Abstract

According to Kant there is not just a current 'republican morality', as if a republic could be anything else but morality. The republican state is the morality of politics. However, this does not mean that politics has to be made subservient to the ethical order. In itself the state implies for everybody the absolute requirement of submission to the law. Republican morality might and should inspire whichever political body, since the republic is neither a structure (a form of sovereignty) nor a practice (a form of government): it is nothing but the will to establish public law on the general will. Although Kant pays tribute to the republican idea, in a way his republicanism is opposed to that of Rousseau as he stresses the disconnection of the rational general will from the empirical will of all. Against popular sovereignty his theory is one of representative sovereignty