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essentially inscrutable. Our commitment to leave the state of nature is not something that we do,
but something that is already implicit in our making normative claims about the use of objects.
Since to make a contract is precisely to do something, to make an explicit commitment at a
particular time, we are not contractually bound to the idea of Recht, because we never explicitly
committed ourselves to making normative claims about the use of objects. Making such claims
is just what we already do.
There is such an explicit act, however, in the attempt of any government to enforce those
normative claims. By an explicit act here I do not mean just the first act of any government, or
anything about its origin or founding. Rather I mean any act of any government at any time. The
explicit act is that a particular person or set of persons, identified in space and time, is claiming
the power to enforce the claims of Recht over a larger set of persons, also identified in space and
time. The idea of Recht is purely conceptual, the bare idea of legitimate restriction of our
external freedom. An actual government is this idea together with the empirical act of
enforcement. But why see this act as implying any sort of contract? The answer lies in the
radical incompatibility of the idea of Recht, which is purely normative, or pure normativity
applied to the idea of external freedom, and the act of enforcement, which in itself is simply a
particular act of physical force. On the one hand, Recht and its enforcement must go together,
because Recht demands the restriction of our external freedom, and only enforcement can insure
this restriction. On the other hand, Recht and its enforcement cannot go together, because the
universality of Recht is always threatened by the particularity of the act of enforcement. Recht is
an ideal, and actual government is always a less-than-ideal application of physical force. How to
resolve this impasse? Kant’s answer is that we have no choice but to link the two together, to
Convention