Many still today consider John Rawls a straightforward Kantian and thus the degree to which his theory has been influenced by the thought of G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) goes largely unnoticed. Numerous communitarian thinkers (e.g. Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel) have criticized Rawls for his “individualism” and lack of an “adequate conception of community”– much in the manner Hegel criticized his predecessor Kant. Not only does A Theory of Justice have strong parallels to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1991 [1821]), however, but Rawls fully accepts a number of Hegel’s central criticisms of Kant. The former cites Hegel (and the British Idealist F. G. H. Bradley) numerous times in A Theory of Justice, and he lectured on Hegel at Harvard in the 1960s and again in the 1990s. So what is his theory’s relation to Hegel?

Rejecting the need to ground political philosophy in a metaphysical system (such as Hegel does with his monism, talk of one world spirit or Geist, etc.), Rawls considers his theory “political notmetaphysical” – a point emphasized in his later work (CP 388ff.). He denies that political philosophy needs any grounding in a comprehensive metaphysics for such systems generally underdetermine practical positions in political philosophy (CP 404 n.22); the materialist Hobbes and the idealist Hegel, after all, both end up defending monarchy. The aim of “justice as fairness” is farmoremodest; it is to provide a conception of justice that may serve as a public basis for the justiication of modern democratic institutions under conditions of pluralism and be supported by (at least) a “reasonable overlapping consensus” (CP 421ff.).