Reason, Right, and Revolution : Kant and Locke

Current readers often bring implicitly Lockean intuitions to bear in their reaction to Kant on revolution: they assume that individuals are entitled to protect themselves, by violent means if necessary, against abuses of its coercive authority by their government. Underlying this assumption is a broader commitment to natural rights morality that many readers attribute to Locke and Kant alike. On this basis Kant is often charged with inconsistency: for one committed to pre-civil individual rights, the denial of a right to resist a rights-violating government seems contradictory. It is, however, also often suggested that Kant's no-right to revolution is marginal to his practical philosophy overall, constituting an unfortunate philosophical slipup that is at odds with his support for the French Revolution and explicable in terms of his excessively legalistic understanding of constitutionalism and outdated conception of sovereignty. These supposed anachronisms within Kant's philosophy of Right are said to warrant a turn to his ethical writings from which an alternative basis for a right to revolution is derived via appeal to the Kantian