Immanuel Kant’s “kingdom of ends – properly understood – is of this world” (p. 4). That is the guiding idea of Rainer Forst’s recent collection of essays, The Noumenal Republic. Forst replaces Kant’s metaphysical dualism of the noumenal and phenomenal worlds with a practical dualism—one we must adopt if we aim to justifiably criticize the one world we inhabit. For we can always ask, as “justifying beings,” whether justifications that do order our social and political lives could be justified to each person subject to them. Each person has the same standing as a normative authority—the presumption of “noumenal equality” (p. 199)—in justifying the order they live under. Forst therefore builds the noumenal republic on a single normative foundation: the “right to justification.” The question is whether the master concept of justification can do all the work Forst asks of it, regarding alienation, progress, domination, and more.
All but two of these essays (chapters 5 and 9) were previously published in English, but Forst maintains—rightly, I think—that they can be read as “steps in an argument leading to a comprehensive philosophy of justification that systematically takes up and connects topics in moral, social, and political philosophy” (p. 15). Read this way, the collection extends the impressive Kantian constructivism Forst has developed over three decades and clarifies how it amounts to a distinct version of Kantian republicanism. This is Forst’s most Kantian book—not because his Kantianism was ever in doubt, but because here it does work at every turn, even in unexpected places like the critique of alienation. Forst urges fellow Kantians to be more Kantian (they never seem Kantian enough), while pressing non-Kantians to take matters of justification more seriously.
The collection has three sections. The first shows how Forst’s theory of justification intervenes in debates within social philosophy over alienation (Ch. 1), progress (Ch. 2), regression (Ch. 3), solidarity (Ch. 4), and social cohesion (Ch. 5). The second extends his “critical political theory” with a programmatic overview useful for newcomers (Ch. 6), before turning to human rights (Ch. 7), transnational justice (Ch. 8), structural domination (Ch. 9), and neo-republicanism (Ch. 10). The third section critically engages with John Rawls (Chs. 11 and 12), T.M. Scanlon (Ch. 13), and Jürgen Habermas (Ch. 14).
Forst’s use of the term “noumenal” to modify many other concepts is not always easy to track, as debates with critics of his earlier work on “noumenal power” revealed (p. 123). In this collection, “noumenal” sometimes gets applied in a normative way—to something “moral” as opposed to “empirical” (p. 50)—but more consistently it is used in a descriptive way to signify anything related to the space of justifications as such, forcing Forst to further distinguish between a “counterfactual, transcending, noumenal normativity” and our “empirical-noumenal spaces of justification” (p. 4). Readers must resist the understandable temptation to think “noumenal” is always normative or points to an ideal. “Noumenal” just refers to anything related to cognition or justification. For Forst, for example, all power is noumenal because it always involves motivating someone to think or do something they would not otherwise have thought or done (p. 122), all of which happens at the cognitive level.
These essays cover far too many topics to do justice to here, but themes of domination and non-domination run throughout. The right to justification gets couched as a “right to non-domination” (p. 41), human rights are viewed as securing each person’s status as “non-dominated equals” (Ch. 7), and a theory of transnational justice, Forst argues, requires both empirical analysis of multiple contexts of domination and the normative defense of principles of non-domination (Ch. 8).
Forst forges a distinctive Kantian-republican path on the nature of domination in chapters 9 and 10, positioned between theorists who hold that structures themselves can dominate and neo-republicans like Philip Pettit, whose paradigm foregrounds one agent’s arbitrary interference with another. Against Pettit, Forst denies that domination is basically a matter of securing spheres of individual choice from interference; what domination violates, on his account, is the agent’s standing as an equal “justificatory authority.” Rather than reject Pettit, however, Forst offers an “immanent critique” of his work that “brings him closer to the Kantian family” (p. 207) by stressing moments where Pettit concedes that the target of non-domination is arbitrary rule, a form of rule unjustifiable to those subject to it. Domination, for Forst, is about the unjustifiability of uncontrolled power.
On the question of whether agentless structures can themselves dominate, however, Forst is closer to Pettit than to theorists of structural domination criticized in chapter 9. While Forst’s middle path reconceives what domination is—a threat to agents’ justificatory status, not to their choice situation—it stops short of treating structures and systems as doing the dominating. For Forst, there is no domination without dominators (p. 193). “Hegemonic justifications dominate the social space of reasons, but they themselves do not ‘dominate’ persons; rather, they enable the domination of persons by others,” he writes (p. 187). Forst rightly insists on identifiable perpetrators and accountability for structural injustice. But proponents of the view that structures themselves dominate might wonder why structures that discount the voice of the dominated—thereby undermining their justificatory standing—should count as merely enabling domination rather than constituting it.
Forst’s immanent critique of Pettit embodies one of his central strategies, used elsewhere to bring Rawls (Ch. 11) and Habermas (Ch. 14) closer to Kant through close readings. Another favorite strategy is showing how key concepts are “normatively dependent”—that is, “they only gain normative substance by being connected to other normative principles or values” (pp. 51–52). Forst first deployed this argument in his work on toleration, extending it here to non-alienation (p. 52), progress (p. 57), solidarity (p. 89), and social cohesion (p. 102). Accurately understanding and properly using such concepts, he argues, requires entering the terrain of normativity and justification.
The pattern is consistent: each concept is reconstructed in relation to one ideal—equal normative authority—so that alienation, progress, and the rest become, in effect, specifications of a single normative relation. Alienation gets defined as denial of one’s equal normative authority (it is “first-order noumenal alienation” when others do it to you and “second-order noumenal alienation” when you do not recognize yourself as a normative authority). The only justifiable way of overcoming conditions causing alienation is—in Forst’s compelling linking of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality with his Social Contract (pp. 28–32)—to grant everyone equal normative authority. This is also how moral-political progress gets measured, in terms of the opening up of the social space of justifications to secure the status of each person as a normative authority, then leaving it up to members of the society in question to determine what they count as further progress (pp. 57–59).
Forst makes the Kantian vision of a noumenal republic as attractive to non-Kantians as it could possibly be. But he may overstate the need for his particular brand of Kantian moral theory when suggesting that practical costs follow from rejecting it: that we need it most in times of despair (p. 279), or to resist oppression with the strongest stance (p. 63), or even to identify progress or regress at all (p. 279, and Ch. 2). Surely, other non-relativist positions can do similar work. A related ambiguity arises in his Kantian treatment of alienation: it is unclear whether he holds that every critique of alienation requires a deontological element (p. 26, pp. 50–51) or that a deontological approach might cede ground to other approaches in a division of conceptual labor (pp. 52–53).
I also wonder if Forst’s admirable theoretical parsimony comes at a cost. Using a single normative notion—justification—to analyze every other concept risks thinning those concepts or flattening them onto one plane. As Forst extends his normatively demanding picture of justice outward to include concepts with rich histories of their own—alienation, historical progress—they get recast as approximations to or departures from his central ideal. This has the virtue of systematically grounding various forms of critique. But they all get assimilated as ways of measuring distance from a just order. Forst’s fellow critical theorists have challenged this move since it displaces the tradition in social philosophy of diagnosing social pathologies. Axel Honneth asks, in a recent Festschrift for Forst, why we need a concept of alienation at all to do what Forst does here. The Kantian vocabulary of heteronomy and autonomy, respect for others, and self-respect—plus the charge that denying equal standing and instrumentalizing others is unjust—seem to do the necessary work without calling it a critique of “alienation.” Likewise, Rahel Jaeggi asks, in her recent work on progress, whether concepts of progress and regress lose diagnostic power if they simply equate to calling something just or unjust.
Forst’s singular focus will surely prompt more debate about what is gained and what is lost by routing so much social and political analysis through the prism of justification. This collection of incisive and tightly connected essays cannot settle that question, but it does make the most compelling case available for what this project offers.
