Lea Ypi
Kant on Revolution
Authors who think about the justifiability of revolution are often divided between those who criticize it on grounds of institutional legalism and those who endorse it on grounds of idealist moralism. Moralists think that since the ends of revolution are right, revolution can never be wrong. Legalists think that since the means of revolution are wrong, revolution can never be right. In this lecture I revisit their arguments and offer a Kantian alternative that tries to cut across the divide. I examine revolution not in relation to the justice of individuals but grounded on a philosophical theory of history that focuses on collective progress.
Lea Ypi is a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and an honorary professor in philosophy at the Australian National University. A native of Albania, she has degrees in Philosophy and in Literature from the University of Rome La Sapienza, a PhD from the European University Institute, and was a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University. She is the author of The Meaning of Partisanship (with Jonathan White, 2016), Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency (2017), and The Architectonic of Reason: Purposiveness and Systematic Unity in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (2021). Her latest book, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (2021) won the 2022 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Slightly Foxed First Biography Prize and is being translated into thirty languages. Her academic work has been recognized with the British Academy Prize for Excellence in Political Science and the Leverhulme Prize for Outstanding Research Achievement. She coedits the journal Political Philosophy and occasionally writes for The Guardian and Financial Times.