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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 January 2017
This article argues that Hegel’s dialectic of wealth and power in the stage of social development called ‘culture’ (Bildung) reveals that even in moments of profound social alienation, Spirit (Geist)—the labour of constructing identity and freedom—remains. This stands in sharp contrast to Heidegger’s theory of alienation and Dasein’s ‘publicity’ (Offentlichkeit), which paints modern social existence as a profound threat to the very ‘Being’ and ‘possibilities’ of human life. The supposed threats of inauthenticity and mass existence are, from a Hegelian perspective, failures of adequate social phenomenology. The desiring, affective subject is not absorbed in the ‘they’ (das Man) but is, instead, the negativity that constantly transforms culture and the structure of social selfhood.