Dictatorship and Insurrection in Schlegel’s Republicanism

This chapters explores Schlegel’s view on transitional forms of republicanism in his Essay on the Concept of Republicanism Occasioned by the Kantian Tract Perpetual Peace (1796). These rightful – but necessarily temporally limited – types of collective action are insurrection and provisional dictatorship. These forms of republicanism are absent in Kant’s theory of right, as they are manifestly incompatible with his account of popular sovereignty. Since Schlegel endorses a different view of sovereignty, the people, and the state, he is able to combine Kantian principles of justice with a defense of revolution and dictatorship as legitimate ways of implementing the republican ideal. This makes Schlegel’s argument on transitional forms of republicanism Kantian in “spirit,” although based on two claims that oppose the “letter” of Kant’s theory of right, namely an account of the people as having the power to depose the ruler or to suspend the law and an understanding of the state as a means rather than an end in itself.