Freedom, property rights and the state. The moral ground of political obligation in Kant's Rechtslehre

It his Doctrine of Right Kant makes property rights the reason of our duty to leave the state of nature and enter the civil condition. This article aims to show that the point of Kant's argument is not that the state is not needed already for safeguarding the exercise of our innate right to freedom. Rather, Kant is suggesting that the right to property is indispensable for conceiving the transition from the state of nature to the civil condition as an a priori requirement of reason, or as a moral duty. Deriving that transition directly from the innate right would stand at risk of establishing it as a mere rule of prudence. The reason is that the innate right is inseparable from its empirical manifestations. On the other hand, the relation between an acquired right and its objects is always intelligible. As such, it is both practically and theoretically possible only in the civil condition. Since the right to property is indirectly required by our innate right, and yet it can be conclusively acquired only in the civil condition, we have a duty to leave the state of nature and enter the civil condition.