There is no doubt that Immanuel Kant has a woman problem. His anthropo-logical studies of women are full of cutting remarks, and despite a generation offeminist Kantian scholarship, it is an open question whether he meant to include women as full, equal agents in either his moral or political philosophy. Those who engage this question within Kant’s political philosophy ask whether or not women can “work their way up” to full, active citizenship. If women can achieve equality in this way, (...) the argument goes, then we can solve Kant’s woman problem. But this approach, I argue, asks the wrong question. It focuses on the status of wives rather than on the structure of the domestic sphere as a whole, and therefore obscures the ways in which the valuation of domestic space and reproductive labor shape access to rights and equality in Kant’s political philosophy. I will argue that this approach misses the deeper structural and gendered inequalities built into Kant’s conception of the state. Re-examining Kant’s “woman problem” points us toward a larger problem with labor and inequality in the Kantian state: Kant’s map of the rightful institutional order normatively requires that someone do the dependency work that makes independence possible. (shrink)

This Element examines Kant's innovative account of labour in his political philosophy and develops an intersectional analysis of Kant. By demonstrating that Kant's analysis of slavery, citizenship, and sex developed in inter-linked ways over several decades, culminating in his development of a 'trichotomy' of Right, the author shows that Kant's normative account of independence is configured through his theory of labour, and is continuous with his anthropological accounts of race and gender, providing a systemic justification for the dependency (...) of women and non-whites embedded in his philosophy of right. By examining Kant's arguments about slavery as intertwined with his account of domestic labour, the author argues that his ultimate rejection of slavery may owe more to his changing conceptualization of labour than to his theory of race, and that his final arguments against slavery rehearse strategies for embedding intersectional patterns of domestic dependence in his account of the rightful state. (shrink)

Kant’s theory of citizenship replaces the French revolutionary triptych of liberty, equality and fraternity with freedom (Freiheit), equality (Gleichheit) and civil self-sufficiency (Selbständigkeit). The interpretative question is what the third attribute adds to the first two: what does self-sufficiency add to free consent by juridical equals? This article argues that Selbständigkeit adds the idea of interdependent independence: the independent possession and use of citizens’ interdependent rightful powers. Kant thinks of the modern state as an organism whose members are agents possessed (...) of rightful (productive) powers, whose interdependent mode of exercise independently of unilateral permission matters for right. The empirical form of that ideal, according to Kant, is a republic of independent commodity producers. I will show that this reading of Selbständigkeit can consistently explain Kant’s disenfranchisement of women, wage labourers and landless farmers; that it offers a robust alternative to influential republican, libertarian and proprietarian interpretations of the Kantian state; and that it can buttress an original account of community as productive interdependence. (shrink)

Elvira Basevich, Martin Sticker, and Helga Varden offered generative criticism of my monograph, Kant’s Theory of Labour. In this response, I explore how the resources they offer for thinking about gender, labour, and the state’s responsibility to ensure the material conditions of freedom can deepen both our attentiveness to patterns of systemic injustice in Kant’s political philosophy, and the resources Kant offers for addressing contemporary patterns of intersectional and material injustice.

Their paper begins with the observation that, even though many philosophers, especially in the twentieth century, have had personal experience of exile, they rarely treat the topic of exile directly in their philosophical works. Existentialist thinkers such as Heidegger, it is true, have employed exile as a metaphor for the human condition, yet the concrete experience of political exile has been treated as somehow lacking the universality that canonical philosophy needs. This paper warns against the temptation to conflate the real (...) situation of exile with a general condition of existential unbelongingness. It goes on to trace two major threads in the history of the philosophical treatment of citizenship, the one deriving from Plato and the other from Kant and to explore their relevance to contemporary debate around the moral and legal status of those who seek refuge abroad from war, oppression, or other kinds of threat in their homeland. The Platonic tradition treats citizenship as deriving primarily from association with a land; it views foreigners as having the potential to contaminate the polis and any citizen who spends time away from the polis as likely to betray it. While many features of the Platonic position have not survived to the present, it is noteworthy that, for indigenous peoples in many parts of the world, attachment to the land remains of fundamental importance. At the same time, though migration of many kinds has become extremely common, some individuals and governments in the first world still demonstrate a visceral belief that refugees and immigrants to their country will somehow corrupt or contaminate it. The Kantian position, by contrast, treats citizenship as, ideally at least, cosmopolitan and global. It envisages nation states as moving towards “an enduring and gradually expanding federation likely to prevent war”. Consequently, the stranger seeking refuge abroad from life-threatening persecution in his or her own country has what Kant refers to as a “right of resort” in another country. While Kant argues that we must therefore not show hostility to such people, our obligations to them do not extend to philanthropic hospitality. This assertion of a limited obligation to displaced persons forms the basis for much contemporary discussion around the rights of refugees and migrants. Globalization, of course, has not taken quite the form that Kant envisaged. While the United Nations asserts the universality of human rights, and certain clusters of countries, such as those in Western Europe, have moved towards federation and free internal movement of their citizens, so-called globalization has taken place primarily on the economic, rather than the political, level. The extreme international mobility of investment capital from first-world countries in search of cheap labour is not currently matched by an acceptance within such countries of the rights of third-world citizens to migrate to their shores in search of higher wages and improved living conditions. Finally, this paper offers a critique of both the Platonic and the Kantian positions and argues the need in the modern world for institutional arrangements which represent a variety of interests and struggles across national boundaries. (shrink)

Forthcoming with R. Maliks & E. Widmer (eds), Kant’s Early Followers in Political Philosophy. London: Routledge. Amongst the various early-feminist critical engagements with eighteenth-century European ideas on women, and Kant’s ideas on women in particular, a figure that merits special attention is Karolina – an unknown, semi-anonymous Polish woman who is known to us only by her first name. In 1779-80, Karolina published three essays in the Polish journal Monitor – essays that are amongst the very few female-authored essays published (...) in this venue and the only texts that address women’s educational and socio-political standing. Karolina’s implicit critique of Kant’s views on women offers a two-fold challenge. First, Karolina critiques the confinement of women to the private use of reason and thus to the sphere defined by their sexual nature. This argument relies on my novel reading of Kant’s notion of the private use of reason, which takes into account Kant’s understanding of ‘private’ as being deprived of our common humanity and being limited to some specific, contingent aspect of ourselves. According to this reading, the notion of the private use of reason encompasses a broader category of individuals and cases – women, children, and domestic servants – i.e., those who are without appropriate education and socio-political standing. Unlike men in professions such as military officer or tax collector, who can switch between private and public uses as the situation demands it, though, individuals without appropriate education and socio-political standing are confined to using their reason in a private way at all times. Second, Karolina opposes Kant’s relegation of women to domestic labor, arguing that limiting women to the household prevents them from developing intellectually and socially – something that they are both capable of and deserve. Karolina advocates for a more egalitarian division of labor between sexes, suggesting that both men and women share domestic responsibilities. This would allow women to pursue broader intellectual and social engagements (including learning how to make public use of reason), aligning with Kant’s ideals of human progress. Since it is precisely the material conditions that preclude women from becoming active citizens in Kant’s view, this critique thereby challenges the confinement of women to passive citizenship and the very category of passive citizenship itself. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Globalization has brought increased attention to the notion that labor rights such asfreedom of association—the right of workers to organize a union—are fundamental human rights. However, the vigorous opposition to freedom of association by US firms is largely ignored in the business ethics literature and exacerbated by compensatory corporate citizenship rating mechanisms that tend to mask labor rights deficiencies. I argue that because freedom of association is a hypernorm, instrumental to fully realizing basic human rights, labor rights and human rights (...) are largely inseparable. Thus, respect for labor rights is a non-substitutable requisite of corporate citizenship. I conclude by providing examples of corporate labor relations strategies that respect freedom of association and business firms that are leading the way. (shrink)

Kant makes and elaborates upon a distinction between active citizenship and passive citizenship. Active citizens enjoy the right to vote and rights of political participation generally. Passive citizens do not, though they still enjoy the protection of the law as citizens. Kant’s examples have left commentators puzzling over how these distinctions follow from his stated rationale or justification for active citizenship, namely, that active citizens possess a kind of political and economic self-sufficiency. This essay focuses on one subset passive citizenry (...) – that of traveling blacksmiths, barbers, and day laborers in order to examine Kant’s distinctions. I argue that these examples show that Kant’s concerns regarding dependence are, at least in some cases, pragmatic rather than political. (shrink)

Despite women’s increased labor force participation, household divisions of labor remain highly unequal. Properly implemented, gender egalitarian political interventions such as work time regulation, dependent care provisions, and family leave initiatives can induce families to share work more equally than they currently do. But do these interventions constitute legitimate uses of political power? In this article, I defend the political legitimacy of these interventions. Using the conception of citizenship at the heart of political liberalism, I argue that citizens would accept (...) political interventions aimed at protecting the ‘genuinely available option’ to enact gender egalitarian lifestyles. More strongly still, I argue that under certain circumstances, citizens would insist on the enactment of political interventions to protect this option. According to political liberalism’s constraints on legitimacy, this insistence renders these interventions not only legitimate but positively mandatory. It is legitimate for a state to exercise power to preserve the genuinely available option to enact a gender egalitarian lifestyle, and under certain circumstances, it is illegitimate for a state to fail to do so. (shrink)

Kant's political philosophy draws a distinction between 'passive' citizens who are merely protected by the law and 'active' citizens who may also contribute to it. Although the distinction between passive and active citizens is often dismissed by scholars as an 'illiberal and undemocratic' relic of eighteenth century prejudice, the distinction is found in every democracy that distinguishes between mere inhabitants -- such as tourists and guestworkers -- and enfranchised citizens. The purpose of this essay is both interpretive and suggestive. First, (...) I will argue that Kant's mature distinction between active and passive citizens follows from an institutional deficiency in the the developing state rather than the natural deficiency of passive citizens, as Kant's critics have alleged. Second, I will draw on systematic features of Kant's political thought in order to claim that the state has a duty to create the institutional conditions of universal active citizenship. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive account of Kant’s cosmopolitanism, highlighting its moral, political, legal, economic, cultural, and psychological aspects. Contrasting Kant’s views with those of his German contemporaries, and relating them to current debates, Pauline Kleingeld sheds new light on texts that have been hitherto neglected or underestimated. In clear and carefully argued discussions, she shows that Kant’s philosophical cosmopolitanism underwent a radical transformation in the mid 1790s and that the resulting theory is philosophically stronger than is usually thought. Using (...) the work of figures such as Fichte, Cloots, Forster, Hegewisch, Wieland, and Novalis, Kleingeld analyzes Kant’s arguments regarding the relationship between cosmopolitanism and patriotism, the importance of states, the ideal of an international federation, cultural pluralism, race, global economic justice, and the psychological feasibility of the cosmopolitan ideal. In doing so, she reveals a broad spectrum of positions in cosmopolitan theory that are relevant to current discussions of cosmopolitanism. -/- TABLE OF CONTENTS: Acknowledgments; Abbreviations; Introduction; 1. World citizens in their own country: Wieland and Kant on moral cosmopolitanism and patriotism; 2. Universal republic of world citizens or international federation?: Cloots and Kant on global peace; 3. Global hospitality: Kant's concept of cosmopolitan right; 4. Hierarchy or diversity?: Forster and Kant on race, culture, and cosmopolitanism; 5. International trade and justice: Hegewisch and Kant on cosmopolitanism and globalization; 6. Cosmopolitanism and feeling: Novalis and Kant on the development of a universal human community; 7. Kant's cosmopolitanism and current philosophical debates; Bibliography; Index. (shrink)

Kant's unduly neglected concept of cosmopolitan law suggests a third sphere of public law -- in addition to constitutional law and international law -- in which both states and individuals have rights, and where individuals have these rights as ‛citizens of the earth' rather than as citizens of particular states. I critically examine Kant's view of cosmopolitan law, discussing its addressees, content, justification, and institutionalization. I argue that Kant's conception of ‛world citizenship' is neither merely metaphorical nor dependent on an (...) ideal of a world-government. Kant's views are particularly relevant in light of recent shifts in international law, shifts that lead away from the view that individuals can only be subjects of international law insofar as they are citizens of particular states. Thereby, a category of rights has emerged that comes close to what Kant understands by cosmopolitan law. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I argue that the concepts of work and labor have been shaped by political and feminist philosophers in ways that are more revealing of their specific visions of society than the character and significance of various socially necessary activities. Hegel, Marx, and Arendt each have particular understandings of work that illuminate other elements of society that are considered important, detrimental, or dysfunctional. Their normative understandings stem from the idiosyncratic visions of the public and private spheres that are (...) embedded in their writings and the specific moral and political characteristics that they ascribe to the concepts of labor and work. For feminist theorists such as Eva Kittay, the notion of labor as housework, childcare or carework stems from the project of offering an alternative social or political framework that accommodates women and recognizes their role in the overall functioning of society. However, feminist accounts of labor in the domestic realm also suffer from a tendency to highlight certain important dimensions and elements of society, such as care, moral labor, or the invisible conditions of capitalist production. This focus distracts us from understanding the role of work as a universal practice engaged in subjectively, idiosyncratically, by each member of society. The latter vision of work requires not a concrete definition but a broad contour of the boundaries of work activities. ;My purpose in exploring the role of work in these writings is twofold: the first is to show the normative role and meanings of work in these philosophers. The second is to clear the way for a new understanding of work. Since the recognition of one's membership in a polity is partially dependent on one's contributions to society, and one's contributions are often evaluated in terms of the concept of "work," there is a need for a more expansive vision of work. The concept and meaning of work must be reformulated in order to acknowledge the social obligations and commitments that individuals express through the performance of a broad variety of work activities. If we can arrive at a new formulation of the concept of work, then we can implement it to acknowledge the social character of various activities, and the individuals who perform them, whether or not they are wage-earners , as crucial to society, i.e. as contributing citizens. (shrink)

The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 63, Issue 253, Page 804-807, October 2013.

This article critiques Jordan Pascoe’s Kant’s Theory of Labour (CUP 2022). After outlining some of its many distinctive contributions, I consider Pascoe’s ideas on women, marriage, method, and the challenges involved in engaging with (classical) texts that express various ‘isms’. In addition to giving readers an introduction to many of the exciting ideas presented in the book, my aim is to stimulate further discussion of the kind all excellent books strive to create.

Citizenship education is a complex matter, and not least the place of civic virtues in it. This is illustrated by a consideration of the civic virtue of gratitude. Two conceptions of gratitude are explored. Gratitude seen as a debt is examined and Kant’s exposition of it, including his objections to a person’s getting himself into the position where he has to show gratitude as a beneficiary, is explored. An alternative conception of gratitude as recognition is developed. This, it is claimed, (...) has more relevance to the kind of gratitude it would be appropriate for citizens of a democratic state to feel. The educational implications of these views are indicated. (shrink)

Prior to the pandemic of 2020, global tourism accounted for over ten percent of global GDP, for a total of $9.6 trillion USD; one in every four jobs created that year, across the globe, was in the travel and tourism sector. And yet the figure of the international tourist is often regarded with an attitude ranging from bemusement to outright contempt so much so that a series of books exists to guide tourists on how to avoid looking or acting like (...) tourists. Why, though, is the figure of the tourist —especially the international tourist— so disreputable? Given the sheer number of such tourists (over 1.4 billion, in 2018 alone) it seems odd to think that there is something shameful or problematic about tourism as a practice. What accounts for our seeming disdain for the tourist, even as so many of us engage in tourism ourselves?There are, of course, many obvious answers to this question. The tourist —especially the international tourist— is often a figure of some wealth and privilege; that tourist is likely to be clumsy, at best, in his or her navigating of a foreign society; and he or she is often likely to be less careful in her caretaking of the physical and social spaces into which she travels, given the fact that she is as it were on vacation. These facts may be enough to engender some antipathy towards the tourist especially one who, as Jarvis Cocker noted thirty years ago, regards the local inhabitants as somehow amusing. Tourists are likely to be —as the British aphorism had it about American GIs— oversexed, overpaid, and over here. In this paper, though, I want to suggest a slightly different story for our ethical disquiet with the figure of the tourist. I will argue that the practice of international tourism raises two distinct sorts of ethical worries —both of which reflect the fact that international tourism requires a local industry in which cultural difference is curated and made consumable by the foreign tourist—. This fact may lead to ethical disquiet, I argue, because it can represent a site at which there is a maldistribution of the benefits and burdens of intercultural conversation; the local who works in the tourism industry must become adept at performing his or her culture for the outsider, while that outsider gains the benefits of intercultural conversation without bearing a similar burden of epistemic labor. A second reason for concern, however, stems from the ways in which this demand for epistemic labor can end up deforming and destabilizing local forms of citizenship and political agency. Those who spend their days performing a debased and simplified version of their cultural identity for outsiders may be, I believe, marked by that effort and their own ability to engage in political conversations with fellow local members may be made more difficult as a result. International tourism, in short, may be a site from which both distributive and political injustices might emerge. These concerns, I should note, may exacerbate already objectionable relationships reflecting colonial legacies of oppression; but they may exist even in the absence of any history of colonialism. The mere fact of a market in the curated experience of cultural difference may be enough to raise these worries; and international tourism, I believe, often involves exactly this form of market. (shrink)

Citizenship regimes are institutionalized systems of formal and informal norms that define access to membership, as well as associated rights and duties. This paper studies illegalized migration as one of the major tests to assess whether citizenship regimes are fair institutions, based on a historical analysis of legislation meant to reduce illegalized migration in the United States between 1995 and 2022. We build our empirical research starting from a simple observation: despite the great number of bills introduced to reduce illegalized (...) migration to the US, most of such initiatives fail to become law. In fact, 93.5% of all immigration initiatives did not even pass the chamber of Congress in which they were originally presented. Such a high rate of failure shows that these proposals are motivated by electoral aspirations, rather than coming from a genuine wish to help migrants or grant them citizenship. Furthermore, there is also an economic interest that justifies the maintenance of low-cost disposable immigrant labor, with no right to citizenship. Our analysis is an example of how state regulation processes seem to work to formalize, rather than alleviate or eradicate, the precarious legal statuses of illegalized migrants. We conclude that a globalized phenomenon such as citizenship requires going beyond merely institutional and formal conceptions. We need to rethink the institutional notion of citizenship, as a merely status held under the authority of a state and consider it from a cosmopolitan perspective and a multilateral basis. But as long as citizenship remains under the responsibility of states, illegalized migrants will continue to experience precarious citizenship. (shrink)

Calls to expand temporary work programmes come from two directions. First, as global justice advocates observe, every year thousands of poor migrants cross borders in search of better opportunities, often in the form of improved employment opportunities. As a result, international organizations now lobby in favour of expanding ‘guest-work’ opportunities, that is, opportunities for citizens of poorer countries to migrate temporarily to wealthier countries to fill labour shortages. Second, temporary work programmes permit domestic governments to respond to two internal, (...) contradictory political pressures: (1) to fill labour shortages and (2) to do so without increasing rates of permanent migration. Temporary work programmes permit governments to appear ‘tough’ on migration, while responding to employer pressure to locate workers willing to work in low-skilled, poorly remunerated positions. The coincidence of national self-interest and global justice generates a strong case in favour of expanding guest-work. We evaluate the moral benefits and burdens of expanding guest-work opportunities, and conclude that although there are benefits to be gleaned from the perspective of global wealth redistribution, at present, temporary work programmes are generally unjust. We will argue that just temporary work programmes, in time, permit temporary workers to attain citizenship. This spells the end of traditional temporary work programmes, which require that workers return to their home country in time; instead, what is temporary is the employment obligation that must be fulfilled as a requirement to access citizenship. As long as this requirement is met, we endorse guest-work programmes as a tool to respond to global inequality. (shrink)

This article applies Charles W. Mills’ notion of the domination contract to develop a Kantian theory of justice. The concept of domination underlying the domination contract is best understood as structural domination, which unjustifiably authorizes institutions and labour practices to weaken vulnerable groups’ public standing as free, equal and independent citizens. Though Kant’s theory of justice captures why structural domination of any kind contradicts the requirements of justice, it neglects to condemn exploitive gender- and race-based labour relations. Because (...) the ideal of civic equality must position all persons as co-legislators of the terms of political rule, the state must dismantle exploitive race- and gender-based labour relations for all persons to command political power as civic equals. (shrink)

In this article, I compare Kant’s and Marx’s analysis of women and domestic labour in their mature political works, and argue that Kant offers more analytic tools for understanding the social and economic role of domestic labour than does Marx. While domestic labour becomes visible to Marx only as it is outsourced, Kant develops a clear account of the specific rules governing domestic labour in the emerging bourgeois household. Because of his commitment to the domestic realm (...) as a core feature of the just state, however, much of Kant’s account of domestic labour should be challenged by contemporary Kantian feminists. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 106 Heft: 4 Seiten: 703-707.

_Nomad Citizenship_ argues for transforming our institutions and practices of citizenship and markets in order to release society from dependence on the state and capital. It changes Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of nomadology into a utopian project with immediate practical implications, developing ideas of a nonlinear Marxism and of the slow-motion general strike. Responding to the challenge of creating philosophical concepts with concrete applications, Eugene W. Holland looks outside the state to analyze contemporary political and economic development using the ideas (...) of nomad citizenship and free-market communism. Holland’s nomadology seeks to displace capital-controlled free markets with truly free markets. Its goal is to rescue market exchange, not perpetuate capitalism—to enable noncapitalist markets to coordinate socialized production on a global scale and, with an eye to the common good, to liberate them from capitalist control. In suggesting the slow-motion general strike, Holland aims to transform citizenship: to renew, enrich, and invigorate it by supplanting the monopoly of state citizenship with plural nomad citizenships. In the process, he offers critiques of both the Clinton and Bush regimes in the broader context of critiques of the social contract, the labor contract, and the form of the state itself. (shrink)

To highlight the promise of Jordan Pascoe’s Kant’s Theory of Labour, my comments concern the diagnostic and prescriptive dimensions of the book’s excellent intersectional critique of dependent labour relations. The diagnostic dimension of Pascoe’s critique establishes that the organisation of dependent labour relations is a neglected problem of Kantian justice. The prescriptive dimension offers solutions to this problem but is underdeveloped. To enhance the book’s prescriptive dimension, I draw on the noted Africana philosopher W. E. B. Du (...) Bois for guidance. For Du Bois, a constitutional republic ought to strive for the abolition of a ‘second’ slavery following the abolition of de jure black chattel slavery with the end of the American Civil War. Given Du Bois’ call for meaningful Emancipation, I argue that philosophers should reinterpret the Kantian normative ideal of freedom as universal independence to uproot the postbellum conditions of second slavery. (shrink)

This book is a collection of twelve new essays on the topic of Kant's account of citizenship, the first book-length text on this topic. It features an international cast of leading scholars who specialize in Kant's ethics, philosophy of religion and political philosophy. The contributors connect Kant's philosophy with contemporary issues concerning citizenship, including the moral grounds of citizenship rights, the relation between citizenship, human rights and dignity, civic virtues, citizenship in the ethical commonwealth, in particular the moral function of (...) religious rituals, the link between ethical duties and faith, and the relation between religious freedom and political power, democratic participation, the legitimacy of international courts, just war theory, cosmopolitanism, and the contemporary relevance of a Kantian account of citizenship. The topic is of interest given some of the currently urgent citizenship-related challenges that we are facing today. Kant's account of justice stipulates that, in a fair and peaceful world, the legal framework that establishes rights and obligations should be effective at national, international and cosmopolitan levels. Kant's legal and political philosophy also features the unique combination of a realistic appraisal of the human condition and powerful normative recommendations concerning action and principles of ethics and law. Together with Kant's emphasis on the requirement of consistency, the approaches discussed in the volume are better able to orient thinking and guide action for currently urgent ethical, legal, political and social problems. Kantian Citizenship will appeal to scholars and graduate students working on Kant's legal and political philosophy, as well as scholars from other fields who are interested in legal philosophy and the politics of citizenship. (shrink)

Arendt famously pointed out that only citizenship actually confers rights in the modern world. To be a citizen is to be one who has the ‘right to have rights’. Arendt’s analysis emerges out of her recognition that there is a contradiction between this way of conferring rights as tied to the nation-state system and the more philosophical and ethical conceptions of the ‘rights of man’ and notions of ‘human rights’ like those championed by thinkers such as Immanuel Kant who understands (...) rights belonging universally to all humans as a result of facts having to do with what it means to be human. Étienne Balibar, in his recent work, adds to this by pointing out that there is a contradictory movement between this universalizing tendency in philosophical thought and the production of the citizen-subject out of the exclusionary acts of law and force. In this article, I put Balibar’s work in dialogue with the contemporary moment where we are witnessing the re-emergence of a nativist right populism. I use Balibar to help distinguish between three modes of political existence that we find today. Two of these three are more or less well understood. They are the non-citizen, who has no – or almost no – rights in a given nation-state and the citizen who enjoys the full benefit of the rights a given nation-state has to give. The third category is what I term the ‘nominal citizen’. This last category is somewhere in between full citizenship and non-citizenship. Individuals in this last category have rights in name but are largely unable to exercise them. Understanding this last category can, among other things, help us at least partially make sense of the return of right populism and also help us see the ways in which the modern category of citizenship, with its contradictions as elaborated by Balibar, can provide a means for resistance. (shrink)

To highlight the promise of Jordan Pascoe’s Kant’s Theory of Labour, my comments concern the diagnostic and prescriptive dimensions of the book’s excellent intersectional critique of dependent labour relations. The diagnostic dimension of Pascoe’s critique establishes that the organisation of dependent labour relations is a neglected problem of Kantian justice. The prescriptive dimension offers solutions to this problem but is underdeveloped. To enhance the book’s prescriptive dimension, I draw on the noted Africana philosopher W. E. B. Du (...) Bois for guidance. For Du Bois, a constitutional republic ought to strive for the abolition of a ‘second’ slavery following the abolition of de jure black chattel slavery with the end of the American Civil War. Given Du Bois’ call for meaningful Emancipation, I argue that philosophers should reinterpret the Kantian normative ideal of freedom as universal independence to uproot the postbellum conditions of second slavery. (shrink)

In my article, I present the historical origins of the introduction of the subject of Citizenship in 2002 to British schools in the state sector, discuss its assumptions and present a translation of its syllabus. I also want to show that the subject of Citizenship is a form of ethical education. In the liberal English tradition, the state avoided influencing axiological decisions in the area of education, hence showing initiative in the sphere of ethical education is a significant fact. In (...) the first part of the article, referring to the history of state education in Great Britain, I reconstruct the historical context in which I situate the introduction of the subject of Citizenship. In the second part, I point out the immediate circumstances of the introduction of the new subject by the Labour Party. In the third part, I examine the theoretical foundations of the Citizenship curriculum as presented in a document known as the „Crick Report”, published in 1998. (shrink)

It is said we live in a second Gilded Age, which makes our understanding of the first all the more relevant. Rosanne Currarino’sThe Labor Question in Americamakes the bold claim that, far from being a period of defeat for the Left, the original Gilded Age saw an expansion of democratic citizenship. A group of economists, social reformers and labour organisers transformed our understanding of political participation from the earlier, producerist to a more modern, consumerist ideal of social inclusion and (...) collective agency. However, on her own telling, Currarino’s ‘expansion’ comes across more as a ‘substitution’. Some workers gained in wages what they lost in control of the means of production. Though Currarino fairly identifies the utopian aspirations underlying the demand for higher levels of consumption, her narrative relies on an overly rigid distinction between production and consumption, missing out on the way in which consumption came to be defined in ways that assumed the workplace would be a site of submission. Finally,The Labor Questionfails to include, as parts of its narrative, the extraordinary violence that marked struggles over the labour question. In this context, the shift from ‘producerist’ emphases on worker control to ‘consumerist’ views of economic citizenship look more like an ideological displacement than they do a progressive expansion of democracy. (shrink)

In ‘Kant’s Changing Cosmopolitanism’ and Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship, Pauline Kleingeld argues that, in ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent,’ Kant meant for the Bund of states to be a coercive federation. Kleingeld admits that there is a disparity between this earlier coercive idea of the Bund and Kant’s talk of a voluntary congress in Toward Perpetual Peace and The Metaphysics of Morals. She explains this disparity by: appealing to a semantic ambiguity (...) in the term ‘Bund’; making claims about with which contemporary 18th century works Kant was acquainted; and ultimately attempting to draw a parallel between the unsocial sociability of individual people within a state and the unsocial sociability of individual states in a larger community of states. In this paper, I argue that while Kleingeld’s claims are superficially supported by the text, her claims depend on her apparent conflating of teleology and morality. (shrink)

In Kant’s Politics in Context, Reidar Maliks offers a compelling account of Kant’s political philosophy as part of a public debate on rights, citizenship, and revolution in the wake of the French Revolution. Maliks argues that Kant’s political thought was developed as a moderate middle ground between radical and conservative political interpretations of his moral philosophy. The book’s central thesis is that the key to understanding Kant’s legal and political thought lies in the public debate among Kant’s followers and that (...) in this debate we find the political challenges which Kant’s political philosophy is designed to solve. Kant’s Politics in Context raises crucial questions about how to understand political thinkers of the past and is proof that our understanding of the past will remain fragmented if we limit our studies to the great men of the established canon. (shrink)

En un interesante y polémico texto publicado por Alejandro Pinzani y Nuria Sánchez Madrid en 2016, bajo el título “The State Looks Down: Some Reassessments of Kant’s Appraisal of Citizenship”, los autores plantean una pregunta a la que aludo en el título del presente trabajo: Kant ¿liberal? ¿republicano? ¿o ambas cosas?, decantándose finalmente por un “ambas cosas”. Procuro discutir ciertas consideraciones sobre la distinción entre ciudadanía pasiva y activa; y la tesis que afirma que: por su clara aversión ante la (...) intervención del Estado en materia económica –incluso en casos de privación material- Kant podría ser enrolado en una posición liberal clásica en la que el Estado no debe intervenir en el status quo económico, pues se trata de transacciones privadas entre individuos libres. (shrink)

Kant’s thought from the 1750s onward can usefully be understood as a series of efforts to overcome the challenge posed in Machiavelli’s Prince: namely, to reconcile our idea of justice with what is actually possible given human nature as it is, rather than as reason tells us that it “should” be. Especially following his reading of Rousseau, this effort took the form of successive translations of the metaphysical concept of a world into the juridical language of world-citizenship, which transformed a (...) rational and physical cosmology into moral and historical cosmopolitanism. The thought of both Hobbes and Rousseau proved instrumental to those efforts. Initially, Kant thought human history oscillated between Hobbesian and Rousseauian conceptions of civil order—i.e., between orders that guarantee, respectively, security and freedom. In his later works, Kant suggested that history progressed from Hobbes to Rousseau, but he hesitated to declare that a transformation from prudence-based security to virtue-based civil independence was completable even in principle. Speaking generally, Kant sought to reconcile a kind of historical providentialism with the sovereign authority of reason. This reconciliation blurs the distinction between, on the one hand, the metaphysical and/or religious and, on the other hand, the secular—a distinction on which Michael Rosen’s perspicuous intellectual history tends to focus. That this earliest version of Kant’s rational providentialism makes reward of effort morally central also suggests that it is ultimately even more important to Kant than the punitive theme on which Rosen himself focusses. (shrink)

This essay develops Kant’s theory of reform to theorize racial justice reform. I assess the function of Kant’s philosophy of race as part of his nonideal theory of justice, which offers a racist pragmatic anthropology that uses the concept of race to determine the practical effectiveness of legislative reason. His philosophy of race defends a teleological account of the natural history of the human species to fulfill the requirements of justice and assumes that certain racial groups have failed to develop (...) their innate capacity for legislative reason. I show that we need an alternative Kantian nonideal theory of justice that demonstrates how legislative reason actualizes practical freedom. Rather than appeal to anthropology, I expand Kant’s model of public reason to advance racial justice reform under the conditions of partial compliance to the requirements of justice in a profoundly nonideal republic such as the U.S. I then showcase the promise—and limits—of the a priori ideals of citizenship and publicity for racial justice reform and introduce the ideal of interracial civic fellowship to guide the public use of reason in nonideal circumstances. (shrink)

European citizenship is a nested membership in a multilevel polity that operates at member state and union levels. A normative theory of supranational citizenship will necessarily be informed by the EU as the only present case and will be addressed to the EU in most of its prescriptions, but should still develop a model sufficiently general to potentially apply to other regional unions as well. The Article first describes three basic characteristics of such a polity — democratic representation at the (...) supranational level, internal freedom of movement between member states, and regional limits to external geographic expansion — and argues that a multiplication of such regional unions would contribute to a more just and peaceful international order. Building on this modification of Kant’s model for a global confederation of republics, the contribution explores three alternative approaches for strengthening democratic citizenship in the European Union: a statist approach that aims at transforming the EU into a federal state, a unionist approach whose goal is to strengthen union citizenship vis-a`-vis member state nationality, and a pluralist one that specifies citizenship norms for each level and balances them with each other on the basis of the current state of federal integration. These approaches are then compared with regard to their implications for three policy questions: general status differences and inequality of rights amongst EU citizens living in their country of nationality, EU citizens residing in other member states, third-country nationals, and EU citizens residing outside the territory of the Union; voting rights in European, national, and local elections; and access to Union citizenship and to member state nationality. (shrink)

In ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Kant claims that no women are currently enlightened. Here I argue that this exclusion is due to certain legal restrictions guiding Kant’s conception of enlightenment. As enlightenment is intended to take place in society, it appears that Kant has a specific legal context in mind that affects its enactment. His twofold conception of citizenship and the dimension of subordination he puts forward by restricting the private use of reason will prove useful in clarifying those legal restrictions. (...) It thus seems unlikely that Kant intended women to take an active part in enlightenment. (shrink)

Demosthenes' client Euxitheos is attempting to defend his claim to citizenship, and finds himself obliged to counteract the prejudice raised by his opponent Euboulides from the fact that his mother works, and has worked, in menial wage labour. The implication is that no citizen woman would sink so low; therefore, she is no citizen, and so neither is he. His response is defensive: he acknowledges that such labour is a source of prejudice , but argues that people often (...) find themselves obliged to undertake such demeaning work through poverty, which is deserving of the jury's sympathy, and in any case has no bearing on questions of citizenship . He does not challenge the assumptions behind the prejudice, suggesting that he expects the jury to share them, and this might encourage us to extrapolate from the passage to a set of common values held by Athenian citizens, namely that paid work by women is degrading, embarrassing and only acceptable as a temporary expedient under the compulsion of poverty. If we then align these attitudes with the implications elsewhere in the orators that women led lives of seclusion, usually confined indoors and largely separated from the exterior male world, we might be inclined to conclude that the labour of women was also confined to the oikos and almost entirely distinct from the labour of males, not least in having little or no monetary aspect, a point which the usual view of the economic capacity of Athenian women appears to confirm. (shrink)

Social contract thought has always contained multiple and mutually conflicting lines of argument; the minimalist contractarianism so influential today represents the weaker of two main constellations of claims. I make the case for a Kantian contract theory that emphasizes the bedrock principle of consent of the governed instead of the mere heuristic device of the exit from the state of nature. Such a shift in emphasis resolves two classic difficulties: tradi- tional contract theory’s ahistorical presumption of a pre-political settlement, and (...) its impossibly high demands on citizens seeking to practice self-rule. Kant’s solutions to these problems of property rights and citizenship are found in his political works, rather than the ethical works through which Kant’s political theory is usually interpreted. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This article considers the economic case for so-called sweatshop wages and working conditions. My goal is not to defend or reject the economic case for sweatshops. Instead, proceeding from a broadly pluralist understanding of value, I make and defend a number of claims concerning the ethical relevance of economic analysis for values that different agents utilize to evaluate sweatshops. My arguments give special attention to a series of recent articles by Benjamin Powell and Matt Zwolinski, which represent the latest and (...) best defense of the economic case for sweatshops. In the process, I challenge Zwolinski’s “non-worseness claim”, and the idea that opposition to sweatshop wages and working conditions fails to respect that the autonomy of would-be sweatshop workers. Ultimately, I conclude that even if the economic case for sweatshops rests on a solid empirical foundation, agents possess good reason to advocate for better wages and working conditions for sweatshop workers, and to prefer less exploitative or coercive relationships. Sweatshop labor undermines a compelling vision of free markets, according to both Kantian and republican conceptions of freedom, and the relationships formed by those who participate in such markets. (shrink)