Hegel’s Political Philosophy

ABSTRACT

The Philosophy of Right presents us with a vision of bureaucratic paternalism that is designed to check the excesses of free markets set in motion by the triumph of natural-law thinking, which abstracted the principles of private property and subjective freedom from the institutions that had tamed them and situated them in a stable context. Against these excesses Hegel pits the agricultural estate, which has not succumbed to natural-law thinking; and a “universal estate” of bureaucrats who are educated in Hegel’s philosophy itself, freeing them of the natural-law conflation of human needs with arbitrary and endlessly expanding preferences. Taught by Hegel to look after the needs of the organic whole that is society rather than the gratification of their own preferences, the task of the bureaucrats of the universal estate is to curb the tendency of free markets to produce the social preconditions for an alienated “rabble” to bring down the system.

Keywords:

• Hegel
• abstract right
• agricultural estate
• mercantile estate
• natural law
• procedural rationality
• rabble
• universal estate
• work ethic

Notes

1 It is important to avoid confusion with Stoic and Thomist natural law. The term “natural law” is used in contemporary political theory largely by such Thomist writers as John Finnis and Robert George.

2 The Institutes was a systematic textbook of Roman law. The Pandects was a collection of older sources on which the law was based. See Allen Wood’s note to PR§ 393.

3 My terms “procedural” and “substantive” rationality are taken over from Charles Taylor, as is much of the content of the following discussion. A concise summary of some of Taylor’s views on this subject can be found in his essay “Overcoming Epistemology” in Taylor 1995, 1-19.

4 In a seminar taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1983, Charles Taylor referred to such knowledge as “agent’s knowledge.”

5 See the discussion of the Reformation in Hegel [1830] 1999, 193.

6 Michael Forster (1998, 226-43) makes a convincing case for the conclusion that Hegel has an “enduring communal consensus” theory of truth.

7 The persistence of a profound divide between urban and rural cultures far into the nineteenth century is beautifully described in Weber 1976.