Spanish Republicanism: Zuruck zu Kant?

Abstract

Some Spanish republican theorists argue for recovering Immanuel Kant’s philosophy for the left, rescuing him from his unwarranted appropriation by the right and correcting his neglect by progressivism. This article argues that this project is misguided in three ways. First, the implication that conservatism has claimed Kant for its camp is simply wrong, given that intellectuals on the right have long explicitly rejected him. Second, it rests on a faulty premise: that the left and right disagree about abstract concepts. Rather, conservatism represents an ad hoc defense of existing power structures without any firm theoretical commitments. Third, Kant is clearly progressive, as he wrote against conservative contemporaries. To conclude, I claim that the progressives’ ill-founded attempt to recover Kant is symptomatic of a broader misunderstanding in how progressives define progressivism and conservatism. I propose rethinking these definitions.