¹ See Habermas's, JürgenThe Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Burger, Thomas and Lawrence, Frederick (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).Google Scholar

² Quotations from Kant are taken from ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Gregor, Mary (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar and Conflict of the Faculties in Religion and Rational Theology, trans. Wood, Allen and DiGiovanni, George (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).Google Scholar Citations are to Kants gesammelte Schriften, 29 vols (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter [and predecessors], 1902- )Google Scholar by volume and page number. Quotations and citations to each of them in the text can be distinguished by volume number: ‘Enlightenment’ is in vol. 8 and ‘Conflict’ in vol. 7.

³ , Habermas, Public Sphere, pp. 104–5, 116.Google Scholar

⁴ For discussion of the idea that philosophy as an institution might have a particular role in political discussion in general see Peterson, Richard, Democratic Philosophy and the Politics of Knowledge (State College, PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 1996).Google Scholar Peterson's brief remarks about Kant (pp. 64-8) are made on the basis of Kant's critical philosophy rather than his more political essays such as the Conflict of the Faculties; thus he does not raise the specific points I do.

⁵ These independent organizations and institutions rather than any work done specifically by faculty at universities are usually seen as the driving force of the Enlightenment, the early German Enlightenment's major figure Christian Wolff being a notable exception. For a discussion of the institutions created or used by proponents of Enlightenment throughout Europe, see Hof, Ulrich Im, The Enlightenment, trans. Yuill, William E. (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 105–54.Google Scholar See also Habermas Public Sphere for his argument that the institutions creating the public sphere are of crucial importance in understanding the Enlightenment.

⁶ For example, Kant supported the Philanthropin academy, a school that attempted to apply novel education techniques. See Kühn, Manfred, Kant: A Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 227–9,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Louden, Robert, Kant's Impure Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 44–6.Google Scholar Most notably Kant was a supporter and contributor to the most important of the Enlightenment journals in Germany, the Berlinische Monatsschrift, publishing no fewer than thirteen essays in it in a dozen years, including those which set out his view of Enlightenment, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ and ‘What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?’. For Kant's relation to the Berlinische Monatsschrift see Weber, Peter, ‘Kant und die “Berlinische Monatsschrift”’, in Emundts, Dina (ed.), Immanuel Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2000), pp. 60–79Google Scholar.

⁷ Kant gives two explanations of the ‘lower/higher’ terminology: first, he believes that the higher faculties receive the title ‘higher’ not due to the intrinsic worth of their subjects (since these subjects can overlap with the lower faculty) but because they are able to command and control their graduates as practitioners of their respective subjects in society, and something in human nature makes such ability to command more worthy of honour even if it is subject to a higher political authority itself (7: 20). Second, he notes that the higher faculties are of greater importance to the government, and that it is from the government's perspective that they are higher (7: 18-19).

⁸ An excellent discussion of the transformation of the German universities from this structure to the structure still in existence today, which links it to the influence of Kant's philosophy, is in Collins, Randall, The Sociology of Philosophies (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998), pp. 638–60Google Scholar.

⁹ See Cronin, Ciaran, ‘Kant's politics of Enlightenment’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 41 (2003), 51–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for detailed discussion of the context of Kant's writings on Enlightenment.

¹⁰ ‘The medical expert does not draw his method of therapy as practiced on the public from the physiology of the human body but from medical regulations.’ This apparently means that doctors do not use natural science in their practice, but refer only to the practices set out by the faculty of medicine, which itself, however, is allowed to be influenced by natural sciences (7: 26-7).

¹¹ Onora O'Neill also discusses the nature of the lower faculty as one which embodies reason. She sees Kant's discussion in Conflict of the Faculties as negatively defining public reason in opposition to the manner of use of reason of the higher faculties, which is conditional upon their orders and sources. See O'Neill, ‘Kant's conception of public reason’, in Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung: Akten des IX Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, vol. 1, ed. Gerhardt, Volker, Horstmann, Rolf-Peter and Schumacher, Ralph (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001), pp. 35–47, pp. 39-40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Rechtslehrer. The Cambridge translation has ‘professors of law’ for Rechtslehrer, which reverses Kant's meaning, since Kant is clearly referring to professors of philosophy in the faculty of philosophy, who are free, and not professors of law in the faculty of law (Juristenfakultät), who are not free. Given his views on the relation between the faculties, Kant could not possibly be holding that the faculty of law plays the role of expounding ‘rights arising out of the common human understanding’, and certainly not in the essay subtitled ‘The conflict of the philosophy faculty with the faculty of law’. Note also that in 1797, between the composition and publication of this essay, Kant published the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals, entitled the Rechtslehre. The connection of ‘enlighteners’ in the passage I quoted with Kant's own work is clear.

¹³ Kant's claim here that the pronouncements of the government are fallible must be compared with his claim in the Rechtslehre that the government itself must be seen as having a kind of divine origin (6: 318-19).

¹⁴ Kant discusses radical evil most famously in the Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (6: 18ff.) and proffers the related concept of unsocial sociability in relation to progress toward an ideal society in ‘Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan intent’ (8: 20-1). I would like to thank Rachel Zuckert for alerting me to the importance of radical evil in this regard.

¹⁵ This analogy is apt in a further way, in that there is no written authorization in the United States Constitution for the practice of judicial review by United States Supreme Court. The other branches of government have traditionally deferred to the Supreme Court in matters of constitutional interpretation. In Kant's framework, the faculty of philosophy would similarly have no written authority to demand compliance by the government but would rely on the government's deference in practice.

¹⁶ Ciaran Cronin overlooks this function of the faculty of philosophy when he says that Kant wrote his essay ‘What is Enlightenment? ‘in the role of a scholar addressing the reading public, not as a university professor’, suggesting that Kant is employing the public not private use of his reason as university professor ( , Cronin, ‘Kant's politics of Enlightenment’, p. 65).Google Scholar

¹⁷ I am grateful to Samuel Fleischacker, Robert Louden, Howard Williams, Rachel Zuckert and three anonymous reviewers for Kantian Review for suggestions that greatly improved this article.