Abstract

While Kant's universalism is politically appealing, he himself did not think that his political theory could say anything about the distribution of economic resources. In my dissertation I look at two competing attempts to give Kant a concern with social justice, that of John Rawls and that of G.W.F. Hegel. ;Rawls is explicitly anti-metaphysical. He believes that he can redeem Kant by replacing the metaphysical foundations of his theory with some widely acknowledged empirical facts. Rawls, though, on a closer look, still requires Kant's metaphysical concept of contingency or heteronomy to exclude conceptions of the good from behind the veil of ignorance. Moreover, that concept would also rule out generally heteronomous principles such as the desire for primary goods, and thus derail his argument for the difference principle. ;Hegel's approach is explicitly metaphysical. He rewrites Kant's political theory by revising his metaphysics, a revision which he claims is implicit in Kant's own arguments. According to Hegel, Kant relies on heteronomous considerations in his argument for unrestrained private property. But if the will is entangled in the heteronomous, Kant could only redeem its independence by having it transform the heteronomous and return to itself. The truth of Kantian autonomy is in Hegelian self-determination. ;Hegel argues that Kant's argument for unrestrained private property is incomplete, that it anticipates an Aristotelian account of value, one which compromises Kant's extreme conclusions. But that combination itself is inadequate without the incorporation of Kant's moral standpoint. Kantian morality forces an expansion of the Aristotelian notions of the public sphere, public personality, and virtue to take account of modern and moral demands concerning conscience, social and economic liberty, and the significance of labor. The result is an institutional structure that holds in balance the right and the good. ;Hegel's strategy of embedding the market within a series of ethical organizations is more promising than Rawls's attempt to provide a single side-constraint over it. Education provides a better way to universality and social justice than abstraction.