Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2025
The Feyerabend lectures (1784) anticipate many fundamental theses of Kant’s political thought in the published writings of the 1790s. In three fundamental topics – 1) the transition from the state of nature to the civil state, 2) the conception of sovereignty and of the division of powers, 3) the infallibility of the sovereign, with the related topics of the non-coercibility of the executive and the denial of the right to rebel – Kant has the basic structure of his political thought already clear and his intellectual debt to Achenwall is limited. These lecture notes also include a fundamental distinction between two senses of legislative power: understood as constituent and operative in the defining moment of the constitution of the state (what Achenwall would call the moment yielding fundamental laws) and understood as the specification of the fundamental laws agreed upon in their hypothetical origin. This distinction is never fully spelled out by Kant but is absolutely crucial to making sense of his body of political thought and addressing some apparent difficulties, including a proper understanding of his (in)famous denial of people’s right to rebel.
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