REVOLUTIONARY EPIGONES: KANT AND HIS RADICAL FOLLOWERS Reidar Maliks 1, 2 Abstract: When Kant in 1793 rejected a right of revolution, he was immediately criticized by a group of radical followers who argued that he had betrayed his own principles of justice. Jakob, Erhard, Fichte, Bergk and Schlegel proceeded to defend a right of resistance and revolution based on what they took to be his true principles. I argue that we must understand Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, which came in 1797, partly as a response to these radical democratic writings. Exploring this forgotten con- troversy reveals that Kant did not betray his own principles when he denied a right of revolution, because he did not mean that persons have an unconditional duty to obey. This becomes clear when we read the final developments of Kant’s thinking on indi- vidual liberty and republican government in light of the radical critique. I Introduction The revolution in France polarized German intellectual life. 3 In the years fol- lowing 1789, conservatives and progressives were divided over the legiti- macy of revolution, and in the debate that followed many wanted to know the opinion of Immanuel Kant, by then indisputably the most influential German philosopher. But Kant remained silent about the revolution until 1793 and had little to say about political principles in general. Many of his followers expected that he, like most German liberals and defenders of the Enlighten- ment, would come out in favour of the revolution, because his ethical theory had seemed to have such implications. In Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and in Critique of Practical Reason, both published before the revolu- tion, Kant had developed a view of humanity as an end in itself, based on a universal capacity for pure practical reason, which conferred on humans a dignity that stood in great contrast to how persons were treated in the old HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXXIII. No. 4. Winter 2012 1 Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo, PO Box 6706, St Olavs Plass 5, 0130 Oslo, Norway. Email: reidar.maliks@nchr.uio.no. 2 I am grateful to Istvan Hont, Leif Maliks, Isaac Nakhimovsky, Mark Philp, Véronique Pouillard, T.J. Reed and two anonymous referees for comments on an earlier version of this article. Thanks to Frederick Rauscher for help in the translation of a pas- sage from Kant. The paper was presented at the Political Thought and Intellectual His- tory seminar at Cambridge University on 25 October 2010. 3 Fritz Valjavec, Die Entstehung der politischen Strömungen in Deutschland 1770– 1815 (Munich, 1951); Rudolf Vierhaus, ‘Politisches Bewusstsein in Deutschland vor 1789’, in Der Staat, 6 (1967), pp. 175–96; G.P. Gooch, Germany and the French Revolu- tion (New York, 1966); Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1992).