Kant

citizenship and critique of legal theory

Abstract

In the kantian idea of citizenship, we have the political relationship submitted to the legal relationship, there is no subjective right of contestation beyond the legal system, thus, given the positions of kantian republicanism, liberalism and jusrationalism, there is a criticism of jusnaturalist conception from Aquinas and John Locke that there is a natural right to political resistance to the sovereign in case of failure by him to fulfill the duty of “common good” or legality, which would lead to the breaking of the political pact itself; in Kant, one must obey the sovereign a priori without there being a natural reason such as “right of resistance” or revolution that breaks the political pact, we can only think of a kantian critical theory of State power from an expansive sense of the function of freedom politics in the intricacies of the principles of “Rational Law” that constitute the State, promoting an internal expansion of some of its constituent elements within the legal-political system itself (relativization of strict obedience to the sovereign and political function of citizenship). In the theory of Law, Kant differs from Kelsen, who equates popular sovereignty and the will of the State and gives the problem of political sovereignty a solution of formal legitimacy in the figure of parliamentary representation of the will of the people; Kant went further, placing the “united will of the people” linked to a republican end of the rational and reformist “State of Law”, which acts objectively  of the constitutional “common good” as the implementation of legal ends in the community.