The Philosophy Of Force

Force and Freedom

In this masterful work, both an illumination of Kant’s thought and an important contribution to contemporary legal and political theory, Arthur Ripstein gives a comprehensive yet accessible account of Kant’s political philosophy. Ripstein shows that Kant’s thought is organized around two central claims: first, that legal institutions are not simply responses to human limitations or circumstances; indeed the requirements of justice can be articulated without recourse to views about human inclinations and vulnerabilities. Second, Kant argues for a distinctive moral principle, which restricts the legitimate use of force to the creation of a system of equal freedom. Ripstein’s description of the unity and philosophical plausibility of this dimension of Kant’s thought will be a revelation to political and legal scholars. In addition to providing a clear and coherent statement of the most misunderstood of Kant’s ideas, Ripstein also shows that Kant’s views remain conceptually powerful and morally appealing today. Ripstein defends the idea of equal freedom by examining several substantive areas of law—private rights, constitutional law, police powers, and punishment—and by demonstrating the compelling advantages of the Kantian framework over competing approaches.

The Philosophy of Force

The Philosophy of Force presents a highly original, republican theory of just war. Taking its inspiration from historic wars against slavery and colonialism, it offers an account of the ethics of defensive violence shaped around the perspective of those oppressed by empire and other forms of social and political domination. Whereas the most intuitive cases of just war are often thought to be those fought against mass killing, more can be learnt about the ethics of violence by focusing on wars against mass domination-wars like the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue that gave birth to Haiti and the American Civil War's emancipation of enslaved people. By contrast with liberal-cosmopolitan ethics, this book argues that the right analytical starting point for thinking about war and political violence is the use of lethal force to defend against enslavement, not the defence of lives against attempted murder. Enslavement highlights the importance of dominating power as a facet of all violent threats and illuminates more fully than other types of threat the intimate relationships between violence, vulnerability, and social domination. Building a republican account of war ethics around this insight helps identify distinctively political dimensions of violence that are otherwise apt to be overlooked. It provides a compelling basis for understanding the legitimacy of armed defence against a wide range of threats, some lethal, some not.

The Principles of the Philosophy of the Expansive and Contractive Forces; Or, An Inquiry Into the Principles of Modern Philosophy