Sandel, Nozick, and Rawls are profoundly in dialogue with Kant. They each inherit Kantian concerns — especially about autonomy, reason, and moral law — but they diverge sharply in how they interpret and apply them. Let’s unpack this carefully.
1. What “Neo-Kantian” properly means
Historically, Neo-Kantianism refers to a specific 19th–early 20th century movement (e.g. the Marburg School: Cohen, Natorp, Cassirer; and the Baden School: Windelband, Rickert) that revived Kant to ground the sciences and ethics in the conditions of knowledge and value.
Its main features:
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Epistemological focus: the conditions of the possibility of knowledge.
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Normativity derived from cognition and value, not metaphysics.
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A “critical” rather than metaphysical use of reason.
Rawls, Nozick, and Sandel do not belong to that lineage. They’re post-war political philosophers, influenced by Kant’s moral philosophy, but operating in a much broader analytic, liberal, and communitarian context.
2. John Rawls — “Kantian constructivist” rather than Neo-Kantian
Rawls explicitly positions himself as Kantian-inspired, not a Neo-Kantian.
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In A Theory of Justice (1971), he adapts Kant’s idea of autonomy: moral principles are those rational agents would agree upon under fair conditions (the “original position”).
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In Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical (1985), he calls his approach Kantian constructivism — meaning that justice arises from rational procedure, not from metaphysical truth.
Rawls thus takes Kant’s form of reasoning (the categorical imperative as a procedure) and applies it to social institutions.
But he also integrates contractarian ideas (Hobbes, Rousseau) and liberal pluralism, which go well beyond Kant.
So, he’s Kantian in structure, but not Neo-Kantian in substance.
3. Robert Nozick — an anti-utilitarian individualist with Kantian traces
Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) explicitly invokes Kant’s dictum that individuals must be treated as ends in themselves. His entitlement theory of justice is built around the inviolability of persons and their rights — a clearly Kantian moral intuition.
However:
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Nozick departs from Kant’s moral universalism.
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His grounding is libertarian and historical, not procedural or rationalist.
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He blends Kant with Locke’s property theory, Austrian economics, and minimal-state libertarianism.
So, while Kant haunts Nozick’s moral premises, his political conclusions are almost the mirror opposite of Rawls’s, and his method owes more to libertarian natural rights theory than to Neo-Kantian logic.
4. Michael Sandel — the anti-Kantian communitarian
Sandel began as a critic of Rawls’s Kantian leanings. His early book Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982) argues that Rawls’s moral subject — the self prior to all ends and attachments — is a Kantian abstraction, detached from the concrete moral world in which real people live.
Sandel draws on Aristotle, Hegel, and communitarian traditions, emphasizing that selves are constituted by their moral and social relations, not prior to them.
While he uses Kant as a foil, he still engages with Kantian ethics deeply — his whole critique depends on taking Kant seriously.
In later works (Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, What Money Can’t Buy), he broadens this critique to utilitarianism and market moralities — but his orientation remains post-Kantian, not neo-Kantian.
5. So, in summary
| Thinker | Relation to Kant | Fair to call Neo-Kantian? | Core orientation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rawls | Strongly Kantian in form (autonomy, moral law as procedure) | ✖ No — better: Kantian constructivist | Liberal egalitarian proceduralism |
| Nozick | Kantian respect for persons, but mixed with Locke and libertarianism | ✖ No — better: Kant-inflected libertarian | Rights-based minimal state |
| Sandel | Critical of Kantian abstraction, draws on Aristotelian and Hegelian thought | ✖ No — better: post-Kantian communitarian | Moral limits of markets and procedural liberalism |
6. The broader point
Calling them all “neo-Kantian” risks flattening the landscape. What really connects them is not shared allegiance to Kant, but a shared effort to reckon with the Kantian legacy — the problem of how freedom, dignity, and moral law can survive within modern pluralism and instrumental rationality.
Each reinterprets that legacy differently:
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Rawls refines it procedurally,
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Nozick privatizes it politically,
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Sandel contests it communally.
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