Why Does Sovereignty Matter, Professor Kant?

Abstract For Kant, recognition of national sovereignty is constitutive of international law, and international law is the sine qua non for peace between Peoples. The article demonstrates how and why national sovereignty is inextricably connected to the self-determination of Peoples in Kant’s philosophy of law and in international law. The principle of self-determination in turn is grounded in his idea of a normative dignity of Peoples. In Kant’s theory, “People” and “state” are diachronically conceived. This allows him to define the state’s primary function and foremost duty as securing the individual and collective dignity of its constitutive People against reification through external interference and manipulation, as well as against self-reification, by means of domestic and international law in a peace union of like-minded (i.e. ideally republican) states.