1984 Book Reviews: Normative Theory
the experiences of successful negotiators do fit
into a pattern, and negotiating skills can be
taught. Zartman and Berman have made a signifi-
cant contribution to the literature on negotiation.
This book should be read by negotiators and
Normative Theory
Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy. By
Hannah Arendt. Edited by Ronald Beiner.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Pp. viii + 174. $15.00.)
Kant's Political Philosophy. By Patrick Riley.
(Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983.
Pp. ix + 213. $28.95.)
These two studies of Kant are part of a remark-
able revival of interest in the work of that
philosopher whose thought has so deeply shaped
what we mean by the modern outlook. Much of
contemporary social science emerged from one or
another school of "neo-Kantian" thought,
although the connection is, unfortunately, rarely
made an object of direct study today. Now, as
Patrick Riley notes, John Rawls has done much to
bring Kant back into currency (Riley calls the
Theory of Justice a "neo-Kantian" work [p. ix]),
although Rawls obviously also subjects Kant's
thought to very serious modification (succinctly
noted by Riley, p. 53 ff.; n. 104, p. 187). But the
return to Kant is not exclusively shaped by Rawls;
in a fine chapter, Riley examines recent works on
Kant by Alexander Kojeve, Lucien Goldmann,
Robert Paul Wolff, Susan Shell, Hans Saner, and
John Charvet, reminding us of a significant recent
literature and developing his own position toward
it.
Riley's own study of Kant is a major contribu-
tion to the discussion. With exemplary tenacity
and open-mindedness, he examines the familiar
thesis that Kant's approach to politics is one-
sidedly formalistic. This view goes back to Kant's
earliest critics and remains a staple. It is perhaps
most deeply argued by Hegel, who made it a point
of departure for his own effort to build a modern
political philosophy adequate to the historical and
the concrete (see pp. 38-42; 174). In our own
framework, it is Rawls and Lewis White Beck who
have recently defined the meaning of Kant's
work. Riley argues that they have overemphasized
277
scholars alike for valuable insights into the
negotiating process.
LINDA P. BRADY
Annandale, Virginia
the procedural formalism of Kant's teaching and,
further, have presented him as a "deepened
Rousseau" who teaches that law cannot be law
unless a product of conscious will (pp. 53-58).
This view makes human ends the product of will
or construction, as if nothing can be an end unless
some act of agreement establishes it.
It is the main goal of Riley's analysis to show
that Kant advocates a critical teleology of objec-
tive ends, not of will legislating for itself. There
are necessary ends for which we must act; this is
ultimately a more important thesis for Kant than
is the process of giving the law to oneself; the
moral law is not constructed but somehow simply
"there" (p. 56; cf. pp. 171-172). Riley must, of
course, rely above all on Kant's late Critique of
Judgment to support this thesis, but he possesses
an extraordinary command of all of the texts and
tracks down every source usable in defense of this
uncommon reading of Kant's thought. Certainly
he succeeds in showing that there is much to be
found in Kant that will bear this interpretation.
After this study, no one will be able to assert with-
out further ado that Kant is either an unqualified
formalist or a Rousseauian constructivist. Riley,
however, admits that his pursuit of Kant's doc-
trine of objective ends establishes at best an
"arguably" stronger reading than the usual one
(p. 170), hence not a categorically stronger inter-
pretation. He does not artificially minimize the
formalist and constructionist strain, but would
hold that he has succeeded in showing that Kant
qualified or limited it.
A genuine dedication to the Kantian outlook
underlies Riley's argument. The book gets its
heart from this adherence. Noting a witty remark
of Oakeshott that Kant is "important but not
attractive" (n. 43, p. 206), Riley hopes to over-
come this deprecation and eventually puts Kant
very high. He is "the philosopher of freedom,"
who also knew how to see freedom in the light of
the "moral law" considered as a "fact of reason"
278 The American Political Science Review
(p. S). In a passage at the end of the book, he
steps out of his concentration on the texts and
sources to suggest that Kant is "both the most
important and the most attractive of political
philosophers" (p. 176). Contrasting Kant with
other moderns, he holds that Kant avoided the
extremism to be found in Hobbes, Hegel, Machia-
velli, Mill, Marx, Locke, Burke, Hume, Freud,
and Nietzsche. Elsewhere, he does not deny a
"Jacobin" strain and even a radical "humanism"
in Kant's thought, however (pp. 132-133; 58-63).
On the whole, the case for Kant's moderation
would also need to be assessed through a thor-
ough evaluation of the content he prescribes for
the ostensibly objective ends (Riley's theme in the
illuminating chapters 4-6).
Occasional flashes of humor in this book aid
the argument for Kant's attractiveness by showing
that moral earnestness is not totally fatal to wit.
Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political
Philosophy is a collection drawing together the
Postscriptum to her Life of the Mind, a set of lec-
tures on Kantian political philosophy given as
early as 1964, then revised and presented on other
occasions during the following decade, and some
notes for a 1970 lecture on imagination. The com-
pilation of these materials is quite useful,
although readers will quickly discover that the lec-
tures were never turned into finished composi-
tions. Ronald Beiner, the editor, argues that they
provide some important clues to the work on the
faculty of judging that Arendt intended but did
not live to write. The texts reflect many of the
well-known mannerisms of her style. On the
positive side, they also reflect her ability to cast an
interesting, sometimes novel, light on famliar and
unfamiliar issues. The whole collection does not
add up to a complete account of the theme of
judgment, or of Kant's political philosophy, as
Beiner is the first to admit, but it does give some
insight into the basis of Arendt's life-long interest
in Kant, her interpretation of his political works
and comments, and the faculty of judgment as she
saw it after her extensive earlier reflections on
thinking and willing in the Life of the Mind.
Like Riley's work, these studies of Kant focus
on the Critique of Judgment. Arendt's interest is
less on the doctrine of ends or telos than on the
type of thinking that Kant calls judging and that is
the way for "thinking the particular" (p. 119).
This mode of thought, she holds, is that by which
we combine the general and the particular to grasp
politics. Ronald Beiner's extended interpretive
essay, occupying about one-half of this volume,
offers an illuminating study of Arendt's un-
completed work on judgment. Significant in its
own right, the essay is perhaps most interesting in
expounding and weighing some of the limitations
in Arendt's work on this theme. An example
Vol.78
would be the comments on the relative neglect of
"prudence" in both Kant and Arendt. Beiner
shows the need for a "confrontation of Aristotle
with Kant" and directs us to work by Gadamer
and others that explores this confrontation (p. 134
ff.). Ultimately Beiner seems to question not the
importance but the sufficiency of both Kant and
Arendt in their elucidation of this aspect of
thought.
DONALD J. MALETZ
University of Oklahoma
Legitimacy of the Modern Age. By Hans
Blumenberg. Translated by Robert Wallace.
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983. Pp. xxxi
+ 677. $35.50.)
Modern science buried centuries of theological
controversy. Hans Blumenberg has unearthed
these controversies again, rethinking the dilem-
mas and dead ends of Christian dogma that pro-
vided the intellectual provocations for the scien-
tific revolution. Especially striking are his ac-
counts of the deep strains between Biblical prem-
ises and Aristotelian and Stoic ideas within Schol-
asticism and of the emergence of voluntaristic
nominalism, whose God was so thoroughly un-
fathomable as to be reasonably ignored. But
Blumenberg has not merely written a scholarly,
nuanced, and illuminating study of the religious
background to modern science. He has also writ-
ten a philosophical book, a combative response to
the dim Romantic suggestion more common in
Germany than America, that the modern age "as
a whole" is somehow illegitimate. Tracing the
many reasons why "the modern age is unthink-
able without Christianity" (p. 30), Blumenberg
sheds light on the legitimate claims of modern sci-
ence and also reveals the historical poverty of all
pre-staged duels between "the ancients" and "the
moderns" that leave Christianity out of account.
Concerned to defend the Enlightenment against
its enemies, Blumenberg is also aware that
modern theorists have often defended indefensi-
ble claims. The fundamental error of the great
modern philosophers, however, lay not in their
wanton break with the past, but rather in their
failure to make a sufficiently radical break. Chris-
tianity accustomed people to great questions such
as, What is the purpose of human existence? and
What is the meaning of history? Although Chris-
tian answers ceased to be credible, Christian ques-
tions lingered on, a disorienting legacy to the
future. Rather than dismissing such questions by
declaring them unanswerable in the positivist
manner, modern theorists tried, unwisely but
perhaps inevitably, to answer them. Thus, for in-
stance, an initially modest idea of progress was