Hegel’s place in the history of social and political philosophy has never been an easy or an obvious one. It is true that his writings have had an enormous impact on different generations of philosophers, and that their importance is recognized today by admirers and detractors alike. But while the works of Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau were regarded early on as essential stages in the development of modern political thought, Hegel has remained something of an oddity. His pioneering emphasis on philosophy’s historical dimension has certainly been acknowledged, as has his decisive influence on Marx, who would claim to have turned his philosophy on its head. Yet apart from these interpretative clichés, Hegel’s social and political ideas have not been as smoothly or as definitively incorporated into the philosophical canon as those of other modern masters. And that is largely due to the unique nature of his writings.

First, and most obviously, the peculiarity of Hegel’s work owes a great a deal to his notoriously difficult style, with its long, convoluted sentences, its cryptic formulations and its (in)famous fixation with contradiction. In Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, he is singled out as ‘the hardest to understand of the great philosophers’,Footnote ¹ and this dubious distinction is frequently invoked by his critics to disparage his work. But this issue is also brought up by more sympathetic interpreters: for Adorno, arguably the most Hegelian of post-modern German philosophers – and himself a notoriously difficult writer – Hegel is the only great thinker ‘with whom at times one literally does not know and cannot conclusively determine what is being talked about’.Footnote ² However, contrary to what might be assumed, this problem is not primarily due to the use of technical or specialized language. As Hegel himself points out, philosophy ‘stands in no need of special terminology’ (HW 5, 21; SL, 12). The difficulty derives, rather, from his use of standard German words in a highly idiosyncratic manner, which leaves many of his arguments open to different interpretations.Footnote ³

A second aspect that sets Hegel’s political philosophy apart from that of other modern thinkers is the way it relates to his wider philosophical vision. As is well known, Hegel conceives of philosophy as an overarching system, of which his mature political thought is but one component. Now this focus on systematicity is not unique to his work: it is already present in Leibniz, Kant and the other post-Kantian idealists, each of whom puts forward his own systematic version of Kant’s critical philosophy. In Hegel, however, this kind of approach is developed to an unprecedented degree. Moreover, it is extended to the social and political realm in a way that had not been previously attempted, which raises the question of how his political ideas are affected by this systematic structure and whether they can be considered and interpreted on their own.

Third, apart from its linguistic and structural peculiarities, Hegel’s political thought also stands out for its broad thematic range. Stretching the disciplinary boundaries traditionally upheld by previous philosophical writings, his work combines notions and insights that are usually associated with social and political philosophy, but also moral philosophy, legal philosophy, ethics and political economy. In contrast to most of his contemporaries – and to the tendency towards specialization that would come to dominate the modern social sciences – Hegel treats these different disciplines not as autonomous domains, with independent aims and methodologies, but as the different, interrelated components of a comprehensive analysis of modern social life.

All of these aspects can help explain the distance that separates Hegel from other political thinkers. At the same time, however, they can also shed light on the distance that separates Hegel’s own interpreters. And in this regard, as well, his work stands out from the rest. While the writings of most modern philosophers, however controversial, tend to generate a basic consensus regarding their main ideas or tenets, Hegel’s work seems to allow for a wider margin of dissent. In a comprehensive study on the reception of his political writings, Henning Ottmann highlights the sheer variety of interpretations elicited by Hegel’s philosophy and notes how many of them are openly opposed to each other. ‘The situation would not be so scandalous’, he writes, ‘if these were the voices of extremist outsiders. At times, philosophers like Kant or Aristotle are also interpreted in extreme ways. In Hegel’s case, however, the controversial interpretations rather than the convergent ones seem to be the norm. Entire schools are unable to find a basis on which to ground a reasonable consensus regarding Hegel’s intentions.’Footnote ⁴

This divisiveness has long been a mark of Hegel’s legacy. Shortly after his death, his work became the focus of a famous philosophical row, opposing the so-called ‘old’ or ‘right’ Hegelians, who endorsed a more conservative reading of his religious and political views, and the ‘young’ or ‘left’ Hegelians, committed to a more progressive conception of freedom and social change. Both parties saw themselves as the legitimate heirs of the philosophical movement initiated by Hegel, but they had very different ideas about how it should be interpreted and moved forward. Yet this well-known dissension is only a small part of a much more complicated story. As is now generally recognized, the division between a ‘right’ and a ‘left’ Hegelianism is an oversimplification, not only because each camp was in fact fluid and heterogeneous – with some thinkers holding views rejected by their companions and shared by their opponents – but also because these stances were only two among many others. Instead of a black-and-white contrast, these early interpreters offer an entire greyscale of different positions, which are often irreducible to a single exegetical current.Footnote ⁵

Ever since the publication of the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel’s main political opus, two basic themes have occupied practically all of his interpreters. The first one concerns the nature of the relationship between his political philosophy and existing reality. More precisely, it concerns the extent to which the political views outlined in the Philosophy of Right constitute a challenge to the political institutions and arrangements of the empirical world. This issue has fuelled the central and still ongoing debate about the normative dimension of Hegel’s political thought. The second basic theme concerns the relationship between the individual and society. This second debate has focused on the weight accorded in the Philosophy of Right to state authority and the room left open for personal freedom and self-determination. And this issue has proven even more controversial, placing a variety of scholars in different political camps.

Many of Hegel’s interpreters have criticized him on both of the previous points. Contemporaries such as Jakob Friedrich Fries or Arthur Schopenhauer saw his work as a defence of the existing Prussian regime and, more generally, as a philosophical legitimation of an authoritarian state. Modern commentators such as Ernst Toppitsch or Karl Popper went even further, establishing a direct link between Hegel’s writings and the rise of fascism. In the last century, however, these charges have been rightly discredited. New generations of Hegelian scholars, from Joachim Ritter and Éric Weil to Shlomo Avineri and Walter Kaufmann, came to view Hegel’s emphasis on freedom and self-determination as the defining trait of a liberal rather than a conservative political project. They emphasized not only the objective differences that separate his political vision from the political reality of his day, but also his clear support for a modern constitutional state and a variety of individual civil rights and liberties. In the wake of this rehabilitating effort, John Rawls famously portrayed Hegel as a ‘moderately progressive reform-minded liberal’,Footnote ⁶ setting the stage for a line of interpretation that would become increasingly dominant, particularly in the Anglophone world.

The present work aims to challenge this line of interpretation. Although I subscribe to the condemnation of Schopenhauer’s and Popper’s approach, I consider Rawls’ alternative to be equally misleading. I claim instead that Hegel’s conception of freedom, albeit in many respects uniquely progressive, is informed by a clear and sophisticated criticism of liberalism’s underlying logic. Moreover, I argue that this criticism is not properly recognized or appreciated by most contemporary interpreters. To be sure, the long dispute over Hegel’s true political colours has led to ever more nuanced readings of his social and political philosophy: just as the early image of a reactionary and illiberal Hegel was gradually abandoned, so too was his reputation as a liberal thinker subjected to a closer examination. As a result, it is now widely acknowledged that his political thought, despite its focus on freedom, civil rights and the rule of law, cannot be so easily fitted into the liberal canon. Even though Hegel joins Locke, Montesquieu or Stuart Mill in defending free speech, freedom of religion or the freedom to own and exchange property, he is also a trenchant critic of the ‘atomistic principle’ he associates with modern civil society. In his eyes, the individualism inherent to the liberal worldview, where each person is primarily conceived as a self-seeking, interest-maximizing agent, is incompatible with a truly rational social order. Only by moving beyond this atomistic framework, towards a communal conception of social and political relations, can freedom be raised to its true form.

Hegel’s emphasis on freedom’s social dimension has not escaped his interpreters. In most cases, however, the transformation he proposes was seen not as a change of paradigm, but as a reform of the existing one. His call for a dialectical synthesis between the interests of particular individuals or social groups and those of society as a whole has been interpreted as the pursuit, within the liberal framework, of a more harmonious balance between the individual and the collective dimensions of modern life. According to this reading, Hegel’s standpoint can be reduced to something like a revised or improved liberalism, whose basic individualism is mitigated by a greater focus on social recognition and mediation. In my view, this kind of interpretation fails to capture the Philosophy of Right’s main argument. And this failure is due not simply to an inadequate grasp of a specific thesis or element within Hegel’s progression, but to a superficial understanding of its overall structure. As I will seek to show, the issue of how far Hegel transcends the liberal standpoint comes down to the distinction between what might be called a linear or horizontal reading of his work and a transformative or vertical one. In the first case, the dialectical progression leading from ‘abstract right’ to ‘ethical life’ is reduced to a cumulative process, where the different stages are not truly transformed, but merely completed or expanded by subsequent ones. According to this interpretation, Hegel is putting together, one by one, the different components of a modern state – from a basic set of legal rights to a system of fully functioning judicial, economic and political institutions. In the vertical reading, on the other hand, each dialectical transition entails a global rearticulation of what went before, so that every new stage ‘emerges as [the former’s] true ground’ (PR §256R). What takes place is not an accumulation of different elements but the redefinition of the same central concept – the concept of freedom – identified in increasingly rational ways.

These two readings correspond not only to different conceptions of Hegel’s dialectical method but also to different understandings of the Philosophy of Right’s socio-political vision. The horizontal reading, by favouring continuity over contradiction, tends to regard Hegel’s views on individual freedom, private property and the free market as fixed elements, which are then contained or mitigated by the communal logic of the state. And herein lies the main source of the ‘moderately progressive’ reading found today in most of the secondary literature, where Hegel’s political standpoint is almost invariably reduced to some form of social or welfare liberalism. The vertical reading, on the other hand, by emphasizing the progression’s hierarchical nature, reveals a different and more radical philosophical proposition. It shows the need to move beyond the logic of civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft), towards a qualitatively different conception of social and political relations.

My own reading of the Philosophy of Right follows the second of these approaches. And it does so by focusing on three of the work’s main aspects: its juridical dimension, and particularly Hegel’s views on property and contract; its economic dimension, or his characterization of the production and exchange of socially relevant goods and services; and its political dimension, or his take on the internal organization of a rational political state. In each case, I argue that only a proper recognition of the progression’s transformative nature can do justice to Hegel’s vision and capture the full implications of his main argument. Furthermore, I believe that this recognition holds the key to its enduring political relevance.

This book is divided into two main parts: Part I examines the historical and conceptual context of Hegel’s critique of liberalism; Part II undertakes a critical reconstruction of some of its main elements. I begin by revisiting, in Chapter 1, the history of the critical reception of Hegel’s social and political thought, from the publication of the Philosophy of Right to the present. I discuss the charges of conservatism raised by Hegel’s early critics, the liberal rehabilitation of his work in the second half of the twentieth century and the communitarian interpretation introduced in British and American debates from the 1980s. Finally, I focus on the ‘middle ground’ approach favoured today by most Hegelian scholars, based on a compromise between the liberal and the communitarian positions. This kind of reading, pursued in different forms by renowned interpreters such as Allen Wood, Frederick Neuhouser or Axel Honneth, is undoubtedly an improvement over the one-sided approach of many previous readings. Nonetheless, it is still indebted to the liberal framework Hegel criticized and sought to overcome. In particular, by favouring the practical dimension of his arguments over their logical or metaphysical foundations (an attitude I call methodological pragmatism) and by regarding the social dimension of freedom as an adjective rather than a substantive component of Hegel’s position (an attitude I call structural individualism), this interpretative trend ends up offering a more qualified version of liberalism, as opposed to the qualitative transformation I claim to be at stake in the Philosophy of Right.

This claim is developed in the following chapters, dedicated to different aspects of Hegel’s mature political thought. Chapter 2 discusses his understanding of the relationship between philosophy and reality, as well as the much-debated issue of whether the Philosophy of Right should be read as a normative enterprise. Focusing on the methodological argument outlined in the preface and the introduction, I argue that Hegel is committed to a critical reconstruction of received reality, aimed at revealing the norms and institutions that best promote human freedom. Moreover, I claim that this critical effort comprises a conceptual and a temporal dimension, corresponding to two different argumentative moments: the progression leading from the stage of ‘abstract right’ to that of the state and the book’s final section, ‘world history’, which deals with the historical actualization of the concept of freedom. While most interpreters tend to focus on the former dimension, the latter is just as important to understand Hegel’s overall position.

Chapter 3 builds on these methodological considerations to clarify the nature and scope of Hegel’s critique of liberalism. I start by discussing the ending of the preface to the Philosophy of Right – where the philosopher’s task is famously compared to the flight of the owl of Minerva – to challenge the widespread assumption that Hegel is fundamentally averse to robust social criticism. While he does claim that philosophy cannot transcend its own time or teach ‘what the world ought to be’ (PR, 27/16), this is meant to ward off the dogmatism he associates with previous, non-dialectic approaches to social and political philosophy. He wants to show both (1) that philosophy’s critical method is not utopian, but immanent, that is, aimed at assessing the given on its own terms and exposing its intrinsic limitations; and (2) that the standpoint to come out of this process is at first only the conceptual outline of a new reality, which has yet to acquire a concrete socio-historical form. None of this is incompatible, I claim, with a substantial critique of the modern liberal order.

Hegel’s preface and its alleged proscription of radical social criticism have often been invoked as proof of his support for the modern liberal state. But this kind of reading has also had other sources, which I go on to discuss. The first is the long-standing tendency, already mentioned, of reading the Philosophy of Right as a horizontal progression, consisting in the accumulation of different aspects or layers of freedom. When applied to the transition from civil society to the state, this approach tends to reduce the latter’s role to the protection and regulation of private interests, bringing it close to the liberal tradition. As I seek to show, this interpretation misrepresents the qualitative transformation envisaged by Hegel, which only a vertical reading of his work can adequately convey. Second, the limited recognition of the Philosophy of Right’s critical dimension has also been motivated by some of Hegel’s own philosophical positions. Indeed, despite his intended sublation of the stage of civil society, his account of what a rational state looks like remains wedded, in important ways, to the former’s underlying logic. This is so not only because the institutional arrangements designed to address the contradictions of the modern economic sphere are ultimately ineffective, but also because some of Hegel’s concrete political options – especially his rejection of popular sovereignty and his defence of aristocratic birth rights – end up reiterating and aggravating those contradictions. These inconsistencies are an important part of the Philosophy of Right and must be recognized as such. However, they are also at odds with the work’s internal logic, and represent therefore a deviation from its wider philosophical vision. As I see it, if we accept Hegel’s claim that a rational state must be able to bring together the particular and the universal dimensions of human freedom, we must reject some of his political options as partly or wholly un-Hegelian. And this immanent tension brings out the need for a critical reconstruction of Hegel’s theory of the state – a Hegelian critique of Hegel, meant to reveal the true implications of his political views.

Such a reconstruction is undertaken in Part II of this book, dedicated to different aspects of Hegel’s social and political theory. Chapter 4 deals with his views on property and the role it should play in a rational state. In the Philosophy of Right’s initial stage, devoted to ‘abstract right’, each person is defined as an independent legal agent, endowed with the basic right to own and exchange property. From this initial standpoint, the political sphere is but a prolongation of the legal sphere and the state is reduced to an external authority, whose main role is to protect and regulate existing property relations. As the progression unfolds, however, this legalistic framework is called into question and eventually sublated: it turns out that individual rights are not the true foundation of the state, but merely a part thereof, subordinated to a wider and more robust commitment to the common good. Yet while this commitment is clearly affirmed by Hegel, it is not easy to reconcile with the priority he insists on according to private property, in the progression’s later stages, over other modes of property. In response to this tension, I argue that a genuinely Hegelian theory of property entails a critical revision of Hegel’s actual treatment of property rights. If the state is to bring together the citizens’ particular interests and the common good, the ownership of society’s productive resources must be shared by all of its members.

Chapter 5 discusses the economic structure of a rational state. Hegel saw the emergence of civil society, which he distinguished from the private realm of the family and the political realm of the state, as a uniquely modern achievement. In contrast to previous social models, where the conduct and aims of individuals were determined, to a large extent, by culturally inherited codes, practices and institutions, the development of a modern liberal economy opened up a new horizon for personal freedom and self-determination. For the first time, individuals were free to set their own life goals and the means to pursue them by engaging in free economic exchanges with other self-determining individuals. But Hegel was also one of the first to denounce the contradictions of this new social order. Anticipating Marx’s critique of capitalism, he argues that the economic freedom enabled by civil society is not as liberating as it seems, for it presupposes an endless expansionist drive that forces economic agents to either grow or perish. Crucially, however, Hegel’s critique of civil society is never strictly economic. His point is not merely that this expansionism generates poverty and inequality, nor is he interested simply in averting these consequences by finding effective means of reducing poverty or redistributing wealth. He aims to show, above all, that the maximization of self-interest promoted within civil society reflects an inconsistent and ultimately irrational conception of freedom, and, consequently, that its elevation to a rational form requires not merely a readjustment of the economic sphere, but a change of paradigm – the transition from the atomistic logic of civil society to the communal logic of the state.

The responsibility for this transition is entrusted by Hegel to a system of professional corporations located between civil society and the state. Within these groups, he argues, by forming bonds of mutual recognition and trust, individuals will cease to focus exclusively on their own interests and come to develop an active concern for the good of all the other members. And this communal disposition will help reshape not only their economic behaviour, but also their role as social and political agents. Given the importance of this argument, I spend some time discussing Hegel’s account of the corporations, their internal structure and their main aims. In my view, although these associations can help mitigate some of capitalism’s most harmful effects, they are not up to the conceptual role Hegel wants them to play. This does not mean, however, that his associative strategy is not promising, nor that it cannot be revived. In fact, that is precisely what I propose to do in the chapter’s final section. Building on the conclusions reached in Chapter 4, I go on to claim that a rational economic sphere implies not only the common ownership of society’s productive resources, but also the democratization of the productive sphere. Drawing on the socialist tradition and on recent Hegelian scholarship, I suggest that the corporations can be fruitfully reconstructed as worker-directed enterprises, capable of recapturing their communal spirit while avoiding their main limitations.

Finally, Chapter 6 focuses on the political structure of a rational state. And here, again, Hegel’s ideas are simultaneously visionary and in need of revision. On the one hand, the constitutional monarchy championed in the Philosophy of Right has been rightly called out as conservative and outdated. By limiting the citizens’ political participation to their membership of a corporation, and by handing the bulk of the state’s political power to unelected landowners and bureaucrats, Hegel is in effect compromising the reconciliation of particular and collective interests he regards as essential to human freedom. On the other hand, his wariness of democracy is much more than a mere relapse into some pre-modern, reactionary standpoint. His denouncement of the social atomism favoured by mass electoral systems, which tend to reduce the citizens’ political identity to that of individual voters, is far from unreasonable or outdated. In fact, it is arguably one of the most prescient elements of his political thought. But while Hegel is right to denounce the limitations of mass democracy, he is wrong to dismiss it altogether. As I seek to show, his critique is overly severe because his conception of democracy presupposes the liberal logic of civil society, which he attempts to sublate in a strictly political manner. Yet the atomism he argues against is best avoided not by limiting democracy, but by extending it to the economic sphere. In a democracy that is both political and economic, individuals are no longer mere atoms, but part of collective social units organized around commonly held goals.