Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Advocates and critics of Hegel?s account of wealth and poverty have generally focused attention on his?Philosophy of Right', (PR) specifically the section on `Civil Society? and its encompassing system of needs. Here, Hegel?s insistence on the pursuit of self-chosen ends in civil society (via labor, consumption, and property ownership) as necessary to the realization of ?subjective particularity,? coupled with his equally compelling recognition of the production of poverty as endemic to capitalism, has yielded the widely held view that (a) Hegel has no solution to the problem of poverty, or (b) his solution rationalizes global hierarchies of wealth and want insofar as he justifies the pursuit of external markets (in less developed or ?backward? countries?) as a means of resolving the problem of poverty in wealthy (western) society. Read as a self-standing text, however, PR offers, I want to argue here, only a partial guide to Hegel?s distinctive understanding of wealth, poverty, and freedom, and by implication, its recovery in discourses on development and social policy within international relations. Against an unmediated translation of labor, work, consumption and property as constitutive moments of `freedom,? as is often claimed based on readings of PR, this paper stages an encounter between the movement of consciousness, the subject of 'Phenomenology of Mind', (PH) (seen by many Hegel scholars as foundational to the entire corpus of his writings), and the political-economy narrative of PR with a view towards (a) identifying an inter-textual tension, between PR and PH that consequently, (b) lends itself to automatist and economistic uptakes in narratives of development and social policy, and (c) its resolution, pace Hegel, in an alternative approach to thinking about global social policy.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The central chapter of Herbert Marcuse’s relatively well-known 1941 work, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, presents what is actually an abbreviated version of a more through investigation of the social relevance of Hegel’s absolute idea Marcuse first developed in Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, published a decade earlier (1932). In addition, Marcuse’s initial, more comprehensive interpretation blunts the critical points he makes against the social relevance of Hegel’s absolute idea in the later work.

Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Hegel's Conception of Citizenship in the Ethical Life of the State

Introduction

The concept of recognition (Anerkennung) in Hegel’s social thought, developed foremost in the Phenomenology of Spirit, 1 suggests that Hegel had a univocal understanding of what it means to be a member of a ethical community construed as the I that is a we, and the we that is an I. Moreover, Hegel’s dictum that the principle of the modern age is that "all are free," combined with his idea that freedom is actualized only when universality is consciously known and willed, raises the question as to whether Hegel’s conception of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) requires a type of society in which everyone possesses a fully actualized relation to the state, perhaps similar to a Rousseauian republic of self legislators but with a more elaborate system of institutional mediations.

Robert Pippin, in a 1981 article entitled "Hegel’s Political Argument and the Problem of Verwirklichung,"2 argues that there is a difficulty in understanding the meaning of citizens being in an actualized relation to the ethical universality of the state. In the Philosophy of Right,3 Hegel states that concrete freedom consists not only in individuals being able to pursue their interests and have their rights recognized but also "personal individuality and its particular interests . . . pass over of their own accord into the interest of the universal, and, for another thing, they know and will the universal; they even recognize it as their own substantial mind; they take it as their aim and end and are active in its pursuit . . . they will the universal in the light of the universal, and their activity is consciously aimed at none but the universal end" (par. 260, pp. 160 61). What this means, as Pippin points out, is that citizens must not merely be in a certain relation to the universal, or simply believe that they are so related, but they must consciously recognize this relation. The state is not merely an ethical community in itself, but rather exists in and for itself, that is, "recognized as such by its free, individual citizens" (p. 522).

However, Pippin in this article is not able to find any concrete explanation of this strong relation between citizens and the actualized state, apart from the state’s legal structure which, though essential to ethical life, is not sufficient to account for how citizens experience such strong explicit recognition of the universal in their participation in society; so it remains unclear as to what is involved in citizens willing for themselves universality as the end of their actions. Given that Hegel emphasizes the reflective nature of the relation of individual and state, i.e., that "The subject is thus directly linked to the ethical order by a relation which is more like an identity than even the relation of faith and trust" and that "adequate knowledge of this identity depends on thinking in terms of the concept" (par. 147, p. 106), one might conclude either that all the citizens of the actualized state are philosophic in their recognition of their relation to the universal, or that this recognition occurs ideally for all but obtains actually only for a minority of citizens. Or, perhaps it occurs only conceptually for Hegel and Hegelian philosophers who have a reflective comprehension of the Ethical Life (Sittlichkeit) of the state, as well as the entire course of world history that leads up to its actualization (Verwirklichung) (p. 529).

Resolving this ambiguity, if it can be resolved, requires taking seriously Hegel’s delineation of the different spheres of ethical life, particularly the spheres of civil society and the political state, and the circles within each sphere. These distinctions are important not only for articulating the "divi¬sion of tasks" between ordinary citizens and political functionaries but also for differen¬tiating the modes of self consciousness of universality that obtain within the various spheres, and thus for understanding how all citizens can consciously will and know the universal.4

My subsequent presentation has three parts. In the first part, I signal the political significance of Hegel’s concept of recognition by reviewing and analyzing Hegel’s account of the struggle for recognition in the Phenomenology of Spirit; in the second, I explain what the resolution of this historic struggle means for social and political life as articulated in the Philosophy of Right; in the third, I examine the meaning of citizenship in the nation state by distinguishing between the levels of citizen actualization, specifically in the different manifestations of freedom in civil society and in the political state. My overall conclusion is that the principle of subjective freedom, the right of individuals to actualize and self-determine themselves, is concretely a principle of civil society but only abstractly a principle of the political state, at least as far as ordinary citizens are concerned. While Hegel incorporates the principle of subjective freedom into civil society for all its members, this principle has limited concrete political instantiation for the ordinary citizen, which as we will see means that the political significance of their activity is largely indirect and a result of mediation from within a higher level of ethical life.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The paper explores the potential of contributions from left-Hegelian scholarship for moves towards conceptualizing the normative and political implications of the entrenchment of global social relations. It reconstructs the Hegel-reception in IR, the predominantly right-Hegelian focus this has engendered, and introduces the most significant contribution to Hegel-scholarship since the demise of his philosophical system, namely the reconstruction of the ?suppresses inter-subjectivity? (Theunissen, 1983; Hoesle, 1992).In light of this category-shift, Hegel?s dialectical method, as well as the substantial arguments of his ?Philosophy of Right? can now be brought to bear on attempts to circumvent some of the limitations which tied phenomenological approaches to the reconstruction of moral experiences apparently exclusively to ?communitarian? conceptions of the ethical life. I discuss two such approaches, tease out some weaknesses, but argue that by building on the strengths, the contours of a different, inter-subjectivist register become visible, which promises to make significant advances for the project of a critical theory of global social and political relations.