The Problem of Poverty and the Limits of Freedom in Hegel’s Theory of the Ethical State

Abstract

This article reinterprets Hegel’s much discussed “failure” to theorize a remedy for the poverty that disrupts modern society. I argue that Hegel does not offer any solution to the problem of poverty because, in his view, the sovereign state depends upon the persistence of poverty. Whereas a state’s achievement of external sovereignty requires the presence of another state, its achievement of internal sovereignty requires the presence of a different, internal other. This role is played by the impoverished and rebellious “rabble,” which opposes the state’s unity and stability. Ethical life cannot eliminate poverty because poverty, and the insecurity that it engenders, are dialectical conditions of the state’s highest development. This interpretation reveals a critical dimension to Hegel’s political philosophy, insofar as the state’s promise of actualized freedom can only be sustained in relation to a mass of internal “outsiders” to whom that freedom does not extend.

The Progress of Law: Aeschylus’s Oresteia in Feminist and Critical Theory

“…In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel claims that unequal property distributions are compatible with-and in fact constitutive of-the universal community. 74 He also specifies that these inequalities occur partly along gendered lines. When men leave their parents and become heads of their own households, Hegel claims, they become the rightful controllers of family wealth.…”

Re-articulating Genealogy: Hegel on Kinship, Race and Reproduction

“…However, the state is unable to fully replace the economic function of broader kinship networks. This is not only the case because Hegel is opposed to ‘public redistribution of both wealth and labor, leaving civil society's network of economic interdependence to function without direct state administration’ (Whitt 2013: 265). The state ‘is simply unable to provide an objective, universal or complete solution’ to inequality and the emergence of the ‘rabble’ because its institutions, were they to operate within civil society, would ‘risk conforming to the contingency, partiality, and subjectivity of that sphere’ (265).…”

“…The same holds for the corporations that act ‘as a voluntary “second family”’ (265). They cannot be a substitute for familial relations because they act on the grounds of ‘objective qualification of skill and rectitude’ (Hegel, quoted by Whitt 2013: 265). The corporations thus require an individual who has been educated, and they are based on a logic of exclusion that differs significantly from that of kinship relations.…”

The Resolution of Poverty in Hegel’s “Actual” State

“…16 Moreover for Matt Whitt, not only can "the state … do little to eradicate poverty or prevent the rabble from forming, because it cannot effectively intervene in the autonomous operations of civil society," but the poor also fulfill the role of a necessary "internal other" against whom the well-off can define themselves as "free" and "sovereign" (analogously to how Hegel sees freedom and sovereignty in opposition to "external" others who are part of different states). 17 In essence, proponents of this viewpoint contend not only that the Hegelian state must preserve civil society by leaving it unaltered, but also that the acceptance of poverty is demanded by the Hegelian principle that contradiction inevitably permeates our experience. As Hardimon sums up, "in Hegel's view, we are to accept the existence of poverty as a part of accepting the general fact that defects and imperfections are an ineliminable feature of the social world."…”