In a lecture that Habermas gave on his 90th birthday he ironically, but with serious intent, called a good Kant a sufficiently Marxist educated Kant. This dialectical Kant is the only one of the many Kants who maintains the idea of an unconditioned moral autonomy but completely within evolution, history and in the middle of societal class and other struggles. The article tries to show what Kant could have learned from his later critics to enable him to become a member of the Frankfurt School’s neo-Marxist theory of society.

In previous papers, Barr and Raphael investigated the situation of a topological space $Y$ and a subspace $X$ such that the induced map $C(Y)\,\to \,C(X)$ is an epimorphism in the category $\mathcal{C}\mathcal{R}$ of commutative rings (with units). We call such an embedding a $\mathcal{C}\mathcal{R}$-epic embedding and we say that $X$ is absolute $\mathcal{C}\mathcal{R}$-epic if every embedding of $X$ is $\mathcal{C}\mathcal{R}$-epic. We continue this investigation. Our most notable result shows that a Lindelöf space $X$ is absolute $\mathcal{C}\mathcal{R}$-epic if a countable intersection of $\beta X$-neighbourhoods of $X$ is a $\beta X$-neighbourhood of $X$. This condition is stable under countable sums, the formation of closed subspaces, cozero-subspaces, and being the domain or codomain of a perfect map. A strengthening of the Lindelöf property leads to a new class with the same closure properties that is also closed under finite products. Moreover, all $\sigma $-compact spaces and all Lindelöf $P$-spaces satisfy this stronger condition. We get some results in the non-Lindelöf case that are sufficient to show that the Dieudonné plank and some closely related spaces are absolute $\mathcal{C}\mathcal{R}$-epic.