Kant, Labour, and Intersectionality

As race and gender have moved towards the centre of Kantian scholarship in the last decade, they have remained strikingly distinct. This has led to an emerging discourse on the difficulty of intersectional approaches to Kant, which reflects Kant’s own careful insistence on categorical thinking. By identifying patterns of institutionalized intersectional inequality in Kant’s theory of labor, I build on recent work developing the role of non-ideal theory in Kant’s political work and offer Kantians resources for attending to the intersectional political economy embedded in Kant’s political thought. Tracking this problem requires new strategies within Kant scholarship to think beyond single-axis frameworks of oppression.