Was Hegel an Authoritarian Thinker?Reading Hegel’sPhilosophy of Historyon the Basis of his Metaphysics

Abstract

With Hegel’s metaphysics attracting renewed attention, it is time to address a long-standing criticism: Scholars from Marx to Popper and Habermas have worried that Hegel’s metaphysics has anti-individualist and authoritarian implications, which are particularly pronounced in his Philosophy of History, since Hegel identifies historical progress with reason imposing itself on individuals. Rather than proposing an alternative non-metaphysical conception of reason, as Pippin or Brandom have done, this article argues that critics are broadly right in their metaphysical reading of Hegel’s central concepts. However, they are mistaken about what Hegel’s approach entails, when one examines the specific types of states discussed (and rejected) by the philosopher in his Philosophy of History. Even on a traditional metaphysical reading, Hegel is not only non-authoritarian; he also makes a powerful argument concerning freedom, whereupon the freest society involves collective oversight and the shaping of social structures so as to ensure that they benefit everybody.

Hegel on Market Laws and External Teleology

“…The political state thus displays different aspects of the logical Idea, such as the structures of the organism and (collective) subjectivity (see Baumann 2021). And the state does so, while ‘sublating’, i.e.…”

“…While this is not the place to discuss Hegel's theory of the political state in detail (see Baumann 2021Baumann , 2018b, the above discussion shows that it is only fitting for Hegel to argue that individuals need clearly structured group identities and interests, and that (representatives of) these groups should oversee their relations. Those relations include their economic relations.…”

From Ethics Washing to Ethics Bashing: A Moral Philosophy View on Tech Ethics

“…Hegel and Nietzsche's philosophical ideas have been instrumentalized by the German Nazi regime to pursue inhumane ends, an instrumentalization that had little connection to what these philosophers were actually doing or thinking. [46,47] More concretely, philosophers frequently understand reflection and engagement with the politics and context of their work as corrupting, and thereby fail to prevent misuses of their ideas for unworthy ends. The hiring of moral philosophers by technology companies is but one instance in which philosophical ideas need to be scrutinized in context; such work cannot be taken at face value just because they are the ideas of a trained philosopher.…”

The Principle of Life in Hegel’s Philosophy

“…the dynamic activity and development of life to describe the process of the activity of reason and thought (Lumsden, 2021a). Hegel uses the term life in his philosophical writing, and after careful observation and reading, we realize that he does not mean for us to take the word life literally, nor for us to see reason as life in the abstract he means that reason is a dynamic, living movement that is constantly developing (Baumann, 2021). So, when Hegel made a systematic expression of his philosophy, he abandoned rational thinking in the sense of knowledge, abandoned the early idea of love, and made a complete expression of his philosophical concepts in his philosophical writing by using the implicit principle of life, why is the principle of life, which is in line with Hegel's expression of his philosophical thought, in which he not only pays attention to the reality but also pays attention to the abstraction of philosophical thought.…”