Immanuel Kant: The Law You Give Yourself

Why the “contract” is not a parchment but a test for legitimacy

Every day at about the same hour, a thin professor in a powdered wig walked a perfect loop through Königsberg. Neighbors supposedly set their clocks by him. The story endures not because it’s cute but because it’s Kantian: rules you can count on, the same for everyone, unbent by mood or weather. Immanuel Kant lived in a provincial city he rarely left, but he spent a lifetime asking a world‑spanning question: what makes a law binding on free people?

Kant, the meticulous bachelor of East Prussia, looked like bureaucracy given human form. But inside that clockwork was a revolutionary: the thinker who insisted that the only authority we can accept without servility is the one we give ourselves as rational equals. Where earlier social contract theories often imagined a prehistoric deal—people bargaining with a sovereign—Kant said the “original contract” is not a signed document at all. It is an idea of reason: a standard for judging whether any law could be accepted by everyone affected as co‑authors of the public order.¹²

Here is the engine of his political philosophy. First, start with the moral core he called the categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”¹ Put bluntly, don’t claim a permission for yourself that you would deny to others. Second, extend this to politics: a rightful state is one where coercive laws could be publicly justified to free and equal citizens. If a rule needs secrecy or special pleading, it fails the test.

An analogy helps. Imagine you’re writing software for a city’s voting machines. Your code must run on every device, not just yours; it must be auditable; and it must not contain hidden conditions that privilege one user. Kant’s universal law is like that compile‑on‑every‑machine requirement. His “publicity principle” is the audit: if a policy must remain hidden to work, it’s probably unjust.⁴ And his demand to treat people as “ends in themselves” forbids designing systems that use some citizens merely as tools for others’ goals.¹

Kant’s stress test came not on a battlefield but in the lecture hall. In 1794, Prussian authorities ordered him to stop teaching certain religious doctrines. Kant complied—“as a loyal subject,” he wrote—promising silence on theology while that king lived. He obeyed the law’s letter but defended the principle of “public use of reason,” the scholar’s right to argue freely in print about public matters.³⁵ When the monarch died, Kant returned to the theme with a vengeance, publishing The Conflict of the Faculties and sharpening his view: citizens owe obedience to public laws, but that obedience is compatible with openly criticizing those laws and appealing to a more just, openly shareable framework. The distinction is Kant’s hallmark: external compliance sustains civil peace; internal autonomy sustains moral progress.

He also read the era’s violence through this lens. Kant never celebrated the French Revolution’s bloodshed, but he paid attention to spectators’ “disinterested enthusiasm” for its declarations of right. That response, he thought, signaled a human capacity to recognize justice beyond self‑interest. For him, a republic—laws made by citizens for citizens—was not a utopia but the only political form that treats each person as a co‑legislator rather than a subject.⁴

So what does this do for us today, when the “social contract” is invoked to defend everything from pandemic mandates to platform moderation? Kant’s move turns your attention from origin stories to operating rules. Don’t ask, “Did we consent long ago?” Ask, “Could we consent now, as equals, if the policy were fully public and applied to everyone?”

Try this three‑step Kantian check on any proposal, from emergency powers to AI content policy:

• Universalize it: Would the rule still make sense if you didn’t know whether you were ruler or ruled, mod or user, majority or minority? If its sense depends on your advantage, it violates the universal law test.
• Publicize it: Could the policy be announced in the town square and still work? If it requires obscurity or gaslighting to function, it fails the publicity principle.
• Respect ends, not means: Does the rule treat people as agents with their own purposes—protecting their equal external freedom—or as mere instruments to someone else’s plan? If it instrumentalizes, it’s out.

Notice what this does to familiar debates. A surveillance program that cannot be disclosed without collapsing signals its own injustice. A “one‑time” emergency exemption that quietly becomes permanent offends equality before the law. A Terms‑of‑Service labyrinth that binds billions without real understanding looks less like consent and more like domination. Conversely, policies that publish reasons, accept contestation, and bind rulers and ruled alike earn legitimacy—even when they constrain us—because they model the law we could give ourselves.

Kant’s walking schedule is not the point; the point is what it symbolizes: rule by reasons that anyone can grasp, not by the will of whoever happens to hold the stick. In Kant’s hands, the social contract isn’t a mythic ceremony; it’s a daily discipline. We test our laws the way he tested his maxims: could everyone live under this and remain a co‑author of our shared world? If yes, obey—and keep arguing in public. If no, the contract has been broken, whether or not anyone ever signed it.