A National Tradition in the Making: A Commentary on Douglas Moggach’s Freedom and Perfection

Douglas Moggach offers a persuasive and erudite genealogy of post-Kantian perfectionism, meaning the ethic-political perfectionist current according to which freedom is “a self-initiating and self-directing activity”, as recast and modified by Kant while reshaping the legacy of Leibniz's concept of spontaneity. From Leibniz and Wolff, through Kant's legal turn, to Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, Bauer, and Marx, Moggach's central achievement lies in demonstrating that Kant did not repudiate the perfectionist inheritance of his Leibnizian predecessor, but rather reoriented it, while still criticizing Wolff's paternalistic Enlightenment absolutism. At the centre of the Kantian revolution is the claim that freedom originates from an inner motive and does not just respond to external stimuli. Moggach's philosophical reconstruction is compelling, and this comment will focus on the framing as ‘German political thought’; which invites further reflection on how such a national tradition was retrospectively constructed and what work that category performs.