semi-automatic waffle

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:

Epistemological focus: the conditions of the possibility of knowledge.
Normativity derived from cognition and value, not metaphysics.
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 Kantian.

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”).
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:

Nozick departs from Kant’s moral universalism.
His grounding is libertarian and historical, not procedural or rationalist.
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.

5. So, in summary

Thinker	Relation to Kant	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

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:

Rawls refines it procedurally,
Nozick privatizes it politically,
Sandel contests it communally,

contests

Patrick Deneen contests Kant’s legacy traditionally — critiquing liberal autonomy and rational universalism in favor of rootedness, virtue, and cultural inheritance.

Here’s how Deneen’s postliberal conservatism fits alongside Rawls, Nozick, and Sandel:

Deneen: Contests It Traditionally

Deneen’s central claim in Why Liberalism Failed is that liberalism’s emphasis on autonomy and individual rights has eroded community, tradition, and virtue.
He critiques Kantian liberalism for its abstract rationalism, arguing that it detaches individuals from the moral and cultural frameworks that give life meaning.
Like Sandel, Deneen contests Kant’s universalism — but while Sandel emphasizes communal belonging, Deneen emphasizes cultural inheritance and moral tradition.
Deneen’s vision is postliberal: he calls for a politics rooted in localism, religious tradition, and classical virtue ethics, rejecting the procedural neutrality of Rawls and the atomistic individualism of Nozick.

Sources:

Deneen’s critique is not just philosophical — it’s civilizational. He sees Kantian liberalism as part of a broader Enlightenment project that, in his view, has failed to sustain the moral ecology needed for human flourishing.

Would you like to explore how Deneen’s postliberalism compares with other critics of Enlightenment rationalism like Alasdair MacIntyre or Charles Taylor? I can chart those connections next.

Disembodied Voices

Deneen might indeed see Rawls and Sandel as representing a liberal tradition that treats individuals as abstract reasoning agents, detached from place, history, and culture. Even Sandel, despite his communitarian leanings, still operates within a framework of deliberative democracy — the “talking shop” — where moral reasoning is supposed to guide political life.

But for Deneen:

Markets and talking shops are symptoms, not solutions.
Liberalism, even in its communitarian or procedural forms, presupposes a disembedded individual, and this disembedding is what enables the marketization of everything — from education to family to identity.
He argues that no amount of discourse can reverse the erosion of tradition, because liberalism itself is the engine of that erosion.

Deneen’s Alternative: Rootedness and Virtue

Deneen calls for a re-embedding of individuals in thick communities, traditions, and moral cultures.
He sees virtue ethics, classical education, and localism as antidotes to the liberal flattening of life into rights and markets.
In this view, Rawls’s veil of ignorance and Sandel’s public reasoning are still too abstract — they miss the embodied, inherited, and cultivated nature of human flourishing.

So yes — Deneen might say: “You cannot reason your way back into a culture you’ve reasoned your way out of.”

G.A. Cohen radicalizes Kant’s legacy economically — transforming Kantian moral rigor into a demand for socialist equality grounded in justice and fairness.

Here’s how Cohen fits into the Kantian constellation alongside Rawls, Nozick, Sandel, and Deneen:

Cohen: Radicalizes It Economically

Cohen was a Marxist analytic philosopher who admired Kant’s moral clarity and Rawls’s framework, but thought both didn’t go far enough.
He argued that Rawls’s “difference principle” — which allows inequality if it benefits the least well-off — betrays Kantian fairness by permitting morally arbitrary advantages (like talent or market demand) to justify inequality.
In If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?, Cohen insists that true justice requires not just just institutions but just personal choices — a “socialist ethos” of solidarity and restraint, not just rules.
He critiques Nozick’s libertarianism as a moral abdication, and sees Sandel’s communitarianism as insufficiently radical in confronting capitalism’s structural injustices.

Mapping the Kantian Legacy

Thinker	Kantian Legacy Reinterpreted As	Core Focus
Rawls	Procedural fairness	Justice as fairness
Nozick	Political privatization	Individual rights and liberty
Sandel	Communal contestation	Moral embeddedness
Deneen	Traditional contestation	Virtue, tradition, culture
Cohen	Economic radicalization	Egalitarian justice, socialism

Cohen’s Kant is not the architect of liberal neutrality, but the moral philosopher of universal duty and fairness — a foundation for radical equality, not procedural compromise. He might say: “If we truly treated people as ends in themselves, we wouldn’t tolerate a system that rewards luck and punishes need.”