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Marcelo de Azevedo Granato
The relationship between morals and politics in Kant, i. e. the claim that the latter "must bend the knee" before the former, may not require extensive argumentation. The purpose of this article is not simply to reaffirm this relationship. Rather, the paper first i) investigates if and how politics can be traced in and/ or within the application of the categorical imperative, then ii) it examines this application in the case of "political" maxims. For this purpose, the Kantian concept of maxim is analysed, and this is followed by a discussion of the "political" maxims contained in the second Appendix of Perpetual Peace and of the process of universalising/judging such maxims. In the last part of the article, the role of publicity in uncovering unjust political maxims is highlighted by means of the transcendental principles of public right (Perpetual Peace), particularly the first of them, which is then paralleled to the categorical imperative. Our conclusions will be, on the one hand, that it is possible to identify a political criterion inherent to the application of the categorical imperative, although the imperative itself focuses on ordinary (referable to all persons), not political, situations; on the other, that by being able to reveal the (im)morality/(in)justice of political maxims, the principles of public right show that the dynamics of politics alone may ground on moral judgements.
