Abstract

Chapter 3 argues that the most prominent contemporary approach to understanding the boundaries of political authority over persons and territories—what is here called Kantian functionalism—cannot in fact locate those boundaries in a plausible way. Appeals to the actual history of political subjection are required for this. Functionalism, however, is disabled by its purely structuralist orientation, an orientation that cannot be corrected by appeals to the authority produced through democratic decision-making. The chapter explores the argumentative resources available to the Kantian, arguing that none can solve this boundary problem. It also examines the possibility of a Kantian retreat on these subjects to the domain of nonideal theory.