Kant on Citizenship and Poverty

For Kant, a citizen is defined by three things: freedom, equality and civil self-sufficiency. Nicholas Vrousalis offers a single reading that binds them together, built around what he calls interdependent independence: in a just society, citizens have independent use of powers that are, in fact, bound up with one another. On this account Kant pictures the modern state as a system of cooperative production, where our claims on each other's labour must be justified, and whose empirical form is a republic of economically independent commodity producers.

The consequence is striking: citizenship and poverty, for Kant, cannot be pulled apart. Vrousalis also traces how these arguments look ahead to Hegel on the division of labour, Marx on alienated labour and Rawls on the well-ordered society. A short, concentrated study for anyone interested in where political philosophy meets economic justice.