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have already done, a past act that now obligates us to obedience in the future. But to posit such
an act is necessarily to posit a prior reason for the act, and as we have already seen with Hobbes
and Locke, it is difficult if not impossible for this reason, and not the act of contract itself, from
becoming the real justification for our obedience. The originality of Kant’s appeal to the original
contract is that government is not conceived as the result of a founding act for which we can or
should recover the reasons. Instead, the continued existence of government is reconciled with
the normative idea of Recht by our demanding, at every moment, a universal form of political
justification. The contract does not look back to a citizen’s prior act; rather, in committing
himself or herself to the contract, the citizen looks forward to a time in which laws are given full
justification. That thought may seem an unreachable ideal, but the Kantian conception of
modern political agency, the possibility of politics in Kant’s sense, gives a coherent picture of
how we might all make the law. If we are asked why we should obey the law, and we answer
that we have made a contract, what we mean by that is that a law is not supposed to be just the
will of any particular individual. Even if we disagree with the law, we cannot simply refuse to
obey, because this would reduce the commonwealth to a series of individual wills, where it is
supposed to be the product of commonwealth. If we disagree with the law, the legitimate
response is not disobedience but politics: the raising of a public claim with which we expect
others to agree and with which we expect authority to comply. In that case, we rule together, but
if we abandon politics for despotism or sheer resistance, we rule and are ruled alone. Whatever
anyone has done in the past, our goal ought to be to rule together in the future. And it is because
we are committed to ruling together that it is entirely appropriate for us to say, and to say only,
that we obey the law because we have made a contract.
Convention