David Gordon was not kind to Peikoff’s attempt to trace the intellectual ancestry of Nazism. According to Gordon, “Peikoff distorts Kant at every point.” Kant was neither a skeptic nor a subjectivist. “On the contrary, he thought of his Critique of Pure Reason as answering David Hume’s skepticism. In particular, he attempted to explain causality in order to justify philosophically the achievements of Newton’s physics.”

Peikoff condemned Kant’s categorical imperative but, as Gordon pointed out, had Peikoff “quoted the second formulation of the categorical imperative, he would have at once given the lie to his charge that Kant laid the foundation for the Nazi doctrine of blind submission to the omnipotent state.” As Kant put it: “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.”

Gordon’s disagreements with Peikoff run deeper than matters of interpretation over Kant’s philosophy. More serious and more fundamental is the method Peikoff used to link Kant to Nazism. Peikoff focused on Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology and then, after spinning out what he believed to be the disastrous logical implications of Kant’s thinking in those fields, concluded that Kant must have been a precursor to Nazism. Although Peikoff admitted that Kant was “not a full‐​fledged statist” and that he defended “certain elements of individualism,” Peikoff, Gordon wrote, “has the gall to dismiss these as trivial compared to the implications he perversely derives from Kant’s metaphysical and epistemological views.”

If this was a flaw in Peikoff’s reasoning (and I agree with Gordon on this point), it was a methodology that he learned from Ayn Rand, who always stressed the primacy of a philosopher’s metaphysics and epistemology. Regardless of how individualistic or pro‐​freedom a philosopher may have been, if his theory of knowledge logically entailed irrationalism (as judged by Rand, of course), then, even if that philosopher explicitly repudiated irrationalism and statism, he could be held responsible for the later political consequences of irrationalism. This was the reasoning behind Rand’s infamous statement that Immanuel Kant was the most evil man in the history of western civilization. And this explains why Rand would have been unmoved by David Gordon’s observation that “such preeminent defenders of freedom as Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek have regarded themselves as Kantians.” (There have been many more Kantian defenders of individualism and freedom, such as Ernst Cassirer, whom I discussed in my last essay.)

It may come as a surprise to many libertarians and Objectivists to learn that Rand and Peikoff were not the first to link Immanuel Kant to Nazism. A more elaborate, knowledgeable, and nuanced defense of the same thesis is found in From Luther to Hitler: The History of Fascist‐​Nazi Political Philosophy (Houghton Mifflin Co, 1941), by William Montgomery McGovern, a Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and a Visiting Lecturer on Government at Harvard. In this book of nearly 700 pages, McGovern wrote: