Hegel's lord-bondsman dialectic has been of especially great interest to progressive and radical Hegelians—broadly speaking, politically left-leaning interpreters of Hegel who object to certain social hierarchies and demand their abolition. They read Hegel as giving an account of how ‘lordship’ over others is an inherently unstable and unsatisfying social formation, even for its supposed beneficiaries. Marxists, feminists and post-colonial theorists have all found inspiration in Hegel's analysis of the lord and bondsman by applying it to concrete relations of oppression, such (...) as capitalism, patriarchy, or racism. In contrast, recent scholarship on Hegel's views on race and colonialism has cast doubt on whether his systematic political philosophy and philosophy of history can be of similar use to progressives. Hegel was undeniably a Eurocentric thinker, but philosophers like Robert Bernasconi and Alison Stone have convincingly shown that he was also a racist and a defender of colonialism. Crucially, however, few of the scholars who write on Hegel's pro-colonialism have analysed this feature of Hegel's thought in connection with the lord-bondsman dialectic. In this article, I argue for two connected theses. First, I argue that contrary to the hopes of some progressive defenders of Hegel, we cannot easily separate the lord-bondsman dialectic from Hegel's pro-colonialism. This is because Hegel himself appealed to the lord-bondsman dialectic to argue that colonial slavery educated its victims, and could therefore be temporarily justified. Second, I argue that this pro-colonial reading of the dialectic, though largely ignored by contemporary interpreters, was in fact recognized and embraced by a group of Hegelians in North America known as the St Louis Hegelians. They used the lord-bondsman dialectic as a basis for a qualified defence of pre-Civil War American slavery. (shrink)

This article sets out from an analysis of the pioneering work of Susan Buck-Morss to rethink, not only Hegel and Haiti, but broader questions surrounding dialectics and the universal brought to light by the Haitian Revolution. Reading through the lens of C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins , I seek to correct a series of ironic silences in her account, re-centering the importance of Toussaint’s successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and underlining the dialectical importance of identitarian struggles in forging the universal. Finally, I (...) offer Frantz Fanon’s reformulation of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic—overlooked in Buck-Morss’ account—as a corrective that allows us to truly rethink progress toward the universal in decolonized dialectical terms. (shrink)

Argues for the importance of the neglected theme of slavery in Antigone.

Hierarchy has been a central concern of work on the modern political imaginary. The need to elucidate hierarchy’s deeper sources and its legitimations were some of the motivations behind Cornelius Castoriadis’ development of the notion of the imaginary. The work of Claude Lefort on the political imaginary similarly commences from a critical analysis of the hierarchical form of bureaucracy and its place in the constitution of totalitarian political regimes. In a different vein, Charles Taylor’s conception of the imaginary details a (...) long-term process of the erosion of preceding forms of hierarchy and their justifications. In the contemporary period, the opposition to hierarchy has penetrated organisations and institutions that had previously been shaped by it, like the family, the capitalist firm, the school, and the political movement. Despite the potentials that these initiatives suggest of a change in the political imaginary, it will be argued that forms of hierarchy have, to varying degrees, been reconstituted and that the problem of hierarchy appears in new ideological forms, both with respect to institutionalised power and the legitimating justifications for how things are organised. The critique of hierarchy was once associated with the radical democratic imaginary, however, there have recently been perverse mobilisations. (shrink)

Re-reading Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) in the context of the international politics after the start of the French Revolution in 1789 and before the rise of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 leads to three discoveries in the history of European ideas. First, her reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was advertised, discussed, and rumoured to be the work of a woman in London papers days earlier in November 1790 than previously (...) documented. Second, Wollstonecraft’s first known instances of public reception beyond Britain were in a major Jamaican newspaper from January to March 1791. Thirdly, and most notably, in February 1791, the Kingston Daily Advertiser published a lengthy excerpt from her Rights of Men that called for the abolition of slavery and the realization of justice for the poor and oppressed. Long before Hegel probably developed his master-slave dialectic in response to journalistic accounts of the independence of Haiti in 1804, there was Wollstonecraft’s actual reception in the international news in Jamaica, amid the spread of reports of the rise of slave unrest in the broader post-revolutionary Caribbean. (shrink)

This article explores the implications of Hegel’s Philosophy of World History with respect to colonialism. For Hegel, freedom can be recognized and practised only in classical, Christian and modern Europe; therefore, the world’s other peoples can acquire freedom only if Europeans impose their civilization upon them. Although this imposition denies freedom to colonized peoples, this denial is legitimate for Hegel because it is the sole condition on which these peoples can gain freedom in the longer term. The article then considers (...) whether Hegel’s basic account of freedom can be extricated from his Eurocentric and pro-colonialist interpretation of the course of history. The article argues that matters are more complicated because that interpretation has significant connections with Hegel’s conception of freedom as self-determination. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

“Racial capitalism” has surfaced during the past few decades in projects that highlight the production of difference in tandem with the production of capital—usually through violence. Scholars in this tradition typically draw their inspiration—and framework—from Cedric Robinson’s influential 1983 text, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. This article uses the work of Orlando Patterson to highlight some limits of “racial capitalism” as a theoretical project. First, the “racial capitalism” literature rarely clarifies what scholars mean by “race” or (...) “capitalism.” Second, some scholars using this conceptual language treat black subjectivity as a debilitated condition. An alleged byproduct of the Transatlantic slave trade, this debilitated form of black subjectivity derives from an African American exceptionalism that treats slavery as a form of abject status particular to capitalism without providing adequate theoretical justification or historical explanation. By contrast, we demonstrate how Patterson’s insights about property, status, and capital offer an analysis of slavery more attentive to race, gender, sexuality, age, and ability. We close by using the “forensics of capital” to explore the notions of causality and protocols for determining who owes what to whom implicit in Patterson’s concept of “social death.”. (shrink)

In his speech at the University of Dakar in July 2007, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy referred to Africa as the continent that has not yet fully entered history. This article takes this obvious reference to Hegel as its starting point and examines the current significance of ‘Hegel’s Africa’. Through a close reading of The Philosophy of History and The Phenomenology of Spirit, it shows that Hegel’s remarks on Africa are by no means incidental. They constitute rem(a)inders of a modernity (...) that is based on the construction of Africa as its own limit. The return of Hegel’s Africa, the article concludes, can thus not be restricted to a problem of the new European right. It is part of an understanding of modernity that remains haunted by the specters of racism. (shrink)

Ludwig Feuerbach's work is often too easily dovetailed with the works of Hegel and Marx and therefore read teleologically as an intermediary step between the two “major” figures. By re-interpreting Feuerbach more as a system critic than as a system builder, this article attempts to elucidate his relationships to the other two. It will also point up the gendered articulation of his critiques of religion and philosophy. The article will show how Feuerbach's use of gender, though remaining fixed within a (...) predictably hierarchical binary, is more than simply symptomatic of its context and offers significant resources for critical re-readings of nineteenth-century German philosophy. (shrink)

All politics (i.e., a collective organised thought-practice), if it is to be emancipatory, must exhibit a dialectic of expressive and excessive thought. The absence of the dialectic implies the absence of a politics. The same point can be made by stressing that, in emancipatory politics, thought and practice are indistinguishable. The dialectic here concerns an emancipatory politics latent in excluded popular African traditions. Such latency means that a potentiality for dialectical thought often already exists within African traditions. Yet it can (...) only be activated in struggle. I show through three examples separated by long periods of time, that Africans—or more accurately some Africans—have successfully activated existing potentials into emancipatory politics by thinking against and beyond the oppressive particularities of interests, place and identity embedded in dominant cultures (such as those typical of civil society today) and have thus emphasised the centrality of universal humanity in the politics of emancipation. (shrink)

As it emerged in the late twentieth century, Empire promised a new era of global cooperation and stability through a seamless integration of late capitalism and neoliberal technocracy. Premised as an end to history itself, all that was left to accomplish was to tinker at the margins, stimulate corporate enterprise, embrace financialization and technological innovation, and encourage liberal rights and inclusion. As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the narrative fictions sustaining Empire have broadly collapsed at the (...) level of symbolic identification and belief. Empire has entered into a period of global emergency and mutation. Engaging with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s work, this paper considers what might emerge when we read education into the circuitry of Empire’s decay. First, we locate Empire within foundational tensions in modernity, using Kantian philosophy and colonialism as examples, to foreground the idea of education as immanent to historical processes of creativity, resistance, and innovation. Second, we highlight dead-end responses, from space colonization to neo-fascism, as representations of how modes of education circulate to stabilize and contain Empire’s crises, specifically in relation to capitalism, nationalism, and identity. Lastly, the paper develops a political ontology of education after Empire. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a non-ideal analysis of a series of theoretical problems affecting liberalism, which have bearing on liberal discourses in today’s concrete political practices with de-democratizing consequences, including the instrumentalization of liberalism by neoconservative actors. I use Benjamin Constant’s attitude towards slavery as case study to show that liberalism is culpably ignorant of many structural injustices, and that this is so because of its basic thesis that the main oppression is the one the state and the political (...) community exert of the individual. The centrality of this oppression makes liberalism unable to give oppressions exerted within the web of social relations a proper place in its own theory. (shrink)

Within political theory the concept of recognition has been generally drawn upon to develop a particular form of ethical theory. The concept has been deployed in debates over culture, feminism, multiculturalism, individual and group rights, and as a means of conceptualising colonialism. A less dominant contemporary line of inquiry is the use of the concept of recognition to think through modes of pre-capitalist and capitalist accumulation. Much of the early philosophical radicalism contained within the concept of recognition has been lost (...) via its subsumption within liberal political theory. Against such a liberal ‘flattening-out’ of recognition this chapter builds an alternative interpretation which focuses upon the relationship between recognition and accumulation. This is done by way of examining how questions of economic power and accumulation were central G.W.F. Hegel’s theory of recognition. In this light, the chapter develops an understanding of recognition as a ‘hinge concept’ – one which links economic relations, the juridical form, moral claims and political struggle. By focusing upon its antagonistic basis, as struggle, a concept of recognition gives us a useful way of thinking about both historical and contemporary modes of global capitalist accumulation. (shrink)

This article interprets Hegel's hierarchical theory of race as an application of his general views about the metaphysics of classification and explanation. We begin by offering a reconstruction of Hegel's hierarchical theory of race based on the critical edition of relevant lecture transcripts: we argue that Hegel's position on race is appropriately classified as racist, that it postulates innate mental deficits of some races, and that it turns racism from an anthropological into a metaphysical doctrine by claiming that the division (...) of humankind into races (at least in the Old World) is not a brute fact, but follows a ‘higher necessity’. We then summarize our interpretation of the relevant metaphysical background to this theory. On our reading, Hegel postulates an essentialist form of explanation that explains given kinds as stages in a teleological, non-temporal process through which the nature of a superordinate kind is realized. We argue that Hegel's views about a hierarchical and necessary division of humankind into races are an application of this model to the case of human diversity, motivated by explanatory considerations and subject to confirmation bias. By way of conclusion, we address two possible attempts to ‘save’ Hegelian philosophy from its racist baggage. (shrink)

This article is dedicated to a topic that has been largely neglected in the historiography of philosophy to date: the position of philosophers towards the institution of slavery. Especially in survey works on the history of philosophy, positions on slavery and colonial conquest are not addressed, but have so far only been discussed in a few individual studies. From the beginning of European expansion, however, philosophical and political theories no longer emerged independently of these developments, as the expansion forced reflection (...) on how to deal with the conquered regions and peoples, and thus on the problematic sides of the ‘voyages of discovery’: land grabbing, subjugation and slavery. Such entanglements are briefly explained using John Locke as an example. In view of the “colonial ensnarement of the Enlightenment” (Elberfeld) and the need for a critical examination of it, I propose as a methodological approach to include texts by thinkers of African origin, who had first-hand experiences of the institution of slavery and critically reflected on their own social position, the social and political conditions of their time as well as moral questions. Using three selected Black thinkers, the poet Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784), the abolitionist Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797) and the theologian Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein (ca. 1717–1747), I discuss the relevance of texts by former slaves for the historiography of philosophy. (shrink)

Abstract: The cosmopolitan imagination constructs a world order in which the idea of human rights is an operative principle of justice. Does it also construct an idealisation of human rights? The radicality of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, as developed by Kant, lay in its analysis of the roots of organised violence in the modern world and its visionary programme for changing the world. Today, the temptation that faces the cosmopolitan imagination is to turn itself into an endorsement of the existing order of (...) human rights without a corresponding critical analysis of the roots of contemporary violence. Is the critical idealism associated with Kantian cosmopolitanism at risk of transmutation into an uncritical positivism? We find two prevailing approaches: either the constitutional framework of the existing world order is presented as the realisation of the cosmopolitan vision, or cosmopolitanism is turned into a utopian vision of a world order in which power is subordinated to the rule of international law. I suggest that the difficulties associated with both wings of cosmopolitanism threaten the legitimacy of the project and call for an understanding and culture of human rights that is less exclusively "conceptual" and more firmly grounded in social theory. (shrink)

What is kitsch? The varieties of phenomena which can fall under the name are bewildering. Here, I focus on what has been called “traditional kitsch,” and argue that it often turns on the emotional effect specifically captured by Edmund Burke’s concept of “beauty” from his 1757 'A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful.' Burkean beauty also serves to distinguish “traditional kitsch” from other phenomena also often called “kitsch”—namely, entertainment. Although I argue that Burkean beauty in domestic decoration allows for (...) us to see “traditional kitsch” as resting on natural and even healthy impulses, I also argue that an all-too-common political function of traditional kitsch directs it to dangerous ends. (shrink)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was one of the philosophic giants of the nineteenth century. Well versed in both ancient and more recent philosophical tracts, he rejected the individualism of Hobbes and Locke, as well as their notion that the state was an agency set up in the first place to protect life and property, and, drawing inspiration from Aristotle, outlined a vision of the state as an agency bound, in the first place, to protect the weak and the powerless. Hegel (...) further rejected Kant’s individualistic ethics and counseled that ethical behavior had to be understood as taking place in a social context, with real duties toward other people. For Hegel, an individual had rights and duties within the context of the family, in the community, and, as a citizen, vis-à-vis the state. He emphasized the network of duties in which each individual finds himself, urging political moderation and concern for the good of the entire community. He has been condemned as a proto-totalitarian, lauded as a democrat of sorts, and described variously as liberal, anti-liberal, authoritarian, conservative-monarchist, and constitutionalist. This essay will argue that Hegel came to champion a constitutional-legal order under an autocratic monarch, with protection for liberal values. The absolute authority of the monarch, thus, was limited to those powers which he needed in order to advance and protect the interests of the citizens of the realm. (shrink)

The late 19th-century Ignorabimus controversy over the limits of scientific knowledge has often been characterized as proclaiming the end of intellectual progress, and by implication, as plunging Germany into a crisis of pessimism from which Liberalism never recovered. My research supports the opposite interpretation. The initiator of the Ignorabimus controversy, Emil du Bois-Reymond, was a physiologist who worked his whole life against the forces of obscurantism, whether they came from the Catholic and Conservative Right or the scientistic and millenarian Left. (...) Du Bois-Reymond’s doubt that scientists would ever elucidate consciousness must therefore be seen as an endorsement, and not a rejection, of his faith in reason. (shrink)

How does creolization fare as a social-scientific concept? While Jane Gordon seeks to underscore the potential such a concept might have in the social sciences and philosophy, her discussants Gopal Guru, Kipton E. Jensen, Mickaella Perina, and Sundar Sarukkai draw attention to descriptive and normative issues that need to be addressed before arguments formulating and enacting creolization processes can be brought into domains of life from which they have been historically excluded.

One might be surprised to find out that Stokely Carmichael and Herbert Marcuse spoke at the same conference in 1967. One might be more surprised to learn that both of their talks revolved around the animation of Frederick Douglass’s act of revolt as a figural point on which their disparate political projects hinged. A potential path not taken in forging an alliance between 60s Black radicalism and the Western Marxism of its time? Perhaps. But perhaps also a shared philosophical mistake.

The representation of Homestead Lockout and Strike of 1892 is powerfully mobilized by later generations of labor activists. But why choose to memorialize, over any of the very real accomplishments of the labor movement, this moment of abject defeat? Rather than endorsing the celebratory discourse of mainstream progressive historiography, Joel Woller turns instead for an answer to Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”.

Pablo Castagno analyzes recent Spanish television in the light of the profound social and economic changes that characterize the transition to the “New Spain” of the 1990s. A confluence of factors, including a rapid social realignment and the privatization of the television industry, conspire to produce an ideal laboratory for exploring the ideological workings of reality television.

This issue is dedicated to thinking about art and current aesthetic perspectives through Hegelianism.

This article offers Hegelian readings, based on his theory of fluid identity, of the blues and African-American identity. All identities, even Hegels, should be denied fixed definitions, in favor of fluid ones that allow for change and the sublation of otherness.