Hannah Peaceman

This text examines the significance of the late absolutist Ständegesellschaft in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. It aims to reveal how social inequality, exclusion, and societal hierarchies are embedded within philosophical concepts and arguments. The text emphasises the historicity of philosophical terms as a methodological approach to analysing conditions of participation and exclusion. Kant’s concept of Enlightenment primarily addresses the “civilised estates” – nobility, civil servants, and bourgeoisie. Through close readings of Kant’s texts, especially “What is Enlightenment?” and “On Pedagogy”, the analysis shows how education, public discourse, and morality are framed in a way that reinforces social exclusion. Rather than criticising structural inequality, Kant individualises it through perceived educational shortcomings. The text advocates for a historically grounded philosophical analysis that examines concepts like morality (Sittlichkeit) as constructs shaped by historical power structures.

In this paper we present a comparison of Immanuel Kant’s and Moses Mendelssohn’s essays on Enlightenment with respect to the Prussian late absolutistic estate-based society and the so-called “Jewish Question”. Our comparison consists of three aspects: firstly, the relation between theory and practice, secondly, the relation between state and Enlightenment and thirdly, the relation between progress and the dangers of Enlightenment. We argue against an individualising and ahistoric reading of philosophical texts and the focus on philosophers as individual geniuses. Instead, we show that the content of terms like “the public” (Kant) and “education” (Mendelssohn) only becomes comprehensible when the correlation of context and systematicity is reflected.