Herder is often recognised as the intellectual originator of a tradition that stresses that language assimilation is a wrong. In what follows, I argue that that the way in which he has influenced that tradition is often misunderstood. Herder’s originality does not lie in his development of ‘linguistic constitutivism’ – the view that language plays a constitutive role in human cognition. Herder surely endorsed linguistic constitutivism, but so did earlier theorists, like Condillac, as well as French revolutionary theorists such as l’Abbé Grégoire. The original move that Herder made, I argue, is to add a normative, recognitionalist argument to the constitutive argument, and to intertwine the two. It is his constitutive recognitionalism that makes him the trailblazer of a new tradition.

Although scholars agree that Fichte’s earliest political writings are Kantian, they contain a theory of individual emancipation through a culture of perfection that is foreign to Kant’s Doctrine of Right. I argue that Fichte based his theory on Kant’s moral duty and therefore derived the conclusion that individual morality should be the constitution’s aim. As a result, principles of right are not limited to securing relations of external freedom among equals but concerned with creating a society of autonomous individuals. Reaching that end goes through emancipation both from the oppression of sensibility over rationality and from the false consciousness that upholds voluntary servitude to unjust regimes. As an alternative Kantian path, Fichte provides philosophical grounding for movements seeking political emancipation through cultural awakening.

Kant is invariably read by his followers as antipathetic to all forms of nationalism. Yet he was interested in differences of national character and used an organic metaphor to explain why states should not be broken up or annexed (unfortunately he never commented explicitly on the dismemberment of Poland by Prussia and its allies). He favoured a plural world in which national differences of language and religion prevented the emergence of despotic world government. So his acknowledgement of a limited obligation to provide refuge to vulnerable people should not be amplified into an acceptance of culturally disruptive mass migration.

Kant argues that civic freedom amounts to being subject to laws to which citizens could have assented. Fichte conversely argues that personal freedom is only fully realized in a state of civil freedom and that citizens are only legitimately ruled by laws to which they have explicitly agreed. This paper shows how their differing accounts are rooted in a deeper disagreement about the relationship between transcendental and empirical freedom and the role empirical citizens’ assent (Beistimmung) plays in justifying civil legislation. The confrontation also shows why reading Kant as requiring citizens’ active assent may be problematic.

A rightful condition, according to Kant, requires both a law to limit the freedom of each and a ruler to enforce that limit, a ruler who cannot himself be subject to the law’s enforcement without ceasing to perform his primary function. Kant placed his hopes, circa 1784, in a future ruler who combined worldly experience, a ‘correct conception’ of a possible constitution, and, above all, the good will to accept it. Subsequent historical events, along with the ‘completion’ in 1790 of Kant’s own critical system, suggested a new basis for confidence in civil progress no longer ultimately dependent on the ‘good will’ of rulers, while also making new demands on citizens themselves. I share the view of many others that Kant came to prefer the people’s actual consent to the laws over the merely hypothetical consent that he endorsed in the works of the mid-1780s. My reading of the Metaphysics of Morals Part One differs in treating the work not only as a theoretical treatise but also, and necessarily, a practical intervention in historical time. The resulting reading yields an internally coherent argument favouring representative democracy of a peculiar kind – one whose ‘organic’ character has not been fully appreciated.

This article uses Böckenförde’s dictum and Williams’s paradox of liberalism as a framework to critically analyse the current theoretical literature on democratic regression and rule of law backsliding in liberal democracies. It argues that the current literature is too strongly focused on (a) the problem of militant democracy (thereby neglecting militant constitutionalism) and (b) on the formal institutional safeguards that are needed to make liberal democracies resilient (thereby partially neglecting the need for a public ethos). In addition, it claims that such an ethos not only implies a democratic attitude but also a patriotic or constitutional attitude.

This paper focuses on the critical relation of reason and language in the work of Kant and Hamann. The biographical and intellectual relationship between Kant and Hamann is briefly outlined. The focus then shifts to Hamann’s essay ‘The Metacritique on the Purism of Reason’. The central themes of Hamann’s essay are unpacked. The discussion then considers the central, if ambiguous, role played by Hume in the whole Kant/Hamann debate. The discussion then moves to Hamann’s critique of transcendental idealism and finally to Kant and the question of language.