic stoicism without the application of his critical method, or the all too common replacement of Kant’s epistemology with an ontological interpretation. Ellis has approached Kant’s politics with a thorough and holistic interpretation providing a ‘Kantian political theory [that] takes the provisional nature of political institutions seriously, focusing less on ideal outcomes than on the places where citizens gain the capacities needed to bring the promise of democratic freedom closer to reality’ (p. 2). As far as Kant is concerned, all institutions must be judged according to the possibility of progress. Readers familiar with Kant’s Perpetual Peace will be on common ground here. In Chapter 2 ‘political judgment’, Ellis sets out to free Kant’s politics from its teleological ball and chain. As Ellis describes ‘If Kant’s political theory can be freed from its teleological blinders, then perhaps his very inter
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