Abstract

By taking the Critique of Pure Reason on the background, the essay analyses the risk of a dialectic use of reason in Kant's theory of law and politics. When the ruler, that is necessary to the existence of the community and the empirical holder of power, becomes an ideal of reason which realizes, hypostatize and personifies sovereignty, the role of the ideas of original contract and sovereign people is seriously questioned. The tracks of this turn within the system of political representation are pointed out through some discontinuities characterizing the movement from the State to the international and cosmopolitical dimensions.