From Marx to Kant

The crisis of contemporary capitalist society suggests a return to Kant. Kant’s republican politics is shown to be a necessary element of his philosophical system. This system becomes explicit in Marx, whose stress on the primacy of philosophy or politics illuminates and distorts the implications of republican philosophy and its politics. An independent methodology that would avoid one-sidedness can be drawn from a rereading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The resulting reading suggests a philosophy of history and politics that can do, in fact, what Marx thought his overcoming of German Idealism would accomplish.