Kant is seen as a strong defender of representative Democracy, political freedom, individual moral autonomy, and the constitutional division of power. Within his views, we find two contradictory responses to revolution. On the one hand, as a spectator, he sympathized with the progressive forces of glorious revolution of 1688, the American Revolution, the French revolution and the Irish attempt to achieve independence. On the other hand, in the Metaphysics of Morals and at the heart of his Doctrine of Rights, he prohibits revolution absolutely. He was sympathetic to resistance to violent and repressive state powers in defense of basic human rights. But why then Kant condemns revolutionary actions? In Metaphysics of Morals, he writes, one must endure “the most unbearable abuse of supreme authority” (MM, 320). The citizens do not have a right to revolt. Both these positions are linked with Kant’s views on justice from a spectator’s point of view (aesthetic judgment) and his progressive views on human history. While as an onlooker (spectator), one may sympathize with the individual rights of a people to revolt in self-defense but in his progressive views of history, he disregards any right for rebellion in favor of the progress of mankind. At several places Kant warns against the illegal and unjust means (incompatible with morality) to achieve the revolution and its constitution. For him ‘a rebellion is never legitimate’. But for him, one cannot be moral unless one is free and revolutions are about people who are already not free. Whether the possibility of moral self-legislation exists for a ‘bondman’ is still open to question for him. The precondition for formation of all laws is the existence of a public space and ‘the freedom of the pen” i.e. the freedom to express one’s thoughts. When this fundamental freedom is abolished one is ready to rebel in the Machiavellian sense of the moment when ‘your care for the world takes precedence in Politics over your care for your own self’ (50). He also prohibits revolutionary action as a general prohibition of individual use of coercive means to promote individual ends. This is further linked to his justification of property and civil society. In my paper, I present a Kantian defense of right to rebellion as an unconditional duty which is based on the basic principles of Kantian justice to resist the lawless powers. I argue from Kant’s perspective, that it is a moral duty to defend one self and others when one is confronted with systematic injustice in an unjust state of war when state power is systematically used to exclude some for the benefit of others. Even in a state of nature, maxims of self defense are permissible (MM 307 &312).
