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Hegel and Liberalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Paul Franco
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Extract

In this article, the venerable but still not entirely resolved issue of Hegel's relationship to liberalism is discussed. In contradistinction to recent communitarian accounts, the Kantian and Enlightenment idea of rational freedom in Hegel's political philosophy is shown to be the basis for Hegel's critique of traditional liberalism. While the Hegelian state incorporates most of the rights and freedoms ordinarily associated with liberalism, Hegel's rationale for these rights and freedoms is never the traditional liberal one. In conclusion, the relevance of Hegel's ideal of the rational state to our understanding of contemporary liberalism and its discontents is assessed.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 59 , Issue 4 , Fall 1997 , pp. 831 - 860
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1997

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References

1 See Haym, Rudolf, Hegel und seine Zeit (Berlin: Rudolf Gaertner, 1857), pp. 357–91.Google Scholar

2 See Carritt's, E. F. contributions in Hegel's Political Philosophy, ed. Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Atherton, 1970)Google Scholar; Popper, Karl, The Open Society and its Enemies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), vol. 2, chap. 12Google Scholar. See also Sidney Hook's contributions in Hegel's Political Philosophy.

3 Among others, see Bosanquet, Bernard, The Philosophical Theory of the State (London: Macmillan, 1951), pp. 229–74Google Scholar; contributions by T. M. Knox, Shlomo Avineri, Z. A. Pelczynski, and W. Kaufmann, in Hegel's Political Philosophy; Pelczynski's, “Introductory Essay,” in Hegel's Political Writings, trans. Knox, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964)Google Scholar; Avineri, , Hegel's Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ritter, Joachim, Hegel and the French Revolution, trans. Winfield, R. D. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982)Google Scholar; d'Hondt, Jacques, Hegel and His Time: Berlin, 1818–31, trans. Burbidge, J. (Lewiston, NY: Broadview Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Ilting's, K.-H. introductions to vols. 1 and 4 of Hegel's Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie, 1818–31, ed. IIting, (Stuttgart: Fromann, 1973)Google Scholar; Perperzak, Adriaan, Philosophy and Politics: A Commentary on the Preface to Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 15–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Wood, Allen, “Editor's Introduction” to Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Wood, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. ixGoogle Scholar; see also xxxi n.10. But for a recent dredging up of the old charge that Hegel is a reactionary defender of the Prussian state, see Hirst, Paul, “Endism,” London Review of Books, 23 11 1989Google Scholar, quoted in Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992), p. 349n.14.Google Scholar Even Alan Ryan portrays Hegel as being “illiberal” in his review of Fukuyama's book; see “Professor Hegel Goes to Washington,” The New York Review Books, 26 March 1992, pp. 8, 10.

5 Taylor, Charles, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Taylor's abridgement of this book, Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)Google Scholar, in which the communitarian themes emerge even more distinctly.

6 See Taylor, , Hegel and the Modern Spirit, pp. 1–14.Google Scholar

7 In Patterns of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 99–107Google Scholar, Charles Larmore interprets Hegel in an even more communitarian direction than Taylor, albeit with a critical intention. He criticizes Taylor for allowing that the idea of rational autonomy plays any significant role in Hegel's political philosophy and for thus underplaying “the extent to which Hegel rejected the ideal of autonomy” (168n.14).

8 Smith, Steven B., Hegel's Critique of Liberalism: Rights in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).Google Scholar

9 Ibid., p. 6.

10 Taylor has made it increasingly clear that communitarianism is not necessarily antithetical to liberal politics; “ontological issues” must not be confused with “advocacy issues.” See his “Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate,” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Rosenblum, Nancy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 159–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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12 The interpretation with which mine bears the closest affinity is that of Wood, Allen, Hegel's Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It also shares a great deal with the general view of Hegel that Robert Pippin has elaborated in a number of writings, beginning with Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; see especially his suggestive remarks on Hegel's relation to the Kantian and Enlightenment idea of autonomy in Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp. 8–15, 46–79.Google Scholar

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14 Hegel, G. W. F., The Philosophy of History, trans. Sibree, J. (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 452Google Scholar; Werke, ed. Moldenhauer, E. and Michel, K. M. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), 12: 534.Google Scholar

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17 PR, par. 29R. For Kant's exact formulation of his definition of right, see Kant's Political Writings, ed. Reiss, Hans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 133.Google Scholar

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25 See Hegel, G. W. F., System of Ethical Life, trans. Harris, H. S and Knox, T. M. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1979), pp. 137–42Google Scholar (System der Sittlichkeit, ed. Lasson, G. [Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1967], pp. 46–52Google Scholar); First Philosophy of Spirit, trans. Harris, H. S. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1979), pp. 236–41Google Scholar (Gesammelte Werke, 6: 307–14Google Scholar); Philosophy of Spirit of 1805–1806, pp. 110–18 (Gesammelte Werke, 8: 213–21Google Scholar).

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27 See the Social Contract, I, 6Google Scholar; III, 12–15.

28 PR, par. 258R.

29 Hegel, G. W. F., Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Miller, A. V. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 357–59Google Scholar; Werke, 3: 432–36.Google Scholar

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37 Shklar, Judith, “Hegel's ‘Phenomenology’: An Elegy for Hellas,” in Hegel's Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives, p. 74Google Scholar. This distorting understanding of the Phenomenology as an elegy or “lament” for Hellas thoroughly informs Shklar's, book, Freedom and Independence: A Study of the Political Ideas of Hegel's ‘Phenomenology of Mind’; (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; see especially pp. 69–95. Patrick Riley seems to follow Shklar in understanding the Phenomenology as an assault on modern subjectivity and individualism; see Will and Political Legitimacy: A Critical Exposition of Social Contract Theory in Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 164, 176–89, 190–91, 197–98.Google Scholar

38 Schmidt, James, “Recent Hegel Literature: The Jena Period and the Phenomenology of Spirit,” Telos 48 (Summer 1981), p. 141.Google Scholar

39 Introduction to The Philosophy of History, p. 27; Werke, 12: 39.Google Scholar

40 The German Constitution, pp. 163–64; Werke, 1: 484Google Scholar. Compare Tocqueville, on “administrative decentralization,” in Democracy in America, vol. 1, pt. 1, chap. 5.Google Scholar

41 Frederick Neuhouser, review of Hegel's Ethical Thought, by Wood, Allen, Journal of Philosophy 89 (1992): 320Google Scholar. Wood's treatment of this issue can be found in Hegel's Ethical Thought, pp. 21, 28–29, 237–38, 258–59.

42 The most influential attempt to interpret Hegel as viewing individuals ultimately as vehicles of cosmic Geist remains Taylor's Hegel.

43 See Larmore, , Patterns of Morality, pp. 91–107.Google Scholar

44 See, e.g., the Preface to PR.

45 See Oakeshott, Michael, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 256–63.Google Scholar

46 I have taken this quote from Oakeshott's, recently published Morality and Politics in Modern Europe: The Harvard Lectures, ed. Letwin, Shirley (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 85CrossRefGoogle Scholar, though Oakeshott speaks of the historic disposition to individuality in a number of places, notably, in the essays “On Being Conservative– and “The Masses in Representative Democracy,” both published in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, ed. Fuller, Timothy (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991)Google Scholar, and in the third essay of On Human Conduct.

47 Oakeshott, , Morality and Politics in Modern Europe, pp. 83–85.Google Scholar