The Eternal Return of Politics

2003

Politics of Historical Signs In his text The Contest of Faculties, Immanuel Kant makes an attempt to answer the question "Is the human race continually improving?" He identifies such an attempt as belonging to a history of future times. Nevertheless, according to Kant, such a history must start from some sort of experience. He reasons that "[w]e must, therefore, search for an event which would indicate that such a cause exists and that it is causally active within the human race, irrespective of the time at which it might actually operate; and it would have to be a cause which allowed us to conclude, as an inevitable consequence of its operation, that mankind is improving." (1) By reading s…