LA TEORÍA FUNCIONALISTA DE MALINOWSKI DENTRO DE LA ANTROPOLOGÍA

In the last section we already encountered a tension in Kant’s theory that deserves extra attention. On the one hand, freedom is central to his account of moral personhood and on the other hand freedom is dependent on there being some coercive agent capable of enforcing the conditions of freedom. Kant defines freedom in a discussion on innate right in the introduction to the Doctrine of Right, stating:

Freedom (independence from being constrained by another’s choice), insofar as it can coexist with the freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law, is the only original right belonging to every man by virtue of his humanity.151

Freedom is a relational concept because it does not make sense to talk of a person as being free if there are no other people whose wills she cannot be subject to. So, the hermit living alone in the woods does not have “freedom” in the sense of freedom from the coercive actions of another. It may seem that living in a society with laws and rules is less free than living without them in the state of nature where one is “free” to do anything

150

Ibid., 8:360.

151

without fear of being punished. However, this kind of freedom is no real freedom at all because in this condition I am always potentially the victim of the arbitrary will of another person. Moreover, I have no recourse to defend my right not to be coerced in this way. The solution to this problem is to set up a coercive institution that can secure the freedom of its various members.

The state is set up as a mechanism to deal with the problem of a lack of freedom in the state of nature. For this reason the state is authorized to use coercion in order to combat the failures of the state of nature. The particular laws that are instituted by the state in order to guarantee the freedom of its individual members are only justifiable if they could have been consented to under conditions of equality for all. This characterization of the original contract in Kant is not a foundational account of how we came to be living in society together. Instead it explains what the limits on coercive power must be in order to justify the limits of what can be legally instituted by the state. What we really want then is to live in a condition where we are under the protection of just laws, or what Kant would term a condition of “right”. Freedom is the gauge by which we determine whether or not the condition of right obtains and not what we are actually aiming for. Kant explains this point in “On the Common Saying: That May be Correct in Theory, but is of no Use in Practice”. At 8:289 in the context of an argument against the Hobbesian conception of the state of nature, Kant remarks that:

The concept of an external right as such proceeds entirely from the concept of

freedom in the external relation of people to one another and has nothing at all to do with the end that all of them naturally have (their aim of happiness) and with the prescribing of means for attaining it.152

The state does not obtain its right to coerce owing to any improvement in the happiness of its subjects; it obtains the right to coerce owing to the condition in which the subjects of a political group find themselves. Right, then, is defined as follows:

152

On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, but It Is of No Use in Practice, ed. Mary J. Gregor, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 8:289.

Right is the limitation of the freedom of each to the condition of its harmony with the freedom of everyone insofar as this is possible in accordance with a universal law; and public right is the sum of external laws which make such a thoroughgoing harmony possible.153

Freedom then does not consist in not being subject to laws, but in only being subject to those laws that create a condition of right in society. All other laws, ones that do not respect the autonomy of subjects, meaning their ability to decide their ends for themselves, are not legitimate laws. So, for Kant, the original contract is what tells us whether the laws that are in place live up to the condition of public right. Kant puts this point in the following way, stating that the:

[original contract] is instead only an idea of reason, which, however, has its undoubted practical reality, namely to bind every legislator to give his laws in such a way that they could have arisen from the united will of a whole people and to regard each subject, insofar as he wants to be a citizen, as if he has joined in voting for such a will.154

So, in spite of the apparent contradiction between freedom and coercion in Kant, there appears to be a sense in which a conception of freedom without coercion is meaningless. If we want to be able to live in society together then there must be some institution capable of guaranteeing that the laws that apply to us as moral individuals are enforceable. While the law, for Kant, is a natural thing, in the sense that we all have access to the law as moral beings, there is only such a thing as law, as opposed to morality, if it is instituted in such a way that it is enforceable. As Mulholland writes: “for Kant knowing the law is insufficient to produce the rule of law.”155 We will come back to this point later but for now I want to turn to Kant’s conception of the state of nature and what condition states find themselves in in the international realm.

153 Ibid., 8:290. 154 Ibid., 8:297. 155