ELEVEN

G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831): The Social Conditions for a NonContractual Theory of Freedom

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a central figure in the philosophical tradition known as German Idealism. The emergence of German Idealism has long been associated with Immanuel Kant whose classic work, The Critique of Pure Reason, was published in 1781. Fichte and Schelling developed this tradition further and Hegel, who was a contemporary and a friend of Schelling, is often seen to be the culmination of this philosophical tradition. In contrast to British empiricist writers like Locke and Hume, and later on Mill, who considered all our knowledge to be derived from sense-impressions, the German Idealists gave a primary role to our thoughts and our ideas as the building blocks of human knowledge. German Idealism inherited the epistemological question—How do human beings get to know their world?—from the empiricists. Beginning with this question, and analysing different forms of knowledge, like science (pure reason) and moral knowledge (practical reason), Kant moved from the realm of epistemology to that of moral and political philosophy. In Hegel we find epistemological questions linked even more strongly to moral and political concerns.

Hegel was born in 1770, in Stuttgart, in what is now south-western Germany. He went to school there, after which he studied philosophy and theology at Tubingen. On completing his studies in 1793, he worked for some time as a tutor for wealthy families in Switzerland and in Frankfurt. During these years, Hegel wrote a few essays on religion, which he never published in his lifetime, but which were published posthumously as Early Theological Writings. In these essays, he grappled both with Kantian philosophy (which states that the most important attribute of human nature is reason) and the teachings of Jesus (which states that the most important attribute of human nature is love). In these early essays, Hegel seemed to favour Jesus’s position over that of Kant’s,¹ but he would later go on to affirm freedom as the most important attribute of human nature and to analyse the relationship of human freedom to human reason and love.

When Hegel was about 30 years old, he began teaching at the University of Jena, and it is here that he wrote his greatest work, Phenomenology of Spirit. In a famous letter to his friend, Hegel wrote that he was penning down the last page of Phenomenology of Spirit as Napoleon was riding into the city of Jena, with his troops. Hegel came of age during the turbulent years of the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic conquests of different parts of Europe, and these events certainly affected Hegel’s thinking.

It is not only contemporary political events that a thinker responds to, but the intellectual currents of the day also influence his or her thoughts. The revolution in ideas of the 18th century named the Enlightenment had its own local flavour in Scotland, England, France, and in the area that we now know as Germany. The German Enlightenment was mediated very strongly by the Romantic movement and its advocacy of individual selfexpression. Goethe, who was the towering figure of German Romanticism, and several other important German Romantics, like Holderlin and the Schlegel brothers, were Hegel’s close friends. Thus, Hegel was a figure whose thought straddles both the German Enlightenment as well as German Romanticism.²

After Napoleon captured Jena, its university closed down and Hegel had to work for about a year as a newspaper editor in Bamberg. Then he became the headmaster of a high school at Nuremberg, where he remained for nine years. In 1816, he finally moved to the University of Heidelberg, and after a short stint there, took up the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, in 1818. He worked and taught there till his death, in November 1831. By the time he died, philosophy departments all over Europe were dominated by Hegelian philosophy.³

Since Hegel taught philosophy for so long, many of his works have survived in the form of lecture notes, like, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Lectures on Aesthetics, and Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Hegel was also a prodigous writer. After publishing Phenomenology of Spirit, in 1807, he brought out Science of Logic in three volumes, followed by Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and finally, in 1821, Philosophy of Right.

Hegel’s work has been subject to many interpretations. As soon as he died, his work generated the two schools of the right Hegelians and the left Hegelians. The former interpreted Hegel as a conservative thinker who was attempting to defend the status quo, whereas the left Hegelians, in whose ranks were included Feuerbach and Marx, saw Hegel’s work as having radical implications. More recently, there has been a tendency to interpret Hegel as a liberal thinker,⁴ but this interpretation is sharply contested by those who want to use Hegel’s work to develop a non-communist, yet radical alternative to liberalism.⁵ Let us now begin a discussion of some Hegelian ideas to see how these alternative interpretations can find a foothold in his concepts.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF FREEDOM

In my opinion, for Hegel, as for the social contractualists, the central modern value was that of individual freedom. Hegel repeatedly interpreted different historical events as struggles which had the realization of freedom as their aim. He also stated that the criterion for the legitimacy of political institutions was whether they hampered or facilitated individual freedom. In this emphasis on freedom, Hegel was as one with modern political philosophy. At the same time, he developed his own distinctive concept of freedom, very different from that of Hobbes or of Kant. Hegel did not see freedom as the Hobbesian fulfilment of unobstructed desire, and neither did he see it in Kantian terms as something that is opposed to sensuous desires. Central to the meaning of freedom for Hegel was the idea of embodiment in an ‘other’. Embodiment in otherness in general becomes a requirement of individual freedom. We have to now examine what Hegel meant by defining freedom as self-determination in otherness, and see how he constructed his political theory on this foundational principle.

Before we begin our explanation, we must deal with an objection. Many scholars have insisted that individual freedom could not be a central value for Hegel, because, according to these scholars, Hegel defined freedom in such a way as to make it look very much like non-freedom. Let us look at this argument briefly. Hegel claimed that whereas animals could not be called free, because they were governed by drives and instincts, it was part of human nature to be free, because human beings, unlike animals, had the faculty of willing. See Box 11.1 for Hegel’s own description of a human will that is free. What is the will, for Hegel? The will, unlike theoretical reason, is thought which results in action. ‘For Hegel, the will is not a faculty separate from thinking but rather, “a particular way of thinking—thinking translating itself into existence, thinking as the drive to give itself existence”.’⁶ Since human beings have the faculty of consciousness, when a human being performs an action in order to fulfil his desires, this action differs from when an animal does the same, because a human being represents to himself the object of his desire.

If it is the nature of animals to follow their drives, it is the nature of human beings to be determined by their will. To be self-determined is to be determined by one’s will, or in other words, to let the will determine itself. For example, if I am hungry, and I eat, this is an example of free action because I could choose not to eat. But even though the choice would be mine, the content of that choice—to eat or not to eat—would not be given by the will. Does that mean that for Hegel, for the will to be free, it must also determine when I feel hungry? Only when we determine all aspects of ourselves, can the will be said to determine itself, and only then can we be said to be self-determined.

This understanding of freedom seems rather different from the common understanding of the concept. Generally, to follow our desires unhindered, and not to fret about the source of those desires, is considered to be freedom. It also seems rather different from Hegel’s definition of freedom, because this is not how Hegel defined freedom. Hegel often defined freedom as, ‘being at home with oneself in one’s other’.⁷ This could mean, for instance, that we become conscious of our body, let us say, as an ‘other’ with its own needs. We accept the needs of the body, like the need for food and the need for exercise as necessary for the body’s and thereby our own health. Once we accept these needs of our body as a part of us, the body no longer seems like an ‘other’, as something which is a constraint or an obstacle to our will. The needs of the body are no longer an infringement on our freedom. ‘The freedom of man, as regards natural impulses, consists not in his being rid of such impulses altogether and thus striving to escape from his nature but in his recognition of them as a necessity and as something rational.’⁸ Human beings can recognize the rational order among their natural impulses, and they are engaged in precisely this attempt when they try to make themselves happy. ‘In happiness, thought already has some power over the natural force of the drives, for it is not content with the instantaneous, but requires a whole of happiness.’⁹

We can see, here, why many scholars argue that Hegel overturned the usual meaning of freedom, although, as we just discussed, the sense of freedom as the absence of constraints seems to be included in Hegel’s understanding of freedom. The problem is that one’s acceptance of the ‘rational order of the impulses’ or of the ‘rational order of specific political institutions and social relations’ would mean that one does not see those impulses or those institutions as a constraint to one’s freedom. Freedom, then, becomes just another name for reconciliation. Individual freedom is, as theorists point out, about how external elements constrain one’s desires, but Hegel seems to make it out primarily to be about what one does to oneself. For these theorists, Hegel diminishes the idea of individual freedom by equating it with self-control or with self-acceptance. It remains true, however, that in Hegel’s writings, we frequently find an attempt to define individual freedom as a relationship between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’. Let us look at this relationship as set out by Hegel, to see whether his conception of freedom can hold true against the objections we have been referring to.

By using the term ‘self-determination’ for freedom, Hegel focused our attention on the ‘self’ which is attempting to determine itself. Selfconsciousness, which is the minimal condition to be fulfilled for there to be a sense of self, only arises, Hegel said, through an interaction with another self, that is, an ‘other’. By insisting on this, Hegel opened up the whole idea of the social requirements of freedom, requirements which are much more stringent than the liberal absence of restraint. For liberals, individual freedom is only possible under certain social and political conditions, which can be encapsulated in the idea of the absence of the ‘other’. In liberalism, until the state prevents others from interfering with one’s life, as well as does not itself encroach upon one’s space, there can be no individual freedom. Liberals often think of freedom as existing when no one stops one from doing as one desires. One must be free to follow one’s desires and aims. Taking an almost opposite position, Hegel pointed out, that even if this were the definition of freedom, what the freedom of the individual requires is not the absence, but the presence of the other.

‘Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another, that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.’¹⁰ If we take this statement of Hegel to mean that our sense of ourselves is mediated through the acknowledgement of others, then we see how others can be perceived as threatening to us. The ‘other’ can make us feel estranged from ourselves; we look down on ourselves because the ‘other’ looks down on us. To get rid of this self-alienation, for which the ‘other’ is responsible, we feel an urge to get rid of, destroy or subjugate the ‘other’, who has cast our self-certainty about ourselves in doubt. This is the famous struggle between the ‘master’ and the ‘slave’ to which we will also be referring to later. It is here that Hegel points out that dominating the ‘other’ is no solution to the problem of self-consciousness. If the self subjugates the ‘other’, then that other’s consciousness cannot be a source of the certainty of the ‘self’. The ‘other’ must be recognized as an equal and only through this ‘mutual recognition’ between two equals, do these two separate ‘selves’ become conscious of themselves as having the capacity of and the right to freedom.

It is not only for a sense of being a ‘self’ with the capacity of freedom¹¹ that the presence of the ‘other’ is required. If we consider the next step, which is the ‘self’ having certain goals, for the achievement of which this ‘self’ wants to be free in the first place, the other enters the picture in yet another way. Hegel believed that all ‘selves’ are constituted in society. It is by growing up as members of particular societies that human beings acquire their aims, desires and purposes, and are thereby constituted as individual selves. The ‘other’, thus, is always present in the ‘self’. Hegel was distinguishing one kind of presence of the ‘other’, which we can call ‘situatedness’, from another kind of the presence of the ‘other’, which we have called ‘mutual recognition’. In all historical societies, we are situated beings, in the sense that our aims and desires develop in and through our belonging to such societies. It is in modern societies alone, though, that there is a mutual recognition between individuals, of being free, of consciously choosing to pursue the aims and purposes given to us in society. When our self-consciousness is a consciousness of ourselves as free beings, for Hegel, this means that such ‘selves’ follow some goals and purposes not merely because these are the purposes that are followed in their society, but because these ‘selves’ consider these purposes to be rational. Hegel rejected the idea that following one’s desires was to be free or self-determined, on the ground that these desires came to one from external social forces. However, if these desires are made one’s own through a process of rational deliberation, then one can be said to be free.

For Hegel, this consciousness of freedom develops progressively in human history. In Philosophy of History, Hegel claimed that all of human history was to be understood as a progressive realization of the idea of freedom. In earlier societies, for example, in the ‘oriental despotisms’ of China, India and Persia, the belief system sustaining these societies was that only one individual, the monarch, was entitled to be free. In other ancient societies that were slave-owning democracies, for instance, several Greek city-states, the dominant ideology was that not one, but some men—the free born Greek males—were meant to be free. The development of Christianity in the Roman empire, and more significantly, the Reformation, brought about the modern idea that individual freedom is an entitlement of all human beings.¹² It should be clear by now that the human consciousness of freedom is not, according to Hegel, inborn. The modern idea that all human beings, male or female, of whatever rank, caste, class or educational status, are entitled to be free, emerges only after a long historical process.

If this long historical process tells us the one story of the human consciousness of freedom, this would imply that for Hegel, all of human history is a seamless web (see Box 11.2). Not only does the history of different societies mark, as we just saw, different moments in our consciousness of freedom, each stage in the historical development of, say, philosophy in Germany, becomes part of the same story of the development of human consciousness. In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel sought to trace the growth of this human consciousness by looking at the evolution of the intellectual culture of the West through its art, religion and philosophy. When Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit traces the unfolding of consciousness to itself, it constantly takes particular schools of Western philosophy to embody different and progressive moments of this unfolding. Seventeenth century empiricism, for instance, is consciousness understanding itself to be merely the reflection of external objects, whereas Kantian philosophy is consciousness realizing that its consciousness of external objects is also a self-consciousness. This whole story, with its different moments being the various understandings of what it means for a human being to be free, is told in Phenomenology, through an interpretation of different moments in Western art, religion and philosophy, with philosophy being, for Hegel, a clearer expression of human consciousness than art or religion.

THE EMBODIMENT OF FREEDOM

The story of human freedom cannot, obviously, be told as the story of art, religion and philosophy alone. For Hegel, it is equally the story of social practices and social institutions. This brings us to the other aspect of the Hegelian philosophy of freedom, that is, the relationship he posited between ideas and their material embodiment. For Hegel, the principle of embodiment was crucial, since it is through its embodiment that the reality of anything is expressed. For instance, according to Hegel, for a human being to know himself, he has to embody himself in a reality outside of his ‘self’, in something that is not his ‘self’. Only when he expresses his ‘self’, does his ‘self’ gain a reality and he gains knowledge of his ‘self’. Thus, an idea must be embodied in something material, for example, in some practice, for us to know what that idea is an idea of. To explain it in religious terms, for Hegel, it is not so much that the world cannot exist without the Absolute (a Hegelian term which some have taken to be a reference to God) but that the Absolute cannot exist without the world, because without embodying itself in the world, the Absolute cannot even know itself. Peter Singer describes well this Hegelian idea of embodiment. ‘For Hegel sees God not as eternal and immutable, but as an essence that needs to manifest itself in the world, and having made itself manifest, to perfect the world in order to perfect itself.’¹³

Earlier, we had described the struggle of consciousness for recognition. The outcome of this struggle is the famous Hegelian master–slave dialectic which has to run its course for the realization of the need for ‘mutual recognition’ to dawn. Before this recognition takes place, only one consciousness wins recognition for its freedom and Hegel terms this consciousness that of the master. The consciousness who loses the battle for recognition is that of the slave. The master, freeing himself from labour, uses the slave to do all the work. It is the slave who ‘transforms nature and himself through work… He works in terms of an abstract idea, a project to be realized. He forms the external world which acquires a consistency of its own and bears his mark, and he forms himself by separating himself from his instincts and by becoming an apprentice in abstract general notions, language and thought. Thus, through the slave’s work, both the world of technique and society itself on the one hand, and the world of thought, art and religion on the other are constituted.’¹⁴ Even though this relationship is not a consciousness of freedom for either the master or the slave, for Hegel, it is the position of the slave which captures one moment of freedom, that of embodiment.

The institutional embodiment of the idea of individual freedom in social practices becomes, then, an essential component of the reality of individual freedom. If the human consciousness of freedom is not inborn, if it is a historical consciousness, emerging or being engendered through interaction with others, then, the social is the location of individual freedom. Individual freedom, for Hegel, is situated in the social. The social (social practices and institutions) is the site of individual freedom. The modern consciousness of freedom, Hegel wrote, is expressed in the social institutions that make up modern life. In Philosophy of Right, Hegel gives us his analysis of how individual freedom is embodied in the modern institutions of the family, civil society and the state, since it is belonging to these institutions that makes up a person’s life in modern societies. Hegel believed that it was the modern family, civil society and the modern state, that were the institutional embodiments of a ‘mutual recognition’ based freedom (see Box 11.3).

For Hegel, the modern family is based on the principle of consent. Whether the marriage through which a new family comes into being results from an arrangement between the partners’ parents, or whether it takes place because two individuals fall in love with each other, Hegel claimed that it must always be based on the consent of the marriage partners. The ‘subjective will’ of the two partners must be satisfied, and it is in this sense that the modern family expresses the idea of individual freedom. In one of his early essays, Hegel had stated that ‘love is somewhat analogous to reason in that it finds itself in other people’.¹⁵ Looking at the institution of the family in light of this statement, we find that for Hegel, the family is, first of all, a union of two individuals. A husband and a wife are supposed to find themselves in each other, and in that sense, the family is based on ‘mutual recognition’. The union of the family is also voluntary; the recognition granted to each other must be freely given. In Hegel’s words, ‘The subjective origin of marriage may lie to a greater extent in the particular inclination of the two persons who enter this relationship, or in the foresight and initiative of parents etc. But its objective origin is the free consent of the persons concerned, and in particular their consent to constitute a single person and to give up their natural and individual personalities within this union. In this respect, their union is a self-limitation, but since they attain their substantial self-consciousness within it, it is in fact their liberation.’¹⁶

The family is only the first unit of social organization. Next, Hegel took up an analysis of the social and economic interactions of individuals belonging to different families. These interactions take place in the sphere of civil society. Civil society is a much wider realm than the economy for Hegel. It is made up of at least four different systems or institutions: the system of needs, the administration of justice, the police and the corporations.¹⁷ By the system of needs, Hegel was referring to the production and exchange of commodities by individuals, in the attempt to satisfy their material needs. This exchange makes individuals conscious of their dependence on each other to satisfy their needs (see Box 11.4). The exchange of commodities also presupposes a certain system of rights. Individuals in modern society have the right to own and alienate property and the justice system protects these rights and punishes their encroachment. Next, Hegel moves to a discussion of the ‘police’, justifying the transition thus: ‘In the system of needs, the livelihood and welfare of each individual are a possibility whose actualization is conditioned by the individual’s own arbitrary will and particular nature, as well as by the objective system of needs. Through the administration of justice, infringements of property or personality are annulled. But the right which is actually present in particularity means not only that… the undisturbed security of persons and property should be guaranteed, but also that the livelihood and welfare of individuals should be secured—that is, that particular welfare should be treated as a right and duty actualized.’¹⁸ As Wood explains, Hegel’s term ‘police’ covers ‘what we would call the “welfare” system.’¹⁹ The ‘police’ or ‘public authority’ provides for the welfare of all individuals in civil society. The welfare institution of the ‘police’ ensures that all individuals in civil society have a source of livelihood, and access, for example, to educational and health facilities. The welfare state becomes essential for individual freedom given Hegel’s belief that poverty stricken individuals must not be dependent on someone’s charity in order to sustain themselves. It is their right that they be sustained by the welfare state. In his third lecture series, of 1819–1820, on ‘right, ethics and the state’, Hegel conceded that ‘the emergence of poverty in general was a consequence of civil society’; yet he called poverty ‘a corruption of civil society’. ‘The poor man is conscious of himself as an infinite, free being and thus arises the demand that his external existence should correspond to this consciousness’. But in his condition of poverty, his self-consciousness ‘appears driven to the point where it no longer has any rights, where freedom has no existence’,²⁰ and so if the modern state is to be the realization of individual freedom, poverty must be dealt with by the ‘public authority’.

The fourth element of civil society, for Hegel, is the corporations. The corporations are mainly associations of workers in trade and industry who share the same profession. Members who belong to the same corporation see their fellow members almost as family members and realize that the fulfilment of the needs of fellow members is beneficial to their own interests. As members of different corporations, individuals acquire an idea of a collective interest. Hegel called the corporations the second ethical root of the state after the family, because each corporation encourages its members to see the complementarity of their interests. Here, again, we see Hegel positing that individual freedom, as the fulfilment of one’s interest, is mediated by the interests of others.

The preceding positive description of the different institutions of civil society cannot do away with the fact that for Hegel, ‘concrete freedom’ is only realized through the modern state. Hegel uses the term ‘state’ in different senses. Sometimes, the term includes the other institutions that make up modern society, since the state is the precondition of these social institutions; otherwise, Hegel used the term in the narrow sense of specifically governmental institutions consisting of a bicameral legislature, a meritocracy based executive and a constitutional monarchy.

For Hegel, the idea of the state was that of a political community, a collective effort by a group of people to define itself in managing its collective life together. The political community subsumes all other kinds of social life or communities because it is the decisions made at the level of the state that govern other kinds of social interaction. In that sense, Hegel is clear that social interaction is not given by nature, but comes about consciously and depends on rules that are made at a political level. The family, for instance, is not a natural institution but its form is decided by the political community.²¹ It is in that sense that the state or political community is prior to other communities like the family or civil society. Given that the modern family and civil society are embodiments of freedom, the modern state, as their precondition, thus also becomes a realization of human freedom (see Box 11.5).

In the narrowly political sense as well, the institutions of the state embody individual freedom. The modern state is based on the principle of political equality, and for Hegel, all members of the modern state participate in some measure in making the rules that determine their collective life. In so far as the legislature is concerned, Hegel believed that the debates in the legislative assembly must be made public, because it is by listening to these debates that the public can participate in the decision making. Endorsing the publicity with which the proceedings of the Estates (Hegel’s term for the legislature) are conducted, Hegel said that ‘Public opinion has been a major force in all ages, and this is particularly true in our own times, in which the principle of subjective freedom has such importance and significance. Whatever is to achieve recognition today no longer achieves it by force, and only to a small extent through habit and custom, but mainly through insight and reasoned argument.’²² Hegel believed that the citizens, by being attentive to and attending the public proceedings of the legislative Estates, and using their freedom of expression and the freedom of the press to generate a vocal public opinion, could be said to be participating in governmental decision making. Hegel was not a supporter of our modern principle of universal adult franchise because he thought that the vote merely ‘atomized’ the individual citizen further.

The same principle of freedom requires that the executive power be in the hands of a bureaucracy chosen by an open competition, and based on merit. Hegel called the members of the bureaucracy the universal class because he believed that they would serve the common interest of the community. Hegel was also insistent that the monarch must be a constitutional monarch, whose role basically would be to sign on the dotted line.

Taken together, these social and political institutions complete the story of Hegelian freedom. They reflect, as well as reinforce the idea that each human being has the right to be free. Their structure also clarifies what it is that Hegel meant when he discussed freedom as self-determination in his different writings.

CRITICAL RESPONSES TO HEGEL

Today, in many quarters, Hegel is not very popular as a thinker. Many people have taken to heart his dictum that history is the progressive realization of the idea of freedom. You must have seen reports about several world leaders who have claimed to be acting for the sake of spreading freedom in the world. For most of them, the spread of freedom means the establishment of liberal democracy. They believe that individual freedom is maximized under liberal democracy, and therefore, they are unhappy with Hegel’s criticism of liberal democracy. His strictures against ‘subjective freedom’ and his rejection of the English Reform Bill of 1831 which sought to extend the suffrage, brand him, in the eyes of these critics, as a conservative for whom individual freedom was not really a central value. When freedom becomes identified with liberal democracy, any reservations about the latter are seen as an attack on freedom itself. Hegel, in such a world view, becomes an enemy of individual freedom.

Of course there are many theorists today, who agree with Hegel that freedom as self-determination requires much more than liberal democracy. For these thinkers, to view the idea of freedom as no one or nothing stopping one from doing as one desires, within a framework of minimal laws, is to make a travesty of the value of freedom. To understand the Hegelian idea of freedom, we need to ask ourselves why we consider freedom for individuals so valuable. What is freedom good for, and how does it enhance human flourishing? Or, is freedom human flourishing itself? Is it because Hegel had a certain view of human flourishing of which freedom was an important part, that he refused to define freedom as just doing what one wants? For these critics, Hegel’s importance as a political philosopher lies in that he complicated the idea of freedom as self-determination. Even these theorists, however, have given up on Hegel’s idea that history is the march of human freedom. So, by his supporters, too, Hegel is branded as a conservative thinker. Hegel is attacked for holding on to the Enlightenment ideas of ‘progress’, ‘science’, and ‘reason’, and for not seeing that these ideals actually mask the domination of large groups of people. Hegel’s claim of having individual freedom as his central value again comes under attack when his philosophical system is faulted for not having the intellectual resources to unmask domination. For these critics, to see all of human history as progressing towards a goal of spreading freedom, is to be unacceptably teleological. The attempt to posit one end for the entire world and then turn the gaze backwards into history, obviously led Hegel to misinterpret different histories to fit the telos that he had already set.

NOTES

1. See W.H. Walsh, ‘The Origins of Hegelianism’, in M. Inwood (ed.), Hegel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
2. See Charles Taylor, Hegel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 3–50.
3. For biographical details about Hegel, see Peter Singer, Chapter 1 in Hegel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. This book is a short and excellent introduction to Hegel’s main ideas.
4. See Steven B. Smith, Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism: Rights in Context, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
5. See John O’Neill (ed.), Hegel’s Dialectic of Desire and Recognition, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996, and Robert R. Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
6. Paul Franco, Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999, p. 157.
7. Ibid., p. 155.
8. Ibid., p. 167.
9. Ibid.
10. Georg W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit translated by A.V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 111.
11. ‘I am somebody with my own aims and purposes and I have a right to fulfil these aims.’—This idea does not come to one automatically. This consciousness arises in one, according to Hegel, as a result of interaction with others, under certain social conditions.
12. See George W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History translated by J. Sibree, New York: Dover Publications, 1956. Hegel divided Philosophy of History into four parts, with the first part discussing the ‘Oriental World’ of China, India and Persia, the second part the ‘Greek World’, the third part the ‘Roman World’ in which a discussion of Christianity is included, and the fourth part the ‘German World’, containing a section on the ‘modern time’ and the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
13. Peter Singer, Hegel, p. 83.
14. Pierre Hassner, ‘George W.F. Hegel’ in Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (eds), History of Political Philosophy, 3rd edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 735.
15. George W.F. Hegel, Three Essays (1793–1795): The Tubingen Essay, Berne Fragments, The Life of Jesus, translated by P. Fuss and J. Dobbins, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984, p. 46
16. George W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, edited by A.W. Wood, translated by H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 201.
17. Ibid., p. 226.
18. Ibid., p. 260.
19. Ibid., p. 450.
20. Hegel lectured on the topics of ‘right, ethics and the state’ seven times. This quotation is from the third lecture series, transcribed probably by one of Hegel’s students, and quoted in George W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, pp. 453–454.
21. The legal rules that govern the family will differ, for example, from one historical period to another.
22. George W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, p. 353.

READING LIST

Franco, Paul, Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

Hegel, George W.F., Elements of the Philosophy of Right, edited by A.W. Wood, translated by H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Hegel, George W.F., Philosophy of History translated by J. Sibree, New York: Dover Publications, 1956.

Inwood, M., (ed.), Hegel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

O’Neill, John (ed.), Hegel’s Dialectic of Desire and Recognition, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.

Singer, Peter, Hegel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Smith, Steven B., Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism: Rights in Context, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Taylor, Charles, Hegel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Williams, Robert R., Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

CENTRAL THEMES

1. Hegel’s conception of individual freedom: Individual freedom is defined by Hegel as some kind of ‘being with the self in the other’. What does Hegel mean by the ‘other’, and what are the different ways in which Hegel shows us that the ‘other’ becomes part of our freedom?
2. History and the Idea of Freedom: For Hegel, history is the story of the consciousness of human freedom. What are the different stages traced by Hegel in this story of human freedom? What role does Hegel’s idea of the cunning of reason play in this conception of history?
3. Hegel’s conception of ethical life: For Hegel, individuals are always to be seen as part of some community or other. In his conception, how do the principles which integrate individuals with each other in the modern family, civil society and the modern state differ? How does his concept of ethical life incorporate these three forms of community?
4. Hegel’s conception of civil society and the state: Hegel’s concept of civil society became one of sources of the idea of civil society which became important in the 1980s. What are the four different aspects of civil society that Hegel discusses in the Philosophy of Right? Why does he call civil society the ‘external state’? On what basis does he distinguish between civil society and the state?