Interpreting the World, Kant's Philosophy of History and Politics

Evan Simpson is a philosophy professor and dean of humanities at
McMaster University and the editor of Anti-foundationalism and Practical
Reasoning: Conversations Between Hermeneutics and Analysis.

This synoptic work joins a small number of serious contributions to the interpretation of Kant’s political philosophy (including Susan Meld Shell’s The Rights of Reason, University of Toronto Press, 1980, to which it displays a general similarity of spirit and structure). Booth clearly and convincingly traces the connections between Kant’s severe limits on the knowable and the constitution of a free and just society.

Much of the early discussion is a useful attempt to elaborate the practical intent of Kant’s critical philosophy and to create active engagement between him and Marx. The most interesting passages contrast Kant’s Copernican revolution with Marx’s Promethean hope, pitting interest in interpreting the world against interest in changing it. Theoverall contribution and integrity of the work might have been enhanced by pursuing this contrast in the latter part of the book, which concerns justice, theory, praxis, and revolution but puzzlingly reverts to Kant’s argument with the “philosophical historians” who preceded him. This is no contest, so that there is room only for exposition, whereas the struggle between liberal and revolutionary retains vast potential for significant argument.

In curious contrast to the loving scholarship, the text is marred by numerous typographical errors. The index is often difficult to use because it cites pages in the text where superscripts appear rather than the pages at the back where relevant endnotes occur.