Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Konigsberg, East Prussia, into a Lutheran family shaped by Pietism, and spent his whole working life at the city's university, becoming professor of logic and metaphysics in 1770. His Critique of Pure Reason (1781) transformed modern philosophy. His political writings include What Is Enlightenment? (1784), Toward Perpetual Peace (1795) and the Doctrine of Right in The Metaphysics of Morals (1797). In 1794 a royal order under Frederick William II barred him from writing or lecturing on religion. He died in Konigsberg, now Kaliningrad in Russia, in 1804.

Kant is among the most influential philosophers in history, and his political ideas shaped liberal theories of rights and the rule of law, including the work of John Rawls. Perpetual Peace is widely seen as an intellectual forerunner of the League of Nations, the United Nations and the democratic peace thesis. Admirers credit him with grounding politics in human dignity and equal freedom. Critics point to his exclusion of women and the poor from full citizenship, his denial of any right to resist even unjust rulers, his defense of the death penalty, and his earlier writings that ranked human races, which scholars now debate as a serious flaw in his universalism.