Smith, Steve B. (1991). Hegel’s critique of liberalism: rights in context.

University of Chicago
Press.

Preface.........................................................................................................................................1
1. Why Hegel Today?....................................................................................................................1
2. The Origins of the Hegelian Project...........................................................................................1
Hegel and the Divided Self..............................................................................................................................1
Romanticism and Revolution..........................................................................................................................1
Civic Religion, Positivity, and the Volksgeist...................................................................................................1
The Discovery of the Dialectic.........................................................................................................................1

3. The Critique of the Liberal Theory of Rights..............................................................................1

Hegel and the Enlightenment.........................................................................................................................1
The Theory of Natural Rights..........................................................................................................................1
Critique of Natural Rights, I: Hobbes and Locke.............................................................................................1
Critique of Natural Rights, IIa: Kant.................................................................................................................1
Critique of Natural Rights, IIb: Fichte..............................................................................................................1
Hegel and the French Revolution: Rousseau..................................................................................................1
The Politics of Virtue.......................................................................................................................................1

Preface
Hegel’s political philosophy intends to promote the values and ideas of the Rechsstaat, as
we can see in his emphasis on the respect for rights and inclusion of a right to recognition
[Annerkenung] – x – as a precondition for the enjoyment of all other social goods. The
structures of social life are not constraints, but “the necessary context within which our
individual powers and capacities can grow and develop”. Sittlichkeit is there “to preserve and
enhance our right to mutual recognition and esteem”.
Hegel is not a reactionary, as Haym and Popper claimed, not a “prophet of emancipation
through labor”, as Adordo stated, and neither a communitarian. His philosophy is not
anachronistic, as Pelcynski affirms, or based on some nonrational and untranslatable
“vision”, as Taylor and Rosen say. “Hegel’s dialectic of Geist is best interpreted
pragmatically or nonmetaphysically as specifying some telos of agreement among persons
who mutually acknowledge and enhance one another’s right to recognition”. - xi

1. Why Hegel Today?

There are two main reason for Hegel’s resurgence. First, the alleged difference between
Continental and Anglo-American philosophy was shown to be not that great. Many analytical
philosophers (Taylor, Rorty etc.) started engaging with thinkers like Hegel and Heidegger
and many European social theorists (Habermas, Apel) did the same with Wittgenstein,
Austin etc. – 1 – Second, Hegel’s political philosophy is a good point of departure for those
tired with the “dominant strategies for justifying liberalism”, like Rawls. In this deontological
liberalism, liberalism is neutral with respect to ends and preferred ways of life. It would
simply serve as a “framework for people to pursue their own self-chosen ends”.
Rawls explicitly states his debt towards Kant by describing this project as “Kantian
constructivism in moral theory”. This procedural Kantianism avoids evaluating substantive
issues. But there are important differences. For Kant, morality is worthy only if pursued for its
own sake – 2 -, while in Rawls the rules of justice are intended to promote the best possible
distribution of “primary goods”. Morality is instrumental. Second, Kant’s core concept is
universality, not autonomy. The latter is a dependent variable in relation to the first one. In
Rawls, autonomy “is more like a natural datum with which we all begin”. This is not an issue
for Rawls, as he is also explicit that the departs from Kant’s text in many points.
There are four main points of departure: rationality as a predicate of individual actors and
actions (methodological individualism); rationality is a form of calculation of means, not to
something to choose ends; the natural goal of each agent is to maximize pleasure and
minize pain (psychological hedonism); and the problem of politics is to organize the limited
number of goods “so that each person can coexist will all under the universal rule of law”. – 3
- Critiques have come from all sides (communitarians, political romantics, conservatives etc.)
and many have been inspired by Hegel. In this sense, Hegel’s revival is a mirror image of
the neo-Kantian revival. – 4
Both approaches, however, are insufficient. The abstraction of the neo-Kantians “does not
result in a stronger foundation from which the self can choose, but in no foundation at all,
since there is literally nothing left to the self”. The communitarian approach, on the other
hand, assumes a “misplaced concreteness” leaving “the individual no room to criticize those
communities except in their own terms”. – 5 – Hegel provides us with a middle term. He is
critical of the individualistic and ahistorical conceptions of rights and also of any attempt to
return to “some form of democratic participatory gemeinschaft”. – 6
Hegel, however, almost never uses the term. One of the few moments is in PH when
discussing the political philosophy of the FR (PH, p. 452). He presents a double critique.
Methodologically, he opposes the “atomistic” conception of the individual as stripped of all
cultural and historical identification. Substantively, he criticizes liberalism for “collapsing the
state into civil society”, for promoting a Notstaat (a state based on need) or an
Verstandsstaat (a state based on understanding). His critique is based on a more general
problem identified by the Romantics. The “divided self” inherited from the Enlightenment and
its dichotomies (public and private, reason and passion, noumenal and phenomenal). – 7 –
Liberalism “liberated modern men from the tyranny of social custom” only to enslave him to
his passions. Hegel’s solution was the Sittlichkeit. – 8
Hegel’s critique of liberalism may seem too mild for critics from the left and the right. This is
partially a result of how he sees philosophy. It is something that not only describes, but also
“tries to bring out the rationality or necessity of events by showing the inner (and inter)
connections between them”. – 9 – To this practice, we give the name of “immanent critique”.
Instead of proposing “some apodictic first principle”, Hegel engages “the various systems of
thought and life on their own terms”. This is, at the same time, also “at least partially
constitutive of the reality which it takes as its object”.
This is not a new approach, but it differs from at least two others. A “political interpretation”,
as seen in Ritter, Riedel, Avineri and Pelczynski. They had the merit to partially dismiss the
idea that Hegel was a partisan of conservatism, but there way of making Hegel more
politically attractive was “at the cost of blunting some of his more arresting and even
visionary ideas”. – 10 – The other is the “metaphysical interpretation”, as seen in Rosen.
Hegel would be a “panlogicist”, subordinating “the facts of experience to the categories of
logical analysis”. This view tends to isolate Hegel from the human and political concerns that
were clearly in his mind. This is not to dismiss Hegel’s systematic preoccupation, but to put
into question “Hegel is better understood, not as doing some kind of fundamental ontology,
but as practicing a form of cultural hermeneutics”. - 11
2. The Origins of the Hegelian Project
Hegel and the Divided Self
The common thread that goes from Hegel’s earliest manuscripts to this works of maturity is
“the desire to overcome the experience of division, diremption, and discord”. Philosophy
arises from the need to overcome the solidified contradictions. Rationality has a synthetic
function. It is able to reunify and make “whole what has been torn apart”. Hegel’s desire was
a shared concern among many of his time, such as Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin and
Schelling. – 17 – The shared problem was the dual existence that characterized the modern
or postclassical world. To be torn between the philosophic demand for rights, equality, and
rationality and an existing order that violated those demands.
In such a conception of morality, the cause of diremption is not outside us, something
beyond our control, but internal. The moral life is the one that overcomes the divided and
self-contradictory aspects of human nature. In the Greek tradition, this was possible only in
thought and was not available to everyone. – 18 – Only the philosopher was capable of
“realizing that part of the divine nous that linked him to the cosmos”. The solution to the
problem of “man’s divided self” was the contemplative life. – 19 – This was a shared belief
across the most different Greek traditions (Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics, Skeptics). With
the advent of the Judeo-Christian tradition the divide deepens. Reason itself is not incapable
of grasping the whole. Only through a life of faith (pistis) can man live a complete existence.
This was led to its ultimate consequences by Ockham - 20 – and his theory of “divine
omnipotence”. The bifurcation between the finite and the infinite was so stark as to lead to
“the disappearance of any sense of order from the universe, where God, the source of that
order, was conceived as so thoroughly unfathomable by human reason as to leave him all
but irrelevant for practical purposes”. In sense, Descartes is “a response to the sense of
anxiety and unrest produced by the understanding of ourselves as contingent, finite
creatures”. – 21
(…)
Descartes “provisional morality” “was given its definitive shape by the Enlightenment”
through the doctrine of natural law – an “attempt to unite reason and nature by making moral
judgments natural”. There was a single moral order underlying the “superficial diversity in
manners, customs, and habits” and it could be discovered – 25 – “consulting the undeniable
facts of human nature and man’s needs, interests, and relationships”. This appears from
Hobbes, who saw “natural law as the factual experience of man’s powers, needs, and will”,
to Hume, who proposed a kind of “moral and political physics”. But the “pleasing harmony
between reason and nature” of natural law could not be sustained. – 26
The most important assault came from Rousseau. In his Second discourse, he denies the
“premise of the essential homogeneity of nature and hence of a unified natural and social
science”. The law of nature is the law of the strong, not a moral law. Moral law demands us
to transcend nature, not conform to it, and we do so by acting according to reason.
Rousseau offered some arguments for rejecting Enlightenment’s naturalism. As physical
objects, human beings are machines “constituted by certain appetites and desires which can
be studied and know through the laws of mathematical physics”. – 27 – From the moral and
metaphysical angle, however, they are free agents. Men is capable of resisting and denying
instinct. If they were not, no man could be held responsible for his actions, as he would be
incapable of morality.
Kant takes up Rousseau’s claim and radicalizes it. The difference is that Kant gives a
universal significance to the general will that Rousseau would not agree with. Rousseau’s
general will was local and political. Limited to small communities. Kant’s cosmopolitanism is
universally binding, but at a price. He severs the will from all natural facts of human
experience. – 28 – Kant seems to “blur the distinction between the politically possible and
the morally permissible”. “Nonetheless, Kantian critical philosophy begins with the attempt to
provide a more articulate defense of Rousseau’s dualism between nature and morality”. His
solution is expressed in the opposition between the real of nature (phenomena) and the real
of freedom (noumena). The first can be is formulated and analyzed through the laws of
natural science. – 29 – The second cannot be reduced to “human beings as we perceive
them”. Moral duty derives from no other source but itself. Kant denies all attempts to ground
morality in natural terms, such as the increase of human happiness or feelings of pleasure
and pain. No “mere matter of fact, including the facts of human psychology, is sufficient to
derive genuinely moral ‘ought’”.
Our duty is obedience to a rational principle or law universally binding to all rational beings
against the inclinations and desires from our natural selves. It is this “putative diremption
between is and ought”, the Kantian morality of the divided self, to which Hegel and his
generation respond. – 30 – Schiller, for example, saw law as frustrating the human desire
from freedom, against Kant’s view of law as the only framework within which freedom was
possible. Romantics were rebelling against a view of morality as obedience to a fixed code
of conduct. - 31

Romanticism and Revolution

Hegel aims to resolve those tensions. In his early writings, like many of his generation, he
goes back to ancient Greece and the classical polis, inspired by Schiller’s Letters onf the
Aesthetic Education of Mankind. – 31 – It was “a call for liberation from the dominant ethos
of the Aufklärung, namely materialism and utility”. Against the fragmentation of modern
society, the harmony and cohesion of the ancient world. One important source of
fragmentation was the division of labor. – 32 – It may increase efficiency, but at the cost of
turning individuals into fragments of the whole. Later, this will be reworked by sociologist, as
Durkheim, as the transition from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft, from organic to mechanical
solidarity. But Schiller does not claim that all is lost. On the contrary, a higher art [höhere
Kunst] would restore “a higher, nondivided humanity”. This new unity would be superior to
the harmony of the Greeks, since it would be achieved “in full self-awareness of the multiples
alternatives open to us”. - 33
In his early years, Hegel shared this “enthusiasm for an aesthetic utopia”. – 34 – He and his
companions saw the French revolution as the possibility of radically transforming the very
constitution of the world. – 35 – (…) – He associates revolution with the vindication of the
rights of man but differs from Schelling’s interpretation on what this revolution would entail. –
38 –Schelling kept the Kantian dualism between noumenal freedom and phenomenal
causality, so true liberation was possible only through mystical withdrawn. Hegel, on the
other hand, tries to secure “the conditions of human autonomy through the acts of a free
citizen of a republic”. – 39 – In this, Hegel is closer to Kant than to Schelling. The state is not
a limitation, but a condition for human freedom. While Schelling proposes “a liberation from
the state and all external restraint, Hegel, at least in his early writings, desires a regeneration
of politics along quasi-classical lines”. - 40

Civic Religion, Positivity, and the Volksgeist

In his early writings – early theological writings [theologische Jugendschriften], if we use
Nohl’s nomenclature -, Hegel shows a “longing for community (…) as the cure for the
problem of alienation and diremption” in his enthusiasm for Greece and the classical
republican model. Those are not properly theological texts but attempts to examine the
interaction between politics and religion in three distinct cultures: ancient Greece, Judaea,
and modern Christianity. – 40 – Hegel presents the concept of Volksgeit which has three
important features: methodologically, it emphasizes “the essential relatedness of all aspects
of a culture”, contrary to Enlightenment’s individualism and its analytical abstractions, and is
“less the product of the empirical arrangements of a society than the creative force behind
those arrangements”; normatively, it is not a descriptive label, but conveys “an ideal of social
solidarity informing all aspects of a people’s collective life” - 41 -, a kind of civic religion;
lastly, Volksgeist has a historical dimension, “a quasi-biological metaphor”. – 42 – The latter
aspect is connected with Hegel’s idea of formation or Bildung. Something the Greeks did not
need, as they saw to clear distinctions between “themselves as individuals and the
appointed social functions and roles that they shared as members of particular
communities”. – 43
(…)
Volksgeist was “intended to recapture the moral harmony and coherence of the early Greeks
and Romans”. But, unlike Rousseau, – 47 – Hegel did not see Christianity as a symptom of
political decay. It came only after the “prior liberation of the individual from the bonds of
communal life”. It was Roman law which “reduced everyone to a legal person” and “each
individual to his own solitary atomistic self, unrelated to his fellows except as a property
owner”. In these early writings, Hegel pleas “for the regeneration of civic virtue” through the
appearance of some “prince” who “could provide a new nonpositive civil religion for
contemporary Germany”. – 48 – This Hegel of Positivity of the Christian Religion will
disappear. - 49

The Discovery of the Dialectic

Hegel’s Kantianism of his Positivity of the Christian Religion vanishes in The Spirit of
Christianity and its Fate. This change is explained by his “disillusionment with the experiment
in radical republicanism” of the French revolution, which failed to “achieve anything remotely
resembling classical polis democracy”. In the latter essay, Hegel abandons this earlier
republicanism and call of civic virtue. Instead of Volksgeist, the central concept is now Geist.
– 49 – Instead of seeing history as the “disharmonious development of individual national
spirits”, Hegel comes to see history “as a process whereby humanity would be revealed as
one”.
Christianity, as a religion of love, now becomes the way through which a reconciliation with
the world is possible. Love substitutes the “Kantian insistence on self-sufficiency and
autonomy”. “It established not only a more satisfying metaphysical relationship between man
and God but a more satisfying moral relationship between human beings”. – 50 – instead of
condemning Christianity’s objectivity, Hegel “now commends it for setting froth ‘the
subjective in general’” (ETW:209, W1:321) because of the peculiar relationship between God
and man. Not one of blind obedience, as in the Jewish tradition. – 51 – He opposes his
conception of Christianity to Kantian ethics and Mosaic legalism. These two may seem to
differ, but not fundamentally, according to Hegel. In the Jewish tradition, “law is an arbitrary
command handed down”. In Kantian ethics, morality emanates from the will alone, but this is
not the abolishment of “the coercive power of law”. Instead, it is its internalization. “Kant
transfers the master-slave relationship from the social to the psychological dimension”. A
religion of love would “strip the laws of legality, of their legal form” (ETW:212, W 1:324). – 52
– “The result is, then, that when we allow love to act as the determining ground of our
behavior, we find law to be dialectically aufgehoben in the precise sense of that term”. Why
Judaism and Kantianism were moral orders based on rules, which Hegel equates “with the
reign of private property”, Christianism would be based on love, showing “how a society
could be united, not by obedience to law, but through participation in a common way of life.
Love becomes here the new principle of community”. – 53
But this was not possible during Jesus’ lifetime. Christianity was not the civil religion of the
postclassical age. Not yet. It was not possible because of the historical conditions
surrounding Christ himself. His message was at odds with the general spirit of his time, so
he withdrew into himself. The dualism between earthly and heavenly cities was to mark the
development of the Christian faith. - 54

3. The Critique of the Liberal Theory of Rights

Hegel and the Enlightenment
Taylor reasonably argued that Hegel’s philosophy can be seen as a response to the
Enlightenment as the critique of tradition and attempt to “submit existing law, practices, and
institutions to the test of their own critical rationality”. – 57 – For our purposes, Enlightenment
can be seen as this attempt in ”unmasking various forms of illusion and error which stood in
the way of a correct apprehension of the truth”. Reason and truth were to oppose error and
prejudice. – 58 – Prejudice can arise from error, but also from the abuse of power and
authority. Traditions were (potential) “repositories of prejudice and popular credulity” against
which the ultimate source of true authority was reason alone. - 59

The Theory of Natural Rights

At the core of the Enlightenment was the idea that human beings had certain natural or
inalienable rights. Their rights are not created by the government or their political society.
Prior to the 17th century, governments made no appeal “to rights as their standard of
legitimacy”. – 61 – This theory was subject to different approaches, but we can identify some
common aspects.
Egalitarianism. Hobbes was perhaps the first one to assert the categorial equality among
men. Albeit there are differences, human beings are, in general, physically and mentally
equals. The differences are there, but there are more equal than different. He also talks
about a equality of desire. Not that we all desire the same thing, but that we all have “a
perpetual and restless desire of power after power”.
Individualism. Contrary to classical political philosophy, which asserted that man was a
political animal, modern natural rights claimed men are “radically asocial”. – 62 – The natural
condition is one of fear and solitude. There is no natural tie or shared obligation, so all
authority derives from convention or agreement.
Voluntarism. Only our consent acts as a standard of political legitimacy. – 63
Reductionism. Applying the scientific method to the political world, we can obtain knowledge
of the social by dividing it into parts. Human behavior is explained through a “mechanistic
psychology of the passions”. The most fundamental is the desire for self-preservation. As
such, Hobbes equates it to a right. All duty derives from this primary right.
Universalism. - 64

Critique of Natural Rights, I: Hobbes and Locke

Hegel’s critique of natural rights is developed at length in NL (1802). The text starts with an
analysis of what he understand to be the two most important methodological approaches to
rights. First, we have the empirical approach of Hobbes and Locke. They both see natural
right naturalistically, as deriving from man’s passions. Rights would derive from natural
needs and desires, starting with the need of self-preservation. Right is defined “as the power
each person has to get what he wants”. A statement about rights would derive from certain
biological or psychological drives common to all men. – 65 – In Locke we have different tale.
“Since the brute desire for life is the mainspring for all human action, we must concede to
men the right to that which they are powerless not to obey”. But Locke also appeals to
reason and God. There seems to be an correspondence between reason, nature and
revelation. – 66 – All men would be equally rational, because reason was given to us by
God.
Hegel contests not these theories results, but their method. Those theorists, Hegel states,
claim to arrive at the most universal feature of men by stripping away everything man
acquired through history, custom and tradition, but empiricism is incapable of differentiating
the necessary from the contingent. – 67 – Empiricism teaches us to learn from experience
but is nor critical enough. It simply choses one feature of a given social institution and “read
this back into its cause”. “The Lockean argument that society exists for the sake of the
protection of property tells us more about the structure of Locke’s own society than the
actual origins of society”. – 68 – When empiricism tries to go beyond simply clarify the
confusion of experience, to go beyond findings of limited validity, it necessarily smuggles
“principles that cannot be discovered in experience alone”. They do not find the simplest and
most elementary needs of human beings in experience, but already start with a pre-
conceived theory. It is not a neutral view of needs, but the underlying adoption of “a
particular view of society and the future”. - 69

Critique of Natural Rights, IIa: Kant

The second method for rights is the moral or transcendental approach as presented by Kant
and Fichte. They are formal because both philosophers claim it to be “strictly universal” and
because it was not conceived from empirical extrapolations. Universality requires a ground
that transcends empirically limited desires. This ground is the will, a “presupposition that
must hold if our talk about rights is to be morally intelligible”. - 70
Antihistoricism. Against the abstract character of Kantian morality, Hegel stresses “that
moral duty has a history”. To think about morality as separated “from social and political
circumstances is to misconceive it”. Morality, however, “is not the product of autonomous
individual reflection on how to live” – 71 -, but “is rooted in the prereflective customs and
habits (Sitten) of a people”. Moral life always happens “within the objective structure of
communal norms”. Hegel’s point is that we cannot abstract morality from other spheres of
social life. – 72
Empty Formalism. Hegel also denounces Kant’s categorical imperative as incapable of
providing any content or direction to human action. Kant’s theory would allow for anything to
be willed, as its preoccupation would be only with form. Kant’s hesitation in prescribing
concrete actions would attest to this claim. Hegel’s interprets have rightly pointed out that his
interpretation “derives from an undue attention to the first formulation of the Categorical
Imperative” – 73 -, while the second formulation (commanding the respect for persons and
not treating other as means to an end) provides exactly what he claims Kant is not giving us.
In his other texts, such as in his Anthropology, Kant goes even further in contextual and
empirical analysis of morality. But even half-true, Hegel critic is still, as such, half-right, as
his discussion of some of Kant’s own examples show (see his response to the trustee
“dilemma” in NL, p. 77). – 74 – Hegel points out that “universalization can only ensure the
consistency of our actions”, but not give substantive social or political prescriptions.
Universalization of a given maxim can lead us to a different world from our own, but it says
nothing about which one is morally inferior. Underlying Kant’s use of the categorical
imperative, “there is presupposed the legitimacy of certain social and political institution and
practices” – by “a conceptual ‘sleight of hand’ the legitimacy of modern bourgeois liberalism
is simply assumed”. – 76
The Beautiful Soul. “But if sheer consistency in willing is the criterion of an action's moral
worth, then in principle any action–murder or torture-could be upheld as moral, so long as
the agent was able to will it consistently. Universality may be no more than adhering
consistently to what one believes, irrespective of the content or purpose of those beliefs or
their objective consequences. The result may even be to sanction hypocrisy and immorality
by providing no external means of checking the intentions of the agent”. – 77 – But, for Kant,
principle alone is not sufficient to ensure we act morally, “unless it is joined to a willingness
to treat all persons as beings endowed with dignity simple by virtue of their personhood”. –
78 - Hegel is also preoccupied with the Kantian notion of autonomy as it delegitimizes “all
social and political institutions that do not flow from our own free will”. The other extreme is
what Hegel calls the “beautiful soul” – one who “is no longer able to participate in any actions
that do not emanate from the absolute purity of his intentions”. Hegel probably had the
German Pietist as his target. They preached “a rejection of doctrine and a return to the
Bible”. – 79 – More important than “external conformity to religious dogmas” was “the purity
of the believer’s convictions”. - 80

Critique of Natural Rights, IIb: Fichte

While Kant tried to “infuse the principles of right with a new idealism that early modern
liberalism had lacked” through “an open, tolerant, market society”, Fichte proposed a closed
commercial state. – 80 – Hegel’s critique of the Fichtean police state “goes to the heart of
Hegel’s critique of revolutionary politics, with its attempt to synthesize collectivist
communitarianism and expressivist freedom”.
Fichte’s Science of Right starts with the division between the I and the non-I. We are faced
with a choice between being determined by nature (dogmatism) or that the world is
determined by us (idealism). Both are moral and epistemological claims. He then defines the
self-conscious subject as the one that is not only aware of the world, but also of its own
awareness of things. To be self-conscious is to both subject and object of knowledge. The
mind is not a passive recipient. It “seeks to grasp, appropriate, and transform reality”. The
self tries to overcome the antagonism between self and other by striving “to subdue and
overcome otherness by turning it into a projection of the mind’s own essential powers”. – 81
“The other mind, the du, serves as a mediating link between the I and the non-I” – “the
Fichtean theory of rights begins with the mutual recognition of freedom that is the original
property of all minds”. While Kant saw this fundamental freedom as “the capacity of
spontaneous choice”, Fichte sees it as “the exercise of worldly mastery and control”. So
joining in a community enhances our freedom, as it connects us with “other selves who seek
to overcome otherness an to impress their collective designs upon the world through labor
and activity”.
The only act of political participation is deciding to enter a community. After that, legislation
is “purely [a] technical expertise rather than popular deliberation” to be handled by impartial
expers. – 82 – The abuse of power would be prevented by “an ephorate empowered to look
after the interests of the citizenry and to remove officials for dereliction of duty”.
According to Hegel, Fichte duality between affirming or denying freedom gives no ground for
deciding one over the other – “freedom seems more like a methodological postulate than an
ontological necessity”. Hegel also criticizes Fichte’s drive towards mastery as “an essentially
infinite and thus impossible moral task”. The essential moral aspiration would always remain
open – Hegel accuses it of being a “bad Infinity” (see SL, p. 150-54). – 84 – Instead of “a
final reconciliation or synthesis between the ego and nature”, we are left with “striving” as
“the most enduring mark of human dignity”.
Third, in Fichte’s police state the people would not form and “organic body of a common and
rich life”, but “an atomistic, life-impoverished multitude” (W 2:85, 87). Lastly, Hegel criticizes
Fichte’s ephors as “utopian or nonsensical, for it would result in a doctrine of dual
sovereignty that would in the long run prove unworkable”. - 85

Hegel and the French Revolution: Rousseau

Hegel claims the French revolution received its first impulse from the natural rights doctrines
of Rousseau “who had sought to remake the world in accordance with the principles of
critical rationality”. It tried to establish a political institution based “on a universal and secure
foundation supplied by the principles of philosophy alone”. – 85 – Even if not abandoning his
view of the French Revolution “as one of the great watershed moments in modern history”,
he came to view it also “as a great moral and political tragedy”. These Prinzipienmänner
“destroyed the fabric of traditional politics by a sort of reckless appeal from the is to the
ought”. 
Hegel traces his nihilistic character back to the philosophic critique of the ancien régime, as
he shows in the “Absolute Freedom and Terror” section of PhG. The revolution originated
“from an effort to overcome the division, or diremption (Entfremdung), of culture under the
old regime”. That regime was marked by a “discrepancy between seeming and being,
between what a culture says and thinks about itself and what it actually is”, as the nobility
which defended the ethical ideals of feudalism – 86 – became the spirit of the flatterer. In
Hegel’s words, the “heroism of service” changed into a “heroism of flattery”. The vassal who
“sought glory and nobility for himself in battle” has become “a property-owning bourgeois
seeking to accumulate goods and property to insulate himself from the consciousness of
death”. From this disintegrated consciousness emerges “the demand for ‘absolute freedom’
from all previous restrictions and cultural restraints”. – 87
“The French Revolution looked to Hegel like an attempt to recreate the conditions for social
and political harmony which not only the old regime but all postclassical culture had torn
asunder. The revolutionaries, acting out of a desire to bring the doctrines of the philosophers
down to earth, directed themselves to removing all traces of transcendence or
otherworldliness. To bring about this reconciliation of the rational and the real, the radicals
sought to recreate the kind of consensus and public spiritedness evinced by the ancient
polis.”
Hegel’s reference to the universal will [allgemeiner Wille] is an allusion to Rousseau’s
volonté Générale. For Rousseau, it was the source of freedom – 88 -, as one “does no more
than obey rules that he has set down for himself”. What it dictates is “universally and hence
impartially applicable to everyone”. Hegel claims this idea, when realized, means the
abolishment of all existing institutions and hierarchies. As the only ground of legitimate
rights, it cannot create, only destroy. – 89 – “The idea of the general will is that I am only free
when I obey the laws that I have myself created. But since the general will is the outcome of
a collective decision, it cannot be decided by me alone. If everyone is to be free, then
everyone must at least participate in the decision making”. But the search for unanimity is a
chimera. As “no standard short of universal agreement (…) can guarantee the legitimacy of
the outcome”, there is no possible legitimate outcome. Every halfway measure (as any
representative institution would be) is “a violation of my inalienable right to self-legislation”. –
90
“Rousseau obviously thought that the procedure alone was rigorous enough to prevent
abuse, but as Hegel was to show, his agnosticism about ends tends to prove dangerously
open-ended. Furthermore, Rousseau uses the concept of the general will to show how
substantive forms of community are generated. But a community is not the product of a will.
Rather, any popular will requires a preexistent community before it can become operative.
Rousseau is thus guilty of presupposing what he needs to establish.” - 91

The Politics of Virtue

The self-sacrificing virtue demanded by the revolutionaries required pre-existing laws and
institutions that were not present in France. – 91 – Lacking those, the only available
standard was the revolutionaries’ own self-certainty or sincerity. But having no criterion of
the worth of an action if not purity of intent, man is judge based solely on his subjective
convictions. Such a subjective conception of virtue unleashed “a relentless search to
unmask those hypocrites who pursued their own private ends under the guise of public
virtue”. – 92
Robespierre and his followers transformed “an essential private conception – 93 – of virtue
as sincerity into a test of citizenship. While Rousseau and his followers may have set out to
politicize the private, they ended up by privatizing the political”. It “conception of civic virtue
wrenched out of all social context” made their experiment in radical republicanism doomed to
fail. – 94
(…)
“And yet , despite his evident admiration for Napoleon and the new historical era he
inaugurated, Hegel sees in him merely an agent for a higher principle which transcends him
and of which he is unaware. This principle is the liberal constitutional government based
upon the recognition of human rights. But when the basis of this state has been laid, the
work of the architect has been made redundant. Like the original Theseus, Napoleon, this
modern tyrant, is fated to disappear from the scene which he has helped to prepare. Strictly
speaking, it is not Napoleon but Hegel who comes at the end of history, since Hegel puts in
conceptual form what Napoleon did.” - 97

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ETW Early Theological Writings. T. M . Knox. University o f Pennsylvania Press, 1971.
JR Jenaer Realphilosophie.. Edited by ]. Hoffmeister. Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1969.
LHP Lectures on the History of Philosophy. 3 vols . Routledge, 1955.
LL Lesser Logic. Translated by William Wallace. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
NL Natural Law. Translated by T. M. Knox. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975.
PhM Phenomenology of Mind. Translated by ]. B. Baille. 1966.
PH Philosophy of History. Translated by Sibree. Dover Publications, 1956.
PM Philosophy of Mind. Translated by A. V. Miller. Clarendon Press, 1971 .
PR Philosophy of Right. Translated by T. M. Knox. Clarendon Press, 1967. References are
to the numbered paragraphs and page numbers of this edition.
PW Political Writings. Translated by T. M. Knox. " Introductory Essay" by Z. A. Pelczynski.
Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1964.
SL Science of Logic. Translated by A. V. Miller, 1969.
Werke Werke in Zwanzig Biinden. Edited by E . Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel. Suhrkamp ,
1971. References are to volume and page number of this edition.