Kant and Rawls on Free Speech in Autocracies

In the works of Kant and Rawls, we find an acute sensibility to the preeminent importance of freedom of speech. Both authors defend free speech in democratic societies as a private and as a public entitlement, but their conceptions markedly differ when applied to non-liberal and nondemocratic societies. The difference is that freedom of speech, for Kant, is a universal claim that can serve as a test of legitimacy of all legal orders, while for Rawls, some legal orders are owed full recognition even if they do not in principle guarantee freedom of speech. I explain Kant's account of free political speech and argue that the defence of individual rights should be seen as its core feature, both in republican and in autocratic states. I then argue that a much-overlooked shift in Rawls's development to Political Liberalism likewise ties his account of free speech in democratic societies to issues concerning rights and justice. In a next step, I discuss Rawls's perspective on some non-democratic regimes in his Law o f Peoples, regimes that he understands as well-ordered but which do not guarantee freedom of speech. I criticize Rawls's account from Kant's perspective and suggest to introduce a 'module' from Kant's prerepublican thought into Rawls's conception, aiming to secure a core area of rights- and justice-related speech. My claim is that under Kant's view of autocratic legitimacy, an important extension of speech rights is called for even in non-liberal, non-democratic states, and that a Rawlsian account should and can adopt it.