Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to locate and defend a specifically Kantian account of political agency, one that is implicit in Kant's short essays on history. The dissertation attempts, first, to show how this account emerges from Kant's more general thinking about moral teleology, and, second, to suggest the relevance of this account for contemporary political theory. ;Part I seeks to motivate these issues by sketching the current debate in political theory between Kantian constructivists and their Nietzschean critics . I suggest that this debate--which has centered around the question of what normative commitments are necessary or desirable for political theory--will remain inconclusive unless we can understand what it means to be a political agent. ;Part II attempts to show that a suggestive answer to this question is already implicit in Kant--specifically, in the culmination of Kant's various attempts to derive the assumptions of moral teleology from the logic presupposed by a moral agent. After a general defense of Kant's strategy of argument, I examine Kant's attempts to prove the immortality of the soul and the existence of God, and to offer a naturalistic defense of historical progress grounded in the unsocial sociability of human beings. Understanding the failures of these arguments sets the stage for my defense of Kant's late essay, "An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race Continually Progressing," in which I argue that Kant has successfully located a commitment to historical progress in the attitude of a political agent. ;Finally, Part III suggests the utility of this description of political agency for a "non-constructivist" Kantian political theory. I argue that such an approach is partially but not fully exemplified by the work of Michael Oakeshott, and I favorably contrast this approach with the constructivist Kantianism offered by Habermas