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Is Hegel a critic of liberalism or one of its best representatives?
In an effort to force these speculations on Hegel’s political philosophy into some sort of order, I have very
briefly outlined the most important parts of Hegel’s thought and then sort to discover where there might be
correlation with common liberal themes, and where there are contrasts (if the various strands and variations
of “liberalism” differ to such a degree that it is worth further comment, I have obliged). I then allude to other
political ideologies to see whether or not Hegel might instead be better related to one of these. Then ‐ while
admitting that I find Hegel too demanding to give an authoritative answer to the set question, and while it
seems Hegel’s style and his objectives themselves simply will not conform to the left/right spectrum ‐ I
nevertheless conclude that we can place Hegel, albeit tentatively, as a communitarian thinker.
We will firstly consider Hegel’s diverse thoughts on economics. On an initial and superficial reading of Hegel’s
views here, we might think we have an uncritical proponent of the classically liberal free market; in this sense,
perhaps, Hegel was a product of his time. Being greatly impressed and influenced by those figures of the
Scottish Enlightenment ‐ Adam Ferguson, James Steuart and Adam Smith ‐ Hegel “believed , as they did, that
the system of free labour, unhindered exchange of contracts and open markets for goods and services led to
the possibility of prosperity for the majority of the populations of those states which adopted it.”1 Published in
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the same year as the American Declaration of Independence, Wealth of Nations (1776) elaborates a way of
describing how the essentially anarchic activities of individuals in a free economy comes to resemble a
constructed system (‘spontaneous order’), and that by allowing people to follow mere self‐interest the
preferences of everyone in a society will by and large be met, resulting in an indirect altruism (the idea being
that free exchange must benefit both parties, otherwise it would not take place). All this is done through the
metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’. Hegel appears to find this quite convincing: the “beauty of the commercial
economy is that it allows everyone to place personal gain at the forefront of their minds without at the same
time submerging the moral. Thus indirectly, in the commercial sphere, material interests are rendered
virtuous.”2 TP PT
1
TP Howard Williams, ‘Hegel: Spirit and State’ in Francis Fukuyama and the end of history, p. 31
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2
TP Ibid. p.32
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Before we get on to the other side of Hegel’s views here – his profound criticism of the atomistic effects of
such economic arrangements ‐ it is worth noting that, in some respects, (at least according to Herbert Marcuse)
Hegel is actually more fundamental in his endorsement of the market ‐ and private property ‐ than Adam
Smith. For this we have to delve slightly into Hegel’s Idealism. According to Hegel, we reach a higher level of
freedom when we come to the realisation that there is no ‘other’, i.e., when we realise that all is mind (Geist).
Yet we cannot abolish this ‘other’, and so it is ‘negated’, without being lost, by being synthesized into an
evolving notion of self‐consciousness. To put it differently, external existing objects become in themselves
part of our free will. I quote Hegel at length:
“If it is not to remain abstract, the free will must first give itself an existence, and the primary sensuous
constituents of this existence are things, i.e. external objects. This first mode of freedom is the one which we
should know as property, the sphere of formal and abstract right; property in its mediated shape as contract…
[t]he freedom which we have here is what we call the person, that is, the subject which is free, and indeed free
for itself, and which gives itself an existence in the realm of things.”3 TP PT
The result of this is that private property, and by extension the market ‐ both recognised essentials in most
variants of liberalism ‐ are not merely contingents which benefit society more than they hinder it (and can be
freely violated when they don’t, using for instance John Rawls’s ‘maximin principle’) but are actually part of us.
It makes us persons. While Hegel is far from being a classical liberal, offering at times really quite scathing
denigration at the effects of unregulated markets, he paradoxically goes much deeper than classical liberals
(John Locke, after Psalm 115: 16, claims that God gives property “to mankind in common”; modern libertarian
thinkers like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek justify their economics on broadly utilitarian grounds)
by claiming property, contracts and markets as metaphysically indispensable for freedom. Marcuse declares
that private property “has rarely been so consistently developed from and founded in the isolated individual’s
nature… property exists solely by virtue of the free subject’s power. It is derived from the free person’s
essence.” The result of this is that Hegel removed “the institution of property from any contingent connection
3
TP Philosophy of Right, §33 (Addition)
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and has hypostatized it as an ontological relation… property is prior to the contingent needs of society. It is
‘the first embodiment of freedom and therefore a substantial end in itself’”4 TP PT
I justify going on this slight tangent because it is illustrative of one of the primary difficulties in addressing any
question like ‘Is Hegel a liberal?’ His Absolute Idealism can be puzzling, drawing us in opposing directions and
arriving at incompatible and often starkly contrasting conclusions; his dialectical method works by bringing
together the essential truths of mutually exclusive doctrines, meaning that any attempt to say Hegel holds to
one particular doctrine over another is to presuppose Hegel’s quest to end philosophy has been unsuccessful –
Hegel’s works do not lend themselves to traditional spectrum placing. I hold to the view that there is a certain
futility here – Hegel will be whatever his interpreters wish him to be – but even accepting this we can certainly
do our best to reach the core of his political ideas and give them some title or other.
Since all is mind, the appropriation of external objects which are not mind must be ultimately unsatisfactory,
because we still need something with which to differentiate ourselves (since knowledge of one thing implies a
rejection of another). This is the new antithesis of our previously solved problem, and it is abolished
(synthesized with our previous solution, which is the new thesis) by making the external object to self‐
consciousness itself self‐consciousness. Herein lies the crucial social aspect of Hegel’s philosophy (which I
believe makes Hegel a communitarian) – we are only realised as persons if others are likewise realised.
The answers then to Hegel’s liberal views on the economy are his proposals to bring the state in to alleviate
the problems resulting in civil society as a result of unfettered economics. While considering what we’ve said
about property as the realization of freedom, Hegel still considers
“private property relations [to] militate against a truly free social order. The anarchy of self‐seeking property
owners could not produce from its mechanism an integrated, rational, and universal social scheme…The task
of making the necessary integration devolved, therefore, upon an institution that would stand above the
individual interests of their competing relationships, and yet would preserve their holdings and activities”5 TP PT
4
TP Reason and Revolution, p.193
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5
TP Ibid. p.201
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Hegel does not believe that economic expansion can occur without the possibility of poverty for others;
neither does he anticipate that income will be so distributed to meet the universalising of wants. He tells of
how a society with an excess of wealth is still not rich enough6 – meaning that an increase in the average level
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of wealth nevertheless cannot deal with the most hard‐hit areas of poverty. Similarly, as specialisation
increases as modern society advances, some technical skills will capitalise on changes in demand and others
will become redundant – leaving otherwise highly trained workers out of jobs; leaving excellence in certain
areas to develop, but at the detriment of general culture. Hegel also realises that the nature of economy is
constant expansion, and he (not completely critically) explains why, as production outstrips demand; a society
is led to colonize others. Finally, the free economy is sometimes susceptible to recession, upon which timely
state intervention can hasten recovery.
Next we should take a look at civil society. For Hegel, civil society is a process or ‘moment’ in the ethical life,
succeeding the family and preceding the state. We should aim to see it in this light – as the nuclear family is
dissolved (the man of the household, the father and husband, qua breadwinner, is integrated into the world of
work7) a larger grouping of families emerges, the new important social relations being between the ‘people’ or
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nation. Freedom is advanced as persons are increasingly liberated from the causality of self‐interest, and
increasingly act in accordance with the ethical life, that is to say, from the viewpoint of the whole. In real terms,
civil society includes corporations (the definition of which also includes immediate associations like churches,
trade unions, and interest groups) and the police (defined as public institutions – I agree with Dudley Knowles8 TP PT
in saying that Hegel is inconsistent here with his own claim to have separated civil society from the state)
which bind society together and protect against and remedy the worst effects of economic life. Some
important further points about this, keeping in mind civil society as a ‘moment’: while we have progressed
beyond the pursuit of mere private goals, in civil society persons are still largely concerned with advancing
their own interests. Civil society, like the family, is a crucial domain for the exercise of a distinctively social
mode of freedom, being a model for understanding the sort of freedom that sociability generates9 ‐ but it still
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6
TP Philosophy of Right, §245
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7
TP Dudley Knowles, p.56
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8
TP Ibid., p.297
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9
TP Ibid., p.259
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remains only the second home through which persons can pursue their interests.10 The true realization of
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freedom can only come at the next stage, with the state.
Hegel understands the state as playing a similar role in civil society that civil society plays within individual
interests, as it mediates between the competing claims of corporations and provides for the general welfare
where civil society proves inefficient. In Hegel’s final dialectic, the two major and opposing conceptions of
freedom are synthesized; the freedom of content without form (where we are free to follow our private
desires – Hobbes, Locke and to some extent Rousseau) is combined with the freedom of form without content
(where freedom is rationality; we are free through abstraction from and transcendence of our private desires –
Kant) which results in one rationally choosing the product of all desires taken collectively. Since the will is free,
the structures comprised of all wills should be ones of freedom – these structures are the institutions of the
state. It is with this explanation that we now directly concern ourselves with how Hegel’s ideas relate to the
common attributes of liberalism.
Following our discussion of economics, we can in relative safety rule out any description of Hegel as a classical
liberal. Hegel’s conception of freedom is not as one‐dimensional as is usually found in that tradition, by which I
mean Hegel does not see freedom ‘negatively’, as the simple right to be left alone (although ironically he
shares libertarian unease with the confusion between society and state11 and anxiety over political
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democracy12). A greater claim to Hegel comes from the modern, pro‐intervention liberal school. The
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similarities start with the modern liberal emphasis on finding a balance between the values of liberty and the
need for societal duties. Certainly Hegel provides here, through his account of civil society in which the role of
corporations and immediate associations in holding society together is coupled with a concern for individuals
(Hegel criticises the atomistic conception of individuals, but he still begins with the idea of ‘abstract right’, and
builds upon this with his highly influential idea of the need for ‘recognition’. The interests of the individual are
not abolished in Hegel’s idea of taking the perspective of the universal, they are actualised; the desires of
persons are not thrown away and forgotten but purified). There is lineage here to Francis Fukuyama, who
takes Hegel’s notion of corporation, providing him with “an alternative, and in his view superior, account of
10
TP Williams, p.33
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11
TP “like the libertarians of our own day, Hegel also celebrated the separation of civil society from the state and
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welcomed the separation as one of the great accomplishments of modernity” – Steven Smith p.236
12
TP Tony Burns, p.147
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liberal democracy to that offered by writers such as John Locke, John Stuart Mill and John Rawls” which he
regards as “laying far too much stress on the concept of the individual.”13 Hegel’s agreement with the market
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and private property, taken alongside his opinions on the need for a regulated economy, are also in line with
the modern liberalism.
There is however a split between Hegel and this modern welfarist liberalism. This is in the idea of natural
human rights, and the largely concurrent idea of the social contract. Hegel’s ideas here are extremely difficult,
but I see them in this way: the state in not entirely organic, yet it is not a construct either – it is the
culmination of wills, and is entirely necessary. Therefore Hegel is hostile to any (usually liberal) notions of the
pre‐political citizen, since Hegel sees this argument as circular; it is only governed by the state, as our being at
one in the state, that we have the freedom to make such decisions. A typically liberal social contract sees
government as contingent, if only in theory – it is essentially a deference of power. Hegel sees the state as the
realisation of freedom, and put like this, there is little room for agreement14. The modern liberal school is close
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enough to Hegel’s idea of civil society, if it is taken artificially in something approaching isolation, but I believe
Hegel’s state is simply too great of an obstacle to negate for any theorist who may wish to categorise herself as
liberal.
(It is tempting to take this rejection of liberalism and leap to the opposite conclusion – Hegel as totalitarian.
These are Karl Popper’s views in The Open Society and its Enemies, and while he is certainly correct in
lambasting state ‘worship’, it is perhaps reasonable to say his criticisms blame Hegel unfairly for the sins of
others who have appropriated his name in bad faith)
Hegel is, in my opinion, best seen as a communitarian. But as Tony Burns’s attempt to appropriate Hegel for
the conservative course shows, (“Hegel’s political thought, like Burke’s… [attempts] to synthesise the
apparently contrasting values of order and liberty”15) ‘communitarian’ has no automatic place on the political
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13
TP Williams, p.33
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14
TP “Hegel believed that liberalism was guilty of collapsing the state into civil society… [providing] an overly
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abstract and limited conception of the state which resembles most of all the night‐watchman authority
proposed by Locke and Hume” – Steven Smith, p.7
15
TP Burns, p.139
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spectrum. He is the bourgeois philosopher who inspired Marx; simultaneously a critic and defender of
liberalism.
The ambition and scale of Hegel’s project is breathtaking. As such, I feel that it would be almost a devaluing of
his ideas and impact to reduce interpretation to an exercise in pinning differently coloured rosettes on his
lapel. The true merit of Hegel is to be found in the ways he argues from the communitarian standpoint. His
famous doppelsatz16 is a testament to Hegel’s insistence of his own methods of reasoned argument, based on
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freedom through sociability, dialectic, and immanent critique. Even if we refuse to come down on one side or
the other, we can surely recognise Hegel’s contribution to theorising politics – “the central tenet of Hegelian
philosophy… is that thinking is not simply about the world – it is something that takes place in the world”17TP PT
16
TP While Robert Stern tries to argue for a neutral reading, others argue for radical and reactionary
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interpretations of “what is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational”
17
TP Steve Smith, p.10
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Bibliography
Cited
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Burns Tony, Natural Law and Political Ideology in the Philosophy of Hegel, Avebury, 1996
Hegel G.W.F, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood, Cambridge, 2006
Knowles Dudley, Hegel and the Philosophy of Right, Routledge, 2002
Marcuse Herbert, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the rise of social theory, Routledge, 1955
Smith Steven, Hegel’s critique of liberalism, University of Chicago Press, 1989
Williams Howard et al, Francis Fukuyama and the End of History, University of Wales Press, 1997
General Reference
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Pelczynski Z.A. (ed.), Hegel’s political philosophy – problems and perspectives, Cambridge, 1971
Popper Karl, The Open Society and its Enemies: Volume 2 – Hegel and Marx, Routledge, 1945
Russell Bertrand, History of Western Philosophy, Routledge, 1946
Singer Peter, Hegel, Oxford, 2001
Robert Stern, ‘Hegel’s Doppelsatz: A Neutral Reading’ in Journal of the History of Philosophy,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_the_history_of_philosophy/v044/44.2stern.pdf
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Jon Steward ed., ‘Hegel Myths and Legends’, Introduction,
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/stewart.htm
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