Kant's Libertarianism and Its Aftermath: Rereading The Conflict of the Faculties, Rethinking Hegel, Arendt, and Haberma

Though Immanuel Kant has traditionally been read as an Enlightenment libertarian, most commentators have not counted him among the political radicals of the Enlightenment era. In this dissertation, I propose and defend an original reading of Kant's late treatise Der Streit der Fakultaten (The Conflict of the Faculties) which aims to show that he should in fact count among the radical libertarians of the Enlightenment era whose conception of libertarianism have clear socialist implications. I then propose to use the form of The Conflict of the Faculties as I reconstruct it to interrogate the ethical-political thought of three very different post-Kantians, namely, G. W. F. Hegel, Hannah Arendt, and Jurgen Habermas.;Chapter 1 lays out the object, scope, method, and normative standpoint of the study. Here I propose that we read Kant's The Conflict of the Faculties as a systematically connected exposition of what I call his metapolitics. This is a term that I introduce to characterize the difference between a major treatise on politics such as Kant's Rechtslehre (Doctrine of Right) and a minor one such as The Conflict of the Faculties. I define a metapolitical doctrine as that part of a philosophical system which treats of questions left unaddressed by the major political treatise. There are three such questions: (i) What are the rights and obligations of philosophy in the political public sphere (what I call the intellectual-political conflict of the faculties)? (ii) What are the methodological rights of philosophy to intervene in domains of knowledge considered to be the exclusive property of neighboring humanistic disciplines that happen to also play an ideological function in the service of the state (what I call the methodological-political conflict of the faculties)? And (iii) What are the ultimate moral ends of political life and why (what I call the ethical-political conflict of the faculties)? Taken together, answers to these three questions constitute what I call a philosopher's metapolitics or metapolitical doctrine. I contend here that in addition to being a fruitful way to inquire into the politics of the thinkers under study in this dissertation, this may also be a productive avenue of systematic inquiry into the politics of other philosophers, belonging to different historical epochs and traditions. Chapter 1 concludes with a normative defense of libertarian socialism as the most appropriate metapolitical doctrine.;In Chapter 2 the dissertation reconstructs Kant's metapolitics by way of recovering his answers to the three conflicts of the faculties and then goes on to assess it. Kant's metapolitics consists of three pillars: (i) institutionalized rational dissent (his answer to the intellectual-political conflict), (ii) a principled defense of the rights of practical philosophy (his answer to the methodological-political conflict), and (iii) libertarian republicanism (his answer to the ethical-political conflict). Chapters 3, 4, and 5 of the dissertation reconstruct the answers to the same set of three questions of Hegel, Arendt and Habermas, respectively. I find that Hegel's answer to the three conflicts of the faculties are (i) Staatsphilosophie (state philosophy) (his answer to the first conflict), (ii) a defense of the rights of speculative philosophy (his answer to the second conflict), and (iii) technocratic corporatism (his answer to the third conflict). Arendt's metapolitical triad in turn consists of (i) men of letters' anticonformism (her answer to the first conflict); (ii) a defense of the rights of political theory (her answer the second conflict); and (iii) the aristocratic council system (her answer to the third conflict). Finally, Habermas's metapolitical triad is based on the following three pillars: (i) universal public intellectualism (his answer to the first conflict); (ii) critical social science and postmetaphyiscal philosophy (his answers to the second conflict); and (iii) deliberative democracy (his answer to the third conflict). In each case, after the exposition of the answers, I provide a critical assessment of each of the metapolitical doctrines that they constitute. I find that Kant's metapolitical doctrine is the closest to the libertarian-socialist metapolitics I defend in Chapter 1, whereas Hegel's is directly opposed to it.;The metapolitics of Arendt and Habermas are more complicated. I find that early Habermas was the closest to the spirit of Enlightenment humanism and libertarian socialism in all the important domains: political economy, philosophical anthropology, and cultural politics. However, after the shift to the communicative paradigm which begins around the time of his Christian Gauss lecture (1970/71), Habermas's commitment to libertarian socialist or Enlightenment humanist positions continues to remain strong only in German cultural politics, whereas it is significantly weakened if not altogether abandoned in the domains of political economy and philosophical anthropology. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.).