Abstract
Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, on its publication in 1971, was interpreted as being starkly opposed to Hegel and the Hegelian tradition.1 The work generated a wealth of critical commentary, including an Hegelianised communitarian critique of its supposedly individualistic and non-historical methodological and ontological assumptions.2 The assimilation of Hegel to an anti-Rawlsian communitarian standpoint was afforded by Hegel’s consistent and trenchant critique of contractualist political theories, from his early critique of natural law theory to his mature political philosophy.3 Communitarians, as Gutmann notes, drew upon an Hegelian conception of man as an historical social being, in condemning what they designated a Rawlsian image of man as a rational individual, lacking defining social ties.4
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Notes and References
See the critical articles T. Nagel, ‘Rawls on Justice’, and M. Fisk, ‘History and Reason in Rawls’ Moral Theory’, in N. Daniels (ed.), Reading Rawls ( Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989 ).
See M. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and the following key works by A. Macintyre: After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981 ); Whose Justice? Which Rationality? ( Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989 ).
See B. Haddock, ‘Hegel’s Critique of the Theory of Social Contract’, in D. Boucher and P. Kelly (eds), The Social Contract From Hobbes To Rawls ( London and New York: Routledge, 1994 ).
A. Gutmann, ‘Communitarian Critics of Liberalism’, in S. Avineri and A. de-Shalit (eds), Communitarianism and Individualism ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 ), pp. 120–1.
See S. Schwarzenbach, ‘Rawls, Hegel and Communitarianism’, Political Theory, vol. 19, no. 4 (Nov. 1991);
P. Benson, ‘Rawls, Hegel and Personhood’, Political Theory, vol. 22, no. 3 (Aug. 1992);
A. Schwarzenbach, A Rejoinder to Peter Benson’, Political Theory, vol. 22, no. 3 (August 1922).
See J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York and Chicester: Columbia University Press, 1996, paperback edition), esp. pp. xxvi, 285–8.
See also C. Kukathas and P. Pettit, Rawls - A Theory of Justice and its Critics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), esp. pp. 144–8.
J. Rawls, ‘Reply to Habermas’, in Political Liberalism, op. cit., p. 395. ‘Reply to Habermas’ first appeared in The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 92, no. 3 (March 1995).
J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971 ), pp. 17–40.
S. Mulhall and A. Swift, Liberals and Communitarians ( Oxford: Blackwell, 1996 ), pp. 231–40.
R. Bellamy and D. Castiglione, ‘Constitutionalism and Democracy - Political Theory and the American Constitution’, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 27 (1997), p. 598.
S. Caney, Anti-perfectionism and Rawlsian Liberalism’, Political Studies, vol. 43, no. 2, June 1995.
R. Bellamy and D. Castiglione, ‘Constitutionalism and Democracy - Political Theory and the American Constitution’, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 27 (1997), p. 604.
VPG: Werke 12; G. W. E Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover Press, 1956).
J. Rawls, ‘The Law of Peoples’, in S. Shute and S. Hurley (eds), On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures, 1993 ( New York: HarperCollins, 1993 ), pp. 69–70.
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© 1999 Gary K. Browning
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Browning, G.K. (1999). Rawls and Hegel: The Reasonable and the Rational in Theory and Practice. In: Hegel and the History of Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596139_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596139_10
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