Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right'

A Reader's Guide

David Edward Rose

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780826487117
• eBook ISBN: 9781441113238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Hegel's Philosophy of Right is a classictext in the history ofWestern political thought and one with whichall serious students of political philosophy must engage.Whileit is a hugely important and exciting piece of philosophical writing, Hegel's ideas and style are notoriously difficult to understand andthe content isparticularly challenging. I n Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right': A Reader's Guide, David Rose explains the philosophical and political background against which the book was written and, taking each part of the book in turn, guides the reader to a clear understanding of the text as a whole. This is the ideal companion to study of this most influential and challenging of texts, offering guidance on

• Philosophical and historical context
  
• Key themes
  
• Reading the text
  
• Reception and Influence
  
• Further Reading

CHAPTER 1

CONTEXT: A TALE OF TWO REVOLUTIONS

Hegel lived in interesting times. Whether this was a blessing or a curse, it was no doubt integral to the formation of both the man and his thought. Culturally and politically, Europe was being swept into uncharted waters by the criss-crossing wakes of the two great revolutions: the political one originating in France and the industrial one spawned by England. As these movements led to the migrations of people and urbanisation, giving birth to war and a drive to Empire, they began to undermine and modify the old social order of Europe. And Hegel lived such times interestingly. He inhabited a Germany that had risen to the forefront of philosophical inquiry and he was, legendarily, to be found finishing and dispatching his first masterpiece as the Napoleonic armies (much to his then support) bore down on Jena. He lived through the French Revolution, its subsequent Terror, the progressive Prussian reforms and the eventual reinstatement of a weakened political status quo. His philosophy began with an optimistic hope in the possibility of a reformed political and religious order before maturing, like the man himself, into a conservative, yet critical, endorsement of the post-Napoleonic social landscape.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart on August 27,1770 to a middle-class family, his father being a civil servant at a provincial court. He encountered philosophy at the gymnasium (secondary school), but his intellectual stimulation would have been at its height in the period from 1788 to 1793 when, attending a seminary for Lutheran pastors in Tübingen, he shared a residence with the poet Hölderlin and the philosopher Schelling. Many of the themes that were later to recur in his philosophy were no doubt the fruit of heated debate between these three intellectuals: the admiration for a supposed Athenian Golden Age, the ideals of social and national unity and the reformation of religion. There was also an initial enthusiasm for the events in France of 1789; the young men celebrated the revolutionary spirit they expected to reinvigorate Europe.

The French Revolution made a political reality of the predominant theory of the time. Of the many differences between social contract thinkers, they were united by the claim that society was an association of individuals for the benefit of those individuals. Implicit to this movement was the rejection of the claims of the ancien régime that society was a natural or divine order justified by the qualitative difference between types of men. Instead the declaration of equality amongst men was, firstly, expressed in the Reformation and its denial of the qualitative duality between the priesthood and the laity, and then politically in the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of the seventeenth century before culminating in the destructive drive for egalitarianism and individual worth of revolutionary France. The development of this concept, so thoroughly modern, promised – so it seemed to Hegel and his friends at the time – the possibility of a political rationalisation of outdated social institutions.

Of course, such initial hope turned to dismay when the centrifugal force of the revolution became, in the Terror, an arbitrary and senseless assertion of the power of individual wills and abstract ideals. Hegel’s conception of modern subjectivity, both its positive and negative aspects, was in so many ways an expression of the mini historical narrative from the Reformation to industrialisation, and his ethical and political thought remained directly concerned with the balancing of a subjective need for expression and a social need for unity. The evils of the revolution and, to an equal extent, the industrialisation of Europe could be seen in the atomisation of modern society and the rise of the legitimacy of individual expression against objective standards of value. The narrative itself was to form the focal point of his first complete monograph, the Phenomenology of Spirit.

Hegel’s academic career started slowly. He began as a tutor in Switzerland and Frankfurt, before following his younger and more successful friend Schelling to Jena, who had already secured a professorship. Hegel used his inheritance to subsidise his unsalaried position as a Privatdozent – a teaching assistant – and published his first major works: The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy (1801) and The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law (1802), the latter being a critical reading of atomistic approaches to ethical and political thought and containing a critique of Kantian moral philosophy. More significantly, in 1807, he published the inconsistent but astonishing account of the philosophical development of both the individual and the species, in The Phenomenology of Spirit. At the heart of the work is the recognition of the need for reconciliation between the human mind and nature (in its broadest sense); a reconciliation that – in this early work – he claimed would be attained through religion and philosophy, but would later, in the Philosophy of Right, shift in focus to an ethical and political resolution.

The disruptions caused by the Napoleonic defeat of Prussia at Jena forced Hegel to move away in 1807, and for a while he took the post of an editor of a newspaper, before becoming a rector of a gymnasium in 1809. His remit was to implement a radical reform of education with his speculative method of philosophy at its heart. He was also able to produce the Science of Logic (the first volume in 1812 and the second in 1816), and, if his students were encouraged and able to read these volumes, there would be no argument against the assertion of falling standards in education.

The achievement of his first paid university post came when he was appointed in Heidelberg in 1816. It was from this period on that Hegel began to publish his lecture notes, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, in order to aid his students through his dense and demanding lectures, which were later to be revised and expanded into three volumes: on logic, nature and spirit. He also delivered his first lectures on the idea of right and political philosophy, and he reached the pinnacle of his academic fame when he was invited to fill the vacant Chair of Philosophy in Berlin, last occupied by Fichte.

In Berlin, Hegel prepared his lecture notes on political philosophy for publication but hesitated as historical events once more affected the nature of political power. The progressive nature of Prussian politics since the defeat of 1806 had slowly returned to a weakened, reactionary aristocracy. Reform had been halted after the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and was fuelled by an establishment paranoia about the rise of anarchy and the revolutionary spirit amongst the people, a fire stoked by the assassination of a reactionary playwright by the student Karl Sands. Universities were seen as cultivating an environment of radical thought and subversive action and many of Hegel’s friends and academic rivals found themselves prohibited from university posts. Professors could find themselves dismissed, as Fries did, who Hegel unwisely attacked in his preface to the Philosophy of Right for encouraging revolutionary attitudes.

It was in this context that the final version of lecture notes for the Philosophy of Right were published in 1821 and Hegel found himself elected to Rector of the university in 1829. He died on November 14, 1831.

Hegel had lived through the apex of Enlightenment thought and, unlike his predecessor Kant, perhaps had a glimpse of its limitations and dangers. As we shall see, he celebrates modern subjectivity as the pinnacle of human history, yet is acutely aware of its atomistic danger to society and its subjectivist danger to truth. Whereas the Enlightenment encouraged all humans to reason for themselves and to legitimise all dictates of authority, society and others through the use of free and public reason, Hegel fervently believed that such subjectivity was one-sided. The individual cannot decide what is true and right on his or her own, but must have standards of legitimacy against which to validate his or her assertions. His very un-enlightenment stand was to seek reconciliation in the social world of interpersonal subjectivity and not in universal and free reason. Whether or not it is accurate to describe Hegel as a man of the Enlightenment is controversial. He thought reason had to be sovereign, but saw it as an historical development and not a given; he wanted the state to be rational, but critically rejected the social contract insights into political authority; he thought freedom to be the highest good, but saw a perfectionist social world as liberation.

CHAPTER 2

OVERVIEW: HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT

AMBITION OF THE GUIDE

This book does exactly what it says on the tin. It is a reader’s guide to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and it does not aspire to be anything more than that. In the following pages, I shall endeavour to present Hegel’s ideas as he himself develops them in the sections of the Philosophy of Right and in relation to the context of both his ideas as a whole and the time in which he was writing. If reading philosophy is much like climbing a mountain, then Hegel would probably be K2. Introductory books ought to work like crampons, as necessary props to ensure that a reader who approaches the primary text for the first time does not fall to the ground or – as is more common – have a poke at the cliff and decide to scale it another week. But, one also needs a base camp and this is the best role I can envisage for the current work. There are more comprehensive interpretations, but they are almost as daunting to approach as Hegel’s own work. My aim is to supply confidence for the reader to approach the text him or herself and then go on to these other introductions. Such a confession of humility, though, ought to be tempered with further confessions of more serious academic sins.

It is not only the intention of this book that limits its ambition but also its size. To reduce Hegel’s own condensed lecture notes into more manageable and accessible prose when the previous one hundred and seventy years have been spent enlarging them seems counter-intuitive at best. Yet, the length of this volume is, paradoxically, both its strength and its weakness. The philosophical thought of Hegel is notoriously obscure and involved and many would think it impossible to summarise the richness of the Philosophy of Right into less than two hundred pages, yet the restriction has made me approach writing this introduction more as if I were designing a map with a viable (but not exclusive) route up the mountain, than offering an interpretative and comprehensive reading. And this is a strength because there is already material which requires robust philosophical training that can be used as crampons later on when the confidence of the reader is assured.

But, the restriction to less than two hundred pages is also a weakness, motivating me to make some controversial editorial decisions. Put simply, certain themes and issues had to be passed over or touched on only briefly. This is most clearly the case in the discussions of the third part of Hegel’s work which concerns the actual structure of the constitution and the social arrangements of the state. I have chosen to concentrate on the groundwork – the theory – that justifies Hegel’s state and, hence, have spent far more time on the first two parts and on the concept of ethical life. I have done so in good conscience, since I believe once the reader has the requisite understanding in place, the discussions of the family, civil society and the state itself will be comprehensible and familiar as they concern subjects which we all engage with on a day-to-day basis.

More significantly, one writes with an ideal of one’s reader fixed as an image before one’s eyes. My ideal would be the mature student who is taking a combined honours course or an evening class and wishes to understand Hegel as part of the context of European political or philosophical thought. I would be surprised if the Philosophy of Right was the first work in philosophy or political science that he or she has ever read and I assume my reader approaches this book with basic knowledge of the ethical thought of modernity (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant), although this is not absolutely necessary. For this reason, I happily make reference to such ideas (and explain where I believe it necessary), but I play down the role of metaphysics in the argument. Metaphysics is a taxing discipline and one that requires a thorough grounding in the basics before any discussion can begin. Hegelian metaphysics is notoriously opaque and obfuscating and although a full understanding of the Philosophy of Right would require a digression into its location in the system of Hegel’s philosophy as a whole, I am strongly of the opinion that much of his lecture series does not require it. Hegel is discussing why human beings live in association with other human beings and what this means for both the individual and the state. He talks about freedom, action, right and wrong, the family, private property and the structure of the constitution. We can all say something about these issues and what Hegel has to say is often clear and reasonable. The full justification of why we ought to accept the grounding claims of Hegel’s political philosophy (that one cannot radically critique one’s existing society, or that Northern Europe is the necessary end of the development of human spirit) does require an understanding of the metaphysical system that contextualises them, but as the first step on a journey to comprehension, one can be permitted to merely hint at what form such a justification would take without having to digress beyond the limits of the text itself. I simultaneously play down the notorious jargon of Hegel’s own lectures, avoiding the very strong temptation to spend pages explaining the use of neologisms and terms of art which Hegel utilises with perpetual indiscretion. Instead, I opt for a language more conducive to our own times. I believe Hegel’s ideas in the realm of ethics and politics can be explained without recourse to a ‘specialist’ or ‘technical’ language, and this is a belief reinforced by Hegel’s own remarks and additions (see below) to his lecture notes, where his style metamorphoses into the lecturer reinforcing a point and then the teacher who uses contemporary issues and examples to illustrate more clearly.

Furthermore, the Philosophy of Right is still caught in a quagmire of controversy concerning Hegel’s own – authentic, as it were – position. Is he a conservative with an eye on reform? Is his model of the political state authoritarian? Much of the secondary literature is concerned with supporting one or other of these positions. I try to be neutral in my approach, to present the text as one would read it naively and innocently. Such controversies will no doubt engage the reader after they have reached a certain level of understanding, but I think it best to reach that understanding without prejudice. Yet, to hold my approach to be silent on these concerns would be disingenuous; if no scientist is value-free, then it would be foolish in the extreme to assume nothing of my own personal reading of Hegel appears in the following pages. We all have prejudices and perspectives and so, to be honest and transparent, I must acknowledge that I read Hegel as a rational conservative who advocates reform when required, but views any attempt to rationally reconstruct the state according to the determinations and demands of pure reason or universal moral realism as a nonsensical and dangerous undertaking. This puts him clearly between two camps: those who view Hegel as a reactionary concerned with ingratiating himself to the powers who be; and those who read in Hegel’s obscure metaphysical approach a more radical and far-reaching critique of his contemporary social world.¹

Yet, to add a proviso to all these worries, the reader ought to view this book only as the beginning of an expedition. It is a modern misconception that information and knowledge ought to be immediate; we rarely read a book more than once or delve too deeply into the context or background that gave rise to it, instead assuming that the words on the page themselves – if read at the correct pace – will disclose all their truth. This is sadly not true and, above all, certainly not in philosophy. Understanding becomes fuller and more robust with re-reading and reinforcement and the shortfalls of the approach I have decided to take will be slightly compensated by the indications in the further reading section. The reader, once confident enough, should begin the climb proper.

HOW TO READ THE BOOK

Given what has been said above, and the current climate whereby we find instructions on the side of shampoos on how to use them, perhaps I ought to say a little about how I believe this book ought to be read. First, it is important that a copy of the Philosophy of Right is close at hand. Ideally, I would urge the reader to read the relevant section of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (for example, the Preface), then the relevant chapter here (Chapter 3) before re-reading Hegel himself. In this manner, the reader will bring his own understanding to the text, be introduced to what I believe is significant and return to the text to see whether he or she agrees with my reading.

I should also mention a bit about the style I have used. I am at times irreverent and often not as careful in my expression as is demanded by philosophical enquiry. I also integrate my own examples with those of Hegel’s, but attentiveness to the primary text will be enough for the reader to separate mine from his. The reason for these choices is obvious: I want this introduction to be accessible and the equivalent of a lecture series on Hegel’s political thought given to students. It would make little sense to have one’s readers puzzling over what I say as well as Hegel’s own words and so the informal style is an attempt to allow the main and taxing thought to be concerned with Hegel himself. My aim is to make myself invisible.

OVERVIEW OF THEMES

Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is the perfect text with which any newcomer to the thought of Hegel ought to engage. Not only is it one of the classics of Western political theory and one of the most accessible of Hegel’s works, but it also represents the maturation of his system of philosophy into its most rational and clearly expressed form, whilst still containing many conspicuous elements from the earlier romantic aspect of his thought. The text is first and foremost a work of normative political theory: it attempts to justify how the institutions and laws of the state ought to be structured and arranged in order for the state to be rational. For Hegel, the rational state is one in which the human can enjoy full freedom, and he introduces this central concept of his work and explains how he will extrapolate a theory of a political state from a common understanding of this notion.

The content of this book mostly follows Hegel’s own structure and the titles of the chapters are direct references to his own sections, but a brief overview of the whole structure would not be amiss. The Preface, for all its inconsistencies and problems, is concerned with how one ought to (or, more accurately, should not) undertake political philosophy. It both introduces, in brief, the aims of Hegel’s lecture series and offers a taste of how he will carry his enquiry out....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations To The Works of Hegel
• Chapter 1: Context: A Tale of Two Revolutions
• Chapter 2: Overview: Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
• Chapter 3: The Preface: The Task of Philosophy
• Chapter 4: The Introduction: Metaphysical Freedom
• Chapter 5: Abstract Right: Personal Freedom
• Chapter 6: Morality: Moral Freedom
• Chapter 7: Ethical Life: Social Freedom
• Chapter 8: Reception and Influence
• Notes
• Notes For Further Reading