Conclusion

Abstract

Abstract The contemporary relevance of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel is where we least expected it—in fact, where they seem most archaic—because it is where they seem most archaic to us that they were most political, that is, made most contact with the actual problems of state-building and governance. And though their political problems are not our political problems, their encounter with those problems forced them to thematize the relation of philosophy to politics in a way that remains broadly relevant for us today. Rather than seeking to advance or defend any of their positions on any particular institution, I have in this work sought to reconstruct those positions in a way that highlights the provisionality, pluralism, and historicism of those positions. On my view these three features are the crucial theoretical resources that Kant, Fichte, and Hegel have to contribute to our own political theorizing.