Ideas for a Future Right: The Logical and Temporal Shift of the Social Contract in Kant's Philosophy

Abstract

The aim of my work is to show how the philosophical position developed by Kant highlights the aporia contained in the modern attempt to give the problem of justice a formal solution. According to Kant, the social contract is, no longer the starting point and source of law fixed in the past, but it is placed in the future, as a regulatory ideal towards which it is necessary to strive. Justice becomes therefore the horizon within which political activity and the production of law must move, not the boundary within which law, due to a pre-existing legitimacy, already develops.