This excellent volume offers a comprehensive examination of Kant’s writings on historical progress, as well as insightful commentaries on his work’s afterlife. It features an editor’s introduction and 13 substantive chapters in two parts. Part I concerns Kant’s work, with essays covering the vast majority of his writings, albeit with emphasis on his Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), and Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793). Part II addresses Kant’s long shadows and includes contributions on Herder, Fichte, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Benjamin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. The scholarship is careful and illuminating throughout, and readers in political science will find the essays by Rachel Zuckert, Susan Shell, Karl Ameriks, and Richard Velkley of particular interest.

In their introduction, editors Paul T. Wilford and Samuel A. Stoner describe Kant’s project as the combined outgrowth of the early modern aspiration to master nature, the nascent liberalism of Locke and Montesquieu, and—most importantly—Rousseau’s critique of progress. “The whole edifice of Kant’s critical philosophy,” they write, “is an attempt to respond to Rousseau’s critique of the deleterious effects of modernity while preserving the emancipatory aspirations of modern philosophy and the Baconian aim of ameliorating our condition” (p. 4). This meliorative thread guides Kant’s conviction in the possibility of progress, for which he argues on practical rather than epistemic grounds. Although we cannot know whether there is progress in history, he claims we must nonetheless entertain its possibility for moral and political purposes. On the basis of this pragmatic sensibility, the editors write, “Kant inaugurates a distinctive theoretical tradition that considers the meaning of human historicity central to political philosophy” (p. 15).

In Part I’s first two chapters, Oliver Sensen and Kate Moran give complementary expositions of Kant’s arguments for moral progress in individuals and communities, respectively, each stressing the practical and nonepistemic grounds for his claims; that is, Kant permits the assumption of progress insofar as he holds that moral striving will be senseless without it. Jens Timmerman’s entry provides a masterful overview of Kant’s moral theory and addresses his often-overlooked distinction between strict “perfect” duties and wider “imperfect” duties, or between laws and rules, arguing that for Kant moral progress involves increasing attentiveness to the latter insofar as the former oblige unconditionally. In one of the volume’s most illuminating contributions, Rachel Zuckert (following Axel Honneth) identifies distinct philosophies of history in Kant: an “official” one that postulates historical progress as a regulative idea guiding and enabling practice, rather than a constitutive fact about the world, found in the Critique of the Power of Judgment and his essays on perpetual peace, universal history, and “Theory and Practice,” and an “unofficial” one that underlines the possibility of human solidarity within history, found in “What Is Enlightenment?” and Part II of the Conflict of the Faculties. Zuckert convincingly paints these respective philosophies of history as responses to different (albeit related) problems: the “official” account offers assurance that historical progress may occur, whereas the “unofficial” account offers assurance that there is a “collective moral agency to which the individual moral agent might contribute” (p. 69). The first responds to the ambiguity of history, whereas the second responds to the loneliness of individuals striving for progress within history.

Both Naomi Fisher’s contribution and the coauthored chapter by editors Wilford and Stoner emphasize the importance of religion to Kant’s thoughts on progress. Fisher finds in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment a new argument for the existence of God predicated on moral teleology, whereas Wilford and Stoner wrestle with the problem of radical evil in Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason, which at first glance seems to militate against the possibility of progress altogether. Part I is rounded out with a lapidary chapter by Susan Shell, who draws out Kant’s distinction between “prophetic” history, whose agent is supernatural, and “soothsaying” history, whose agent is natural: the soothsayer himself. All of these Kant exegetes stress the catalytic role of human action in historical progress, in line with his insistence on the vital primacy of practical reason.

Part II opens with Karl Ameriks’s rich account of the relationship between Kant and his former student Herder that challenges the stylized antipodal perspective popularized by Isaiah Berlin, according to which the two stand opposed as respective archetypes of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment thought. Ameriks describes their differences as largely methodological: Kant, he writes, “always had a special interest in seeking the universal and necessary even in the particular, whereas Herder loved to express and linger over the particular and the contingent for its own sake” (p. 143). Richard Velkley’s chapter vindicates Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (1808); rather than dismissing this work as an ur-text of chauvinist nationalism as is today’s wont, Velkley situates it historically as a call for political autonomy against Napoleon’s occupying troops that reflects, furthermore, the tensions inherent in Fichte’s radicalization of Kant. Mark Alznauer presents the conceptual form of Hegel’s philosophy of history as a manifestation of the tripartite dynamic of self-identity, concrete manifestation, and reflective universalization that is characteristically churning in all his mature work; and Ryan Kemp reads Kierkegaard as a thinker of immanent satisfactions despite his ostensibly supernatural religious orientation. Although neither chapter delves much into these respective relationships to Kant, each is a compelling treatment in its own right. C. Allen Speight’s illuminating contribution steps into the twentieth century, detailing Walter Benjamin’s debt to Kant while underlining his alternative understanding of hope not as future oriented but as a selective redemption of the past. Robert Pippin’s chapter rounds out the collection with a broader view of the idea of history in modernity, emphasizing the shift from Kantian progress and toward declension narratives in the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger, both of whom change the terms of the debate from the question, “What is the best human life?” to the question, “What makes for a meaningful life?” General readers will find all the chapters rewarding; specialists will enjoy a host of insights and the occasional salutary provocation.

The volume has its roots in a 2018 Boston College conference organized by the editors, both students of Velkley—to whom, incidentally, it is also dedicated. Although the collection does not feel like an exclusively friends and family affair, neither does it represent an especially broad sweep of scholarly perspectives on Kant. Along these lines, the absence of any extended commentary on the fraught link between the Enlightenment idea of progress and the justification of empire, let alone the racist and anti-Semitic “skeletons in Kant’s closets” that Ameriks (practically alone) notes (p. 139), is a missed opportunity—not least because the avoidance of these complicated and unsettling aspects of Kant’s thought cedes the field to critics who would dismiss him outright. The fact that Kant can be defended against many of these charges accordingly goes largely unremarked. Readers in political science may be disappointed that although gestures toward politics abound, Kant’s essays on the topic proper are mostly avoided in favor of his works on morality and religion, with little commentary on works like “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective,” and the “Doctrine of Right” from the Metaphysics of Morals (Shell’s chapter on the Conflict of the Faculties is a notable exception). Finally, the contributors are mostly silent on the “postmodern anxieties” promised in the volume’s subtitle, and the editors, alas, do not hazard answers to their questions about the import of Kant’s regulative progress for the present (p. 16), for our own practical purposes in a world vastly different from the one he inhabited.

To be fair, these are sins of omission, and the editors cannot be expected to assemble a complete or let alone perfect (the word is the same in German) collection on Kant’s philosophy of history. In sum, this is an unquestionably valuable collection for understanding the ins and outs of Kant’s approach to progress, as well as the residue of his thought in subsequent philosophy. More can and should be written on the subject; this volume provides an important foundation for any subsequent inquiry.