Why does Kant Think that Democracy is Necessarily Despotic?

Abstract

Kant’s criticism of democracy has been traditionally defused with the consideration that Kant’s aversion is not to democracy per se, but to direct democracy. However, what Kant says – ‘to prevent the republican constitution from being confused with the democratic one, as commonly happens’ (ZeF, 8: 351) – appears to count not only against direct democracy, but also against conceptions of democracy closer to the ones we are accustomed to. By offering a new account of what Kant sees as the real problem of democracy (direct or not), the article unpacks a lesson about the limits of democracy that has gone largely unnoticed among political theorists and Kant specialists.