This dissertation explores the German political philosophy that emerged from a generative encounter between two revolutions in the 1780s. The first of these was Immanuel Kant’s “Copernican Revolution”, an epochal vindication of human reason that revealed the autonomous subject at the centre of the knowable world. The second was the nearby revolution in France, a period of political upheaval that enraptured the German political imagination, apparently reorienting legal and social orders around claims of popular sovereignty. My project examines how, in the aftermaths of both revolutions, German political philosophy adapted the politics of Kant’s rationalism to accommodate the collective subjectivity of the people (Volk, Nation). The result, spanning a generation and a half of idealist writings, was a powerful intellectual current that reimagined progress through the relationship between an abstract standard of justice (Recht) and the lives of popular subjects.

Understanding this innovation requires closer attention to the foundations of Kant’s political thought. Kant’s own political philosophy had doubtless responded closely – and often sympathetically – to the events of the French Revolution throughout the 1790s. But Kant’s German readers soon revealed what his republican politics owed to earlier eighteenth-century contexts and concerns, including a model of incremental progress that had prioritized the “point of view” rulers and their “manner” of governing, over the spontaneous and organic agencies of their peoples. Following a first chapter on Kant’s political philosophy, three subsequent chapters examine novel visions of the popular subject through the post-Kantian imperatives of J. G. Fichte and J. B. Erhard, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Hardenberg and Friedrich Schlegel, and G. W. F. Hegel.

A project of intellectual history, the dissertation contextualizes these writings within the major events of the French revolution. This period of post-Kantian political philosophy has long featured in historical narratives on the collapse of the enlightenment and the rise of German nationalism, amidst the pressures of Napoleonic invasion. Interrogating these narratives, my dissertation points instead to an intellectual imperative, predating the Napoleonic wars and irreducible to German particularism, of expanding Kant’s rationalist politics to new modes of collective political agency, including the Nation, the Masse and the Volk als Staat. It shows that the tradition of political thought between Kant and Hegel was above all an exploration of the popular subject and its historic potential to pursue the ends of reason.