Active Citizenship and Kantian Republicanism

Kant’s account of citizenship has been the subject of some critical attention in recent literature. This literature has focused primarily on his criteria for distinguishing active from passive citizens. Active citizens, Kant says, are those members of a state who are entitled to introduce and maintain the laws of that state. Passive citizens are protected by those laws, but they do not contribute to them. Understanding the criteria for active citizenship is an important task given the centrality of the state and its laws in Kant’s political philosophy. However, the result of the focus on this aspect of Kant’s views is that the nature of active citizenship itself has not been sufficiently discussed. This is unfortunate, since an examination of the rights and duties associated with active citizenship provide us with resources for better understanding Kant’s republicanism. In this paper, I contribute to remedying the lack of attention that has been paid to active citizenship on Kant’s account. In doing so, I hope to show that Kantian republicanism is compatible with a number of different modes of participation on the part of citizens.