Kant’s theory of citizenship replaces the French revolutionary triptych of liberty, equality and fraternity with freedom (Freiheit), equality (Gleichheit) and civil self-sufficiency (Selbständigkeit). The interpretative question is what the third attribute adds to the first two: what does self-sufficiency add to free consent by juridical equals? This article argues that Selbständigkeit adds the idea of interdependent independence: the independent possession and use of citizens’ interdependent rightful powers. Kant thinks of the modern state as an organism whose members are agents possessed of rightful (productive) powers, whose interdependent mode of exercise independently of unilateral permission matters for right. The empirical form of that ideal, according to Kant, is a republic of independent commodity producers. I will show that this reading of Selbständigkeit can consistently explain Kant’s disenfranchisement of women, wage labourers and landless farmers; that it offers a robust alternative to influential republican, libertarian and proprietarian interpretations of the Kantian state; and that it can buttress an original account of community as productive interdependence.
The article is structured as follows. After introducing Kant’s discussion of citizenship (section 1), I broach the idea of interdependent independence, that is, the way in which members of a state independently exercise their rightful (productive) powers (section 2). Kant’s citizens, I argue, have as their object of legislation their own independence in productive community with others, such that franchise follows independence and not vice versa (section 3). I then explain why this inclusive interpretation of Selbständigkeit is exegetically superior to competing republican accounts, which attempt to explain Kant’s exclusions by appeal to voter dispositions (section 4). I also show that, pace proprietarian and libertarian readings of Kant, his concern with property and propertylessness is wholly derivative of a more fundamental concern with the independent exercise of the citizens’ interdependent rightful powers (section 5).
1. Kant on citizenship
Citizenship is a crucial step in Kant’s argument for the justification of the liberal stateFootnote 1 and is discussed in TP (8: 290–7) and DR (6: 314–16).Footnote 2 In DR §46, Kant argues that the state’s legislative authority belongs to ‘the concurring and united will of all’, where ‘each decides the same thing for all and all for each’. He adds that, since one ‘can never do wrong in what he decides upon with regard to himself’, it follows that the legislation of such a united will must be consistent with the demands of right. Kant’s co-legislating citizen has three normative attributes (rechtliche Attribute): heFootnote 3 enjoys freedom (Freiheit), ‘the attribute of obeying no other law than that to which he has given his consent’, equality (Gleichheit), the attribute of ‘not recognizing among the people any superior with the moral capacity to bind him as a matter of right in a way that he could not in turn bind the other’ and civil self-sufficiency (Selbständigkeit),Footnote 4 the attribute of ‘owing his existence and preservation to his own rights and powers as a member of the commonwealth, not to the choice of another among the people’ (6: 314). Freedom, equality and civil self-sufficiency, then, are the ideal expression of Kantian independence. What needs to be explained is what the third attribute adds to the first two.
A preliminary explanation follows Kant’s account of the franchise. After suggesting that ‘the only qualification for being a citizen’ is ‘being fit to vote’, Kant adds that this:
presupposes the self-sufficiency of someone who, as one of the people, wants to be not just a part (Teil) of the commonwealth but also a member (Glied) of it, that is, a part of the commonwealth acting from his own choice in community (Gemeinschaft) with others. The quality of being self-sufficient, however, requires a distinction between active and passive citizens, though the concept of a passive citizen seems to contradict the concept of a citizen as such. The following examples can serve to remove this difficulty: an apprentice in the service of a merchant or artisan; a domestic servant (as distinguished from a civil servant); a minor; all women and, in general, anyone whose preservation in existence (his being fed and protected) depends not on his management of his own business but on arrangements made by another (except the state). All these people lack civil personality and their existence is, as it were, only inherence (Inhärenz). (DR, 6: 314; translation amended)
Kant’s passive citizensFootnote 5 enjoy freedom and equality if they possess legal standing as parts (≠ members) of the commonwealth and if they can work their ‘way up from this passive condition to an active one’ (DR, 6: 315). Both conditions are satisfied, he implies, in the case of apprentices, domestic servants, minors and women, albeit passively. Minors, for example, enjoy a right ‘to the care of their parents until they are able to look after themselves’ (DR, 6: 280), a right entailed by their innate right to independence. It follows that enjoyment of innate right is compatible with de facto lack of control over its exercise. On the interpretation I will present, civil self-sufficiency just is independent possession and use of one’s rightful powers, including one’s productive powers. If I am right, then self-legislating citizens in the Kantian state must enjoy interdependent independence, that is, an ability to make their own (productive) choices in (productive) community with others.
I will show that this interpretation of civil self-sufficiency is key to understanding Kant’s disenfranchisement not only of apprentices, domestic servants, women and minors – all of whom are subject to fiduciary ‘status’ relationships – but also of wage labourers and landless farmers. In the DR passage immediately following the definition of civil self-sufficiency (see the quotation above), Kant writes:
The woodcutter I hire to work in my yard; the blacksmith in India, who goes into people’s houses to work on iron with his hammer, anvil and bellows, as compared with the European carpenter or blacksmith who can put the products of his work up as goods for sale to the public; the private tutor, as compared with the school teacher; the tenant farmer as compared with the leasehold farmer, and so forth; these are mere underlings of the commonwealth because they have to be under the direction or protection of other individuals, and so do not possess civil self-sufficiency. (DR, 6: 314–15; translation amended)
The Indian travelling blacksmithFootnote 6 contrasts with those subject to status relations, in that she is merely contractually bound to ‘let and hire’ her productive powers to her employer(s) (DR, 6: 285).Footnote 7 But the blacksmith’s position is similar to those subject to status relationships in that she, too, lacks civil self-sufficiency. According to Kant, the Indian blacksmith enjoys freedom and equality insofar as she could come to own enough iron and thereby come to bind her employer as much as the employer actually binds her. This is the significance of Kant’s equal opportunity proviso, that ‘anyone can work his way up from this passive condition to an active one’ (6: 315). But the blacksmith presently lacks iron ownership, which means she lacks independent use of her productive powers: in order to exercise these powers she must get permission from the iron owner(s) to use the iron they own, which means she must put her powers at their disposal. She therefore lacks civil self-sufficiency. Like the minor, the Indian blacksmith remains subject ‘to the choice of another among the people’ (6: 314),Footnote 8 quite independently of a supervening status relationship.
The rest of this article argues for three claims. First, Selbständigkeit is the idea that free and equal people can co-legislate if and only if they have independent possession and use of their rightful powers as members of the commonwealth. Lacking such independence, dependents cannot legislate on behalf of their own agency. Second, the relationship between citizenship and property, for Kant, does not have the educational, psychological or anti-corruption significance it has for Sieyès, for the French constitution of 1791 or for contemporary republican interpretations of Kantian citizenship. Rather, property is relevant only insofar as it gives citizens unsubjected discretion over the exercise of their rightful powers. By enjoying means to the exercise of their powers, including their productive powers, Kant’s interdependent citizens independently facilitate the conditions of their mutual independence. Third, Kant takes the empirical form of independence in the modern state to be independent commodity production.Footnote 9 That is, Kant’s citizen uses her productive powers to produce external means for others, without having to make her powers into their means. In depending only on the content of exchange relationships – what she produces with her own powers – each member of the commonwealth depends only on her own ‘ability, industry, and good fortune’ (TP, 8: 296). After introducing the interdependent independence reading in section 2, I defend each of these claims in sections 3, 4 and 5, respectively.
2. Citizenship and Selbständigkeit
This section offers a reconstruction of DR §46. It explains why, for Kant, the franchise follows independence and not vice versa, in the strong sense that dependence suffices to disenfranchise dependents in both fiduciary status relationships – e.g. the minor and the domestic servant – and non-fiduciary contractual relationships – e.g. the Indian blacksmith:
In a nutshell, Kant could not have thought that dependents should be disenfranchised, unless he thought that, in legislating, they would be making ‘arrangements about another’. Economically dependent citizens, for example, would be legislating not for themselves as citizens, but only for their bourgeois masters as citizens. The interpretative challenge consists in offering an account of civil self-sufficiency broad enough to explain why such dependence, according to Kant, implies potential wrongdoing (claim (5)) and why it suffices for disenfranchisement (claim (7)). The only interpretation that makes these inferences exegetically palatable, I will argue, is the interdependent independence interpretation of civil self-sufficiency (hereafter simply interdependent independence).Footnote 10 According to this interpretation, you enjoy civil self-sufficiency if and only if you enjoy unsubjected exercise of your rights and powers, including your productive powers,Footnote 11 as a member of the commonwealth. Interdependent independence sees legitimate public power as regulating the compossible choice sets of interdependent choosers who produce their own lives by independently exercising their commonwealth-conferred rights and (productive) powers. The rest of this section offers textual evidence for the reconstruction of DR §46 just provided.
I begin with important terminological issues. DR §46 calls the active citizen a ‘member’ (Glied), in contrast with the passive citizen, a mere ‘part’ (Teil) of the state. Kant also suggests that the choices of active citizens form a community (Gemeinschaft) and that the existence of passive citizens is ‘as it were, mere inherence’ (Inhärenz). These terms are explicitly connected in the critical philosophy. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant contrasts the reciprocal determination of ‘coordinated relations’ (as in members of a body) with the ‘subordinated’ relation of effect to cause. The former relation, unlike the latter, constitutes a community (Gemeinschaft) between ‘agent and patient’ (CPR, A80/B106). Inherence, on the other hand, is contrasted with subsistence, in that only subsistent entities – substances – have causal powers. It follows that only substances can partake of community: they are independent as substances but interdependent as reciprocally dependent on other substances.Footnote 12
Kant applies these categories explicitly to politics in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. In a footnote discussing the French Revolution, he applies the idea of organization to the ‘body politic’ and suggests that ‘in such a whole, each member (Glied) should certainly be not merely a means but at the same time an end … whose position and function should be determined by the idea of the whole’ (CPJ, 5: 375). On the present interpretation, political community is a form of reciprocal interdependence through a social division of labour, while the ‘body politic’ is the united will of independent ‘substances’, that is, of free and equal people in independent possession and use of their rightful powers. The criteria for voter-fitness, on this view, are entailed by three a priori premisses (claims 1, 2, 4). The first two (claims 1, 2) reflect Kant’s views of the appropriate object of legislation, namely the self-legislating will itself. Kant then identifies that will with free and equal people in independent possession and exercise of their rightful powers (claim 4). It follows that the domestic servant, the private tutor and the Indian blacksmith cannot legislate. For in legislating, they would not be self-legislating: their agency, as ‘inhering’ in the agency of others, is not part of the appropriate object of legislation. I now offer a unifying explanation for these assertions, based on the idea of interdependent independence.
3. The unifying explanation: interdependent independence
This section offers a unifying explanation for Kant’s disenfranchising exclusions. These exclusions are not, I will argue, about how citizens are disposed to vote, but rather about the nature of the object of universal legislation in the Kantian state. The idea is that only interdependent independents can, in legislating, self-legislate, that is, make arrangements about their own agency.
Suppose the European and the Indian blacksmith share a qualitatively identical productive power of working iron into hammers. Both produce, say, an equal output per hour out of equal inputs; both serve the commonwealth by making it richer by some hammers. Suppose, further, that both enjoy the same set of commonwealth-conferred legal rights to exercise these productive powers, in addition to the right to own iron. Kant implies that the Indian blacksmith owns no iron, such that, if she is to exercise her productive powers by working iron, she must ask permission from the iron owner(s).Footnote 13 The Indian blacksmith’s ironlessness thereby gives the iron owner(s) discretion over the exercise of the blacksmith’s productive powers – her ability to work iron into hammers. According to Kant, it follows that she lacks Selbständigkeit, since her labour process, and therefore the conditions of exercise of her commonwealth-conferred legal rights and powers, is de facto unilaterally controlled by others.Footnote 14 The Indian blacksmith is interdependent but not independent, which makes her into a mere part (Teil) of the commonwealth. Consider an analogy with musical production.
Suppose you control the musical instrument I need in order to perform as a member of the orchestra, such that that you can, by legal right, deprive me of it at will and at any time. It follows that I cannot exercise my music-making powers as an orchestra member by playing that instrument, except through your unilateral permission. That way my music-making, if realized at all, serves two masters: you and the orchestra. Kant’s objection to this predicament is not that my dependence on you might make me fearful, obsequious or servile in my music-making, inclined to pursue your ends as opposed to mine, and so on. These empirically contingent effects on my psychology are not at the centre of Kant’s democratic theory (which is why they are never mentioned).Footnote 15 Rather, the ground of my exclusion from orchestra membership just is the dependence of the realization of my music-making ends on your unilateral will: even if I were to perform, the exercise of my agency would only be permissionally conditional on yours. Such dependence, Kant thinks, alienates me from the exercise of my own agency, which disqualifies me from making arrangements about myself as music-maker, which disqualifies me from occupying the office of music-maker altogether.
Contrast the case where I or the orchestra itself control(s) my instrument. The orchestra has elaborate public rules meant to serve the goal of music-making: who can occupy the office of violinist, pianist and cellist, who can use the instruments under what conditions, and so on. Then, in setting the instrument as a means to the realization of my orchestra-conferred music-making powers, the exercise of these powers is subject to nothing but the end of music-making. I therefore no longer serve two masters and my agency is no longer alienated.Footnote 16 As an orchestra member, I am dependent on you, just as you are on me, for nothing but the mutual exercise of our orchestra-conferred musical powers, that is, for carrying out our respective parts in the division of musical labour. The orchestra’s powers are now only the musicians’ interdependent powers, independently exercised.
Kantian Selbständigkeit supports this analogy between orchestra and modern state.Footnote 17 Take the European blacksmith, who produces means that others need in order to set and pursue their ends as members of that state. By selling the hammers she makes in return for wigs, cloth or money, she exercises her productive power without having to ‘alienate’ it to others (TP, 8: 295). That way, she produces means that facilitate the unsubjected purposiveness of the wigmaker or the tailor, without making her own purposiveness – as opposed to its products – into their means. The European blacksmith thereby serves ‘no one other than the commonwealth’ (TP, 8: 295), the condition of her own interdependent independence. The Indian blacksmith, by contrast, serves two masters: the commonwealth and her employer(s). For to alienate your productive powers is to serve a (series of) private master(s), rather than the conditions of your own freedom. So, even if the Indian blacksmith were deemed fit to vote by dint of her independent-mindedness, she would still be bound to making her productive powers into the means of others.Footnote 18 By interdependent independence, she would thereby lack civil self-sufficiency and therefore the normative ability to legislate on behalf of her own productive agency. Crucially, the nature of this heteronomy is independent of the Indian blacksmith’s psychological dispositions or the contingent content of her material ends, as opposed to the form assumed by the exercise of her own powers as subject to the choices of others.Footnote 19
The orchestra analogy can explain why Kant’s democratic theory is at least mildly progressive for his time (Maliks Reference Maliks2014, Weinrib Reference Weinrib2008). Suppose that orchestra membership can be expanded in either of two ways: the orchestra itself provides more instruments to more musicians or more musicians bring their own instruments. Both arrangements allow for the free, unsubjected exercise of this extended membership’s music-making powers.Footnote 20 In a similar vein, Kant proposes to extend interdependent independence – and therefore the franchise – by extending public poverty relief to ‘those who are unable to maintain themselves’ (DR, 6: 326),Footnote 21 by enforcing the opportunity of anyone to ‘work his way up from his active condition into an active one’ (6: 315)Footnote 22 and by giving every active citizen an equal vote. This egalitarianism of voting shares is most explicit in Kant’s discussion of the estates. Having raised the question ‘how it came about that many human beings who could otherwise have acquired a lasting status of possession were thereby reduced merely to serving [the landowner] in order to be able to live’ (TP, 8: 296, my emphasis), Kant explains that enfranchisement should depend only on the ‘status of possession, not … the size of … possessions’. So possession matters because and insofar as it evinces independent use of one’s powers, including the ability to feed and protect oneself by right.Footnote 23 I will return to this in section 5.
To sum up the argument so far: according to interdependent independence, an active citizen is someone whose exercise of her commonwealth-conferred political powers is not subject to another (set of) agent(s), just like the independent musician is someone whose exercise of her orchestra-conferred musical powers is not subject to another (set of) agent(s). Kant’s schoolteacher and European blacksmith, for example, enjoy both (a) a set of commonwealth-conferred political powers and (b) unsubjected discretion over their conditions of exercise.Footnote 24 Kant’s private tutor and Indian blacksmith, by contrast, enjoy (a) but not (b): both must get permission to use their powers, which trivially entails that they lack discretion over their exercise. By interdependent independence, the private tutor and the Indian blacksmith lack civil self-sufficiency (claim (6)). This, Kant thinks, suffices to disenfranchise them (by claims (4) and (6)): only the interdependently independent can, in legislating, legislate on behalf of their own rightful powers.
Contemporary liberalism solves this problem by severing the link between franchise and independence, thereby enfranchising wage labour. But this move, which proceeds by denying the presupposition in claim (4), misunderstands the spirit of Kant’s argument. Kant wants to make interdependent independence – unsubjected exercise of one’s interdependent rightful powers – central to political life in the modern state. The rightful condition must therefore reflect more than free consent by juridical equals: this is what Selbständigkeit adds to the Freiheit-Gleichheit diptych. And this is also why the Indian blacksmith, lacking Selbständigkeit, cannot self-legislate: the way Kant sees it, her dependence means she would not be legislating on behalf of her own rightful powers, even if she had the right to vote.Footnote 25
I now argue that Selbständigkeit, read as interdependent independence, is the only consistent interpretation of Kantian citizenship. If I am right, then Kant’s omnilateral will does not just represent a republic of property owners united by state-enforced relations of property, contract and status.Footnote 26 For this is compatible with a republic of non-interdependent subsistence farmers. Rather, an omnilateral will represents a republic of free citizens enjoying all-round interdependence under conditions of independent use of their rightful powers – more port city than agrarian republic.
4. Against the republican interpretation
I have, so far, argued that Kant’s active citizens enjoy, in addition to freedom and equality, interdependent independence. This third attribute, Selbständigkeit, precludes alien unilateral control over the exercise of their rightful powers, including their productive powers. This section rebuts a broadly republican interpretation of Selbständigkeit.
Some philosophers take Kant’s disenfranchising exclusions to depend on an empirical claim from cognitive, volitional or motivational corruption. Luke Davies, for example, argues that, for Kant: ‘[T]hose who depend on private relations of authority for their survival are more likely to act in a way that advances the private interests of themselves or those on whom they depend when participating in lawgiving’ (Davies Reference Davies2021: 23). This corruption reading of Kant’s exclusions resonates with Claus Dierksmeier’s idea that ‘having sovereignty over your own business and household would educate you to participate adequately in the affairs of political government and sovereignty’ (Dierksmeier Reference Dierksmeier2002: 50). In a similar vein, Jacob Weinrib cautions against the ‘potentially particularizing’ nature of the will of dependent persons, who cannot, by dint of that dependence, ‘achieve the requisite level of impartiality to contribute to the general will’ (Reference Weinrib2008: 11). Sarah Holtman underlines the possibility of ‘fearful decisions of subordinates’ in response to power over them, which she contrasts to ‘the well-informed and skilful reasoning of those who comprehend and are committed to justice’ (Holtman Reference Holtman2004: 100). And Rafeeq Hasan argues that ‘Kant’s ostensible point about the passive citizen is that … he is likely to feel pressured into voting the interests of his boss’ (Hasan Reference Hasan2017: 922; emphasis added).
These broadly republican concerns are not Kant’s concerns: his account of civil self-sufficiency is not premised on a corruption reading. For one thing, Kant never mentions the psychological dispositions presupposed by such an idea. Furthermore, there is no reason to think that a disposition towards servility (Davies), partiality (Weinrib) or fearfulness (Holtman) will necessarily accompany the dependent.Footnote 27 Indeed, the self-sufficient might manifest these dispositions and to a greater extent. Finally, the corruption reading cannot explain why only dependents can wrong others. Consider the following entailments from the argument of section 2:
There is no textual evidence in Kant that (8) refers to the empirical dispositions of voters, just as he discusses no evidence that extending the franchise would make new voters fearful, obsequious or more likely to do other voters wrong. If anything, one would expect the opposite. The corruption reading therefore misunderstands the thrust of Kant’s position, which follows validly from certain a priori claims about the proper object of political legislation and the nature of political community (claims 1, 2, 4). There is, I conclude, no basis for the corruption reading in DR. Rather, as §46 makes clear from the outset, Kant is interested in the pure normative features that define independence and the accompanying non-psychological features of agents ‘as members of the commonwealth’.Footnote 28
Consider a further illuminating contrast. Kate Moran has recently traced the republican ideas underlying the corruption reading back to Sieyès and his discussion of the ‘lackeys of feudalism’ (Moran Reference Moran2021: 9). In that discussion, Sieyès offers an argument for why ‘women, children, and foreigners’ should only be accounted as passive citizens, namely that they ‘contribute nothing to the maintenance of the public establishment’.Footnote 29 Davies draws a suggestive parallel between this argument and a striking passage from Kant’s drafts:
The possessors of land are the genuine state subjects because they depend on the land for vitam sustinendo [sustenance of life]. To the extent, however, that they farm only as much as they need to live they are not citizens of the state. For they could not contribute to the commonwealth. Only possessors of great amounts of land who have many servants, who themselves as servants cannot be citizens, could be citizens, and yet they are citizens only to the extent that their surplus is purchased by others who, as free citizens, do not depend on the land. But one must first have citizens before one can have subjects of the state. Thus in regard to the commonwealth the pactum civile [civil contract] comes first, with the caveat that those whose existence depends on the will of another, thus those who do not enjoy a free existence, have no vote. (LDPP, 23: 137–8; translation amended)
Pace Davies,Footnote 30 this passage refutes the Sieyès reading. For Kant’s surplus-producing landowners can certainly contribute to taxation or to ‘the maintenance of the public establishment’. So, by Sieyès’ reading of ‘contribution’, these landowners should be enfranchised. Yet Kant disenfranchises them (‘and yet they are citizens only to the extent…’). Why? Because ‘contribution’, for Kant, means something more specific than it does for Sieyès, namely interdependent independence: participation in a division of labour among free and equal people with independent possession and use of their (productive) powers. How else are we to explain Kant’s argument that only those landowners who produce a surplus consumed by nonlandowners, namely, by those who ‘do not depend on the land’, can be citizens? Since Kant’s landowners do not partake of that interdependence, they are, just for that reason, disenfranchised.
Unlike the republican reading, interdependent independence illuminates both sets of contrasts implied by the LDPP passage. First, civil self-sufficiency contrasts with the non-civil self-sufficiency of the subsistence farmer and the surplus-producing landowner who only sells to other landowners.Footnote 31 Second, it contrasts with the civil non-self-sufficiency of servants and wage labourers. The first set enjoy independence, but are not interdependent, whereas the second set enjoy interdependence but are not independent. The European blacksmith, by contrast, enjoys both interdependence, by selling the product of the exercise of her powers in the market, and independence, by not having to make her productive powers into the means of others. She thereby acts from her ‘own [possibly productive] choice in [productive] community with others’ (DR, 6: 314).
Now, Kant’s early characterization of citizenship in the loose sheets is even more exclusionary than the published account in TP. But it is in keeping with his inclusive vision of the modern state as a system of interdependent independence, featuring cooperative production under a division of labour. That vision brings the contradictory status of the dependent producer – at once formally free and equal but substantively dependent – sharply into view.
I now explain why Selbständigkeit, read as interdependent independence, is exegetically superior to another, property-based interpretation of Kantian citizenship.
5. The mutual irrelevance between citizenship and property
Interdependent independence takes Kant’s concerns with property and propertylessness as wholly derivative of a more fundamental concern with the independent exercise of one’s rightful powers as a member of the commonwealth. It therefore contrasts with a proprietarian interpretation of civil self-sufficiency, according to which you enjoy civil self-sufficiency if and only if your making a living depends exclusively on the exercise of your rightful property in external things. The proprietarian interpretation has numerous exegetical advantages. It explains why the DR takes domestic servants, minors and women to lack self-sufficiency. It also explains Kant’s insistence, in TP, that property is the condition for citizenship (TP, 8: 295), as well as his belief that propertylessness – poverty – undermines self-sufficiency, which is why he argues for state-provided poverty relief (DR, 6: 326–7).Footnote 32 According to the proprietarian interpretation, the unsupported poor lack self-sufficiency because their making a living depends not on their own property, but on the property rights and associated powers of the propertied, including their benevolence and goodwill.Footnote 33
Despite these exegetical advantages, the proprietarian interpretation is inconsistent with Kant’s texts. The inconsistency arises in empirical examples of two kinds: (i) examples involving property but not civil self-sufficiency, (ii) examples involving self-sufficiency but not property. In respect of (i), consider wage labour. According to interdependent independence, wage labour undermines self-sufficiency by making the exercise of the worker’s productive powers dependent on the rights and powers of private employers – the owners of scarce productive assets – both for finding employment and for the exercise of these productive powers once in employment. Yet one can imagine a wage labourer whose income and wealth exceed those of Kant’s civil servant and craftsman, both of whom are deemed to be self-sufficient.Footnote 34 In cases like the wage labourer, the proprietarian interpretation generates false positives. In respect of (ii), consider cases of independent commodity production, in which each producer owns some, but not all, of the means of production she needs in order to set and pursue ends. Each can recover her purposiveness by selling to others the net product of the exercise of her unsubjected powers. In these kinds of cases, Kant allows for self-sufficiency without property, such that the proprietarian interpretation generates false negatives.
I now elaborate on these two kinds of cases, arguing for the exegetical superiority of interdependent independence over the proprietarian interpretation.
5.1 Property is insufficient for Selbständigkeit
I begin by defending two claims. First, Selbständigkeit as interdependent independence can account for all the empirical illustrations that the proprietarian interpretation can account for. Second, the proprietarian interpretation generates false positives, that is, deems as involving self-sufficiency cases that Kant deems as not involving self-sufficiency.Footnote 35 In a word, Kantian economic dependence is broader than poverty.
Consider again Kant’s contrast between the Indian and the European blacksmith. This seems to support the proprietarian interpretation. After all, the Indian blacksmith lacks property in productive assets. But the proprietarian interpretation fails to account for the contrast between private tutor and school teacher,Footnote 36 which says nothing about the private tutor’s extent of property rights or her wealth and income. If her services are in especially high demand, for example, she might accumulate more property than the school teacher. By Kant’s own lights, she still lacks self-sufficiency. The proprietarian interpretation deems the rich private tutor self-sufficient and therefore generates false positives. Unlike the proprietarian interpretation, interdependent independence can account for these contrasts. The Indian blacksmith, for example, lacks self-sufficiency because she cannot make a living by exercising her productive powers without asking permission from the owner(s) of the conditions of production. The absence of independence, for Kant, deprives her of the normative power to legislate on behalf of her own productive agency and therefore makes her unfit to vote. Similar considerations apply to the private tutor.
5.2 Property is unnecessary for Selbständigkeit
I now argue for two further claims. First, the proprietarian interpretation generates false negatives, that is, deems as not involving civil self-sufficiency cases that Kant deems as involving self-sufficiency. Second, interdependent independence offers a systematic explanation for why the latter set of cases involves self-sufficiency.
I begin with the first claim. Kant thinks that ‘being fit to vote’, serving ‘no one other than the commonwealth’ and ‘being [your] own master’ are extensionally equivalent. Giving others permission to use your powers, by contrast, is a form of servitude. He elaborates:
Someone who makes an opus can convey it to someone else by alienating it, just as if it were his property. But praestatio operae is not alienating something. A domestic servant, a shop clerk, a day laborer, or even a barber are merely operarii, not artifices (in the wider sense of the word) and not members of the state, and are thus also not qualified to be citizens. Although a man to whom I give my firewood to chop and a tailor to whom I give my cloth to make into clothes both seem to be in a quite similar relation to me, still the former differs from the latter, as a barber from a wigmaker (even if I have given him the hair for the wig) and hence as a day laborer from an artist or craftsman, who makes a work that belongs to him until he is paid for it. The latter, in pursuing his trade, thus exchanges his property with another (opus), the former, the use of his powers, which he grants to another (operam). (TP, 8: 295)
The relevant contrast, for my purposes, is that between barber and wigmaker: the former, Kant says, is relevantly like domestic servants, shop clerks and day labourers in that she must give others permission to use her powers. Not so in the case of the wigmaker, who can exercise her own powers independently of such use – she merely sells the product of that exercise. Crucially, Kant adds that the wigmaker enjoys such self-sufficiency ‘even if I have given him the hair for the wig’. By contrast, the proprietarian interpretation deems the wigmaker to lack self-sufficiency, because she does not own hair. So the proprietarian interpretation generates false negatives. This conclusion impugns Rafeeq Hasan’s proprietarian elaboration of the Indian blacksmith’s status. Hasan suggests that, unlike the Indian blacksmith, the European blacksmith:
owns not only his tools and his labor but also necessary raw materials. If he does not like the terms a particular customer offers and cannot find another buyer, he is still free to consume the product for himself, perhaps by decomposing it into its raw materials and selling those on the market, or trading his product for food. (Hasan Reference Hasan2017: 921)
The problem with this interpretation is that both wigmaker and Indian blacksmith lack raw materials (hair and iron, respectively). Yet, according to Kant, the former is her ‘own master’ and therefore self-sufficient.Footnote 37
Interdependent independence can account for these contrasts. What matters for interdependent independence is not the origin of the subjection of the Indian blacksmith’s labour – which could be structurally conferred propertylessness, à la Hasan – but only the fact that her setting and pursuing the end of iron production depends upon giving others permission to use her productive powers to bring about that end. As I understand him, Kant is saying that the concern with propertylessness is derivative of a more fundamental concern with the independent (although possibly joint) exercise of human productive powers, a proper subset of our powers as members of the commonwealth. Just like an orchestra of independent musicians, where each exercises her share of musical powers unsubjected to alien control, so under legitimate public power each commonwealth member exercises her share of productive powers unsubjected to alien control.Footnote 38 This makes her into an organic member of the commonwealth, acting ‘in [productive] community with others’.
So how is the hairless wigmaker self-sufficient and the ironless blacksmith not self-sufficient? By interdependent independence, you enjoy self-sufficiency if your (structurally conferred) social position in the economy allows you to exercise your productive powers without having to give others permission to use them. It is therefore possible that the wigmaker borrows hair from a merchant, which she uses to produce wigs, which she sells back to the merchant.Footnote 39 By contrast, if iron is very scarce or monopolized, then the blacksmith will not receive iron from a merchant in return for hammers. Instead, she will have to work for the iron owner(s).Footnote 40 This is how Kant can consistently hold that the wigmaker empirically enjoys self-sufficiency, whereas the Indian blacksmith – who, by dint of inadequate access to capital, must alienate her powers – lacks it.Footnote 41
If this interpretation is correct, then one need not own all of one’s production inputs to enjoy interdependent independence. Rather, the question seems to be whether, in general economic equilibrium, any one agent unilaterally controls the labour process of any other(s). In a commodity economy of independent producers without a high concentration of labour-commanding pecuniary wealth, as was prevalent in Kant’s time, even the hairless wigmaker can preserve her Kantian independence. The empirical form of interdependent independence, Kant thinks, is independent commodity production. Contrast a capitalist economy, in which the concentration of labour-commanding wealth guarantees that some – the owners of that wealth – will unilaterally subsume the productive purposiveness of others.Footnote 42 According to Kant, this economy undermines the normative ability of the latter to legislate on behalf of their own agency, and therefore their fitness to vote.
The empirical forms of interdependent independence are, of course, peripheral to Kant’s main project in DR, which is to justify externally coercive laws by appeal to an independent premiss about the conditions of citizenship. But the contrasts he draws between empirical cases ostensibly illustrating these conditions can only be coherently explained by appeal to interdependent independence: unsubjected discretion over one’s rights and powers, including one’s productive powers. Omnilateral rule, on this view, is constituted by free and equal citizens legislating on behalf of the independent possession and exercise of their rightful powers.Footnote 43 Kant’s account of citizenship, in other words, presupposes Selbständigkeit as interdependent independence.
Interdependent independence is therefore the only consistent interpretation of Kant’s discussion of the ideal and empirical forms of citizenship. Now, Kant was not and could not have been an anti-capitalist: like Sieyès, his main concern was to eradicate the juridical vestiges of feudalism. But Kant went further than Sieyès, by thinking of the modern state as an organism whose members are agents possessed of rightful (productive) powers, and whose interdependent mode of exercise independently of unilateral permission matters for right. Selbständigkeit, read as interdependent independence, explains how this enfranchisement of human production might work as part of Kant’s broader theory of justice. Its application to the modern capitalist state, moreover, helps unearth an important tension at its foundations:
Kant would acknowledge that the empirical conditions within the State prevent the freedom envisaged by the idea of the State from being realized. The formal equality of each person within civil society is empirically contradicted by his actual economic and social dependence on other persons. (Williams Reference Williams1983: 180–1)
According to interdependent independence, this ‘contradiction’ is entailed by Kant’s understanding of the proper object of universal legislation in the modern state. Most theories of citizenship since Kant have had to grapple, implicitly or explicitly, with this problem.
6. Conclusion
Kant thinks that public power enjoys legitimacy only insofar as it legislates on behalf of free, equal and interdependently independent citizens. It follows that a public power legislating on behalf of economically dependent citizens would lack legitimacy. This is why Kant – eager to preserve the legitimacy of public power but under no illusions about the pervasiveness of dependence – is wont to disenfranchise the dependent. But Kant’s obsolete distinction between active and passive citizens has a singular virtue: unlike contemporary Kantian defences of the liberal capitalist state, fidelity to Kant’s own position need not pretend that the denizens of such a state can all be independent. For all its emphasis on inclusion, liberal capitalism presupposes that some of its co-legislators must remain dependent on the unilateral will of some ruling class – whether private owners of productive assets or unelected bosses and managers of these assets. In other words, the liberal capitalist state purchases inclusion at the cost of illegitimacy. The revolutionary implication is not to preserve the letter of Kant’s argument through an indefensible exclusion of passive citizens. Rather, it consists in preserving the spirit of Kant’s argument by guaranteeing all citizens independent use of their interdependent rightful powers.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Micha Gläser, Rafeeq Hasan, Benjamin Hofmann, AJ Julius, Pauline Kleingeld, George Pavlakos, Allen Wood and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, as well as audiences in Groningen, London, Patras and Rotterdam for helpful discussion.
Open access
