 The very idea of a right to rebel against the government is incoherent, Kant argued, because the embodiment of all right is the actually existing state. By this he did not mean that any actually existing state is always completely just, or that merely by virtue of having power, the state could determine what justice is. He meant that a rightful condition, the opposite of the state of nature, is possible only when there is some means for individuals to be governed by the “general legislative will” (6:320). Any state embodies the general legislative will better than no state. While such reasoning seems pragmatic, it is not. It is instead based upon the claims above that a rightful condition requires the centralizing of coercive power in a state as the only means of bringing about reciprocal coercion, obligation, and objective settlement of disputes. Kant also argues that a right to rebel would require that a people be authorized to resist the state. This kind of authorization for action, however, is an exercise of sovereign power, and any people who claimed such a right would be claiming that it (the people) rather than the state embodies sovereign power. It would thus “make the people, as subject, by one and the same judgment sovereign over him to whom it is subject” (6:320). This is a contradiction. The nature of sovereignty is such that sovereign power cannot be shared. Were it shared between the state and the people, then when a dispute arose between them, who would judge whether the state or the people are correct? There being no higher sovereign power to make such a judgment, all other means for resolving the dispute fall outside of rightful relations. This role of judgment relates to the judgment that Kant discusses with regard to the social contract. Under the idea of a social contract, the sovereign legislator may not make a law that the people could not make for itself because it possesses irrational, non-universal form. The state, not the people, is the judge of when a law is rational (8:297). People who argue for a right to revolution, Kant claims, misunderstand the nature of a social contract. They claim that the social contract must have been an actual historical occurrence from which the people could withdraw (8:301–02). But since the social contact is only an idea of reason which sets moral limits to the sovereign’s legislative acts, and the sovereign’s judgment alone determines how these limits are to be interpreted, there is no independent contractual agreement to which the people could refer in its complaints. Citizens are still allowed to voice their grievances through their use of public reason, but they can do nothing more than attempt to persuade the sovereign to adopt or repeal decisions.