Kant and the good will
For Kant the problem of freedom or autonomy is not approached from the point of view of the problem of the transition from the state of nature to the state of culture, since such a transition is non representable.
However, through his interrogation of the properties of the moral subject Kant observes that the condition of freedom lies, as for Rousseau, in a “will” each man as a man harbours within himself. The stress must be put here on the fact that the will, which is at stake in Kantian analyses, does not stem from desires or inclinations but from a feeling of “duty” the author calls the “categorical imperative”. Also, this duty is not the product of a worldly experience; it is the product of reason in so far as a moral subject, whatever his specific conditions, is endowed with reason in the same way as he is endowed with instincts or sentiments. The will which obeys this duty is the will governed by reason, the “good will”. Each moral subject as a member of the cogitable world wants, under the requisites of the categorical imperative, freedom and autonomy that is the cultural equivalent of physical independence in Rousseau’s terminology. Here the concept of the social contract takes on its full meaning. Not an imaginary deliberation or negotiation which is supposed to lead the contractors to freedom, but a structure in which nobody can refuse to be free.In the Kantian philosophical handling of Rousseau’s political concepts and intuitions, the social contract theory loses all its positivist and arbitrary features and becomes the theory of the individual considered as the subject of moral law and as a rational being whose will is supposed to be necessarily “a universally legislating will”. When Kant says that “we must use humanity in our own person as an end”, he means that the human person, in his capacity as a member of the cogitable world, is equivalent to humanity and as such has to be considered as an absolute end.
Such a conception of morality has nothing to do with any individualism. In line with Kant’s reasoning, Hegel’s concept of State represents the political community which recognizes the human person as an absolute end; as such the Hegelian state incarnates the general will. However, the question of the state is complex. The state, more exactly the states, always existed. The problem of Rousseau, Kant or Hegel is not so much to reach the essence of the state in general but to analyse the conditions of possibility of the state thanks to which all are free, to question the conditions of the abolition of “all personal dependence”. Both Rousseau’s “general will” and Kantian “good will” are above all attempts to conceptualize the political structure of freedom for all. However, on this matter Hegel goes further than Rousseau and Kant. His conception of the good and the general will is rigorously in line with Rousseau’s and Kant’s, but concerning the modern state Hegel is attentive to the new social sphere through which labour is rehabilitated and the labourers recognized. This new social sphere is the “civil society”. You could say that Hegel returns to the discovery of the Scottish Enlightenment through Rousseau and Kant.