REVOLUTION AND PROGRESS IN KANTIAN REASON

Immanuel Kant’s project for a critique of reason exhibits a foundation that has an avowedly not despotic profile. This is to say that the sense in which Kant speaks of reason as a faculty of principles appears to be intimately connected with the idea that ‘principle’, in a strict sense, can only be said of what does not escape the critical opinion and autonomy of thought that such a judgment necessarily involves. The strictly political form of government that is applied, according to Kant, to the authority of reason as exercise of non-despotic power affords a privileged point of view from which to reread, in not necessarily antagonistic terms, a widespread image in contemporary debate – that is, Kant torn between a revolutionary spirit and a reformist profile.