In this article, I argue that the main contribution of Hegel's philosophy of right to the contemporary political debate is that it opens a window on the idea that liberalism and individual freedom are incompatible. My main thesis is that the liberal conception of the State and law, structured from a nonrelational account of singularity, ends up denying the individual freedom that it claims to defend. I begin by reconstructing the Hegelian concept of freedom from its most general lines, showing (...) that being free consists in wanting to become someone and not so much in wanting to do something. After showing that the purpose of becoming someone can only be fulfilled in a social medium, I focus on Hegel's critique of the liberal state (as expounded in the section on “civil society”). I argue that civil society structurally impedes individuals from realizing their purpose of becoming someone: the economical interactions of civil society give rise to impersonal and inscrutable mechanisms, which take the social conditions of people's individuation beyond their control. Finally, I claim that (rational) individual freedom consists in being able to thematize and democratically control the very social conditions of individuation through the State and law. (shrink)

Rodney G. Peffer argues that Karl Marx cannot be considered a utilitarian, a consequentialist, or a nonutilitarian consequentialist. Based on ethics of social consequences as one of the versions of nonutilitarian consequentialism, the author examines Marx’s early journalistic articles concerning the common good published mainly in the Rheinische Zeitung. The author verifies the hypothesis that Marx was a nonutilitarian consequentialist in the given period with regard to the common good. By examining Marx’s views on freedom of the press and censorship, (...) as well as his criticism of the feudal experiences of Prussia, the author came to the conclusion that Marx’s views expressed in early journalism are close to ethics of social consequences and thus to nonutilitarian consequentialism. (shrink)

With Hegel’s metaphysics attracting renewed attention, it is time to address a long-standing criticism: Scholars from Marx to Popper and Habermas have worried that Hegel’s metaphysics has anti-individualist and authoritarian implications, which are particularly pronounced in his Philosophy of History, since Hegel identifies historical progress with reason imposing itself on individuals. Rather than proposing an alternative non-metaphysical conception of reason, as Pippin or Brandom have done, this article argues that critics are broadly right in their metaphysical reading of Hegel’s central (...) concepts. However, they are mistaken about what Hegel’s approach entails, when one examines the specific types of states discussed by the philosopher in his Philosophy of History. Even on a traditional metaphysical reading, Hegel is not only non-authoritarian; he also makes a powerful argument concerning freedom, whereupon the freest society involves collective oversight and the shaping of social structures so as to ensure that they benefit everybody. (shrink)

By highlighting the logico-metaphysical undergirding of Hegel's discussion of the market, this article brings to light certain proto-Marxist or proto-socialist tendencies in Hegel as well as key disagreements with Adam Smith, which have been missed by recent studies like Herzog's Inventing the Market (2013). For Smith, market laws function like an impartial arbiter that rewards honest effort; his main worry is that individuals may fail to display virtues like honesty, probity and frugality, thereby hindering the smooth functioning of the market (...) mechanism. For Hegel, by contrast, the market is a de-personalized player in its own right that imposes its arbitrary rule, a rule that does not reflect in any way the virtues and efforts of market participants. This assessment is easily overlooked, unless one realizes that Hegel believes the market to be functioning according to the structures that he discusses in the ‘Objectivity’ section in his Science of Logic. As a consequence of this assessment Hegel attributes a different role to the state than Smith does: Rather than aiding and shaping individuals, by means of institutions, education and health care, the state needs to address the structural functioning of market laws and, to some extent, inhibit its free-flowing functioning. Individuals need to re-appropriate their own social relations by organizing them along the lines of the logical organism or internal teleology. After outlining Hegel's interpretation and assessment of the market structures with the help of the Logic, I will discuss Hegel's demand for an organic state, that sublates and oversees the market, thereby safeguarding the important personal freedoms enjoyed by market participants. (shrink)