In this essay, I explore the role of philosophy in politics and public policy along one dimension that is suggested by the question ‘Does reason have a place in the shaping of public policy and institutions?’ In considering this question, I focus on the factors that prevent reasoned argument from influencing political process and outcome. Among the factors standing in the way of reason, two, I think, are of special importance. The first is the dominance of interests, and the second is the dominance of fixed ideas rooted not in interests but in myth and fantasy. I begin with the role of interests in politics arguing that interest provides a limited role for reason, but that this role erodes the more interest is an expression of greed. I then turn to belief and the way belief systems operate as the more powerful of the two factors excluding reason from politics.

While interest-based politics can create space for reason, what now tends to dominate in politics is not interests so much as other factors operating on an altogether different plane. These are the factors associated with fixed ideas, convictions made impervious to any doubt by forces over which reason has no power. It is possible, of course, to attempt to treat conviction as a kind of interest. We can, after all, be said to take an interest in our belief systems. Yet, an important distinction can still be drawn, within the set of objects in which we might take an interest, between those associated with belief and those associated with the narrower matter of economic well being.

Thom Brooks's Hegel's Political Philosophy: A Systematic Reading of the Philosophy of Right presents a very clear and methodologically self-conscious series of discussions of key topics within Hegel's classic text. As one might expect for a ‘systematic’ reading, the main body of Brooks's text commences with an opening chapter on Hegel's system. Then follow seven chapters, the topics of which (property, punishment, morality, family, law, monarchy, war) are encountered sequentially as one reads through the Philosophy of Right. Brooks's central claim is that too often Hegel's theories or views on any of these topics are misunderstood because of a tendency to isolate the relevant passages from the encompassing structure of the Philosophy of Right itself, and, in turn, from Hegel's system of philosophy as a whole, with its logical underpinnings. Brooks is clearly right in holding that Hegel had intended the Philosophy of Right to be read against the background of ‘the system’ and the ‘logic’ articulating it —nobody doubts that— but there is a further substantive issue here. Should contemporary readers heed Hegel's advice? Brooks's answer is emphatically in the affirmative, and what results is a series of illuminating discussions in which he makes a case for his own interpretations on the basis of systematic considerations, presented against a range of alternatives taken from the contemporary secondary literature, which is amply covered, often in the extensive endnotes to the book.

The Great Financial Crisis that broke in 2008 and the Great Recession that followed has led many to question the very structure of contemporary economies. Some argue that the economic model of the past forty years is now broken. Criticism has also been directed at the orthodoxies of economics. For example, neoclassical equilibrium economics, the mainstream economics of the day, is accused of failing to understand some of the most basic aspects of the modern economy (debt and money), of supporting policies that have led to the economic breakdown (deregulation), and of failing to see the crisis coming (Bezemer 2012, Keen 2011). Consequently, heterodox thinking in economics is getting a hearing as never before. Heterodox economics offers itself as the requisite radical reconstruction of the science of economics and also proposes policies for the radical reconstruction of the major economics.

Yet to talk of the reconstruction of the modern market economy is at the same time to raise the ethical question: what shape ought the market economy to take? Heterodox economics may acutely analyse the inadequacies of real economies and propose plausible reforms, but as an essentially descriptive science there will be limits on its ability to state what ought to be. Rather, what is required seems to be a systematic prescriptive ethics. In other words, recent events in the world of economics have provided an opening for what ethical philosophy should be best at providing. Determining whether a specific ethical philosophy, to be identified shortly, has the capacity to address the questions raised by heterodox economics is the task of this paper.

On the cover of Thom Brooks's admirable Hegel's Political Philosophy is a picture, taken by the author, of Tynemouth Castle, near where he lives on the northeast coast of England. It is an attractive image, yet it also has significance in relation to the argument of his book —one that only emerges at the end of his narrative.

A basic question that faces all interpreters of The Philosophy of Right is: how far must we understand Hegel's views on politics in the light of his wider philosophical commitments? Behind that question lies a very simple argument:

(1) If we take Hegel at his word, and his political philosophy is indeed integrated within his broader philosophical system; and,

(2) if that philosophical system is a consistent realization of speculative idealism; then

(3) everything will depend on how we evaluate speculative idealism.

Hegel's ambitious metaphysics now finds few defenders, however. So, does his political philosophy fall with it?

To this there are two kinds of reply. The first would make a separation between the political doctrines advanced in Hegel's work and the philosophical framework within which they are embedded. The second, while accepting that Hegel's philosophy is meant to form an integrated whole, disputes the idea that, for that reason, the “dialectical” treatment of particular areas of life and experience depends on our final verdict on the system as a whole. It is possible to enter his system at any point and to continue piecemeal, treating its arguments on their own terms without concern for its final resting point. Against this, Brooks argues that the piecemeal approach fails to do justice to Hegel's text.

In The Just State, Richard Dien Winfield has completed his exposition of the immanent logic of ethical life, the earlier parts of which are developed in his books The Just Economy, The Just Family, and Law in Civil Society. The purpose of his exposition is not to discuss isolated or miscellaneous topics pertaining to politics or ethics. Instead, his goal from the beginning has been to show objectively what justice looks like when it is fully embodied in a state's political and social institutions. The just state, as he presents it, is simply the largest possible political framework for maintaining equitable arrangements within a country's already established civil society, a framework that permits civil society to adjust to new contingencies as they arise, be they domestic or international. The purpose of the just state is to preserve, not to tamper with, the political and nonpolitical freedoms of its citizens. The essence of these freedoms is that they are all modes of self-determination, whereby what one does is freely determined by oneself and not by the arbitrary controlling authority of others. An individual whose life is determined by family, by tradition, or by commandment, is unfree. A state whose people are imposed on by a leadership class, or by any authority other than that of the people themselves, is likewise unfree. In order to establish freedom and justice, the citizens of a sovereign state must codetermine their own institutions. In accordance with this purpose, their institutions must be constructed in a particular way, which is the subject of The Just State.

Hegel was a systematic philosopher, who grounded his system on a speculative logic. But his greatest philosophical contributions lie in his reflections on human culture: ethics, social and political philosophy, aesthetics, religion and the philosophy of history. This fact poses a problem for anyone who accepts it and then attempts to provide a philosophical discussion of Hegel's thought with the aim of making it available to a later age.

There can be no doubt that any authentic treatment of Hegel's social and political philosophy must take account of Hegel's explicit intention to ground it in his logical system of thought-determinations. But if we simply take that intention at face value, we make our appropriation of Hegel hostage to his philosophical system and speculative logic, which now are at best outdated and, though they may themselves contain some insights of lasting philosophical value, are not of nearly as much philosophical interest as Hegel's thoughts about human culture, society and history. A Hegel whose ethical, social, historical and cultural insights could be appropriated only by those who accept his speculative logical system would be a Hegel few would ever read or learn from.

The other horn of the same dilemma is that those interpreters who are honest enough that they don't accept uncritically Hegel's own account of the structure of his philosophical accomplishments will inevitably be charged with doing violence to Hegel's thought, ignoring its true structure and unity. To quote a passage from Fred Beiser, which Thom Brooks uses to pillory all such Hegel scholarship: ‘We make Hegel alive and relevant, a useful contributor to our concerns; but that is only because we put our own views into his mouth.

Hegel's Philosophy of Right is more than a major work of political and legal philosophy; it is a battleground for two different interpretive approaches. My Hegel's Political Philosophy: A Systematic Reading of the Philosophy of Right argues that these approaches are mistaken about their differences and that one approach offers a more compelling interpretation of Hegel's Philosophy of Right than the other. I will briefly outline my defence of the systematic reading of the Philosophy of Right before replying to the constructive criticisms raised by Redding, Rosen and Wood.

There are two different interpretative approaches to understanding Hegel's Philosophy of Right. These are the metaphysical and the non-metaphysical readings. The former often highlight Hegel's insistence that some political states may be considered more ‘true’ or ‘actual’ than others. This reading also often emphasises the special place of religion in Hegel's philosophical system, for example. In contrast, the non-metaphysical reading argues that such an interpretation is not only unattractive, but perhaps even unnecessary because Hegel's views on ‘actuality’ and ‘actualization’ are less controversial than traditional metaphysical readings of Hegel's philosophy have claimed. Commentators must choose between these competing camps and interpretations of Hegel's work are conceived within these approaches. Importantly, each reading claims that its approach best captures Hegel's philosophical importance. But would Hegel endorse either the metaphysical or non-metaphysical reading?

The problem is that this debate rests on a central misconception about Hegel's philosophy. The debate is characterized as a disagreement about the role and perhaps the very existence of metaphysics in Hegel's philosophy. But this is a false impression. It is virtually nowhere in doubt that metaphysics is present in Hegel's philosophy, including his Philosophy of Right. Therefore, the debate between a ‘metaphysical’ and ‘non-metaphysical’ reading of Hegel's works is not a debate about whether these works contain metaphysics. The characterization of the debate invites a false impression about what is at stake.

The Just State, as Richard Winfield notes at the outset, is the culmination of an ambitious project devoted to limning the contours and content of a systematic philosophy of right. Apart from its value as a substantial contribution to the understanding of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, The Just State offers its own self-standing, content-rich account of political justice. Winfield's book is overflowing with argument and analysis, which calls for careful, detailed consideration, and the brief set of comments that follow cannot possibly do it full justice. It is useful, however, to focus on a specific topic concerning normativity discussed in the ‘Introduction’. In particular, I would like to raise some questions about the principle of equal opportunity and the adjustment problem that arises from it.

Before turning to those questions, it might be helpful to offer an overview of the overarching structure of The Just State. The ‘Introduction’ and eight chapters can be clustered thematically into three parts. The ‘Introduction’ has the important task of clearing away the obstacles thrown up by sceptical arguments against the very possibility of a normative theory of political justice. Chapters 1-3 set the stage for the account of political justice proper, which then takes up the remainder of the book, chapters 4-8. So the argument starts, in the ‘Introduction’, with a refutation of the sceptical denial of the project of political philosophy understood as the normative theory of political justice. This is important because the positive upshot of this anti-sceptical argument is the identification of a singular normative criterion: self-determination.

The financial crisis that currently besets Europe not only disturbs the life of many citizens, but also affects our economic, political and philosophical theories. Clearly, many of the contributing causes, such as the wide availability of cheap credit after the introduction of the euro, are contingent. Analyses that aim to move beyond such contingent factors tend to highlight the disruptive effects of the neoliberal conception of the market that has become increasingly dominant over the last few decades. Yet while the financial sector has received most of the blame, and rightly so, few commentators seem willing to take into account the role played by representative democracy in its current form. Even if it is granted that actual democratic policies fall short of what they ought to achieve, contemporary representative democracy itself is seldom regarded as part of the tangle it was supposed to resolve. David Merill touches upon this issue when he notes, in the preceding issue of this Bulletin, that ‘the economic dilemmas faced today may be ultimately the consequences of state failure’. The state that has failed to regulate the markets is described as ‘weak’ and ‘subject to external blows, blind to its ends, merely one actor among many in the events of the day’ (Merill 2012: 28). Yet Merill does not seem to consider this weakness to be an inherent feature of the constellation of which contemporary democracy is a part.

There are, of course, excellent reasons not to take this path. First, representative democracy has in many cases proved to be the best way of preventing small elites from acquiring political power, and many of the impressive social and political achievements of the twentieth century are the result of democratic processes.

For politics to measure up to reason, two requirements have long been acknowledged: first, that the ends of political action be universal, and second, that the pursuit of such universal ends consist in political self-determination, that is, in self-government.

Aristotle set the stage for all further political inquiry by distinguishing political association through the universality of its end or good, while identifying the end of politics with political activity itself, an activity in which citizens rule over one another while presiding over all other associations, which fall under political dominion owing to the particularity of their pursuits. Aristotle joined the universality of politics with the activity of self-rule by recognising political activity to be an end in itself that is also a master end for the sake of which all other conduct is to be pursued. As such, politics was itself the highest good, making ethics possible by overcoming the hegemony of instrumental action, whose every end is devoid of intrinsic value, leaving conduct ultimately pointless (see Aristotle 1984b: Nicomachean Ethics, 1094a18-1094b12).

Two corollary difficulties, however, undermine Aristotle's enterprise. On the one hand, he is unable to give the universal end of political association a non-arbitrary content. Politics may claim universality by being both an end in itself and a master end, but this is just a recipe for ‘might makes right’, where any prevailing rule would be identical with the highest good. Appeal to a distinctly human function or to forms of rule that pursue the common good rather than the particular interests of some ruler can provide no remedy.

When I was first studying Hegel, I encountered quite divergent readings of his views on religion. The teacher who first presented Hegel to me was a Jesuit, Quentin Lauer at Fordham University, who read Hegel as a Christian theologian providing a better metaphysical system for understanding the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation. When I studied at Yale University, Kenley Dove read Hegel as the first thoroughly atheistic philosopher who presented the conditions of thought without reference to any foundational absolute being. Meanwhile, also at Yale, John Findlay read us a deeply Neo-Platonic Hegel who taught about absolute forms held in a cosmic mind. In giving my own reading, I want to talkabout the ways Hegel redefines both metaphysics and religion. I would like to approach these issues by way of the medieval controversy over double truth, which was a previous conflict between religion and science.

In the thirteenth century, Aristotle's scientific and philosophical texts were becoming available in European universities from the Muslims in Spain. These texts offered a well-argued, systematic, and more comprehensive scientific view of the universe and its god. Reading Aristotle, people quickly realised that his ideas contradicted some Christian (and Muslim) doctrines. For example, Aristotle argued that the world could not have had a beginning in time, while the religious revelations told of a first moment of divine creation. Aristotle's obscure treatment of the active intellect seemed to argue that there was no individual immortal soul, while the revelations spoke of individual survival after death. And Aristotle's god, the totally self-absorbed first mover, the pure actuality, seemed useless for religious purposes.

In 1807 Hegel published the Phenomenology of Spirit which calmly asserted that philosophy had, at long last, ceased to be merely the love of knowing and had finally consummated its lust for truth, giving birth to ‘strenge Wissenschaft’ in logic and the system (Hegel, 1807: 3). In 1944, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno circulated mimeographed copies of Dialectic of Enlightenment, ominously asserting that the same process of reason's self-clarification which Hegel described brings us, not, as he claimed, to truth and freedom, but to barbarism. Somehow critical reflection's efforts to liberate humanity from superstition, darkness, and oppression has lead instead to Auschwitz.

A crucial aspect of Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of enlightenment is the notion that enlightenment and its seeming antithesis, myth, are inextricably linked. In the Phenomenology Hegel had already investigated the underlying link between the rationality of the Enlightenment period and faith, its ostensible arational other, in Chapter VI. In various places Horkheimer and Adorno acknowledge the influence of Hegel, and they make suggestive passing references to the Phenomenology. Obviously, their connecting of enlightenment and myth bears more than a family resemblance to Hegel's pairing of enlightenment and faith. Just as Hegel disclosed that enlightenment and faith have more in common than usually thought, Horkheimer and Adorno aim to show that there is an important aspect of enlightenment already in myth and further, that enlightenment has itself fallen back into the essential features of myth it purports to be have overcome.

In the recent Hegel literature there has been an effort to portray Hegel's philosophy as compatible with naturalism, or even as a form of naturalism (see for example Pippin 2008 and Pinkard 2012). Despite the attractions of such a project, there is, it seems to me, another, and potentially more interesting way of looking at the relationship of Hegel to naturalism. Instead of showing how Hegel's philosophy can be compatible with naturalism, I propose to show how Hegel's philosophy offers a challenge to naturalism. Naturalism has become the dominant ideology in much of contemporary analytic philosophy (Kim 2003: 84), but also within other disciplines. Evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics, which attract a lot of media attention, attempt to explain the human mind and human behavior in purely naturalistic terms, usually in terms of the biological past and makeup of humans (Pinker 2002). Philosophy's task is, among other things, to examine the assumptions of human practices including its own. In that vein I am interested in showing how Hegel can be seen as someone offering a challenge to our contemporary philosophical culture and its underlying naturalist premise.

Of course that Hegel never explicitly talks about naturalism in his writings already presents us with the problem of risking anachronism. The other great problem is the fact that naturalism is an elusive philosophical position. There are a few different versions of the key theses of naturalism, so that if our aim is to diagnose Hegel's philosophy as naturalist or anti-naturalist it would seem we have to pick which version of naturalism we are going to work with.