So many of the themes that later surface in German idealism's treatment of the philosophy of history make their first appearance in Kant's essay – indeed, so much so that it is tempting to see Kant as foreshadowing Hegel's own famous treatment of the subject in his lectures. This has not gone unnoticed, and there have been recent attempts to make Kant into a Hegelian avant la lettre (or maybe Hegel into a Kantian propter hoc). However, as Pauline Kleingeld has convincingly shown in her work on the topic, the idea that Kant is really offering up a version of Hegel's own historicized conception of reason, or that Kant can make the assertions he makes only at the cost of inconsistency with the basic tenets of the critical philosophy, are not really tenable positions to hold, even if Kant's own lists of the various problems to be solved by such a philosophy of history looks in some respects like the checklist that the later post-Kantians read as they constructed their own views on the matter.

On the one hand, there is one strikingly obvious difference between Kant and his idealists successors (most prominently, Hegel) which has been noted so often that it is only worth briefly mentioning here. Whereas Kant thinks that the achievement of a free political and social life is a regulative ideal, something for which we hope and progressively approximate but never actually fully attain, Hegel holds that it is in fact entirely possible to have a free society in the here and now which answers to all we can reasonably hope for in a free society.