Abstract
This article argues that Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of history is best understood as a theodicy of reason—a public defense of human rationality against the despair that threatens both philosophy and politics. Kant’s writings on progress, from the Idea for a Universal History to Toward Perpetual Peace, are not optimistic doctrines of inevitable moral advancement but complex reflections on the possibility of hope in the face of reason’s self-doubt. Against the “sorrow” of the thinking human being, Kant’s anthropology situates despair as a fundamental problem of rational life. The article reconstructs Kant’s response to the problem of despair through his conception of history as a moral and teleological process that interprets nature and human antagonism as purposive. Nature’s “step-motherly” stinginess and “unsocial sociability” compel the species to develop its rational capacities and discover the moral end of reason, transforming indignation at the apparent folly of human history into grounds for hope. Kant’s “anthropology of hope” provides the moral and psychological foundation for liberal politics. By reinterpreting Kant’s account of progress as a response to the philosophical and political problem of despair, the article shows how his thought continues to offer resources for a liberalism in crisis. Kant’s project invites us to see history as the temporal unfolding of humanity’s effort to justify itself.