Reconsidering Rawls: The Rousseauian and Hegelian Heritage of Justice as Fairness

This dissertation is an attempt to better understand the moral and political thought of John Rawls. I begin by calling into question the conventional, though misleading, image of Rawls as a thoroughgoing Kantian. While the influence of Kant upon Rawls is undeniable and therefore well documented, there are important theoretical differences between them, and these differences open up the necessary interpretive space for the under-appreciated influences of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and G.W.F. Hegel. That neither Rousseau – a theorist of recognition – nor Hegel – a theorist of reconciliation – is regarded as an important influence on Rawls is a major oversight in the history of political thought – an oversight that my dissertation hopes to amend. But there is more at stake here than the addition of a new chapter in the history of political philosophy: when we expose the full extent of the Rousseauian and Hegelian heritage of justice as fairness (and later, political liberalism), we get a more complete, nuanced – and, in my view, a more attractive – image of the moral and political philosophy of Rawls. This new, richer image of Rawls’s political philosophy is captured by what I call “robust reasonableness”: what Rawls offers, in the end, is a more conspicuously demanding account of the reasonable – of our obligations towards our fellow participants in social cooperation. Justice as fairness is thus anchored by a morality of engaged and committed citizenship. This is precisely what Rawls sees as missing from Kant’s ethical philosophy. In response, he turns to Rousseau and to Hegel, both of whom provide, at least on Rawls’s view, persuasive solutions to the pathologies of social and political life. Rawls incorporates many of these solutions into the normative and practical landscape of his own philosophical doctrine, and this compels us to reconsider that doctrine in the light of these unrecognized influences.Ph