Why Kant did not write political philosohy.

Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy.

Abstract

The text is a critical analysis of Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, directed at its use in research on the aestheticization of politics. The first part is devoted to posing a problem and reconstruction of the ideas contained in Arendt's Lectures. The second part is the critical one. The author of The Human Condition does not reflect on Kant’s understanding of human nature and the structures and interconnections of cognitive powers. Instead of it, Arendt used the thesis of the natural “sociability" of the human being as the basis of politics. As a consequence, she ignored its ethical and rational dimension and understood the sensus communis as a primarily community sense, she underestimated the meaning of the general will in Kant's thoughts, and in the outlined vision of progress of human kind she assumed that it has an asymptotic character, but the asymptotes of development left unthought-out. In the effect she rejected all invariants in the Kantian vision of the history that seems unacceptable in the case of Kant. I argue that Kant's thought should be interpreted as an intermediate link between Rousseau's and Hegel's vision of politics - an attempt to generalize the general will onto the entire human race. Arendt was as far from it as possible, but she gave me a perspective for studies on the aestheticization of politics. While in Rousseau and Kant the legitimacy of politics is provided by the ethical power of judgment, its aestheticization consists in this perspective in the taking over of this function by the aesthetic power of judgment.