In this paper, I examine Kant’s reception of and solution to the problem of the unity of the political will. I propose that Kant distances himself from the modern paradigmatic foundations of sovereignty principally with his theses of the ideality of the general will (section II) and of the apriority of the justification of popular sovereignty (section III). My interpretative hypothesis is that Kant solves the problem by grounding sovereignty in a conceptual element which is new in the history of political philosophy, i. e. the a priori unified omnilateral will. In section IV, I explain why my reading of the ideality of the general will can respond to seemingly plausible objections arising from Kant’s own texts and how it works in the face of concrete political states of affairs.

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Debates between cosmopolitan liberalism 1 and statism (broadly construed) continue to proliferate and ramify. Underneath their polymorphism and the longstanding dispute about which is to be the basic normative unit of international politics, human individuals or states, they all share a critical core, which inevitably poses questions concerning the role and place of democracy in the face of globalization. What these questions principally ask is exactly how the transnationalization of capital jeopardizes the concept of democracy, if and how democracy can be enhanced by some virtuous process of internationalization, and how and whether local and interlocal democracies can counteract the negative effects of globalization. But at the same time, many of the theoretical and practical difficulties in responding in morally and politically efficacious ways to many of the unjust phenomena of today's world order (where the imbalance of power between states is radical) are due to the unjustified conflation of the normative principle of popular sovereignty and the sheer factual, empirical assertion of state power by formal constitutional democracies. There is, therefore, a normative question conceptually prior to that of the role of democracy in the face of the negative effects of globalization: the status and function that the concept of popular sovereignty has vis-à-vis democracies and the sovereign nation-state within the state, and towards other states and political and economic transnational actors. This article intends to provide some initial reflections on this status by introducing an alternative reading of the modern political theory most cited in the philosophical debates on cosmopolitanism and international law: Kant's. 2 It is possible and desirable to construct a concept of popular sovereignty whose empirical use does not collapse into the mere empirical assertion of power by modern, post-Westphalian nation-states and formal democracies, that does not necessarily clash with international, transnational, and cosmopolitan political-juridical realms, and that is able to play normative roles in the context of globalization. A Kantian theory offers us the possibility of developing a normative notion of popular sovereignty 3 that satisfies these requisites for two basic reasons. First, it functions as a normative principle to regulate those practical contexts. For example, it would serve to distinguish critically intromissions against political autonomy, even when states formally agree to the terms of their international relations and of their dealings with international financial institutions. Second, it is not conceptually jeopardized by the desirable transformation of international and transnational practices into ambits of fairer interactions with norms neutralizing power asymmetries, or by the protection of the rights of refugees and migrants, insofar as it does not coincide with the declarative and territorial power of nation-states. [Correction added on 22 January 2020, after first online publication: removed "a...

<p class="p1">En este trabajo, presento e intento resolver un problema que la</p><p class="p1">oposición de Kant al eudaimonismo podría plantear al segundo deber de virtud.</p><p class="p1">Tras analizarlo, propondré que el deber de la felicidad ajena consigue</p><p class="p1">disolver al menos uno de los obstáculos para alcanzar la felicidad en la Tierra</p><p class="p1">(la felicidad propia empírica anhelada naturalmente por los seres humanos</p><p class="p1">en cuanto seres racionales y finitos). El motivo de esto es que el deber de</p><p class="p1">promover los fines de los demás logra reubicar la felicidad hedónica en el</p><p class="p1">plano de la moralidad, algo que la noción intelectual de felicidad como componente</p><p class="p1">del bien supremo no consigue hacer y en esto consiste el rol que el</p><p class="p1">deber de la felicidad ajena cumple en el sistema ético kantiano.</p>