Hegel's Political Philosophy by Bosworth Stephen C.;

Author:Bosworth, Stephen C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten:

HEGEL’S SOCIAL THEORY

The previous three chapters have examined some of the foundations which should help us to assess the extent to which democratic monarchy is or is not based on Hegel’s own arguments. These chapters have addressed themselves to the wider issues of Hegel’s system, prescription, and necessity. This chapter will examine what might be broadly called the social basis of Hegel’s constitutional conclusions. More exactly, it offers an interpretation of how his conception of the “rational state” in the Philosophy of Right is the highest objective synthesis (Rechts PP257) of the many “affirmative” 1 yet subordinate elements which have emerged in social history. However, before proceeding with this account, it should again be made clear that it would be unrealistic to expect that all will find the interpretations here to be obviously ‘correct’. The complexities and obscurities of Hegel’s formulations too easily invite conflicting yet plausible readings. For example, some may want to question the suggestion that, by the application of Keynesian or Marxian methods, Hegel’s state could solve the problem of poverty which he claims a market society tends to produce. Of course, all of the possible, real and imagined, objections to such an observation could not explicitly be met here in advance even if one had unlimited space. This problem is aggravated, for this chapter, however, by its greater relative brevity. The political focus of this book requires that less time be spent on economic and social issues. Still, this chapter endeavours to face the most important arguments and it is hoped that its suggestions would at least provide part of an agenda for any more extended disputations. In line with the method of seeking ‘lenient interpretations’ mentioned in Chapter Six, the search for those constructions of Hegel’s text which make his argument as strong as possible is continued.

We shall begin with Hegel’s account of the social foundations of constitutional monarchy. It was suggested earlier that Hegel sees his rational state as the highest objective synthesis of the varied “affirmative” elements which have emerged in human history, i.e. “elements of Reason as the human spirit”. Alternatively expressed, Hegel’s implicit plan in The Philosophy of Right was to outline the human conditions for a rational state. Correctly, he makes a distinction between the “subjective” and the “objective” conditions. Some are subjective in the sense that they reside in the developing feelings and thoughts of human individuals and groups. Others are objective in the sense that the relevant generation finds them already there in its empirical world as shaping forces (e.g. natural, crafted or manufactured “things” 2 and certain social habits, customs, traditions and institutions). They are already there before they could have come to the reflective consciousness of the generation concerned. Of course, this does not deny that some of these objective conditions were partly the result of the subjective thoughts and wills of individuals and groups in previous generations. The Introduction 3 to The Philosophy of Right explains how the human individual’s ability over time to

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