Commonwealth Notes — Part I: Republic of Property (Excerpted Transcript)
Commonwealth Notes — Part I: Republic of Property (Excerpted from Transcript)
General framing across the excerpt
Hardt and Negri aim to reframe the current crises by challenging the narrowness of conventional debates about alternatives to capitalism.
They argue that the real engine of power is not a distant sovereign or fascist regime alone, but the everyday systems of property and capital embedded in law.
The book seeks to illuminate the intimate, constitutive relation between sovereignty, law, and capital, and to propose a transformative political project grounded in the immanent (on-the-ground) life of society, i.e., the multitude, rather than a transcendent, idealized sovereignty.
They propose a transcendental critique (in the Kantian sense) not of reason itself but of the structures that condition social life: property and capital as the a priori conditions that shape political possibility.
They distinguish two Kantian trajectories: the “major” Kant (the Enlightenment as reform within the existing order) and the “minor” Kant (daring to know, know-how to dare, and creating a new order). Their project is to develop the latter in order to overthrow the Republic of Property and build a democracy of the multitude.
The central claims about power and sovereignty
Contemporary power is not primarily a transcendent sovereign force above the law, but an everyday, this-worldly power embedded in legal and economic structures—that is, property and capital.
The apocalyptic discourse (sovereignty, state of exception, fascism) obscures the ordinary mechanisms by which power operates day-to-day through law and property.
The dominant forms of sovereignty, law, and capital intertwine to create what they call the “republic of property.” This republic determines the conditions of social life in all its aspects, often invisibly.
They advocate an analysis that follows Euhemerus: demystify the heavens of sovereignty and reveal the earthly bases of power.
They invoke the Kantian Copernican revolution to shift focus from objects of power to the transcendental conditions of possibility of power, which, for them, are law and capital.
Capital is an impersonal, largely invisible form of domination that imposes its own economic laws and structures social life, making inequality seem natural and inevitable.
Finance capital, due to its abstract nature, has universal reach (debt, financial instruments, currency and interest rate manipulation) and thus serves as the modern a priori of social life.
The unity of law and capital as immanent powers creates a framework in which obedience is produced not by coercion alone but by the very conditions of possibility for social action.
The methodological move: transcendental critique of the republic of property
They borrow Kant’s idea of the transcendental plane (conditions of possibility) and apply it to power: ask what must be true for social life to be possible under capitalism and property.
They argue that Kant’s framework (which historically seeks to justify bourgeois legality) can be repurposed to reveal how property and law together constitute modern power.
They acknowledge they are using Kant “against the grain”: Kant’s epistemology is a tool to dissect how power operates, not to erase critique of property.
They emphasize that Kant’s critical method can be harnessed to expose and challenge the power of property and the constitutional state, while pushing beyond Kant to affirm an immanent, biopolitical project.
The republic of property is described as an ethical and juridical formation that constitutes the modern subject as primarily a property-owning subject (the “patrimonial” individual, increasingly framed as shareholder).
Key terms and concepts introduced
Republic of Property: The idea that modern political constitutions and legal systems are fundamentally organized around and defended by property rights.
Transcendental critique: A method to analyze the a priori conditions (law, capital) that make social life possible, rather than treating power as something merely external or contingent.
Immanence: The insistence that politics must be organized on the level of immanent social life (labor, relations, everyday practices), not as a distant ideal of sovereignty.
Biopolitics as Event (De Corfore, De Homine): Frameworks to analyze power as it operates on life (biopower) and the events that disrupt or reorganize power relations; these sections set up the broader biopolitical critique (not fully elaborated in the excerpt, but introduced here as a structural concern).
The structure of power in modern capitalist society
Power is embedded in law and the private property regime; the rule of property is the governing logic of modern constitutional life.
Capital operates as an impersonal force that seeks to impose its own order on labor and social life, making exploitation and hierarchy appear natural.
Finance capital’s abstraction masks its coercive reach, yet its effects are pervasive (debt, financial instruments, currency manipulation) and thus a global a priori of life chances.
The “formal structure” of law (Kelsenian/Rawlsian formalism) has historically aligned with the power of property, shaping ideology and political imagination.
Republican Rights of Property (historical-disharmonics with property)
The term republicanism has encompassed diverse, often conflicting political tendencies; the authors highlight one dominant lineage: republicanism grounded in property rights that exclude or subordinate those without property.
The American Revolution’s constituent power is contrasted with the Constitution’s later formalization of sovereignty and property rights; the Founders’ debates treated property rights as foundational, sometimes at the expense of broader political equality.
Charles Beard’s thesis (economic interpretation of the Constitution) is cited to support the claim that property rights underwrite the constitutional order.
The Second Amendment’s transformation from a collective right to defend liberty with a militia to a right perceived as guaranteeing individual gun ownership as a property shield is used to illustrate how property logic reshapes constitutional rights.
The Haitian Revolution is presented as a case where the republic of property undermined the principle of universal liberty, because slavery as property was foundational to the property regime. The Haitian case is often excluded from the canon of republican revolutions because it violated the rule of property.
Colonial histories show how colonial governance enshrined the rule of property (e.g., the Permanent Settlement in Bengal) to preserve landed property and tax systems, aligning with bourgeois republican logic.
The welfare state’s emergence introduced public property and state involvement in economic life, but still within the overarching logic of property and capital.
Evgeny Pashukanis’s claim that “all law is private law” and that public law is a rhetorical figure of bourgeois legal theory underlines their critique of the supposed neutrality of law; the law is a reflection of capitalist relations of production.
Across these examples, the authors argue that private property has been the foundational logic of modern constitutional orders, shaping not only rights but the very form of political subjectivity.
Real rights, dynamic rights, and the French Revolution
The French Revolution reveals a dynamic shift between “real rights” (jus reale, rights over things) and “dynamic rights” (rights arising from labor and production).
In the early revolutionary period, rights tied to labor (dynamic rights) appear more prominent, but over time real rights come to predominate, especially as property becomes central to the legal order.
The 1804 Code Civil (Article 544) defines property as the right to enjoy and dispose of goods, provided they are not used contrary to law; this formulation crystallizes property as a cornerstone of the legal order.
Property thus becomes the paradigm for all fundamental rights, and landed/slave property (real rights tied to production) recedes or consolidates in a new form of ownership that underwrites the modern economy.
Across the revolutionary arc (1789, 1793, 1795 constitutions), equality’s legal meaning shifts and becomes subordinated to the rule of the majority when defined in property-based terms.
The Haitian Revolution’s exclusion from republican canon is used to illustrate how property logic suppresses true emancipation for enslaved peoples; Haiti’s challenge to property rights is treated as a threat to the republic’s order.
Real-world and colonial illustrations of property as power
The Bengal Permanent Settlement is cited as a colonial articulation of the rule of property to secure revenue and landed interests, shaping colonial governance toward property security.
Guha’s analysis of the Settlement highlights how bourgeois rationality and property rule can justify quasi-feudal arrangements in colonial contexts, reinforcing the centrality of property in political life.
The Haitian Revolution shows that the republic of property has a built-in tension with universal freedom and equality; its suppression demonstrates the limits of republicanism when confronted with anti-property emancipation.
The critique of contemporary social democracy and reformism (the major Kant path)
The authors critique contemporary social democratic theorists (Habermas, Rawls, Giddens, Beck) for maintaining a transcendental framework that upholds the republic of property while advocating reform.
Habermas’s emphasis on communicative reason and intersubjectivity, and Rawls’s difference principle, are viewed as reformist within a formal transcendental mode that preserves existing property relations.
Giddens’s reformist project attempts to reform from the inside, sometimes resorting to sovereign power to push reform through when social mechanisms fail; Beck’s approach emphasizes empirical realism but still operates within modernity’s structural constraints.
A common thread among these thinkers is a reformist Enlightenment that seeks to preserve the core structures of capital and property while patching the system from within; this is viewed as insufficient to overcome the republic of property.
Other theorists of globalization (Held, Stiglitz, Friedman) are cited as offering reformist perspectives that do not challenge the fundamental corporate and property-centered framework.
The alternative proposed: the minor Kant and the democracy of the multitude
The authors advocate for the minor Kant’s injunction: not only to dare to know but to know how to dare, i.e., a theory and practice that combines knowledge with courageous political action.
They aim to overthrow the republic of property by building a democracy of the multitude on an immanent plane of social life, not by appealing to transcendent sovereignty.
The proposed political project situates democracy within the life of labor and social relations, with a metamorphosis of the current order rather than a simple reform.
They emphasize that emancipation requires organizing resistance and transforming spontaneous reactions into collective political agency and organized force that can construct an alternative social order.
Intersections with biopolitics and modernity (setup for Part II and beyond)
The discussion on sovereignty and biopolitics sets up the broader project: to analyze how biopolitical power operates in late modernity and how it intersects with property and capital.
The Preface and opening sections frame the later exploration of antimodernity as resistance and altermodernity as a landscape of change, with the multitude as the agent of common wealth.
Notable quotes and ideas mentioned (selected excerpts for study)
“The primary form of power that really confronts us today, however, is not so dramatic or demonic but rather earthly and mundane. We need to stop confusing politics with theology.”
“Power embodied in property and capital, power embedded in and fully supported by the law.”
“The republican constitution is the constitution of private property.”
“Property is the right to enjoy and dispose of things in the most absolute manner, provided they are not used in a way contrary to law or regulations.”
“Sapere Aude! Kant is a prophet of the republic of property not so much directly in his political or economic views but indirectly in the form of power he discovers through his epistemological and philosophical inquiries.”
“The minor Kant blasts apart its foundations, opening the way for mutation and free creation on the biopolitical plane of immanence.”
“Enlightenment is an obligation to both dare to know and know how to dare.”
Connections to related theoretical strands (contextual links)
Foucault and Agamben’s sovereignty and state of exception are acknowledged as important debates in sovereignty studies; the authors engage with these discussions to reframe sovereignty in terms of legal-economic structures rather than transcendent power.
Kant is used as a methodological pivot: the major/minor Kant distinction guides their approach to political theory and revolutionary practice.
The Haiti example aligns with postcolonial and anti-racist critiques of liberal republicanism and reveals the racial dimension of property-intensive constitutions.
The discussion of Pashukanis connects to Marxist theories of law and the claim that legal forms reflect underlying capitalist social relations.
The critique of Habermas, Rawls, Giddens, Beck situates the authors within debates on modernization, globalization, and reformism, arguing for a more radical reconfiguration of political possibility beyond transcendental frameworks.
What this section sets up for later parts
A move from the analysis of the Republic of Property to an interpersonal landscape of the Multitude and a critique of Modernity’s ambivalences, and eventually to the analysis of Capital and its transformations.
The pretreatment of violence as insufficient by itself, with an emphasis on educating resistance and organizing collective power on the immanent plane.
The aim to metamorphose capital and to realize a plural, democratic politics grounded in the life of the multitude rather than the sovereignty of property.
Quick glossary (for study quick-reference)
Republic of Property: The idea that modern constitutions and laws are fundamentally organized to protect and empower property rights.
Transcendental critique: Investigating the a priori conditions (like law and capital) that make social life possible under a given system.
Immanence: Political organizing rooted in the actual, everyday life of the social body (labor, relations, communities) rather than in abstract sovereignty.
Minor Kant: An interpretation of Kant that emphasizes critical, disruptive, creative tension—daring to know and knowing how to dare—as a tool for transformative politics.
Major Kant: An interpretation of Kant that emphasizes reform within existing structures, often aligned with transcendental formalism and reformist liberal-democratic projects.
Note on structure and sources cited in the notes (as referenced in the transcript)
The notes section provides extensive scholarly references to: Agamben on sovereignty, Kant’s Political Writings, Pashukanis on private/public law, and a broad set of historical examples (Beard, Adams, Jefferson, Sieyes, Haitian Revolution, Bengal, etc.).
The bibliography anchors the argument in a wide historical and philosophical tradition, including Marxist and post-Marxist critiques of law and property.
Quick takeaway for exam readiness
The central thesis of this section is that modern political life is organized around the republic of property, and thus any genuine democratic transformation must interrogate and move beyond property-based sovereignty toward an immanent, biopolitical democracy of the multitude.
The methodological move is to apply a Kantian transcendental critique not to uphold but to destabilize and supersede the current order, using the minor Kant as a theoretical compass for transformative politics.
IN SUBSECTION.
General Framing
Challenging Conventional Debates
Hardt and Negri aim to reframe the current crises by challenging the narrowness of conventional debates about alternatives to capitalism.
They argue that the real engine of power is not a distant sovereign or fascist regime alone, but the everyday systems of property and capital embedded in law.
The book seeks to illuminate the intimate, constitutive relation between sovereignty, law, and capital, and to propose a transformative political project grounded in the immanent (on-the-ground) life of society, i.e., the multitude, rather than a transcendent, idealized sovereignty.
Transcendental Critique & Kantian Trajectories
They propose a transcendental critique (in the Kantian sense) not of reason itself but of the structures that condition social life: property and capital as the a priori conditions that shape political possibility.
They distinguish two Kantian trajectories: the “major” Kant (the Enlightenment as reform within the existing order) and the “minor” Kant (daring to know, know-how to dare, and creating a new order). Their project is to develop the latter in order to overthrow the Republic of Property and build a democracy of the multitude.
Central Claims on Power and Sovereignty
Nature of Contemporary Power
Contemporary power is not primarily a transcendent sovereign force above the law, but an everyday, this-worldly power embedded in legal and economic structures—that is, property and capital.
The apocalyptic discourse (sovereignty, state of exception, fascism) obscures the ordinary mechanisms by which power operates day-to-day through law and property.
The dominant forms of sovereignty, law, and capital intertwine to create what they call the “republic of property.” This republic determines the conditions of social life in all its aspects, often invisibly.
Demystifying Power & Kantian Shift
They advocate an analysis that follows Euhemerus: demystify the heavens of sovereignty and reveal the earthly bases of power.
They invoke the Kantian Copernican revolution to shift focus from objects of power to the transcendental conditions of possibility of power, which, for them, are law and capital.
Capital as Domination
Capital is an impersonal, largely invisible form of domination that imposes its own economic laws and structures social life, making inequality seem natural and inevitable.
Finance capital, due to its abstract nature, has universal reach (debt, financial instruments, currency and interest rate manipulation) and thus serves as the modern a priori of social life.
The unity of law and capital as immanent powers creates a framework in which obedience is produced not by coercion alone but by the very conditions of possibility for social action.
Methodological Move: Transcendental Critique of the Republic of Property
Repurposing Kant's Framework
They borrow Kant’s idea of the transcendental plane (conditions of possibility) and apply it to power: ask what must be true for social life to be possible under capitalism and property.
They argue that Kant’s framework (which historically seeks to justify bourgeois legality) can be repurposed to reveal how property and law together constitute modern power.
They acknowledge they are using Kant “against the grain”: Kant’s epistemology is a tool to dissect how power operates, not to erase critique of property.
Beyond Kant: Biopolitical Project
They emphasize that Kant’s critical method can be harnessed to expose and challenge the power of property and the constitutional state, while pushing beyond Kant to affirm an immanent, biopolitical project.
The republic of property is described as an ethical and juridical formation that constitutes the modern subject as primarily a property-owning subject (the “patrimonial” individual, increasingly framed as shareholder).
Key Terms and Concepts Introduced
Republic of Property: The idea that modern political constitutions and legal systems are fundamentally organized around and defended by property rights.
Transcendental critique: A method to analyze the a priori conditions (law, capital) that make social life possible, rather than treating power as something merely external or contingent.
Immanence: The insistence that politics must be organized on the level of immanent social life (labor, relations, everyday practices), not as a distant ideal of sovereignty.
Biopolitics as Event (De Corfore, De Homine): Frameworks to analyze power as it operates on life (biopower) and the events that disrupt or reorganize power relations; these sections set up the broader biopolitical critique (not fully elaborated in the excerpt, but introduced here as a structural concern).
Structure of Power in Modern Capitalist Society
Embedded Power and Rule of Property
Power is embedded in law and the private property regime; the rule of property is the governing logic of modern constitutional life.
Capital operates as an impersonal force that seeks to impose its own order on labor and social life, making exploitation and hierarchy appear natural.
Finance capital’s abstraction masks its coercive reach, yet its effects are pervasive (debt, financial instruments, currency manipulation) and thus a global a priori of life chances.
The “formal structure” of law (Kelsenian/Rawlsian formalism) has historically aligned with the power of property, shaping ideology and political imagination.
Republican Rights of Property: Historical Disharmonies
Diverse Republicanism & Property's Foundation
The term republicanism has encompassed diverse, often conflicting political tendencies; the authors highlight one dominant lineage: republicanism grounded in property rights that exclude or subordinate those without property.
The American Revolution’s constituent power is contrasted with the Constitution’s later formalization of sovereignty and property rights; the Founders’ debates treated property rights as foundational, sometimes at the expense of broader political equality.
Charles Beard’s thesis (economic interpretation of the Constitution) is cited to support the claim that property rights underwrite the constitutional order.
Property Logic Reshaping Rights
The Second Amendment’s transformation from a collective right to defend liberty with a militia to a right perceived as guaranteeing individual gun ownership as a property shield is used to illustrate how property logic reshapes constitutional rights.
The Haitian Revolution is presented as a case where the republic of property undermined the principle of universal liberty, because slavery as property was foundational to the property regime. The Haitian case is often excluded from the canon of republican revolutions because it violated the rule of property.
Colonial histories show how colonial governance enshrined the rule of property (e.g., the Permanent Settlement in Bengal) to preserve landed property and tax systems, aligning with bourgeois republican logic.
The welfare state’s emergence introduced public property and state involvement in economic life, but still within the overarching logic of property and capital.
Evgeny Pashukanis’s claim that “all law is private law” and that public law is a rhetorical figure of bourgeois legal theory underlines their critique of the supposed neutrality of law; the law is a reflection of capitalist relations of production.
Across these examples, the authors argue that private property has been the foundational logic of modern constitutional orders, shaping not only rights but the very form of political subjectivity.
Real Rights, Dynamic Rights, and the French Revolution
Evolution of Rights
The French Revolution reveals a dynamic shift between “real rights” (jus reale, rights over things) and “dynamic rights” (rights arising from labor and production).
In the early revolutionary period, rights tied to labor (dynamic rights) appear more prominent, but over time real rights come to predominate, especially as property becomes central to the legal order.
The 1804 Code Civil (Article 544) defines property as the right to enjoy and dispose of goods, provided they are not used contrary to law; this formulation crystallizes property as a cornerstone of the legal order.
Property thus becomes the paradigm for all fundamental rights, and landed/slave property (real rights tied to production) recedes or consolidates in a new form of ownership that underwrites the modern economy.
Across the revolutionary arc (1789, 1793, 1795 constitutions), equality’s legal meaning shifts and becomes subordinated to the rule of the majority when defined in property-based terms.
The Haitian Revolution’s exclusion from republican canon is used to illustrate how property logic suppresses true emancipation for enslaved peoples; Haiti’s challenge to property rights is treated as a threat to the republic’s order.
Real-World and Colonial Illustrations
Property as Power in Practice
The Bengal Permanent Settlement is cited as a colonial articulation of the rule of property to secure revenue and landed interests, shaping colonial governance toward property security.
Guha’s analysis of the Settlement highlights how bourgeois rationality and property rule can justify quasi-feudal arrangements in colonial contexts, reinforcing the centrality of property in political life.
The Haitian Revolution shows that the republic of property has a built-in tension with universal freedom and equality; its suppression demonstrates the limits of republicanism when confronted with anti-property emancipation.
Critique of Contemporary Social Democracy and Reformism (The Major Kant Path)
Preserving Existing Structures
The authors critique contemporary social democratic theorists (Habermas, Rawls, Giddens, Beck) for maintaining a transcendental framework that upholds the republic of property while advocating reform.
Habermas’s emphasis on communicative reason and intersubjectivity, and Rawls’s difference principle, are viewed as reformist within a formal transcendental mode that preserves existing property relations.
Giddens’s reformist project attempts to reform from the inside, sometimes resorting to sovereign power to push reform through when social mechanisms fail; Beck’s approach emphasizes empirical realism but still operates within modernity’s structural constraints.
A common thread among these thinkers is a reformist Enlightenment that seeks to preserve the core structures of capital and property while patching the system from within; this is viewed as insufficient to overcome the republic of property.
Other theorists of globalization (Held, Stiglitz, Friedman) are cited as offering reformist perspectives that do not challenge the fundamental corporate and property-centered framework.
Alternative Proposed: The Minor Kant and the Democracy of the Multitude
Daring to Know and Act
The authors advocate for the minor Kant’s injunction: not only to dare to know but to know how to dare, i.e., a theory and practice that combines knowledge with courageous political action.
They aim to overthrow the republic of property by building a democracy of the multitude on an immanent plane of social life, not by appealing to transcendent sovereignty.
The proposed political project situates democracy within the life of labor and social relations, with a metamorphosis of the current order rather than a simple reform.
They emphasize that emancipation requires organizing resistance and transforming spontaneous reactions into collective political agency and organized force that can construct an alternative social order.
Intersections with Biopolitics and Modernity
The discussion on sovereignty and biopolitics sets up the broader project: to analyze how biopolitical power operates in late modernity and how it intersects with property and capital.
The Preface and opening sections frame the later exploration of antimodernity as resistance and altermodernity as a landscape of change, with the multitude as the agent of common wealth.
Notable Quotes and Ideas
“The primary form of power that really confronts us today, however, is not so dramatic or demonic but rather earthly and mundane. We need to stop confusing politics with theology.”
“Power embodied in property and capital, power embedded in and fully supported by the law.”
“The republican constitution is the constitution of private property.”
“Property is the right to enjoy and dispose of things in the most absolute manner, provided they are not used in a way contrary to law or regulations.”
“Sapere Aude! Kant is a prophet of the republic of property not so much directly in his political or economic views but indirectly in the form of power he discovers through his epistemological and philosophical inquiries.”
“The minor Kant blasts apart its foundations, opening the way for mutation and free creation on the biopolitical plane of immanence.”
“Enlightenment is an obligation to both dare to know and know how to dare.”
Connections to Related Theoretical Strands
Foucault and Agamben’s sovereignty and state of exception are acknowledged as important debates in sovereignty studies; the authors engage with these discussions to reframe sovereignty in terms of legal-economic structures rather than transcendent power.
Kant is used as a methodological pivot: the major/minor Kant distinction guides their approach to political theory and revolutionary practice.
The Haiti example aligns with postcolonial and anti-racist critiques of liberal republicanism and reveals the racial dimension of property-intensive constitutions.
The discussion of Pashukanis connects to Marxist theories of law and the claim that legal forms reflect underlying capitalist social relations.
The critique of Habermas, Rawls, Giddens, Beck situates the authors within debates on modernization, globalization, and reformism, arguing for a more radical reconfiguration of political possibility beyond transcendental frameworks.
Setup for Later Parts
A move from the analysis of the Republic of Property to an interpersonal landscape of the Multitude and a critique of Modernity’s ambivalences, and eventually to the analysis of Capital and its transformations.
The pretreatment of violence as insufficient by itself, with an emphasis on educating resistance and organizing collective power on the immanent plane.
The aim to metamorphose capital and to realize a plural, democratic politics grounded in the life of the multitude rather than the sovereignty of property.
Quick Glossary
Republic of Property: The idea that modern constitutions and laws are fundamentally organized to protect and empower property rights.
Transcendental critique: Investigating the a priori conditions (like law and capital) that make social life possible under a given system.
Immanence: Political organizing rooted in the actual, everyday life of the social body (labor, relations, communities) rather than in abstract sovereignty.
Minor Kant: An interpretation of Kant that emphasizes critical, disruptive, creative tension—daring to know and knowing how to dare—as a tool for transformative politics.
Major Kant: An interpretation of Kant that emphasizes reform within existing structures, often aligned with transcendental formalism and reformist liberal-democratic projects.
Note on Structure and Sources
The notes section provides extensive scholarly references to: Agamben on sovereignty, Kant’s Political Writings, Pashukanis on private/public law, and a broad set of historical examples (Beard, Adams, Jefferson, Sieyes, Haitian Revolution, Bengal, etc.).
The bibliography anchors the argument in a wide historical and philosophical tradition, including Marxist and post-Marxist critiques of law and property.
Quick Takeaway for Exam Readiness
The central thesis of this section is that modern political life is organized around the republic of property, and thus any genuine democratic transformation must interrogate and move beyond property-based sovereignty toward an immanent, biopolitical democracy of the multitude.
The methodological move is to apply a Kantian transcendental critique not to uphold but to destabilize and supersede the current order, using the minor Kant as a theoretical compass for transformative politics.
General Framing
Challenging Conventional Debates
Hardt and Negri aim to reframe the current crises by challenging the narrowness of conventional debates about alternatives to capitalism.
They argue that the real engine of power is not a distant sovereign or fascist regime alone, but the everyday systems of property and capital embedded in law.
The book seeks to illuminate the intimate, constitutive relation between sovereignty, law, and capital, and to propose a transformative political project grounded in the immanent (on-the-ground) life of society, i.e., the multitude, rather than a transcendent, idealized sovereignty.
Transcendental Critique & Kantian Trajectories
They propose a transcendental critique (in the Kantian sense) not of reason itself but of the structures that condition social life: property and capital as the a priori conditions that shape political possibility.
They distinguish two Kantian trajectories: the “major” Kant (the Enlightenment as reform within the existing order) and the “minor” Kant (daring to know, know-how to dare, and creating a new order). Their project is to develop the latter in order to overthrow the Republic of Property and build a democracy of the multitude.
Central Claims on Power and Sovereignty
Nature of Contemporary Power
Contemporary power is not primarily a transcendent sovereign force above the law, but an everyday, this-worldly power embedded in legal and economic structures—that is, property and capital.
The apocalyptic discourse (sovereignty, state of exception, fascism) obscures the ordinary mechanisms by which power operates day-to-day through law and property.
The dominant forms of sovereignty, law, and capital intertwine to create what they call the “republic of property.” This republic determines the conditions of social life in all its aspects, often invisibly.
Demystifying Power & Kantian Shift
They advocate an analysis that follows Euhemerus: demystify the heavens of sovereignty and reveal the earthly bases of power.
They invoke the Kantian Copernican revolution to shift focus from objects of power to the transcendental conditions of possibility of power, which, for them, are law and capital.
Capital as Domination
Capital is an impersonal, largely invisible form of domination that imposes its own economic laws and structures social life, making inequality seem natural and inevitable.
Finance capital, due to its abstract nature, has universal reach (debt, financial instruments, currency and interest rate manipulation) and thus serves as the modern a priori of social life.
The unity of law and capital as immanent powers creates a framework in which obedience is produced not by coercion alone but by the very conditions of possibility for social action.
Methodological Move: Transcendental Critique of the Republic of Property
Repurposing Kant's Framework
They borrow Kant’s idea of the transcendental plane (conditions of possibility) and apply it to power: ask what must be true for social life to be possible under capitalism and property.
They argue that Kant’s framework (which historically seeks to justify bourgeois legality) can be repurposed to reveal how property and law together constitute modern power.
They acknowledge they are using Kant “against the grain”: Kant’s epistemology is a tool to dissect how power operates, not to erase critique of property.
Beyond Kant: Biopolitical Project
They emphasize that Kant’s critical method can be harnessed to expose and challenge the power of property and the constitutional state, while pushing beyond Kant to affirm an immanent, biopolitical project.
The republic of property is described as an ethical and juridical formation that constitutes the modern subject as primarily a property-owning subject (the “patrimonial” individual, increasingly framed as shareholder).
Key Terms and Concepts Introduced
Republic of Property: The idea that modern political constitutions and legal systems are fundamentally organized around and defended by property rights.
Transcendental critique: A method to analyze the a priori conditions (law, capital) that make social life possible, rather than treating power as something merely external or contingent.
Immanence: The insistence that politics must be organized on the level of immanent social life (labor, relations, everyday practices), not as a distant ideal of sovereignty.
Biopolitics as Event (De Corfore, De Homine): Frameworks to analyze power as it operates on life (biopower) and the events that disrupt or reorganize power relations; these sections set up the broader biopolitical critique (not fully elaborated in the excerpt, but introduced here as a structural concern).
Structure of Power in Modern Capitalist Society
Embedded Power and Rule of Property
Power is embedded in law and the private property regime; the rule of property is the governing logic of modern constitutional life.
Capital operates as an impersonal force that seeks to impose its own order on labor and social life, making exploitation and hierarchy appear natural.
Finance capital’s abstraction masks its coercive reach, yet its effects are pervasive (debt, financial instruments, currency manipulation) and thus a global a priori of life chances.
The “formal structure” of law (Kelsenian/Rawlsian formalism) has historically aligned with the power of property, shaping ideology and political imagination.
Republican Rights of Property: Historical Disharmonies
Diverse Republicanism & Property's Foundation
The term republicanism has encompassed diverse, often conflicting political tendencies; the authors highlight one dominant lineage: republicanism grounded in property rights that exclude or subordinate those without property.
The American Revolution’s constituent power is contrasted with the Constitution’s later formalization of sovereignty and property rights; the Founders’ debates treated property rights as foundational, sometimes at the expense of broader political equality.
Charles Beard’s thesis (economic interpretation of the Constitution) is cited to support the claim that property rights underwrite the constitutional order.
Property Logic Reshaping Rights
The Second Amendment’s transformation from a collective right to defend liberty with a militia to a right perceived as guaranteeing individual gun ownership as a property shield is used to illustrate how property logic reshapes constitutional rights.
The Haitian Revolution is presented as a case where the republic of property undermined the principle of universal liberty, because slavery as property was foundational to the property regime. The Haitian case is often excluded from the canon of republican revolutions because it violated the rule of property.
Colonial histories show how colonial governance enshrined the rule of property (e.g., the Permanent Settlement in Bengal) to preserve landed property and tax systems, aligning with bourgeois republican logic.
The welfare state’s emergence introduced public property and state involvement in economic life, but still within the overarching logic of property and capital.
Evgeny Pashukanis’s claim that “all law is private law” and that public law is a rhetorical figure of bourgeois legal theory underlines their critique of the supposed neutrality of law; the law is a reflection of capitalist relations of production.
Across these examples, the authors argue that private property has been the foundational logic of modern constitutional orders, shaping not only rights but the very form of political subjectivity.
Real Rights, Dynamic Rights, and the French Revolution
Evolution of Rights
The French Revolution reveals a dynamic shift between “real rights” (jus reale, rights over things) and “dynamic rights” (rights arising from labor and production).
In the early revolutionary period, rights tied to labor (dynamic rights) appear more prominent, but over time real rights come to predominate, especially as property becomes central to the legal order.
The 1804 Code Civil (Article 544) defines property as the right to enjoy and dispose of goods, provided they are not used contrary to law; this formulation crystallizes property as a cornerstone of the legal order.
Property thus becomes the paradigm for all fundamental rights, and landed/slave property (real rights tied to production) recedes or consolidates in a new form of ownership that underwrites the modern economy.
Across the revolutionary arc (1789, 1793, 1795 constitutions), equality’s legal meaning shifts and becomes subordinated to the rule of the majority when defined in property-based terms.
The Haitian Revolution’s exclusion from republican canon is used to illustrate how property logic suppresses true emancipation for enslaved peoples; Haiti’s challenge to property rights is treated as a threat to the republic’s order.
Real-World and Colonial Illustrations
Property as Power in Practice
The Bengal Permanent Settlement is cited as a colonial articulation of the rule of property to secure revenue and landed interests, shaping colonial governance toward property security.
Guha’s analysis of the Settlement highlights how bourgeois rationality and property rule can justify quasi-feudal arrangements in colonial contexts, reinforcing the centrality of property in political life.
The Haitian Revolution shows that the republic of property has a built-in tension with universal freedom and equality; its suppression demonstrates the limits of republicanism when confronted with anti-property emancipation.
Critique of Contemporary Social Democracy and Reformism (The Major Kant Path)
Preserving Existing Structures
The authors critique contemporary social democratic theorists (Habermas, Rawls, Giddens, Beck) for maintaining a transcendental framework that upholds the republic of property while advocating reform.
Habermas’s emphasis on communicative reason and intersubjectivity, and Rawls’s difference principle, are viewed as reformist within a formal transcendental mode that preserves existing property relations.
Giddens’s reformist project attempts to reform from the inside, sometimes resorting to sovereign power to push reform through when social mechanisms fail; Beck’s approach emphasizes empirical realism but still operates within modernity’s structural constraints.
A common thread among these thinkers is a reformist Enlightenment that seeks to preserve the core structures of capital and property while patching the system from within; this is viewed as insufficient to overcome the republic of property.
Other theorists of globalization (Held, Stiglitz, Friedman) are cited as offering reformist perspectives that do not challenge the fundamental corporate and property-centered framework.
Alternative Proposed: The Minor Kant and the Democracy of the Multitude
Daring to Know and Act
The authors advocate for the minor Kant’s injunction: not only to dare to know but to know how to dare, i.e., a theory and practice that combines knowledge with courageous political action.
They aim to overthrow the republic of property by building a democracy of the multitude on an immanent plane of social life, not by appealing to transcendent sovereignty.
The proposed political project situates democracy within the life of labor and social relations, with a metamorphosis of the current order rather than a simple reform.
They emphasize that emancipation requires organizing resistance and transforming spontaneous reactions into collective political agency and organized force that can construct an alternative social order.
Intersections with Biopolitics and Modernity
The discussion on sovereignty and biopolitics sets up the broader project: to analyze how biopolitical power operates in late modernity and how it intersects with property and capital.
The Preface and opening sections frame the later exploration of antimodernity as resistance and altermodernity as a landscape of change, with the multitude as the agent of common wealth.
Notable Quotes and Ideas
“The primary form of power that really confronts us today, however, is not so dramatic or demonic but rather earthly and mundane. We need to stop confusing politics with theology.”
“Power embodied in property and capital, power embedded in and fully supported by the law.”
“The republican constitution is the constitution of private property.”
“Property is the right to enjoy and dispose of things in the most absolute manner, provided they are not used in a way contrary to law or regulations.”
“Sapere Aude! Kant is a prophet of the republic of property not so much directly in his political or economic views but indirectly in the form of power he discovers through his epistemological and philosophical inquiries.”
“The minor Kant blasts apart its foundations, opening the way for mutation and free creation on the biopolitical plane of immanence.”
“Enlightenment is an obligation to both dare to know and know how to dare.”
Connections to Related Theoretical Strands
Foucault and Agamben’s sovereignty and state of exception are acknowledged as important debates in sovereignty studies; the authors engage with these discussions to reframe sovereignty in terms of legal-economic structures rather than transcendent power.
Kant is used as a methodological pivot: the major/minor Kant distinction guides their approach to political theory and revolutionary practice.
The Haiti example aligns with postcolonial and anti-racist critiques of liberal republicanism and reveals the racial dimension of property-intensive constitutions.
The discussion of Pashukanis connects to Marxist theories of law and the claim that legal forms reflect underlying capitalist social relations.
The critique of Habermas, Rawls, Giddens, Beck situates the authors within debates on modernization, globalization, and reformism, arguing for a more radical reconfiguration of political possibility beyond transcendental frameworks.
Setup for Later Parts
A move from the analysis of the Republic of Property to an interpersonal landscape of the Multitude and a critique of Modernity’s ambivalences, and eventually to the analysis of Capital and its transformations.
The pretreatment of violence as insufficient by itself, with an emphasis on educating resistance and organizing collective power on the immanent plane.
The aim to metamorphose capital and to realize a plural, democratic politics grounded in the life of the multitude rather than the sovereignty of property.
Quick Glossary
Republic of Property: The idea that modern constitutions and laws are fundamentally organized to protect and empower property rights.
Transcendental critique: Investigating the a priori conditions (like law and capital) that make social life possible under a given system.
Immanence: Political organizing rooted in the actual, everyday life of the social body (labor, relations, communities) rather than in abstract sovereignty.
Minor Kant: An interpretation of Kant that emphasizes critical, disruptive, creative tension—daring to know and knowing how to dare—as a tool for transformative politics.
Major Kant: An interpretation of Kant that emphasizes reform within existing structures, often aligned with transcendental formalism and reformist liberal-democratic projects.
Note on Structure and Sources
The notes section provides extensive scholarly references to: Agamben on sovereignty, Kant’s Political Writings, Pashukanis on private/public law, and a broad set of historical examples (Beard, Adams, Jefferson, Sieyes, Haitian Revolution, Bengal, etc.).
The bibliography anchors the argument in a wide historical and philosophical tradition, including Marxist and post-Marxist critiques of law and property.
Quick Takeaway for Exam Readiness
The central thesis of this section is that modern political life is organized around the republic of property, and thus any genuine democratic transformation must interrogate and move beyond property-based sovereignty toward an immanent, biopolitical democracy of the multitude.
The methodological move is to apply a Kantian transcendental critique not to uphold but to destabilize and supersede the current order, using the minor Kant as a theoretical compass for transformative politics.