The mere fact that a group of people in the past agreed to a constitution is not enough to make that constitution just. What kind of imaginary contract could possibly avoid this problem? Kant simply calls it “an idea of reason, which nonetheless has undoubted practical reality; for it can oblige every legislator to frame his laws in such a way that they could have been produced by the united will of a whole nation,” and obligate each citizen “as if he had consented.” Kant concludes that this imaginary act of collective consent “is the test of the rightfulness of every public law.”47
