GOVT2112 Lecture 11: WK 11 Kant
23 Dec 2018
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Document Summary
Kant was writing in the kingdom of prussia which was committed to modernisation but in a very top-down authoritarian manner in which public criticism was not readily accepted. He argued that the series of intellectual movements known as the enlightenment that had transformed modern intellectual life implied that individuals needed to be able to speak up critically if they were to play a useful role. Enlightenment" was a kind of individual and political maturity. This progressive view also lead kant to argue that in the long term history would develop towards a federation of self-governing (republican) states that would no longer go to war with one another. This was a development that he regarded as necessary given the forces at work. This kind of teleological" thinking about history as a process with a definite end state would be very influential on both hegel and marx and inspired much of twentieth century ideology on both.
