2. The case of domestic servants in Kant’s theory of labour relations: the household as a source of social domination

Kant’s account of the lawful hiring of domestic servants implies a legal legitimation of social subalternity. Even if throughout history domestic service has been a helpful professional goal for the maintenance of large groups of population, the very fact that domestic servants always occupied lower social class positions than their employers confirms that such a labour bond entails some sort of domination of worst-off classes by others relatively more well-off.Footnote ⁸ As is well known, Kant’s republicanism is intended to oppose any form of social and political domination. Thus, a refined awareness of the forms of such domination should help to update the transformative aims of his political theory. Moreover, his account of the household showcases it as a ‘society of unequals’ (RL, 6: 283), where the head of the household commands, his wife eventually ‘dominates’ the domestic economy (Anth, 6: 306-11), insofar as she tends to spend money on luxury goods – characterizing the lifestyle of a privileged social class – and their domestic servants simply do what they are told (Pascoe Reference Pascoe2015: 345-6 and Reference Pascoe2017: 603-4).

The extensive research which has been done on the intertwinement of feudalism and capitalism in the rise of domestic employment in Enlightenment-era Prussia should have a deep impact on the philosophical interpretation of Kant’s account of the type of work that the welfare of the household motivates. His suggestions for improving the work conditions of domestic servants seem to reflect awareness that the landed nobility in Prussia – the Prussian Junkers – had enslaved their domestic servants as part of a primarily agrarian economy and thus that the peasant workforce needed legal protection (Pascoe Reference Pascoe2024a).Footnote ⁹ Moreover, Kant attempts to put an end to this abuse through the legal innovation of the ‘rights to persons akin to right to things’, as it endeavours to stop the blatant breach of human dignity that results from the lack of legal protection regarding such essential workers. In fact, they were considered part of the Junker’s property and faced countless difficulties in obtaining their freedom, including the payment of large amounts of money.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet this protective attitude did not call into question the oppression that domestic labour meant for Prussian servants, and Kant’s efforts to furnish a legal refuge for especially vulnerable working people, such as the potential domestic servants of affluent families in both rural and urban areas, did not help them to become emancipated from their employers’ domination. As mentioned, de facto the combination of history and anthropology sheds some light on the development of this type of labour exploitation. In this vein, it should be noted that Kant’s legal criticism of colonialism, in either Perpetual Peace or the Doctrine of Right, did not carry a condemnation of its concrete manifestation in the extended use of racialized people as domestic servants in 18^th-century Europe. Moreover, Kant’s criticism of labour abuses generally applies to the inhuman exploitation of indigenous people in the colonies, but not on the European continent, even if the Old World tolerated overt human abuses in spheres of work.

Aristocratic and bourgeois households give rise in the Doctrine of Right to a theory of contracts governing domestic labour, which motivates a sort of innovation of private, acquired right which is embodied in ‘the right to a person akin to the right to a thing’ (RL §22, 6: 276). This type of labour contract extends to household servants, whom the contract binds to ‘do whatever is permissible for the welfare of the household’ (RL, 6: 360-1), a revealing formula for the demanding caregiving that the worker is expected to provide to the members of the family under the authority of the head of the household.Footnote ¹¹ Thus, ideal theory appears helpless to counteract the effects of classist and racist cultural biases, for neither does right remove the structures of domination ensuing from social prejudices, nor can the doctrine of virtue claim any capacity of coercion to substantially change the relationships of dependency that impede the entry of some individuals into the civil space as equal to others. However, it is interesting to note that Kant views the contracts governing domestic labour as ‘a strange type of right which has recently been added to the doctrine of natural law, although it has always been tacitly in use’ (6: 361). By adding this nuance, he attempts to conceptualize practices that were widespread in the society of his time (Pascoe Reference Pascoe2024a). Thus, Kant’s aim seems to have focused on the legal protection of domestic servants from the abuses committed throughout Western cultural history. Hereby, Kant attempts to reframe the historical status of slave for protecting the servant from work abuse.

Nevertheless, signing a contract to provide someone 24/7 care for a specified period of time sounds in itself like a legal authorization of abusive work schedules.Footnote ¹² Moreover, caregiving and reproductive tasks are distinguished from other dependent jobs by the fact that the labour is not limited to a specific temporal span. Thus, Kant considers that the domestic servant has to live with her employer to better perform her job. But thereby, he carves out a conceptual puzzle that aims to supersede a deep-rooted form of domination burdening the most vulnerable subjects of society with caregiving and reproductive tasks by means of an allegedly legal agreement that binds a human being to care for others without an established timetable and with an unlimited delivery of energy. Thus, while Kant sees that this sort of labour underpins the civil order as a material condition, he does not consider that a republican state should distribute the burden of human basic needs equally, as in our times ideas such as that of ‘mandatory public service’ (Satz Reference Satz and Baggini2022) suggest. Indeed, one might affirm that an updated form of slavery has replaced an outdated one, insofar as §30 of the Doctrine of Right pledges that the master of these domestic servants should not behave as if he owned them, as dominus servi (6: 283), while at the same time allowing him to ‘bring them back in his control by his unilateral choice’ (ibid.) if they should run away. While Kant recognizes that renouncing one’s own ‘freedom for the other’s advantage would be self-contradictory’, he stresses the fact that the domestic employer retains his servants ‘for an unspecified time’ (ibid.), albeit not for life, as was the case of slaveowners in Europe and in the colonies. Yet the difference between the unspecified time that domestic servants were hired to serve according to the law and lifelong slavery was quite blurred in 18^th-century Prussian society, which conflated the mentioned traits of both feudalism and capitalism. In a clarifying Appendix, written in response to Friedrich Bouterwek’s review of the Doctrine of Right, Kant offers the following account of the legal bond between the head of a household and his domestic servants:

It must be mentioned that Kant himself worked for some years as a private tutor for affluent families in Prussia, a task related to the caregiving that domestic servants provided to those households. It is worth examining the extent to which the dynamics of government rooted in the households of the 18^th and 19^th centuries vanished as workplaces such as factories and workshops became predominant. Yet, as the workplace democracy theorist Elizabeth Anderson affirms, the expected emancipation of workers from household exploitation did not entail a transformation of the workplace. On the contrary, the demands of the great dedication and availability required from domestic servants in Kant’s time were to spread to other supposedly ‘productive’ sectors such as the contemporary service industry and the more precarious gig economy in our own time, blurring the boundaries between private and professional space. What is more, the emerging Fordist post-Kantian work culture would confirm that ‘industrial employers retained their legal entitlement to govern their employees’ domestic lives’ (Anderson Reference Anderson2017: 49), often displaying an exorbitant amount of control over the private lives of labourers. Such an evolution indicates that, far from banning forms of domination linked to domestic service in the workplace, the contemporary labour framework has eagerly adopted patterns of exploitation from the past, importing forms of domination of domestic work into factory and managerial work (Williams Reference Williams2024: 12).

As this section has highlighted, Kant considers the legal recognition of domestic servants a great step forward in recognizing their rights as labourers and thus protecting them from the capricious decisions of their masters. Some of his contemporaries, such as the forerunner of feminism, the British philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, would make more emotional claims regarding the harsh living conditions of European servants, which share with Kant the assumption that domestic servants fulfil essential tasks for guaranteeing household reproduction. Wollstonecraft simply recommends trusting in the force of love to improve the quality of life for these labourers:

This excerpt allows us to grasp the ideological patterns that led 18^th-century thinkers to view the household as a closed and settled entity, without challenging the unfair structures that might explain the unequal positions of employers and employees in the domestic realm. Nonetheless, Kant had the insight to realize that domestic labour is an activity worthy of legal shelter, one which puts limits on the abuse of servants, as he understands that the rule of law always provides more reliable outcomes than mere good intentions for promoting their happiness. Such an account, however, does not take issue with the injustices undergirding the hierarchical composition of the household that Kant views as the primary unit of economic life (Brosch Reference Brosch2024).

3. Domestic work, gender, race, and social class: the outsourcing of care in the 18^th century

The private right governing the domestic sphere appears in Kant’s legal philosophy as an attempt to improve the working conditions of the usually undervalued reproductive and care workers, which he considers as a feature of daily life that wealthy families should be able to outsource. Thus, male or female servants coming from the peasantry – a source of domestic service more usual in 18^th-century Prussia than in the colonies – could take the place of a wealthy woman in performing the care tasks attributed to her gender. In any case, someone in the social sphere had to take charge of caregiving and thus a dark and silent condition with regard to human autonomy resulted, counterbalancing the allegedly universal emancipatory aims of Kant’s notion of republican order.

Nancy Fraser has described in a recent essay the tensions and contradictions spawned by capitalism throughout its historical evolution in terms of social reproduction.Footnote ¹⁴ She denounces the global subalternity of work triggered by the privatization of care tasksFootnote ¹⁵ in a passage that suggests we have not experienced much progress in this matter since Kant’s time:

It is a matter of fact that when caregiving and reproductive tasks wane as a public issue, they become a burden that socially privileged subjects hand over to more vulnerable ones. I also agree with Pascoe’s view that reproductive labour was a hidden flipside of the republican goal of citizenship, since ‘the patterns of outsourcing domestic labour force us to consider how intersecting forms of oppression organize [the] right to “work one’s way up”’ (Pascoe Reference Pascoe2022: 61). The fact that the theory of right should include a special right to protect domestic servants from abuse by the head of the household confirms that Kant assumes their social contribution to be completely necessary. This is also shown by the fact that in Kant’s view the women of wealthy families can avoid care tasks by hiring external servants by virtue of their class privileges. In contrast to this ‘emancipatory path’, one only accessible to well-off women, a clear division of work by gender is displayed in the rest of society, where women in poor households assume all the care and domestic tasks while men engage in agricultural work, for example, outside the home. In slightly different terms, as no active citizen can disregard this feature of life, household servants appear in Kant’s legal and political writings as key supporters of the welfare of ‘active citizens’, i.e. as surrogates for the domestic labour expected from the wives of affluent ‘lords of the household’.Footnote ¹⁶ Thus, a systematically structured theory of the republican order opens the door to a legally authorized social domination and labour exploitation.

As Pascoe (Reference Pascoe2022) has attentively examined, opening a trailblazing avenue of research in Kantian studies, some of Kant’s lectures on anthropology yield telling examples of natural passive subjects, as were women in the ethical and civil order of the 18^th century, whose wealth enabled them to surrogate to others the tasks assigned to them by gender.Footnote ¹⁷ In other words, economic power would be a boon for the wives of wealthy husbands, based on what was seen as a natural subalternity. As Kant’s writings on anthropology hint, wealthy Europeans outsourced to hired workers the tasks that would normally fall to the women of the household due to their gender. Thus, Kant’s Drafts for the Metaphysics of Morals claim that women are the natural providers of the domestic labour required to maintain the household, unless the woman has a wealthy husband and ‘can make use of others for this purpose’ and not be ‘troubled to assist with matters of domestic well-being’ (VAMS, 20: 465). Kant comes to praise as a symptom of civil progress the fact that human mothers might overcome their natural attachment to their children and outsource the tasks of breeding and nurturing so as to dedicate themselves to activities governed not by natural drives, but by reason:

This passage from the anthropology lecture Friedländer shows an incredible timeliness. It describes a caregiving and even breeding outsourcing affordable for well-off women that may back the contemporary feminist denouncement – as we saw in Fraser in the previous section – of the ongoing exploitation of racialized women from the Global South to perform tasks that women from the Global North sought to outsource for more free time. The fact that Kant views the trend in French high society of outsourcing these female matters – including the upbringing of children – as a case of superseding blind drives by way of rational purposes reveals some key features in his understanding of how the social realm is constructed.Footnote ¹⁸ In effect, the type of child-rearing he refers to pertains to a patriarchal image of the sexual division of work, which invests the husband with the duty of sustaining his one-earner household and the woman with the right to flaunt the patrimony and properties amassed by her husband:

In accordance with the ethical order ruling marriage and the foundation of a household, Kant assigns a sort of emotional domination to the wife, while the husband remains the only authorized ruler of the domestic space, even if he is pragmatically urged to disguise his ethical and epistemic superiority so as not to arouse any resentment in his wife. Kant claims a sexual division of domination, insofar as women display it not head-on, but indirectly, through sexual attraction – the advantage of charm – that they produce in the ‘male sex’. Such an account of the alleged reciprocity of the sexes in the household conceals a patriarchal sexist domination, as women are meant only to yearn to dominate their men at the level of inclination (Anth, 6: 283), and not of judgement and reason.

Two observations can be made here: first, that Kant’s anthropological remarks are focused on a particular model of the family, selecting the bourgeois domestic tradition as the standard form of household; and second, that he views the role played by women in such a household as one influenced by whimsical emotions.Footnote ¹⁹ This standpoint, therefore, does not offer a universal view of domestic lifestyles and biases women’s history according to religious and intellectual prejudices. In effect, the material conditions of bourgeois domestic welfare conceal the exploitation of the people needed to sustain the one-earner household, breaching the universal respect for every human being that Kant’s ethics claim as a key commandment. Indeed, his interpreters have been too prone to view the social violence entailed by dependent work as being forestalled by the moral authority of the commandment to treat every human being as sacred simply for the sake of his or her humanity. Yet, apart from condemning the platforms of exploitation that European colonialism promoted in the modern era, Kant does not correctly gauge the damaging consequences of subaltern jobs for the subjects performing them. In this context, the so-called peaceful bourgeois household may in fact present a character of risk for the human and civil development of other social layers. The following passage, also taken from the previously quoted lecture on anthropology, gives a sketch of this biased image of the roles gender and sex play in the domestic space:

As the text suggests, the women of wealthy households are wont to display the estate accrued by their husbands as ‘decoration, amusement and sociability’, an attitude that often leads to excess and irresponsibility. Meanwhile, the head of the household is urged to water down the content of his words so as not to appear despotic and thus arouse the outrage of his wife.Footnote ²⁰ The reader might infer that Kant is painting a picture of the emotional bonds and rituals that shaped domestic life in 18^th-century Prussia, one similar to the oppressive landscapes for women detailed in the novels of Jane Austen. Such an account of gender denies women the power of understanding by attributing to them an irrepressible tendency to dominate that seems to be socially embedded, as only upper-class women are expected to adopt such an attitude towards their role in the household. In contrast, working-class women are not viewed as having developed all of their capacities and potential, and Kant seems to view them as ‘domestic animals’, which he considers to be the status of women in ‘barbarous’ societies (ApH, 7: 304). Yet no rejoinder or criticism of such a picture of the domestic order is raised in the pages of the Lectures on Anthropology or in the published course, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Standpoint (1798), which invites the consideration that Kant is focusing on an image of the household that he views as a civilized and universal pattern, one that should inspire imitation among the underdeveloped social classes and allegedly savage peoples. Yet, if lower-class and racialized people would stop performing the caregiving and nurturing tasks necessary to undergird the social reproduction of wealthy one-earner households, Kant’s social and economic order would collapse. Therefore, according to Kant’s account of social dependence, domestic workers who safeguard the welfare of affluent families could not become independent and hire their own domestic servants without, on account of an obvious economic inequality, weakening the civil framework.

4. Kant’s theory of domestic labour from a non-ideal standpoint: a contemporary account

The previous sections of this article explored Kant’s theory of domestic labour as a considerable historical source of the intertwinement of labour performance, gender, race, social class, and civil status in Western modern philosophy. In my view, Kant’s account of labour as a key activity for the social condition of the human being might thereby help to shed light on the regrettable vestiges of oppressive labour relations typical of the past that still exist in the contemporary labour market (Anderson Reference Anderson2017: 48-61). Indeed, the assumption that the market distinguishes between waged labour and undervalued labour has largely triggered social suffering throughout history. As Anderson formulates it, this vision of the labour market seems to suffer from a sort of ‘hemiagnosia’:

An overly ideal account of labour relations in the capitalist market ignores the inequality and domination that workers may suffer at the hands of their employers. It should also be noted that even 19^th-century socialist workers’ movements did not sufficiently stress the racial and gender injustice that labour oppression entails. Thus, these blind spots underpinning Kant’s notion of republican justice only reinforce the claim that the state should not upgrade the dependent labourer to the same status as the independent labourer, at least unless he finally falls into the condition of beggar, which becomes only a source of concern for Kant in the case of extreme poverty (RL 6: 326). Moreover, Kant’s civil order seems to assume a ‘domination contract’Footnote ²¹ (Pateman and Mills Reference Pateman and Mills2007: 87) that condemns some social groups – 18^th-century domestic servants and dependent workers – to subalternity, disregarding this stain on the making of the modern European state.Footnote ²² In my view, this acceptance of the labour precarity afflicting some social groups helps us also to understand Kant’s reluctance to relieve economic inequality (Sánchez Madrid Reference Sánchez Madrid, Krasnoff, Satne and Sánchez Madrid2018 and Reference Sánchez Madrid2019). In other words, while Kant acknowledges that the economic order and social reproduction must depend on subaltern labour to meet the reproductive and caregiving needs of the commonwealth, he does not provide for civil recognition of the corresponding network of tasks that involve structural domination and a priori exclusion from an active role in the civil community. Kant recognizes that dependent workers perform a crucial task for sustaining households, institutions, and states, yet he does not point out the political consequences of the structural inequality that his account authorizes, nor does he note that racialized human beings, and others of the most vulnerable of Europe’s social agents, are the usual targets of labour exploitation by colonial European countries.

Naturally, this view makes Kant’s theory of republicanism incompatible with a democratic account of social reproduction. However, the non-ideal traits of this account of the republican order do at least indicate the political agenda needed to gear up a civil equality without concessions. In this sense, an interpreter committed to revealing the ideological burden of Kant’s political philosophy such as Basevich claims that public power ought to guarantee the ‘background structural conditions of civic equality’ (Basevich Reference Basevich2022: 12; see also Vrousalis Reference Vrousalis2019). In a nutshell, she urges an updating of Kant’s theory of republican citizenship, which would require a profound transformation of, for example, property, housing, and welfare rights. She has also argued for a critical review of the classic emblems of republicanism – freedom, equality, and self-sufficiency – aware of the institutional transformation that Kant’s ideals might inspire for undertaking a democratic transformation of republican normativity in today’s society as well:

I move from this suggestive excerpt to recall the fact that racialized human beings have traditionally dealt with the caregiving and survival needs of their own families by becoming dependent workers who provided care for others, often the children of wealthy families.Footnote ²³ Put differently, the legitimation of domestic servants in private right entails key consequences at the level of public right, as they cannot claim a right to active citizenship, and also at the level of cosmopolitan right, as many of the domestic servants in Kant’s time stemmed from colonial trade. History thus reveals the structures of domination that enabled the daily maintenance of the bourgeois civil order, exposing the ‘original accumulation’ that caused the caregiving needs of the more privileged social layers to be seen as more valuable than the social reproduction of ‘the rabble’. Naturally, an ideology of domination stealthily favours this shift, assigning disparate cultural and civil values to the independent and dependent members of a society. In this way, ideology conceals the challenges that republican normativity should actually face in order to achieve its goals. Fraser has steadily stressed the mistake of considering waged work as the central element of economic and social dynamics, as it is only the iceberg activity of a realm that encompasses many other generally unpaid tasks:

Considering the central role that social reproduction plays in human history, a fruitful reading of Kant’s writings on labour and citizenship might urge a redressing of the structures governing the bonds between men and women, household owners and domestic servants, wealthy women and racialized servants, so as to bring the social community into accordance with the commitments of innate right and civil republican principles as universal goals. If the interpreter considers Kant’s description of the economic and social inequality in his time as prejudices that do not impair the core of ideal political normativity, there is a risk of agreeing with the unfair social structures that burden certain groups with common reproductive tasks. The fact that a scholarly hermeneutic of the legacy of a classical thinker does not address the non-ideal features of his ideas and doctrines, thus concealing the ideological frameworks that bias an understanding of justice, citizenship, and political participation, hinges on the same shortcoming. A reading from the perspective of contemporary social philosophy would instead question Kant’s assumption that peasants and racialized human beings should always be at the disposal of wealthy households, and denounce the fact that such an account dooms human groups to the renunciation of full civil membership. Indeed, as life is seen in the central position it has within social reproduction, a radical revolution in labour recognition follows. Moreover, tasks related to caregiving and nurturing become essential, as we were all able to confirm during the COVID-19 crisis, highlighting the domination scheme which underpins non-democratic workspaces.

It is obvious that Kant did not understand the civil order as a horizontal space. Yet, as some interpreters have suggested (Vrousalis Reference Vrousalis2019 and Reference Vrousalis2022), the ideal of self-sufficiency as a universal condition should encourage a deep transformation of labour relations in order to promote dependent workers to the status of civil independence and enable them to reject inhuman and degrading jobs. In this context, contemporary measures such as a universal basic income (Pinzani Reference Pinzani2023 and Sticker Reference Sticker2024) may be helpful for further developing a social agenda that Kant’s notion of state tends to consider as paternalistic and intrusive with regard to the private affairs of citizens. In my view, contemporary social science and social philosophy have much to say for separating Kant’s ideal political normativity from the non-ideal features attaching to it, which still burden the construction of a democratic society, one which is aware of the structural injustices it harbours in the workplace and beyond.

Even if Kant’s account of labour offers a historically contextualized landscape of hierarchies, interpreters should value the fact that he chose to put labour at the centre of his theory of private right, viewing it as a condition for accessing full citizenship. As the social philosopher Axel Honneth pointed out in his last book, Kant may not have satisfactorily addressed our own contemporary challenges regarding work, as our time was not his;Footnote ²⁵ yet he contributed decisively to the idea that due appreciation of labour relations will lessen abuse in the same way that understanding of public right casts light on the area of private right. Despite the cultural distance that separates us from this classical German thinker, a democratic fulfilment of labour relations should indeed be considered a regulative ideal of republican freedom. Thus, underscoring the non-ideal features of the Kantian political ideal may serve to promote the universal achievement of full citizenship rights, rather than its being relegated to a matter for censure targeting past philosophers who, after all, did not share our own social and political experiences.

5. Reevaluating Kant’s republican order: the civil recognition of domestic labour

I have addressed some of the non-ideal features embedded in Kant’s citizenship requirements which help to perpetuate the traditional social domination of vulnerable workers, especially racialized subjects, women, and peasants. I also considered that Kant intends to establish a sort of legal shelter for domestic servants with the concept of rights to persons being akin to rights to things, thus condemning labour bondage, albeit nonetheless legitimating outsourced social reproduction tasks carried out by household servants, often racialized subjects and peasants, as guarantors of the daily life of affluent families. In my view, this neglected flipside of German Enlightenment republicanism overlooks the traditionally despised and unrecognized work upon which the material conditions of social reproduction depend. Yet modern social philosophy opens up a hopeful path for reevaluating Kant’s republican order, giving it assistance toward effectively materializing the principles of an inclusive theory of citizenship. In other words, I claim that Kant’s normative legal and political theory might well inspire another account of social domination that does not match Kant’s own liberal approach to social relations, which he often assumed to be the product of empirical causes from which no a priori or metaphysical recourse could be available.Footnote ²⁶

The conceptual framework that Kant establishes to shed light on the legal bonds underpinning private labour relations (Pascoe Reference Pascoe2017: 601-3) – private property, labour contracts, and domestic labour – leads to deficiency in the social and civil recognition of domestic labour,Footnote ²⁷ as well as concealing the unequal status of employers and employees in the labour market (Williams Reference Williams2024: 11-12). Kant’s approach to private right viewed the household as a substantial instance of the commonwealth, which merely fulfils its essential purpose through the maintenance of vertical bonds between the head of the household and the dependent agents composing this unequal community – wife, children, and domestic servants – and which entails an unequal distribution of the burden of caregiving and domestic work. As this article has attempted to show, Kant’s theory of republicanism retains a meaningful emancipatory potential, capable of providing due support to claims of civil self-sufficiency for all the members of the commonwealth. Yet such a goal requires substantial reconsideration of the social meaning of labour, one able to grasp that being charged with caregiving and related domestic tasks should not jeopardize the active civil membership of the workers in question. Thus, granting civil recognition to the social reproduction of life might inspire Kant-inspired public policies intended to relieve the exclusion of vulnerable social groups from the promise of lawful freedom and civil rights. To draw such a conclusion from a contemporary reading of Kant’s legal philosophy should not, however, entail a paternalistic agenda, which Kant openly condemned. On the contrary, it would help to view the goal of guaranteeing the welfare of the commonwealth as a shared universal end, whose fulfilment should not exclude any ethnic, social, or gender group from partaking in political lawgiving.Footnote ²⁸ Naturally, such a standpoint deeply transforms some features of Kant’s account of the ties between private and public right, but with the aim of attuning his legal and political views to the demands of a democratic society.