Actuality, Integrity, and Freedom in Hegels Philosophy of Right

J.J. McFadden
Draft prepared for:
Western Political Science Association Conference
April 2011
Please do not cite or circulate without permission

Democracy, at its conceptual core, is a system in which the people rule

themselves. Autonomy (auto-nomos) or self-legislation is thus an idea close to the heart
of democracy, and of democratic theory. Advocates of autonomy within democratic
theory range from straightforwardly liberal defenders of the legal independence and
assured political integrity of citizens and their sharing with other citizens equally in the
exercise of political power(Rawls 1996, xliv) to republican thinkers such as Pettit, who
endorses a non-domination designed to force the state to track all and only the
common avowable interests of the people (Pettit 2001, 159) and Habermas rational
reconstruction of the idea of the rights citizens must accord one another if they want to
legitimately regulate their common life by means of positive law (Habermas 1996, 82 &
passim). Autonomys wide appeal is easy to understand. By locating law-giving and
law-abiding as distinct moments within a single demos (or self), it provides a way to
reconcile freedom with law and obligation: freedom becomes a matter of rule-following,

of subjection to a sovereign who is oneself, and thus the constraints politics places on
self-governing democratic citizens do not violate their freedom.
Another strand within democratic theory rejects this reconciliation, however,
advocating instead a democratic freedom opposed to rule itself. Pointing to the excesses
and differences separating the demos subject to the law from that which authors it,
theorists concerned with novelty and contingency highlight the tendency of autonomys
self-subjection to appear as, or turn into, mere subjection. Against such subjection, they
figure democracy as specifically an-archic, an escape from rule, a rebellious moment that
may assume revolutionary, destructive proportions that is averse to order (Wolin 1996,
39); the demos appears as a rupture in the logic of arch (Rancire, Panagia, and
Bowlby 2001, 14). Taking free action to be that which escapes from or exceeds the order
that sovereignty seeks to impose, this account of democracy is able to align freedom
with non-sovereigntythe dependence on others, self-opacity and lack of control
inherent in our finituderather than on self-command. In doing so, however, it forfeits
the possibility of a lasting democratic form capable of sustaining freedom as an ongoing
project. Further, locating free actions precisely beyond or outside any norm against
which they might be measured severs the link between freedom and obligation that
autonomy provided.
Freedom, then, presents democracy with a dilemma: democrats interested in
freedom may have autonomy or non-sovereignty (constitutionalism or democracy) but
they cannot have both. This dilemma stems from an assumption, shared by thinkers on
both sides of the theoretic divide just sketched, that autonomy depends on sovereignty,
a self-mastery that ensures continuity between the agent who institutes a norm and the
agent whose action that norm governs; and if autonomy depends on sovereignty, of
course, then non-sovereignty undermines autonomy by precluding the self-identity that
ties the moments of the norms institution and manifestation together. Put another way,
autonomy and anarchy differ over the possibility of integritythe capacity to uphold
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ones commitments by holding oneself, qua actor, to a norm. Autonomy understands

free action as action constrained by norms, and so makes such integrity constitutive of
freedom. Non-sovereign anarchy, by contrast, understands free action as action
unbound by norms, making integrity seem an impossible and perhaps dangerous
aspiration.
This dilemma casts G.W.F. Hegel in an interesting light because Hegel embraces
both autonomy and non-sovereignty, without suggesting that there is any tension
between them. Rather, he develops a retrospective theory of actiona theory that
holds the action-character of what an individual does and the agent-character of the
individual who does it to be indeterminate prior to the act itself, and bound up in some
way with the unfolding of the deedas in implication of his understanding of
autonomy, showing that autonomy properly understood is not merely compatible with
non-sovereignty but depends on it. And his account of the way that autonomy and
non-sovereignty fit together revolves around a consequential re-imagining of integrity,
or so I want to argue here.

1.
To begin with the relatively uncontroversial: Hegel takes over from Rousseau
and Kant a commitment to autonomy as the thesis that the authority of norms for a
person depends on her authorization of those norms.1 One characteristic way that he
expresses this thesis is in his definition of freedom as a matter of being with oneself

Compare Brandoms formulation of the autonomy thesis he attributes to Kant and Hegel in (Brandom
1999, 170): The distinction between force, coercion, or mere constraint on me, on the one hand, and
legitimate authority over me, on the other, consists in the latters dependence on my endorsement or
acknowledgment of the authority as binding on me.

[beisichselbstsein] in an other;2 further, he specifies that one of Kants crucial

contributions lies in his account of duty as this kind of self-relation:
The essential element of the will for me is duty.I should do my duty for its
own sake, and it is in the true sense my own objectivity that I bring to fulfillment
in doing so. In doing my duty, I am with myself and free. The merit and exalted
viewpoint of Kants moral philosophy are that it has emphasized this
significance of duty. (PR 133A, emphasis added).
To understand what Hegel thinks this self-relation amounts to in any more detail,
however, we need to know, at least, (a) what he takes to be involved in somethings
being a self, and (b) what he takes to be involved in such a selfs being with itself in
some other. Hegel discusses these issues in a number of places, but the account that is
most obviously directed at both political freedom and practical freedom more generally
lies in his analysis of the will in the Introduction to the Philosophy of Right.
There, Hegel begins by asserting that willing is constitutive of being a self, a
subject of freedom (PR 4), and arguing that willing involves two essential moments: a
moment of reflection in which the self abstracts from all particularity or determinacy
(PR 5), and a moment of determination in which the self posits a particular content as its
object (PR 6). Thus being a self, having a will or individuality requires, first, a certain
sort of self-relation, a relation to the determinate contents of ones will mediated by
reflective abstraction. This relation between the moments of reflection and
determination constitutes the self-determination of the I, in [which] it posits itself as the
negative of itself, that is, as determinate and limited, and at the same time remains with
itself [bie sich], that is, in its identity with itself and universality (PR 7). And as Hegels
language already indicates, the self-relation involved in willing is importantly a selflimitation or self-constraint; against the wills own abstract universality, the moment of

See, e.g. PR 7, PR 21-3, PS 177, 184.

determination allows the will to will something, taking on one particular content by
ruling out others:
I do not merely will I will something. A will whichwills only the abstract
universal, wills nothing and is therefore not a will at all. The particular which the
will wills is a limitation, for the will, in order to be a will, must in some way limit
itself. (PR 6A).
Further, Hegel argues that the self-limitation involved in willing is a self-limitation by
concepts, since it amounts to forming a representation of ones end distinct from that
ends particular actuality. It is this capacity to represent our ends to ourselves that
Hegel claims differentiates human willing from animal behavior, and leads him to
identify the will as a particular form of thinking (PR 4A). Hegels account of the
structure of the will thus incorporates two features important for understanding human
agency in terms of autonomy: By insisting on the wills need to limit itself, he accepts
the idea that freedom requires genuine normsnorms sufficiently determinate to
distinguish actions or states of affairs that accord with them from those that do not. At
the same time, by identifying the wills limitation as reflectively mediated selflimitation, he accepts the idea that freedom can accept as such genuine norms only
norms that are self-given.
The self-determination involved in willing is further complicated, however, by
the kind of thinking willing isthinking translating itself into existence (PR 4A). In
addition to (or rather, as) a self-relation, willing is a world-relation, a relation to
actuality. This means, first, that the will is free only when it is with its subjective
determinations in external reality. A persons will therefore counts as actual only if she
acts to bring about her ends in the world (PR 8-9). Second, since the thing that her
will must encounter in external reality is itself, and it just is the self-relation Hegel takes
to constitute freedom, her will can count as actual only if the ends she acts to bring
about in the world are genuinely her ends, that is, are artifacts of her wills capacity for

conceptually structured self-limitation. In specifying these two conditions, he again

emphasizes that willing just amounts to limiting oneself: realizing ones ends in external
reality requires accepting ones finitude by foregoing some possibilities in order to
realize others: Only by making resolutions can the human being enter actuality,
however painful the process might be (PR 13A); likewise, although Hegel claims that
all limitation [is] superseded in the will, he goes on to argue, in essence, that this is so
because self-limitation is not a form of limitation:
[The will] is universal, because all limitation and particular individuality are
superseded within it. For these lie solely in the difference between the concept
and its object or content, or, expressed in another form, in the difference between
the wills subjective being-for-itself and its being-in-itself (PR 24).
It turns out, then, that the answers to the two questions I posed above are
intertwined. Somethings being a self involves its having the capacity to institute norms
for itself by representing its ends to itself; but it also involves its actualizing that
capacity, manifesting norm-guidedness in its activity and thereby being with itself,
qua norm-instituting agent, in that activity. Hegels analysis of the will thereby appears
to commit him to an understanding of autonomy as a practice of undertaking and
keeping commitments through which one becomes a self possessed of a will. And, as
Hegel says everywhere in the concluding sections of the Introduction, this practice is
one in which the will is related solely to itselfwhat it means for the free will to be bei
sich is for it to be present in both its norm and its action as moments of the same selfdetermining will. Or, what it means for an agent to act freely is for her, first, to
undertake a commitment for her own reasons; and, second, to recognize the
commitment her action manifests as the same commitment she undertook in binding
herself to that norm, again for her own reasons. Thus:
Only in this freedom is the will completely with itself [bei sich], because it has
reference to nothing but itself, so that every relationship of dependence on
something other than itself is thereby eliminated (PR 23)
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The radically self-determining character of the will seems perfectly in tune

witheven required bythe idea of autonomy, but it also creates a problem. The crux
of the idea of autonomy is the thought that the norms that bind an agent are dependent
on her, in the sense that they require her authorization. But norms can guide an agents
action only if they provide her with a way to distinguish action in accord with them
from action that falls afoul of them, and this requires that the norms be independent of
her, so that the agents view about whether her act accords with a given norm and the
truth about whether it does so can come apart. Whether or not I have lived up to a
norm, followed a rule, cannot simply be up to me; otherwise (to paraphrase
Wittgenstein), whatever seems right to me is right, and the distinction between right
and wrong collapses.3
The problem, in essence, is that genuine normativity seems to require precisely
what autonomy precludessome authority outside of the agent in which to ground the
norms or obligations that bind her. For all that weve seen so far, Hegel seems caught on
the horns of this dilemma: he insists both that free action depends on the ability of the
agent to give herself binding norms and that norm and act are both somehow moments
internal to the individual will. He is by no means unaware of the tension between these
two claims; indeed, in at least one place he seems to celebrate it, as the contradiction
between the moments of indeterminacy and its particularity:
These are two moments that belong to the will as such. The first is the negation of
all that is particular, the second the negation of all indeterminacy; the first is the
transition to indeterminacy, the second the transition to particularity; the first to
free myself from all determination, the second to posit all determination. Every
may will find these two determinations in his self-consciousness: this is freedom.
Man appears now as a being full of contradictions; he is contradiction itself and
only through this comes to consciousness. It is the power of spirit which can
endure this contradiction within itself; no other natural being can exist with it.

See Wittgenstein 2001, 258.

Spirit, however, is not merely the existence of this contradiction, but is just as
much its resolution, and this is the concept of the will.4
The question, then, is how spirit can endure this contradiction; that is, how the
bindingness of norms can be made consistent with the claim that the relation between
norms and the acts they govern is a relation internal to the agents will. Hegel attempts
to explain this by examining the ways in which the self-relation that is the autonomous
will may be stretched or strained in our engagement with the world. In his analysis of
wrong at the close of Abstract Right, Hegel suggests that the particularity of the
individual will can be contradicted by its own universal moment, and its the
discovery of this tension between universal and particular within the will that catalyzes
the move from Abstract Right to Morality.5 At the same time, it makes agency centrally
about the problematic practice of integrity, the practice of keeping ones commitments.
The general topic of Abstract Right is free or rightful relations with external
objectsproperty rightsand Hegel understands such relations free or rightful
character to depend on their constituting relations of the individual will to itself.6 Thus
he distinguishes between mere possession and property, the circumstance that I, as a
free will, am an object to myself in what I possess (PR 45); and takes contracts to make
that self-relation the object of a common will (PR 71-73). But such a common will also
introduces the possibility of wrong, and this is because it locates the universal moment
of the individuals will in one placeher agreement with another will in the contract
and the particular moment of that same will in another placeher actions, in which she
may either manifest that agreement or undermine it. This separation makes it possible
for the universal and the particular in her will to come apart:

(Hegel 1974, iv.118), translated by Allen Patten and cited in (Patten 1999, 87).
This sentence is indebted to Mark Alznauers argument in (Alznauer 2008, ch. 2).
6
On points in this paragraph and the next, again, compare Mark Alznauers helpful discussion in
(Alznauer 2008, ch. 2).
5

In any relationship of immediate persons to one another, their wills are not only
identical in themselves and, in a contract, posited by them as common, but also
particular. Since they are immediate persons, it is purely contingent whether their
particular wills are in conformity with the will which has being in itself, and which
has its existence solely through the former. If the particular will for itself is
different from the universalthis is wrong (PR 81).
The will can come into contradiction with itself, Hegel is claiming, because it has the
capacity to be in two places at oncein the norm instituted when an agent undertakes
a commitment and in the act through which she manifests or discharges the
commitment, or fails to. Wrong appears, in other words, with the recognition of the fact
that the self-relation central to autonomythe relation between norm and act, universal
and particularcan be problematic (we might say that what the persons of Abstract
Right discover here is that the self-relation of the will is a genuine relationship rather
than a simple self-identity). And this complex picture of the wills relationship to its
own commitments leads him to conclude, by way of a famous argument that criminals
must be understood to have willed their own punishment (PR 100-101), that Abstract
Rights immediate understanding of the will as only a particular will related to
external things is inadequate, and must be replaced by a picture of the agent as a moral
subject conscious of the fact that her will contains both the moment of universality and
the moment of particularity within itself, a will which, as a particular and subjective
will, also wills the universal as such (PR 103).
Now, Hegel has to understand wrong in these terms, as a self-contradiction
within the individual will, because autonomy requires the criteria embodied in the will
which has being in itself to originate in the individuals own will if they are to have any
purchase on her actions. Put differently, his commitment to autonomy requires him to
presuppose a moment of identity with the universal will within the individual will, in
order then to hold the individual responsible for any actual deviations from that
universal will. And this suggests that, for all his conceptual rigor, Hegel is a quite
9

conventional theorist of autonomy as a form of sovereignty that elevates the self as

legislator over the self who is subject to the law, relying on precisely the fallacious
identity that critics claim allows autonomy to underwrite domination and exclusion.
Note, however, that one aspect of Hegels conceptual rigor is an insistence that
the will which has being in itselfhas its existence solely through the particular wills of
the parties to a contract.7 This indicates, firstwhat he says repeatedly elsewherethat
imputing a universal moment to the immediate will of a wrongdoer requires reading it
off of her actions; such a moment cannot simply be presupposed. (Both Hegels choice
of the violation of an explicit contract as his paradigm case for wrong and his emphasis
on the artifactuality of the common will a contract represents seem intended to point up
this fact.) Second and crucially, it indicates that the separation between the universal and
particular moments in the will should not be interpreted as a simple subordination of the
latter to the former. In keeping with this point, the specific contradiction Hegel claims
the moral will resolves is not one between the criminal qua particular will and the agent
of avenging justice qua universal will, but rather a contradiction between the
particularity of both parties and the self-conscious universality that punitive justice
requires (PR 102-3). Finally, understanding the relationship between the universal
and particular moments of the will as one of interdependence rather than subordination
or sovereign control helps to bring the problematic of the Morality section into view as
well, because Hegels analysis there of the ways that particular actions manifest the
universal, conceptually-structured intentions of agents is fundamentally informed by
the thought that freedom exists only as actuality. The general topic of Morality is the
moral subjects free and rightful relations to her own actions as manifestations of her
capacity for self-determination, but here as elsewhere Hegel refuses to separate an
agents intentions from the activity that gives them actual existence, or to separate the

See the Remark to 81 for confirmation of this reading of has its existence solely through the former.

10

self from the activity of its realization. The picture of autonomy that results is one that
locates agents between intention and deed, if you will, confronted with unruly
commitments and the unpredictability of action and faced with the challenge of
maintaining an integrity that might hold the two together

2.
The treatment of moral subjectivity in Morality sustains Hegels concern that
agents only be responsible for what they freely will by defending the right of the
subjective willthe right of a moral agent to recognize something or be something
only in so far as that thing is its own (PR 107). It also sustains, however, his concern
with actuality as a constitutive condition of freedom; thus Hegel reiterating the
definition of the will as the activity of translating this content from subjectivity into
objectivity in general (PR 109), and (thereby) makes the right of the subjective will
applicable only in so far as this end has achieved external objectivity (PR 110). And
since Hegel takes our relation to our selves is problematic, socially and historically
mediated, and evolving, actions actual, or manifest character inflects the meaning of
the right of the subjective will in a crucial way: rather than action appearing as the
more- or less-successful realization of an already-present and clearly given self, known
with something like Cartesian certainty, the external reality of action appears as an end
that gives the action, and the self behind it, its characteristic shape. To put the point
simply, Hegel understands the actuality of action as criterial for intentions because he
thinks that something only counts as an intention if an agent has acted on it. Action is
the process of realizing an intention, and that intention becomes an intentionas
opposed to a notion about what to do that I entertain but do not act ononly by virtue

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of this process. Thus it is the objective external world of actuality that serves as a
criterion for the self that acts.
The dependence of the self and its intentions on action, and the uncertainty and
self-opacity that this reveals, is more obvious in a number of Hegels formulations in the
Phenomenology. Thus:
when [ones] performance and his inner possibility, capacity or intention are
contrasted, it is the former alone which is to be regarded as his true actuality,
even if he deceives himself on the point and, turning away from his action into
himself, fancies that in his inner self he is something else than what he is in the
deed. (PS 322)
And the structure of the Phenomenology as a narrative about the character
Consciousness allows him to emphasize the continuity between its conception of an
action or commitment and the particular concrete activity that constitutes that action or
commitment as real, i.e. as a feature of the external world:
This consciousness, then, when bringing itself to act, does not let itself be led
astray by what is merely the show of a given reality.True, this [its] original
content is only explicit for consciousness when the latter has made it into a
reality; but the distinction between a content, which is explicit for consciousness
only within consciousness itself, and an intrinsic reality outside it, no longer exists.
Consciousness must act merely in order that what it is in itself may become
explicit for it; in other words, action is simply the coming-to-be of Spirit as
consciousness. What the latter is in itself, it knows therefore from what it actually
is. (PS 401)
Action, rather than an event in the outer world opposed to Consciousness inner
intention, appears here as a movement of Consciousness toward its own actualitya
movement defined by the reality or explicitness at which it stops. Thus for
Consciousness as for the will in the Philosophy of Right, what its content is in itself
depends on the actual shape of that content that only its own activity can bring about.
The idea that Consciousness knows not what it does, so that its deeds always
commit it to more than it could initially grasp, is crucial to the movement of the
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Phenomenology: from Antigones tragic self-discovery to the breaking of the hard heart
that leads to its reconciliation with acting consciousness, the impropriety of action is
one of the engines driving Hegels dialectical narrative.8 There are two reasons for this
impropriety. The first, revealed starkly in the Master-Slave parable as well as in the
discussion of Antigone, is that agents are simply self-opaque, prone to stepping out into
the world without a clear view of the commitments driving them to act, or to mistaking
where one commitment is bounded by others; the result of this self-opacity is that,
while Hegel will want to count as action what an agent turns out to do, he denies that
this can be settled at the outset. The second reason is that what an agent turns out to
do depends on what others are willing to credit her with having done. The issue here is
that Hegel thinks, first, that a deed can count as an action at all only if the agent can
recognize it as an artifact of her self-determining will (this is the point of the right of
the subjective will); and, second, that the only sort of thing that can reflect a deed back
to an agent as such an artifact rather than as a simple event or happening is another
consciousness. That is, Hegel thinks actions are characteristically manifestations of
commitments, and ones commitments can only appear to her as objective if they are
recognized by others capable of accepting or rejecting them as commitments.9 That the
proper account of an action will be the result of a (more or less contentious) process of
shared interpretation is therefore a necessary condition of its being an actualization of
the agents self-determinationthat is, of her will. And this implies that Autonomy
turns out to be a form of dependence, because normative authority must be an authority
that the agent shares with others authorized by her to interpret, register, and reject her
commitments.10

On the idea of actions impropriety, see Markell 2003, 63-4 & passim.
My use of the language of commitments here (and throughout) is indebted to (Brandom 1994; 1999; and
Pinkard 1994).
10
On the conception of normative authority indicated here, see (Brandom 1994; 1999).
9

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In Morality, Hegels project is to outline the limits placed on an agents

responsibility by her autonomy. To do so, he pulls actions universal and particular
moments analytically apart, and this can make their interdependence hard to see, but
Hegel never backs away from the implications of his insistence that freedom exists only
as actual. Rather, his repeated conclusion, as he considers one after another several
ways in which subjects might fasten on their intention as a way to back away from their
actual deed, is that to be a moral subject just is to be responsible for all of what one turns
out to have done.11 One way that he holds the universal and the particular together is to
assert the right of the subjective will only in relation to actions that already exist in
actuality, ruling out calling a non-event or a mere fantasy ones action. Thus, he
introduces the right of the subjective will as the right of the will to recognize something
or be something only in so far as the thing is its own and in so far as the will is present to
itself in it as subjectivity (PR 107). He also picks up on the dependence on recognition
just mentioned, noting that the actuality of an agents subjectivity depends on other
subjects:
While I preserve my subjectivity in implementing my ends, in the course of thus
objectifying them I at the same time supersede this subjectivity in its immediacy,
and hence in its character as my individual subjectivity. But the external
subjectivity which is thus identical with me is the will of others. The basis of the
wills existence is now subjectivity, and the will of others is the existence which I
give to my end, and which is for me at the same time an other. (PR 112)
Subjectivity can be actual only through the recognition of others because it wills
particular deeds in a conceptually mediated wayas manifestations of an intention (PR
118), as means to an end (PR 119, 125-6), and as right or wrong, good or evil, legal
or illegal (PR 132). This mediation of the particular (the deed) by the universal (the
agents conception of it) is what makes a deed an action, an (external or objective)
11

This is a slight rhetorical overstatement, as Hegel does allow that one is not responsible for utterly
unforeseeable contingencies, but the effort of Morality is all directed toward tying the subject tightly to
her actions by setting the boundaries of the forseeable very widely.

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existence of the subjects capacity for inwardness and reflection. At the same time, it
leaves the individual subject dependent on the subjectivity of others, because whether
ones particular deed matches or fits the universal conception she takes it to is always
a question of interpretation, and only other subjects can evaluate and interrogate the
agents interpretation. And this leaves the Hegelian moral subject in a tricky position:
on one hand, the universal, conceptual form in which she wills her actions is essential to
their autonomous character, since its the concepts that constitute the normative selfconstraints in virtue of which her actions count as instances of freedom. On the other
hand, Hegel insists that her finitude and dependence force her to discover the proper
way to understand the conceptual implications of her deeds only after the fact, in the
process of acting as well as from the interpretations and responses of others; and if she
discovers the norms behind her actions only retrospectively, then it is hard to see both
how they can serve as constraints at all, and how, if they can, they could qualify as selfgiven. A dilemma looms here, one horn of which is autonomys apparent need for
stable, free-standing norms against which to evaluate action, and the other horn of
which is the non-sovereignty Hegel takes to be specifically characteristic of autonomous
action, which seems to deny agents any position from which to give themselves such
norms. If Hegel is to avoid this dilemma, he needs to provide subjectivity some way to
endure the instability of its normsa way to reconcile self-determination with the fact
that in in their actions, human beings are necessarily involved in externality.which
accordingly has a right over me and is an existence of my own volition (PR 119A).

3.
The question posed by the subjection to externality characteristic of action
might be phrased this way: how can an agent take up the problem of maintaining the

15

relationship between universal norm and particular act as a relation among equal
terms? As a first cut, this would seem to require agents to respond to the authority of
both of actions poles; on one hand, we take the norm as a genuine constraint,
sufficiently determinate to rule some acts in and others out as its manifestations; on
the other hand we allow the course of activity and discoveries made in media res to
inform the norm, providing it with a precise shape and force. Understanding autonomy
as the performance of this sort of balancing act suggests a change of focus from
authority to integrityfrom a concern with the ability of self-given norms to control
action to a concern with the ability of norms and acts to respond to one another.
Integrity, so understood, would demand that we sustain our commitments across the
vagaries of time and experience, but understand that commitments may flex, grow,
distend or otherwise change in the course of being sustained.
Hegel seems to suggest thinking of autonomy this way insofar as he speaks in
the voice of each of these poles of authority. On behalf of norms, he notes that
maintaining ones status as an agent requires sustaining ones commitments in the face
of temptationsthus he argues that understanding momentary blindness, the
excitement of passion, intoxication, orthe strength of sensuous motivesas taking
away the criminals guilt, is once againto deny the criminal the right and dignity of a
human being, and this is because to be a subject just is to have integrity of a sort, to be
more than one is at any given moment: for the nature of a human being consists
precisely in the fact that he is essentially universal in character, not an abstraction of the
moment and a single fragment of knowledge (PR 132R). At the same time, he speaks
for the authority of the actual by noting that to acting is simply the transformation of
necessity into contingency and vice versa. From this point of view, to act therefore
means to submit oneself to this lawthe law of accepting as necessary aspects of ones
actions even contingencies that arise in the course of carrying it out. The different
16

temporal registers of these two moments in Hegels argument suggest that the relation
between norms and acts that integrity requires might be better understood in terms of
the initiation and continuation of a movement rather than the institution and
instantiation of a rule. And this, I think, is in keeping with his understanding of action
as a form of self-realization, a process that changes the agent as well as the external
world into which she emerges in acting. If, as Hegel claims, action contains my
subjectivity for meas my inner end, the subjectivity it contains need not have been
clear or even available to me; my own point of view on what I intended is not infallible,
and the subjective consciousness my act manifeststhe self I am with in my action
may be recognizable to me as my own and nonetheless startlingly at odds with any
account I could have given prior to the act.
Further, and crucially, thinking of action as a process that moves from beginning
to end rather than from rule to instance also resonates with Hegels view that actions
and agents alike are social artifacts. If the degree to which a deed counts as ones action
is the degree to which she can give others an account of it as manifesting a commitment
of hers, then it will depend on the degree to which those others can recognize both the
commitment she articulates (see it as a coherent intention, principle, or conception of
action, meaning especially see what it rules in and out), and her account of an
unfolding course of activity as continuing that commitment, even as it may also inflect
or revise it. And both the agents own and her interlocutors understandings of the
relation between her norm and her action will therefore have to be sensitive to changes
in her relation to the deed during its performance and throughout its reception and
interpretation by those others, because what the action turns out to bewhat action she
and they can in the end agree was attributable to herwill depend essentially on where
she stops being willing or able to connect consequences and implications to her initial
commitment and to respond to others objections and alternate understandings.
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Finally, this dependence of actions final form on the interpretive interplay

between the agent and her interlocutors implies that the shape of our commitments is
always relative to the available reasons for, and objections to, the courses of action they
animate in the specific context in which we live them out: whether going along with the
orders of an imperial occupier who rules at gunpoint counts as prudence or treason
depends a great deal on the proximity of the gun. In one sense, these deeply relativist
implications of the authority of the actual in Hegels understanding of Sittlichkeit are
well known (indeed, the whole point of his distinction between Morality and Sittlichkeit
might be taken to be that action, and so free subjectivity, is only possible within a
concrete context).12 But the standpoint between norm and act that a concern for integrity
recommends suggests a somewhat different view of these implications force, by
suggesting that the actuality of freedom concrete historical spaces of reasons make
possible is precisely the activity of negotiating the relationships among the various
mutually-held commitments that make them up, rather than the capacity to deploy those
commitments firm in the knowledge of their settled contents and implications.
__

Finally, a democratic coda. Little of what Ive said about autonomy and integrity,
or about Hegel, is directly about democracy, and I have not tried to say anything about
Hegels view of democracy. Politics, though, just as the idea of a life shared with others,
is another matter. And if Hegel is right to see that what makes autonomy a profoundly
political project is the fact that non-sovereignty is built into the aspiration to autonomy
itself, then democracy might well be understood as the institutional order that makes
the political realmthe institutional and social space in which control of our shared life
is assigned and exercisedtruly a space of politics. To put this thought another way,
the importance of democracy might be understood to be its recognition that if being
12

For an excellent discussion of this aspect of Hegels view, see (Pippin 2008, chap. 9)

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democratic citizens is something we can do freely, we must be able to do it for our own
reasons, and we can do that just in case were recognized as doing it by others who have
their own views about what doing it amounts to, and whose views we recognize as
authoritative. Certainly such mutual recognition must have some basis in commonality
of views or practices, but the point of that commonality, at least with respect to
freedom, is not to secure us against the instability of our commitments or the possibility
that democratic politics wont go our way. Rather, that commonality makes possible the
engagement with others and the novelty of politicsboth risky and enriching as it is
that are the Idea of right the concept of right and its actuality (PR 1)

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Works Cited:
Alznauer, Mark. 2008. Hegels Defense of Moral Responsibility.
Brandom, Robert. 1994. Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Brandom, Robert B. 1999. Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegels Idealism: Negotiation and
Administration in Hegels Account of the Structure and Content of Conceptual Norms.
European Journal of Philosophy 7 (2) (August): 164-189.
Habermas, Jrgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and
Democracy. Studies in contemporary German social thought. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1973. Vorlesungen ber Rechtsphilosophie, 1818-1831. Stuttgart-Bad
Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog.
. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
. 1991. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Cambridge texts in the history of political thought.
Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press.
Markell, Patchen. 2003. Bound by Recognition. Princeton University Press.
Patten, Alan. 1999. Hegels Idea of Freedom. Oxford philosophical monographs. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Pettit, Philip. 2001. A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency. Oxford
University Press, USA.
Pinkard, Terry P. 1994. Hegels Phenomenology: the sociality of reason. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Pippin, Robert B. 2008. Hegels Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life. 1st ed.
Cambridge University Press.
Rancire, Jacques., Davide Panagia, and Rachel Bowlby. 2001. Ten Theses on Politics. Theory & Event
5 (3).
Rawls, John. 1996. Political Liberalism. John Dewey essays in philosophy no. 4. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1968. Philosophical Investigations. Third edition with English and German
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Wolin, Sheldon. 1996. Fugitive Democracy. In Democracy and Difference: contesting boundaries of the
political. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

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