The book aspires to show the inherent paradoxes of the “pure idea” of freedom and its foreignness, and possible contrariety, revealed in and by some specific historical-political contexts, to freedom as practice of human liberation. This theme is looked at mainly through the prism of Kant’s moral and political philosophy, which—by way of critical engagement with it—offers a particularly propitious vantage point for its exploration and elaboration. Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, with its dramatic juxtaposition and conjoining of freedom with evil, along with its emphasis on “radical evil” and, at the same time, its dismissal of “diabolic evil” (as something applicable to and practicable by humans) is particularly seminal in this respect. The book furnishes a political-philosophical reading of the paradoxes of Kant’s account of freedom and culminates in showing what they reveal and allow us to come to grips with politics in “real life”, in particular the politics of great revolutions.
