Kant on Citizenship and Poverty

For Kant, citizenship rests on three things: freedom, equality and civil self-sufficiency, or Freiheit, Gleichheit and Selbständigkeit. Nicholas Vrousalis draws them into a single reading built around what he calls interdependent independence. In a just society, he argues, citizens make independent use of powers that are rightfully bound up with one another. The state becomes a system of cooperative production in which our claims on each other's labour must be justified, and its empirical form is a republic of economically independent commodity producers.

The consequence is a striking one: in Kant, citizenship and poverty cannot be pulled apart. Vrousalis also shows how these arguments anticipate Hegel on the division of labour, Marx on alienated labour and Rawls on the well-ordered society. This is a compact, rigorous Cambridge Element for anyone drawn to the meeting point of political philosophy and economic justice.