Kant’s Nonideal Theory of Politics is a very welcome addition to the growing roster of recent studies of Kant’s politics. Unlike many, which concentrate on a particular policy area (such as colonialism or just war theory), Huseyinzadegan’s aim is a systematic one: namely, to sketch out a hitherto underspecified ‘non-ideal’ political realm to complement the ideal theory for which Kant is best known. Her most original claims centre on what she calls ‘political Zweckmässigkeit’, for on her account, the main rules that are to guide the political actor in non-ideal circumstances are the regulative teleological principles elaborated in the first and third Critiques, as well as occasional writings, including, most famously, the Idea for a Universal History, What is it to Orient Oneself in Thinking, and Perpetual Peace. By linking political action in a non-ideal world with such familiar critical principles she hopes not only to situate such action within Kant’s larger critical framework, but also to provide a ready means of disassociating Kantianism rightly understood from his less savoury positions on gender, race and Eurocentric history. Huseyinzadegan especially associates such unfortunate tendencies of Kant’s thought with his embrace of a Eurocentric ‘cosmopolitanism’, which she sharply distinguishes from ‘peace’, as the object of ideal politics. Unlike ‘peace’, cosmopolitanism in a political, as distinguished from strictly moral, sense is, on her reading, a revisable regulative ideal that guides Kant’s own non-ideal politics as it stands, but that is also deeply compromised by Eurocentrism and naïve assumptions as to the benignity of ‘commerce’.

The aim of her effort is not only to salvage what is worth keeping in Kant’s ideal theory but also to open a path toward a revised version of non-ideal politics (not offered in Huseyinzadegan’s current study) in which the goals of Kant’s ideal theory might be pursued through regulative principles that were both more respectful of human diversity and fallibility and more mindful of both the dark side of commerce and the ongoing burden of past racial and ethnic injustices: in short – a Kant ‘awokened’ from his dogmatic slumber.

Huseyinzadegan takes her bearings from ‘two interpretive keys’: the principle of right (Recht), which provides a priori norms, and ‘the regulative principle of Zweckmässigkeit … anchored in Kant’s philosophy of nature’, which ‘allow[s] us to produce tentative pictures’ of ‘politically salient features’ of the world (p. 3). Huseyinzadegan also takes for granted the distinction, drawn mainly from the work of John Rawls, between ‘ideal’ and ‘non-ideal’ political theories, relying here especially on the work of John Simmons and Laura Valentiti, among others. This gives her study immediate salience within the contemporary Kant literature, but somewhat limits its reach as a study of Kant’s own approach to politics and what might profitably be gleaned from it. Rawls’ own ‘ideal’ theory of justice abstracted from such ‘real’ conditions as the need for institutions to ensure compliance with the principles of justice. Kant’s own a priori theory of justice, which equates right from the outset with the ‘authorization to coerce’, makes no similar assumption. Any effort to map Kant’s actual political thought onto a Rawlsian framework, then, risks distorting Kant’s own understanding of the difference between the a priori idea of justice and its real-world approximation. Still, given Kant’s own description of politics in Perpetual Peace as ‘the art of using nature to govern human beings’, there is much to be said for Huseyinzadegan’s vigorous effort to work out a non-ideal theory of politics based on a regulative principle of purposiveness that is specifically ‘political’.

In part one, Huseyinzadegan lays out a general framework, based on certain rational ideas and associated regulative principles, for understanding Kant’s treatment of history and politics. Kant’s argument, as she sees it, ‘boils down to this: in order to identify a viable goal for ourselves, we need a specific view of the overall pattern of history’ (p. 23). This requires, in turn, an approach to history that makes use of ‘regulative’ principles of reason as developed in the first Critique and in What is Orientation in Thinking. Although the fundamental task is ‘normative’, the means, for Huseyinzadegan, are drawn from the regulative principles of reason in their theoretical use, and hence similarly hypothetical and tentative. This allows her to argue that the cosmopolitan political condition, generally taken for an a priori idea that has ‘objective practical reality’, is in fact a culturally encumbered construction, open for revision as more enlightened views emerge. Regulative ‘ideas’ on the view presented here are (merely) ‘hypotheses’ or ‘imaginary focal points’, serving, for example, as ‘loci’ for a hypothetical unity of theoretical cognitions, or for scientific inquiry into the nature of living beings.

Parts two and three present rich and insightful readings of works (or sections of works) that are often treated as marginal. In part two she brings welcome attention to the striking analogy Kant draws both in the Critique of Judgment and elsewhere between organic life and the organization of a political community, making particular use of the notion of the ‘lawfulness of the contingent’. That analogy enables us to conceptualize political life, on her account, as transitional between a realm of nature governed by deterministic laws and a wholly moral realm of freedom, with each part working mechanistically and yet also part of a larger (ideal) whole. Her analysis of §§82–4 of the Critique of Judgment brings commendable lucidity to a topic whose broader implications for Kant’s practical thought are rarely treated in such detail.

In part three, Huseyinzadegan extends her argument from the acquisition of ‘culture’ to the emergent cosmopolitan community at large, taking pains to distinguish Kant’s own Eurocentric cosmopolitanism both from ‘peace’ as such and the conditions best suited (given what we now know) to give rise to it. Among its interpretive highlights is a reading of the ‘First Supplement’ of Perpetual Peace that forcefully establishes its essential role in articulating the relation between nature and freedom in Kant’s thought.

At the same time, Huseyinzadegan makes two significant departures from the usual reading of Kant. First, as noted above, she argues that, just as regulative teleological principles allow us to navigate the ‘labyrinth of nature’ by directing us to form hypotheses as to its more general laws under the necessary presumption that nature is unified, so the principle of political purposiveness allows us to navigate the ‘labyrinth of history’, by directing us to form ‘unifying and coherent narratives’ under the necessary presumption that history as such is meaningful. Second, and drawing largely on that theoretical analogy, she argues that Kant’s initial ‘universal history’ culminates in a cosmopolitan ideal that is ‘provisional’, not only in the sense that it will never fully come about, but also in the sense that it need not be construed as normatively optimal (p. 61).

That Kant himself revised his own concept of such an order, at least as an object of human politics, by replacing the coercive federation of states sketched in Idea for a Universal History with the free federation of republics of Perpetual Peace and the Metaphysics of Morals, while also introducing a new category of ‘cosmopolitan right’ that is limited to the so-called right to hospitality, speaks to the power of Huseyinzadegan’s claim that at least some of Kant’s political assertions are indeed intended as revisable hypotheses. At the same time, the character of the normative political goal that on her account is non-revisable – namely, ‘peace’ – remains somewhat underspecified here. In what does ‘peace’ consist, if not a condition in which rights are universally secured against violence – a condition, in short, that is, broadly speaking, both cosmopolitan and liberal? And how to ensure that peace is not a ‘soulless despotism’ – let alone the ‘peace of the grave’, as Kant sardonically puts it in Perpetual Peace – without robust republican regimes in which liberal rights are guaranteed?

But this brings me to a deeper difficulty, with which any theory of politics that takes its primary bearings from perceived ‘patterns in history’ must grapple: namely, how to distinguish true knowledge from harmful and misleading myths (for myths are also often perceived as ‘meaningful’). It is one thing to discover that markets may be less benign than neo-liberal apologists have promised or that ‘Western Civilization’ may be less enlightened than its champions have claimed. It is another to ensure that one does not replace one false narrative with another, be it Aryan supremacy or the triumph of world socialism.

At the same time, as Huseyinzadegan instructively brings out, Kant’s own attraction to misleading narratives was balanced by rational principles with universal application to all human beings. And it is by the adequacy of those principles that Kant’s practical philosophy must ultimately be judged. Huseyinzadegan’s original and provocative application of the concept of purposiveness to that larger project is thus especially welcome; and one looks forward to the continuation of her study in a promised second volume.