Thoughts on recent interpretations of Kant, Hegel, and Marx in Anglophone academic philosophy: a thread.

Raymond Geuss observes that the widespread idea that Kant was politically liberal is a fabrication of Rawls. No major 19th or early 20th century liberals thought of Kant as being 'on their side'.

Rawls turns Kant into a liberal, and this becomes the dominant Anglophone reading through Rawls's students: Barbara Herman, Christine Korsgaard, Onora O'Neill, and Susan Neiman. Kant becomes a liberal and feminist.

How did Rawls do it? How did he turn Kant into a liberal? The answer is: by reading Hegel into Kant.

Hegel, *unlike* Kant, was far more receptive to the idea of reforming institutions so they would express and affirm the inter-dependence of the people in order for the people to reflectively endorse those institutions.

Hegel was far closer to the republican political tradition than Kant was, and this is what Rawls reads back into Kant and produces Kantian liberalism.

So why couldn't Rawls be a Hegelian? Because by this time, Hegel was openly branded as a totalitarian (thanks to Popper) and intellectual grandfather to Stalin and Mao. The polarizations of the Cold War meant that no American academic could be openly Hegelian.

Certainly not Rawls -- nor (for that matter) Wilfrid Sellars or Frederick Will. To be a Hegelian was to be anti-American (despite the fact that America's greatest philosopher of democracy, John Dewey, was a Hegelian).

Moreover, there wasn't much room to maneuver with regard to Marx. Analytical Marxism was (thankfully) short-lived and non-Soviet readings of Marx were in short supply, despite the influence of the Frankfurt School.

Only within the past 20 years or so, thanks to the rise of the Pittsburgh School and the revival of civic republicanism in political theory, has it been possible to appreciate that it is Hegel, and not Kant, who deserves credit as the theorist of universal emancipation

and that Marx followed Hegel and others in looking to the republican political tradition in his understanding of capitalism as an unstable, inherently self-contradictory half-way position between feudal hierarchy and universalized non-domination.

FINI (for now)