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Abstract: Although Kant is not usually counted among the forerunners of social sciences, any look at the work of the most prominent social theorists of the past century shows the pervasive influence of Kant's philosophy. This influence is obvious and crucial at the epistemological level, if only because Kant himself set the frame for subsequent discussion of the difference between human and natural sciences. Yet, Kant's work is also rich in substantive contributions to social theory, which may be articulated around his conception of culture and cultural progress.
Key words: culture, civilization, social sciences, unsocial sociability, humaniora
I. Methodological Insights
In the first paragraph of Idea for a Universal History, Kant expresses certainty about the possibility of scientific knowledge of historical developments, which in his view would ultimately replicate the methods of natural science. Accordingly, historical science should discover the profound universal laws which rule the otherwise chaotic realm of human affairs:
Whatever concept one may form of freedom of the will in the metaphysical context, its appearances, human actions, like all other natural events, are certainly determined in conformity with universal natural laws. History - which concerns itself with providing a narrative of these appearances, regardless of how deeply hidden their causes may be - allows us to hope that if we examine the play of the human will's freedom in the large, we can discover its course to conform to rules as well as to hope that what strikes us as complicated and unpredictable in the single individual may in the history of the entire species be discovered to be the steady progress and slow development of its original capacities.1
For sure, in this approach to the subject matter of history, Kant is consciously renouncing any metaphysical consideration of human actions. As he already argued in the first Critique, scientific knowledge in the modern sense of the term cannot go beyond the realm of appearances. Accordingly, human actions can only be the object of scientific knowledge insofar as we explain them just as every other natural event, hence caused by natural laws - no matter whether, from a practical perspective, we take them to be the result of free self-determination.
Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that this well-known...