Abstract
This article presents a Hegelian argument in favor of measures for reducing poverty that go beyond typical welfare policies. Most commentators argue that either (1) Hegel’s system must tolerate poverty (as part of the state preserving the autonomy of civil society), or (2) Hegel provides for the welfare of the poor through the civil-society institutions of the “corporations” and the “police.” According to Hegel’s dialectical method, however, the Hegelian state becomes “actual” to the extent that it “sublates” civil society—that is, to the extent that the state both preserves the elements of civil society that promote freedom and negates the elements that hinder freedom. This entails state action to eliminate poverty, even though Hegel also expresses concern over how welfare policies targeted at the poor may reinforce the poor’s subordination. In contrast with such policies, universal basic income is one public policy that can help the state sublate civil society in the fashion Hegel intends.
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Notes
Allen Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 249.
Frederick Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 174.
Robert Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
Alan Patten, Hegel’s Idea of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 198.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans., with notes, T.M. Knox (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, [1821] 1942), 245. Hereafter abbreviated as PR (cited by paragraph number).
I will elaborate on the precise meaning of Hegelian freedom below.
PR, 244A.
Ibid., 245.
Ibid.
Ibid., 246.
Susan Buck-Morss does portray Hegel as justifying European colonialism, but even her portrayal does not suggest that colonization represents Hegel’s solution to poverty. See Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 116.
Michael Hardimon, Hegel’s Social Philosophy: The Problem of Reconciliation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 236.
Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought, 250.
Harry Brod, Hegel’s Philosophy of Politics: Idealism, Identity, and Morality (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 109–10.
Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 152.
Renato Cristi, “Hegel’s Conservative Liberalism,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 22 (December 1989): 729. See also Renato Cristi, Hegel on Freedom and Authority (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005).
Matt Whitt, “The Problem of Poverty and the Limits of Freedom in Hegel’s Theory of the Ethical State,” Political Theory 41 (April 2013): 265, 268–72.
Hardimon, Hegel’s Social Philosophy, 250.
Z.A. Pelczynski, ed., “Political Community and Individual Freedom in Hegel’s Philosophy of State,” in The State and Civil Society: Studies in Hegel’s Political Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 63.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, [1807] 1977), 18. Hereafter abbreviated as PS (cited by paragraph number).
G.W.F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. and ed. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1812] 2010), 478. Hereafter abbreviated as SL (cited by page number).
SL, 482.
PS, 12.
SL, 81–82.
PS, 3.
PR, preface.
Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1843] 1970), 39.
PR, 270A.
Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition, 23. Herbert Marcuse has also defended Hegel in this regard, claiming that Hegel’s state has “a distinctly critical and polemic character”; see Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (New York: Humanity Books, 1954), 11.
See, for example, Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition; Patten, Hegel’s Idea of Freedom; Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory; Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
PR, 262A.
Ibid., 185A, 194.
Ibid., 20–21, 27–28.
Jeffrey Church, “The Freedom of Desire: Hegel’s Response to Rousseau on the Problem of Civil Society,” American Journal of Political Science 54 (January 2010): 135.
PS, 175.
Ibid., 192.
Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 4–5, 7, 14–15, 21–22, 23–24, 35–36, 38, 94.
PR, 158.
Pelczynski highlights the similarity between the family and the ancient Greek polis as immediate ethical wholes. See Z.A. Pelczynski, “Introduction: The Significance of Hegel’s Separation of the State and Civil Society,” in his The State and Civil Society, 9.
PR, 181.
Ibid., 184.
Ibid., 238A.
PR, 229A.
Ibid., 186.
Ibid., 184A.
Ibid., 260, 270A.
Ibid., 33A.
Ibid., 263A.
SL, 745.
Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, 151.
Hardimon, Hegel’s Social Philosophy, 246.
Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition, 256.
Ibid., 253.
Ibid., 257.
Ibid., 257–58. This point about corporations addressing poverty by transforming consumption practices is echoed by Joel Anderson in “Hegel’s Implicit View on How to Solve the Problem of Poverty,” in Beyond Liberalism and Communitarianism: Studies in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, ed. Robert Williams (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 185–205.
Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory, 172.
Ibid.
Ludwig Siep, “Constitution, Fundamental Rights, and Social Welfare in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Hegel on Ethics and Politics, ed. Robert Pippin and Otfried Höffe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 283.
Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory, 174.
PR, 236.
Ibid.
Ibid., 249.
Ibid., 253.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 256.
Ibid., 299.
PR, 299A.
Ibid., 288.
Ibid., 289.
Ibid.
PR, 295.
Church has also emphasized these roles for the corporations; see “Freedom of Desire,” 136.
Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), 4, 25.
Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 273–306.
John Medearis, “Deliberative Democracy, Subordination, and the Welfare State,” in Illusion of Consent, ed. Daniel O’Neill, Mary Shanley, and Iris Young (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2008), 208–30.
Nancy Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition, and Participation,” in, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, ed. Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth(London: Verso, 2003), 77.
See the various selections in Basic Income Worldwide: Horizons of Reform, ed. Matthew Murray and Carole Pateman (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 12, 13, 19, 20–21, 39, 41, 46, 93, 95–96, 124, 188–9, 240, 241.
Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics,” 78–79.
See Murray and Pateman, Basic Income Worldwide, 20–21, 46, 95–96.
Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics,” 79. On the issue of gender equality, Hegel himself must be rejected; for example, see PR, 165–6.
PR, 295.
Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics,” 28–32. Honneth responds by claiming that Fraser herself cannot avoid, in her own notion of recognition, the ideas of ethical self-realization she seeks to reject. See Axel Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition: A Response to Nancy Fraser,” in Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, 114, 178–80.
Patten, Hegel’s Idea of Freedom, 166.
Ibid.
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A draft of this article was presented at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association in Portland, Oregon. The author would like to thank Joshua Dienstag for invaluable guidance, as well as Jeremy Elkins, Brian Walker, the editor of Polity, and three anonymous reviewers for extremely helpful comments. The author would also like to gratefully acknowledge the late Victor Wolfenstein, for the conversation that got this project started.
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Jackson, J. The Resolution of Poverty in Hegel’s “Actual” State. Polity 46, 331–353 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2014.15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2014.15