Abstract: The article examines Kant’s Principle of Independence, which awards the vote on condition that one is independent. It argues that we should distinguish between the idea of independence and its empirical form; that Kant equates the former with the idea of freedom as the real, non-nominal exercise of choice and the idea of equality as the absence of all overt and covert coercion; and that, as construed, both ideas are intrinsically connected with conditions which must be satisfied if consent to a law is to be real rather than merely nominal. Further, it examines the empirical forms that independence takes in Gemeinspruch and in the Rechtslehre, relating them to its idea and to Kant’s historical circumstances as he seems to perceive them.
© De Gruyter
