Leaving the State of Nature. Strengths and Limits of Kant’s Transformation of the Social Contract Tradition (online first)

I first outline how Kant’s ideal account of rightful external freedom transforms the social contract tradition as found in the works of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, before proposing a way to see Kant’s two-layered non-ideal theory as complementing his ideal theory of rightful freedom. This enables us to envision a conception of rightful external freedom and of rightful human freedom in particular societies. These arguments also show us the importance of realizing that the four possible political conditions for Kant – anarchy, barbarism, despotism, and republic – are ideas of reason, which means that they are never perfectly realized. Hence, historical societies are not either in the state of nature or in civil society, and in historical republics, there are pockets of injustice or pockets devoid of justice that can only be captured by means of one of the three political ideas that are not constitutive of the republican legal-political framework.