1.1 Equal Non-Domination

Arguably the centerpiece of contemporary neo-republican views is the conception of freedom as non-domination. It will be useful to analyze equal non-domination into its two different sides – equality and non-domination – and take them on separately. We begin with the latter. Pettit’s conception of non-domination is sophisticated, with an extensive vocabulary for defending his view against liberal options. But for our purposes the essential ideas are twofold: The relevant freedom is freedom of choice, and I don’t have that freedom in its authentic form unless others cannot interfere with my choice – not merely that they don’t interfere with my choice, but that they cannot interfere with my choice. This is what it means to call the relevant freedom “non-domination.” The basic thought is that it isn’t enough for me to have choices available to me – it is further important that I be able to exercise those choices independent of another’s will. You must have “freedom to satisfy your preference, regardless of what others prefer that you do” (Pettit, Reference Pettit2012, p. 66).

For Pettit, the relevant equality means securing a threshold of undominated choices for everyone in those spheres protected by basic liberties; everyone is to be raised to at least the range of secure and resourced choice required to count as a free person, even if some have a greater range, more resources, or more security. Pettit then distinguishes between two meanings that such equality has: first in terms of relations between individuals, and then the meaning that it has in terms of the relation between individuals and the state: “Although it constitutes a sufficientarianism in the currency of free or undominated choice, the neo-republican theory of justice supports a substantive egalitarianism in the currency of free or undominated status” (Pettit, Reference Pettit2012, p. 88). That is, equality between persons is secured by giving each a sufficient range of choice such that they do not have to fear or debase themselves before others in the exercise of their basic liberties, and equality between persons before the state is secured by recognizing that each has the same status as a free person. But importantly, it is the same set of secure and resourced choices that do both things.

Hegel’s relation to this general line of thinking is multifaceted. One apparent difference should be explored and set aside first, before we can enter into the heart of the matter. This apparent difference has two formulations. In Hegel scholarship, it is common to see the claim that Hegel rejects freedom of choice (Willkür) for a more substantial rational will (Wille); and in political philosophy, it is common to see the claim that Hegel held a view of positive freedom, whereas neo-republicanism (and liberalism) are versions of negative freedom views. In Hegel scholarship this is usually touted as an advantage for his view; in political philosophy, as a fatal flaw. Both views have in common an interpretation of Hegel according to which he rejects independence from interference in our choices (negative freedom) as an interpretation of freedom, substituting for it guidance by rational principles or adoption of a rational goal (positive freedom). If this were the case, then the range of choices so important to neo-republicans would be of no value for Hegel, and would be replaced by the attempt to secure some positive goals or principles for citizens, whether that was chosen by them or not. I will put off until Section 1.3 the discussion of this issue in terms of negative and positive freedom, since that is related to the distinction between forms of citizenship. In terms of the distinction between two forms of will, the truth of Hegel’s view is more complicated, but there is no sense in which he outright rejects freedom of choice. There is a complicated logical story to tell about Hegel’s relation between Willkür and Wille, but for our purposes we can restrict ourselves to the following points.Footnote ⁸ First, Hegel’s criticisms of Willkür are criticisms of it as a free-standing philosophical conception of free will and are not criticisms of the value or importance of alternate possibilities for an adequate theory of free will. Hegel complains about a theory of free will that prizes alternate possibilities for their own sake – what might be termed leeway incompatibilism – that such a view is incapable of explaining the actual choice made in terms of features internal to the will, and thus external factors play a determining role in a way that undermines the agent’s control and thus the status of the agent as a locus of responsibility.Footnote ⁹ Hegel is a source incompatibilitst, i.e., he has a view of free will according to which alternate possibilities are entailed by free will because they are a necessary condition for our being the sources of our actions.Footnote ¹⁰ On Hegel’s view, this sourcehood is essential to the kind of status that we have as free agents, which is the kind of status that a just state should protect. In the political register, this puts Hegel quite close to some of Pettit’s formulations. Second, Hegel is a clear advocate of the importance of choice in social spheres ranging from marriage (including divorce) to markets to the free choice of profession (PR§§170&176, 185, and 206). It is not too much to say that the single greatest impetus to which Hegel’s mature political philosophy responds is the need for the state to accommodate dramatically new spheres of voluntary choice, which Hegel terms civil society. Indeed, this discovery puts Hegel right in the circumstances which motivate neo-republicans to abandon the civic humanist conception of freedom as a perfectionist imperative of civic participation and shift to a conception of freedom as the non-domination of choice; yet as we will see, Hegel does not make this same shift. Instead, he advances a conception of freedom as being at home in the other (bei sich selbst im Anderen) and attempts to design institutions that actualize that conception of freedom in the modern (i.e., turn of the nineteenth century) world.

We can see this by focusing on three related Hegelian principles surrounding property rights in particular: the “command of right” to be a person, the abstract nature of property [Eigentum], and the importance of productive resources [Vermögen]. We get the first two early on in Hegel’s discussion of Abstract Right, which has a content that from the history of modern political philosophy would lead us to expect as a title Natural Right, i.e., property and contract rights as well as crime and punishment. The command of right is as follows: “Personality contains in general the capacity for right and makes up the concept and the (itself abstract) foundation of abstract and thus formal right. The command of right is thus: be a person and respect others as persons” (PR§§36). There is an important form of equality contained in the reciprocity of this command, but it is not that of the Golden Rule (“do unto others as you would have them do unto you”). The Golden Rule asks you to transfer your preexisting self-regard to others; in contrast, the command of right is an exhortation for how you ought to treat yourself just as much as how you ought to treat others. In a broad sense of the term, it calls you both to respect yourself and respect others as a person – as someone who is the kind of being who owns property and exchanges it with others. In relation to neo-republicanism, it is important to note that this equality of status demanded by the command of right is essentially negative along two dimensions. First, it concerns simply the possibility of choice rather than the wisdom of or motivation for any one of those choices; in this respect it is very much a modern property right which is completely independent of the use or waste of the owned object. Second, it commands non-interference with choice rather than any particular structure of choice.

But the picture changes dramatically when we move from the abstract ownership interests that are protected by property rights to the concrete ownership interests that are protected by the right to resources. On the one hand, Hegel discusses resources in a way that is even closer to the neo-republican formulation than is property, e.g., “Personal property is something immediate, but resources are not so; they are the possibility of possession and so something lasting. [Das Eigentum ist etwas unmittelbares, das Vermögen nicht so, es ist die Möglichkeit des Besitzes, also etwas bleibendes]” (GW 26, 1293). Resources relate to the basic conditions for self-sufficiency that protect one from interference, rather than limited uses of spatiotemporal objects. On the other hand, resources are introduced as a corrective to the abstract individualism of property once we have a recognition of the actual form of economic production: “This necessity which is inherent in the interlinked dependence of each on all now appears to each individual in the form of universal and permanent resources … in which, through his education and skill, he has an opportunity to share … ” (PR§199). That is, quite in contrast to the model of independent members of society who can then jointly do the business of government together – whether in a participatory or contestatory way – Hegel sees the nature of modern society as an interlinked set of dependencies which first provide for the possibilities of choice that are to be protected. Pettit’s view is that such dependencies are just as dominating as are the outright restrictions on choice, since they substantively change my options.

When we shift from considering non-domination to considering equality, the divergence between Hegel and the neo-republican view is even more stark. On Hegel’s view, inequality of resources comes with the modern territory, because our access to resources is contingent on our skills and education, which are themselves contingent on all sorts of natural and social circumstances. These contingencies are only magnified by the new voluntary modes of production as opposed to subsistence agriculture. He thinks of this as the way that particularity manifests itself in social life, and in a typical remark complains that to set against this “a demand for equality is characteristic of the empty understanding, which mistakes this abstraction and obligation of its own for the real and the rational” (PR§201 R). On the other hand, when this inequality rises to the level of poverty, and particularly the kind of poverty that includes prolonged unemployment, then Hegel has the kinds of concerns discussed at the beginning of this section. There Hegel seems to have precisely the same worries as neo-republicans about the ability of members of society to feel respected. But in this case even the equality of a sufficient threshold seems best understood in a way that is foreign to Pettit’s neo-republicanism. Hegel’s worry is not that the impoverished worker will be forced to make their choices while depending on the good will of others – his worry is that they won’t even be able to do that. Hegel thinks that all of our engagement of resources is dependent on the choices of others – e.g., of offers of continued employment. In fact, he thinks that modern civil society – whose members pride themselves on a sense of independence – is, in fact, nothing but a system of mutual aid.

Our skills and our needs both make us valuable to others and others valuable to us: Skills in a non-subsistence economy are the skills of divided labor and thus require others with complimentary skills; and needs in a market economy are opportunities for trade. For Hegel, the independence of choice prized by the neo-republican is simply incompatible with modern economic reality. This peeks through in Pettit’s view in a response to the worry that certain economic or political rights, e.g., property rights or the right to free expression, will not be able to satisfy his two conditions for basic liberties – co-exercisability and co-satisfiability – because, of course, not everyone can speak at once or own the same object. At this point Pettit appeals to government-established coordination rules (such as time, place, and manner rules for speech or land use rules for property) (Pettit, Reference Pettit2012, p. 97). But Hegel sees the woeful insufficiency of this type of move in relation to the kinds of economic resources that are essential to both the freedom and status of modern participants in civil society, particularly the ability to access economic networks such as workshops and markets. Furthermore, even if we were to understand the problem of poverty in the terms of domination suggested by Hegel’s lecture remarks concerning the emotional rift between the poor and the rich, it is precisely this problem which Hegel doubts modern states can solve, and they are certainly not set up to avoid it as a Pettit-style neo-republicanism would require.

Thus, despite his central concern for the sort of status relations that motivate neo-republicanism, Hegel does not share non-domination as a philosophical articulation of the status that is to be secured by the just state. Instead, Hegel’s mutual-recognition conception of freedom is more directly tied to the kind of status that is supposed to be achieved. We have seen already a bit how that is supposed to be achieved horizontally, as Pettit puts it, between citizens. Now we can turn to how it is supposed to be achieved vertically, i.e., between the citizen and the state. But even in this vertical relation it is worth pointing out the centrality of the category of the social for Hegel. Whereas for Pettit, the only two kinds of social entities whose relations are considered are individuals and the state, for Hegel social groups – what Hegel calls estates (Stände) and corporations – are a key third term. The discussion of resources in this section primarily concerned the relation between individuals and estates – and was primarily focused on working individuals within the commercial estate – but in the following two sections we will be concerned first with the relation of the estates to each other in the mixed constitution and then with the estates as mediators of the individual-state relation for a participatory, rather than contestatory, citizenry.

1.2 The Mixed Constitution

Hegel’s advocacy of a mixed constitution takes the form of a constitutional monarchy. In essence, Hegel’s state has a bicameral estates assembly which engages with the monarch, on the one hand, and a professional bureaucracy, on the other. A judicial system with the usual modern procedural protections rounds out what we would take to be the governmental functions, though that system is officially considered to be a part of civil society. Here we have something like the mixture of the classical political systems – monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy – through the crown, the educated public servants, and the representative legislature.

Before going into detail, a few things ought to be noted for a contemporary audience. First, though the very idea of a monarchy that isn’t just for display now seems archaic to us, the advocacy of a constitutional monarchy puts Hegel among the progressive reformers of his own time. Though the promise to give constitutions to their people was part of the 1815 agreement of German states at the Vienna Congress which established the new German Confederation after the Napoleonic Wars, that promise went largely unfulfilled and was the subject of intense political discussion and activity. But what debates at the time show is an awareness that the “constitutional” part of “constitutional monarchy” makes a fundamental difference – precisely because it frames the monarchy as responding to a set of rights and freedoms that have a validity independent of the will of the crown. The question, then, was: What was the source of that validity? In contingent historical developments (Savigny’s historical school)? In reason alone (Kantians)? Or in the rationalized form of existing social relationships? Hegel joined reformers including Wilhelm von Humboldt in choosing this last option.

Second, Hegel’s use of the term “monarchy” is fairly standard for his time but rather different from our own. When we use the term, we generally mean simply that the head of state is a single person specified by the heredity of a certain family. But in Hegel’s more eighteenth-century use of the term, the monarchy is the extension of a system of orders that includes other nobility as well. This is the meaning that Montesquieu has in mind, for instance, in his famous taxonomy of regimes, and which makes it the case that honor is the primary motivation within monarchies (SL II.4 and III).Footnote ¹¹

Third, this system of orders is connected to the separation of powers by Montesquieu in a way that is updated and broadened by Hegel into something that is properly designated a mixed constitution. For Montesquieu, it is essential not just that the powers of government – the executive, the judicial and the legislative – be separated institutionally, but also socially. As Montesquieu puts it:

We see Hegel making a similar complaint about the English constitution in his late essay On The English Reform Bill:

Institutional design thus requires a social theory of the relevant groups for which that constitution is designed, and one which gives each of the groups an institutional foothold in the government so that one group cannot dominate the others.

Even more strongly, on Hegel’s view, all that a written constitution can do is express and reform a social constitution that is already in place.

In Hegel’s state, the existing constitution which is reforming itself is determined by the estates structure of society. In Hegel’s understanding, the society for which he wrote the Philosophy of Right was composed of three main groups (estates) who were divided by their mode of production and corresponding political disposition: a group involved in agriculture (including the nobility), a group involved in craft and commercial production for markets, and a group working directly for the public good (including doctors, professors, and civil servants). To the reform conversation, the agricultural estate brings patriotism and stability; the craft and commercial estate brings a pressure for the rationalization of markets and expansion of property rights; and the public estate brings a disposition to concrete, feasible reform. The result is a constitutional monarchy that deserves to be called a mixed constitution because we have an expanded set of social orders whose representation is based on particular political virtues and all of this is to be articulated in a publicly accessible document that also provides procedural protections for citizens exposed to the use of government power through judicial proceedings.

One understands Hegel just as little as one understands Montesquieu if the category of the social is not kept constantly in view. In both cases, the institutional design aims to achieve what Montesquieu called moderate government through creating a system of mediation that will ward of despotism (for Hegel, see PR§301-2). The role that the estates play for Hegel is directly connected with the third plank of the neo-republican platform, since one of the roles of the sociology of the estates is to guide a view about the possibility of political participation under modern conditions.

1.3 The Virtue of Contestation

As we noted in the introduction, neo-republicanism stakes both a claim to the meaning of freedom and political legitimacy as well as a claim to the meaning of the history of political philosophy. With respect to the historiography, two related distinctions are important. The first is the distinction between an Italian-Atlantic republicanism and a Continental republicanism, and the second is the distinction between neo-republicanism and civic humanism. In both cases, the distinction between positive and negative freedom which we mentioned earlier is important, since positive freedom is taken to be a feature of the latter term of each pair. Neo-republicans argue that for Continental republicanism, positive freedom comes out as a communitarianism which threatens to become a general-will absolutism, whereas for civic humanism it comes out as a perfectionism which requires a level of political participation unlikely in modern democracies. We will very briefly take up each of these in turn and Hegel’s relation to these distinctions.

Pettit inherits the distinction between Italian-Atlantic and Continental republicanism from two of the great twentieth-century historians of political philosophy, J.G.A. Pocock and Quinten Skinner. On this view, there is a line of influence from the “Machiavellian Moment” of the early sixteenth-century to eighteenth-century debates about virtue and commerce in England and the Americas.Footnote ¹² This is taken to be quite different from Continental republicanism, as represented by Montesquieu and Rousseau. Hegel is certainly influenced by the latter tradition – but within the latter, mainly by the former author. In fact, Hegel himself sees Rousseau as a liberal – i.e., as excessively individualistic:

Since this is so contrary to our own approach to Rousseau and the tradition, it is worth discussing briefly.

This passage comes from a long remark in which Hegel is trying to clearly differentiate between civil society and the state. This conceptual clarity was hard-won in modern European political discourse.Footnote ¹³ On Hegel’s reading of the history of modern political philosophy, the social contract device confuses the state and civil society by presenting the origin of the state as an agreement between independent individuals (whether hypothetical or rational is in this connection irrelevant). Hegel’s point is that the state first created civil society through its action on traditional society, and thus it is only in virtue of citizens’ embedding in the state and broader societal structure that they can show up as the sorts of independent individuals who can form contracts. This complaint is overarching with respect to the fact that Rousseau draws the distinction between the general, common, and individual wills – so long as the picture of the citizen remains individualistic. As a matter of political ontology, at least, Hegel is no liberal.Footnote ¹⁴ This naturally suggests an interpretation of Hegel as republican in an older, humanist sense, which leads us to our second historiographical distinction.

This second distinction between neo-republicanism and civic humanism is likewise a debt Pettit owes to Pocock and Skinner, but in this case to a difference between the two. Whereas Pocock followed Hans Baron in holding republicanism to be a kind of humanism, Skinner advanced a view according to which republicanism shed humanism’s perfectionist commitments to a specific (politically engaged) form of the good life in favor of a negative-liberty view that Pettit then develops further with his theory of freedom as non-domination (Skinner, Reference Skinner1978). To shift this into the register of political virtue, the older civic humanist tradition interpreted the Machiavellian moment in terms of a demand for political virtue, i.e., every citizen’s active political engagement with the community, as a necessary condition of the good life. But on Skinner and Pettit’s view, this seems both implausible (because of the scale of modern states) and undesirable (because of the diversity of modern states), so the better option is to reinterpret the role of the citizen in terms of contestatory representation.

We can see this historiographical split in the argumentative structure that Pettit uses to argue for this latter option. In the first stage of the argument, Pettit takes up the possibility of a plenary assembly of all citizens and asks whether those citizens could make consistent law on the basis of majority voting procedures.Footnote ¹⁵ He argues that it cannot, because there is no feasible way to avoid inconsistencies produced by the aggregation of individual votes, and no principled way to resolve inconsistencies. As a result, such an assembly requires us to choose between individual responsiveness and collective rationality. In this “discursive dilemma,” the choice of the first horn accepts the inconsistencies as the price to pay for true individual participation in government – but part of that price is to give up government as a consistent and stable agent over time. The choice of the second horn eliminates the inconsistencies at the price of adopting principles that no majority of citizens actually endorses, and so gives up meaningful individual participation at the same time that it threatens to devolve into Rousseau’s general-will absolutism. What we wanted was individual responsiveness to a collectively rational state, and it seems as if we can’t have that on this participatory interpretation of democratic legitimacy.

Pettit then turns to two sorts of representational assemblies – the indicative and the responsive – where those two types themselves constitute the main options for representation Skinner finds in the modern tradition (Skinner, Reference Skinner2005). An indicatively representative body is statistically or demographically representative of the citizenry as a whole, whereas a responsively representative body is the sort of elected legislature that is common in contemporary democracies. As Pettit summarizes, “The members of the indicative assembly count as proxies for the people as a whole, standing in for them on the basis of their aggregate likeness to the people. The members of an elected assembly count more naturally as deputies: figures whose job it is, on pain of losing power, to be responsive to their constituents” (Pettit, Reference Pettit2012, p. 198). Pettit argues for a kind of mix of the indicative and the responsive. The primary representative body is to be responsive, since Pettit holds that a general indicative assembly would be nothing but a benevolent despot (since unaccountable), and so dominating of the citizenry (Pettit, Reference Pettit2012, p. 205). But pathologies of responsive representation such as the tyranny of the majority argue for its combination with a secondary order of indicative bodies, handling issues such as redistricting.

I won’t go into any detail here examining Pettit’s argument, and I will put off until Section 3 and the Conclusion a detailed discussion of Hegel’s views on participation and contestation, since it will make more sense to do that once we have a bit more of civic republicanism on the table. There we will take up the difference between representation and participation. But at this point we need to note a fundamental distinction between Hegel and neo-republicanism which comes out in the form of Pettit’s argument. Note that it is entirely framed in the language of individual practical reason – even the state is understood in those terms. It is from this perspective that Pettit himself tars Hegel with the same brush as Rousseau, Bodin and Hobbes, namely, as being opposed to a contestatory citizenry on the grounds that the individual citizens are a heap unfit for a political relation to their same organized selves as the state (Pettit, Reference Pettit2012, p. 290). And indeed, Hegel sees little prospect for the sort of individualized contestation that matters a great deal to Pettit, but has been rather seldom on display as an effective force in the two centuries separating Hegel from Pettit and ourselves. Since Pettit essentially lacks the category of the social, the form of contestation that is present in Hegel is invisible to him. Hegel’s constitution is a form of contestation, but that contestation is primarily organized at the group level. Furthermore this contestation is understood more as mediation within the state rather than resistance to it, since it is the groups composing the state that contest each other, rather than individual citizens contesting the state. Let us look briefly at the way in which each group constitutes part of the state.

The public estate – which includes professors, lawyers, civil servants, doctors, and pastors – has the highest education of the three estates, and the most directly meritocratic processes for selection and advancement. Hegel holds members of this estate responsible for all-things-considered judgments and thinks that their primary drive is to be effective in the social world. Temporally they are oriented to the present, to what can be done under current conditions. In virtue of their professions, members of this estate are constantly working for the public good through institutions that place them (and their students) quite close to the levers of power and to discursive fora with policy-making processes. This group does not suffer from either the scale or diversity problems which seem to undermine the possibility of direct participation in government in modern states, and both the authority hierarchies within bureaucracy as well as the ongoing feedback loops of discussion bypass the discursive dilemma as well. This group, then, has the ancient virtue of the democratic citizen, and for this very reason Hegel denies them representation (at least as a group) in the estates assembly in the final design of his Philosophy of Right; they don’t need to be represented because they are directly participating in governing.

The commercial estate – which includes workers, managers, artisans, factory owners, and merchants – embodies a different political disposition. Hegel thinks of this estate as more cosmopolitan and oriented toward the future. They are accelerationist: The opening of markets and the removal of fetters of production cannot happen fast enough, nor can the undermining of the old status hierarchies of the nobility and the church. On the one hand, this group is represented responsively through deputies who are elected. But on the other hand, these deputies are chosen through discussions and elections within their workshops and industries that are themselves forms of participation. Hegel thinks that modern states both promise and potentially deny political involvement: At the same time that the new category of “citizen” is being created with respect to the state – in German, Staatsbürger (citizen of the state) is coming to replace Stadtbürger (citizen of the town) as the common usage – the opportunity to act as a citizen is being undermined by the features we have discussed:

But Hegel also insists that the discussions within smaller sociopolitical units – which Hegel terms the “corporations” in a broad sense in which, e.g., school districts are corporations – are forms of political participation in their own right. In addition, these discussions connect to the representative structure required for the larger estates-assembly. Interestingly, these opportunities for political participation have only grown in number and availability since Hegel’s time, despite the fact that among political philosophers the growth of the size of states is generally taken to increasingly rule out political participation. In the medium-sized town in the United States in which I live, there are city council meetings, county plan commission meetings, school board meetings, and redevelopment commission meetings – all of which are open to public participation.

Finally, the agricultural estate is indicatively represented in virtue of its large landowners. Of course to us, male property owners of large estates hardly seem statistically representative of the agricultural population. But Hegel’s argument that all landowners have the same claim to political virtue as the nobility is significant – he tries to generalize the political disposition of the nobility to all owners of farmland, whom he characterizes as having resources which are relatively independent of the state and should be passed down according to majorat (i.e., in full to the eldest male relative) (PR§306-7). Heredity is irrelevant in itself – as is certainly birth order – but both the disposition without choice and the sacrifice of full property rights entailed by these restrictions marks this estate as having a distinctive role to play in the state. The patriotic and patriarchal disposition of the agricultural estate is oriented toward the past – toward the maintenance of tradition and social cohesion. Bringing this essentially conservative estate into the estates assembly is designed to bring the opposite perspective from the commercial estate, and together those estates are supposed to scrutinize the plans and policies brought forth by the public estate and enforced by the police.

Of course, in this discussion of the mixed constitution Hegel is engaged in a project which is somewhat different than Pettit’s in the sense that he is quite explicitly attempting to design political institutions for a specific place at a specific time with a specific history. As we already saw Hegel write in defending Machiavelli from his critics, “It is quite senseless to treat the exposition of an idea directly derived from observation of the Italian predicament as a compendium of moral and political principles applicable indiscriminately to all situations – i.e., to none at all” (GC80-1). In this place and time, Hegel is more concerned than Pettit with the ability of government to act decisively in times of crisis – a concern that is natural against the background of the Holy Roman Empire and the Napoleonic Wars – but the estates structure is guaranteed to be agonistic in virtue of the different forms of life involved – perhaps it is right to say that for Hegel, agonism rather than Pettit’s antagonism is the goal.

2.1 Labor Republicanism in the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries

To connect with the previous section, we begin here with Gourevitch’s criticism of the neo-republican theory from the perspective of labor republicanism. Historiographically, Gourevitch criticizes republicanism from Pocock to Pettit for stopping its consideration of the republican tradition at the time of the American revolution instead of considering the extent to which it was developed by the labor movement in the nineteenth century (Gourevitch, Reference Gourevitch2014, p. 10) and (Gourevitch, Reference Gourevitch2013, p. 593). Gourevitch sees labor republicanism as modifying civic and neo-republicanism both theoretically and practically – by expanding its conceptual toolbox as well as by deriving some policy suggestions for economic reorganization.

In the previous section we were concerned with the question of whether modern economic relations were incompatible with the kind of protected choices demanded by Pettit’s neo-republicanism. At one level of specificity, Gourevitch thinks that they are incompatible: “both critics and neo-republicans have missed the full implications of the republican theory … the republican theory of liberty delivers a powerful critique of economic domination, and leads to arguments for various kinds of democratic control over work” (Gourevitch, Reference Gourevitch2013, p. 592). But at another level of specificity, Gourevitch thinks that the labor republicans saw that modern economic relations could be made compatible with a revised republicanism. He distinguishes labor republicans from earlier republicans in the following way: “What set the labor republicans apart from earlier republican critics of capitalism was their attempt to reorganize rather than reject industrialize life … [T]hey did not reject the large-scale, collective character of the modern economy but sought instead to realize the potential immanent to it” (Gourevitch, Reference Gourevitch2013, pp. 595–597). Labor republicans accept industrialization and the division of labor – the features of the modern economy on which neo-republicanism founders – while nonetheless arguing for reorganization of collective work along republican lines. On the one hand, labor republicans saw industrialized economies as less compatible with republican liberty than neo-republicans saw them because the labor republicans identified management supervision in the workplace as itself a form of arbitrary interference and thus domination. On the other hand, labor republicans saw industrialized economies as more compatible with republican liberty because they produced the possibility of cooperative enterprises which extended republican liberty from the political sphere into the economic sphere.

We can put this a bit more theoretically in terms of Gourevitch’s framing of the nineteenth-century developments as a paradox in republican theory at that time (Gourevitch, Reference Gourevitch2014, p. 19). On the one hand, republican conceptions of non-domination had been developed in historical contexts in which it was understood that non-domination for the few required domination of the many. On the other hand, any viable nineteenth-century conception of freedom had to be universalizable – and a form of non-domination which requires domination is clearly not universalizable. We can use this dialectic to bring out aspects of Hegel’s view because it leverages the historical changes of the nineteenth-century economy to motivate conceptual change in political theory by means of a paradox brought on by the expansion of suffrage.Footnote ¹⁷ Though there is no direct influence in either direction, Hegel faces a similar set of conditions in early nineteenth-century Germany, as the constitutions promised by German states at the Vienna Congress of 1815 raised expectations of widespread political participation at the same time as both economic changes and increases in the sizes of states made it more difficult to understand how such participation was possible.

We can get a grip on the paradox by contrasting republican solutions with a more obvious and well-known solution. As Gourevitch notes, the most important contrast to nineteenth-century labor republicanism is nineteenth-century liberalism, and nineteenth-century liberalism is at least in part a bona fide attempt to adapt republican conceptions of freedom to economic reality, on pain of republicanism falling back on an agrarian ideal in the face of industrialization (Gourevitch, Reference Gourevitch2014, p. 66). According to this liberalism, self-ownership of one’s labor by those who worked for a wage was sufficient for the economic independence requisite for political standing (i.e., suffrage). This is a natural response to the dilemma of universalizing political participation in a context in which an ever-greater proportion of the population were wage-laborers, which involves a status of dependence on one’s employer that had seemed incompatible with the standing needed for participation in self-government. But the more minimal self-ownership sufficient for contractual relations looked like an achievable ideal and thus universalizable.

In contrast, labor republicans shifted from the scene of the labor contract to the scene of the workshop to evaluate the justice of economic relations and the agency of workers. And in this scene of the workshop, they noted that an essential aspect of those labor contracts was their indeterminacy and the resulting fact that the employee was at the disposal of management to organize and direct as the latter saw fit. This potential for arbitrary interference was enough to generate injustice:

Labor republicans thus tried a different tack to reach the goal of realizing freedom in industrial relations, which involved reconceptualizing the notion of independence required for citizens to be capable of self-government. On this reconceptualization, the key theoretical notion is to think of cooperation as a kind of independence, and the key practical notion is to think of cooperative enterprises as an economically viable alternative to hierarchically organized workshops.

This view takes on board the fact that labor contracts are necessarily underspecified and argues that the specification of labor during the process of social production must be accomplished by democratic rather than autocratic means. This makes them quite different from a paradigmatic contract with definite terms, such as a contract for services in which, for example, you agree with the roofer to pay a certain amount of money in exchange for a new roof on your house with certain materials by a certain date.

Independently of the consideration of nineteenth-century labor republicanism, Elizabeth Anderson has also made the point that the relationship between the employer and the employee is not primarily contractual:

As Anderson notes in her brief history of republicanism (which she construes quite broadly), the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century variants attempted to universalize non-domination in the economic sphere by articulating a vision in which wage labor was merely a transitional stage to the acquisition of property sufficient for economic independence as a farmer, merchant, or craftsman. But the industrialization of capitalism removes the possibility of self-employment from the opportunity set of the vast majority of the population, leaving only employment. Employment is a governance relation and furthermore a hierarchical relation out of economic necessity. On this point, Anderson’s reasoning follows that of the economist Ronald Coase and echoes some of the difficulties that labor republicans had in making their cooperative enterprises economically viable:

Coase’s point is that for these very reasons, it is misleading to refer to the labor agreement as a contract. And it is precisely its noncontractual nature that makes employment relationships within the firm economically viable (Coase, Reference Coase1937). But Anderson argues that the noncontractual and even hierarchical essence of employment within firms underspecifies the governance structure of the firm. Such firms could be hierarchical while employing the election of supervisors or executives who operate under clearly defined rules, and such a governance structure would satisfy republican criteria of non-domination without undermining the economic rationale of firms. Thus, unlike the nineteenth-century labor republican prescription of cooperation, Anderson calls “not for abolishing but for taming workplace hierarchy” (Anderson, Reference Anderson2015, p. 66).

To return to nineteenth-century labor republicanism, Gourevitch sees in their proposal of cooperative enterprise a reinterpretation of the central republican concept of non-domination:

We have no space here to go into the fascinating details of nineteenth-century labor republicanism as Gourevitch has done. But it is worthwhile noting that within the Knights of Labor – the group which did the most to promote these cooperatives – they primarily broke down because of the tension within the notion of cooperation itself between voluntarist and compulsory conceptions of cooperation. Allowing workers to back out of cooperation or refuse specific terms most obviously secured the voluntary, non-dominating character of cooperation, but at the cost of making cooperation uncertain and impermanent and thus economically infeasible (Gourevitch, Reference Gourevitch2014, p. 125).

2.2 Hegel in Relation to the Labor Republican Tradition

Thus, from Gourevitch and Anderson we get a conception of republicanism in the economic sphere that attempts to find a real possibility within industrial capitalism which could be realized as a form of non-domination. This possibility makes the specific criterion of non-domination a valid criterion for the evaluation of the justice of current forms of industrial capitalism because that possibility is immanent to it – something it could do and so a real expectation rather than a utopian hope. We saw three main strands of this reappropriation of republicanism. First, labor republicans and liberals alike were searching for generalizable conceptions of freedom and political participation, but for republicans they wanted a conception that did not reduce to liberal self-ownership. Second, labor republicans identified management directives as arbitrary power over workers, even if exercised benevolently, and thus as the primary challenge to the possibility of a more robust, non-liberal republican freedom. In this respect, republicans differed from liberals both in looking to workplace dynamics rather than to a contractual conception of the labor market as the scene of justice and in seeing the management-labor power relation itself as a source of domination and thus injustice. And third, labor republicans propose forms of cooperation or workplace democracy as forms of non-domination or independence. This is both a practical proposal and a theoretical reinterpretation of republican freedom. We will follow these threads through a brief reconstruction of Hegel’s attempts to understand the modern economy and the forms of freedom possible within it.Footnote ¹⁹

3.1 A Higher Sphere than Politics

Though Patten is brief here, it is an important point. The basic idea is that the project of civic republicanism was animated by an understanding of human beings as political animals, called to collective self-government as their highest sphere of activity and proper realm for the satisfaction of ambition and the display of virtue.Footnote ²⁷ In contrast, Hegel thinks that artistic, religious, and scholarly activities are higher forms of activity, potentially demoting politics to mere administration rather than leadership through character. There is certainly some truth to this point, but Patten is right that it is not enough to divide Hegel from civic republicanism or to make the label inapplicable to him.

To elaborate, a bit of Hegel’s systematic presentation must be brought into view. He divides his philosophy into three large parts: logic, nature, and spirit (Geist – which might also be translated as “mind” or even “mindedness”). Spirit itself is divided into three sections. The first section on subjective spirit concerns features of individual psychology such as perception and will. Hegel’s political thought is located in the second section on objective spirit. Here Hegel discusses the institutional and relational dimension of human life, including a historical treatment of the changes of this dimension over time and across different geographical and cultural contexts. Finally, in absolute spirit Hegel discusses art, religion, and philosophy. As Hegel thinks of it, when we engage in art, religion, and philosophy we find significance that transcends time and place in a way that politics never can. It is essential to politics that Hegel’s audience was, for example, nineteenth-century Germans rather than eighteenth-century French. But Germans can be moved by French art – in fact Germans can be moved by ancient Greek art, and this is why we are still performing plays by Sophocles more than two millennia later. We also still read Ancient Greek philosophy, as well as worshipping gods even older. There is something about these activities that is eternal and timeless, according to Hegel. Thus, there is a sense in which there is a sphere of human activity which transcends the limitations of time and place.

But it is important not to overstate or misunderstand this point, particularly as it relates to civic republicanism. After all, civic republicanism found much of its inspiration in Aristotle, who clearly believes in the superior value of a life of contemplation: “complete flourishing will be its activity in accord with its proper virtue; and we have said that this activity is the activity of study” (Aristotle, Reference Irwin1999, p. 163 (Book X Chapter 7 (1177a17-20))). In addition, we will see next the way in which Hegel saw a religious valence in political participation which tracks various forms of Florentine civic republicanism. Finally, an essential part of civic republicanism was the value of studying the earlier Greek and Roman writers, creating a kind of community across time and space. Machiavelli’s most famous presentation of this value comes in his well-known December 10, 1513, letter to Francesco Vettori:

Thus, there are many senses in which civic republicanism also made room for the value of things beyond the politics of its time and place, even if they were brought back to politics as their ultimate proving ground.

And with respect to the details of Hegel’s own view, it is important to note that in Hegel’s discussion of absolute spirit – particularly of art and religion – he is primarily concerned with its practice in the community rather than its status as a higher culture above the mundane. But to focus on religion – which is of more direct relevance to civic republicanism than art or philosophy – Hegel has a long discussion in the Philosophy of Right on the relation between religion and the state:

Religion gives us a serene outlook on the world which can never be matched by even the most profound political achievement – and furthermore the satisfaction of that religious outlook can be had by everyone, not just the powerful or successful – but only because religion is independent of the concrete form of life with which politics is concerned. Thus, it is higher than politics in one sense, but not in a way which undermines the significance of politics. This understanding obviates Machiavelli’s concerns that religion will distract people from the this-worldly activity of politics and make them unwilling to sacrifice for their republic (Machiavelli, Reference Machiavelli, Mansfield and Tarcov1998, pp. 156–161 (Book II, Chapter 2)).

In sum, though it is right to note that Hegel, like Aristotle, identifies a form of human activity which is in some sense higher or more satisfying than political life, this doesn’t serve to undermine the importance of political life in a way that would fundamentally distinguish his view from civic republicanism. After all, we still read Hegel arguing that for individuals their “highest duty is to be members of the state” (PR§258).

3.2 Political Participation

Patten thinks that Hegel is working in the opposite direction to civic republicans along what we might call the democratic axis: Whereas civic republicans promoted expanded political participation by ordinary citizens, Hegel argued for restrictions. Here we must be more critical of Patten’s view, since it gets both civic republicans and Hegel wrong.

With respect to civic republicans, both the Aristotelian and Florentine roots of the view include restrictions on political participations in many respects: gender, but also social status, property ownership, and even nobility as establishing citizenship (e.g., in Venice). In fact, many recent critics of neo-republicanism have attacked it by way of the elitist nature of much civic republican discourse, arguing that this elitism disqualifies it for contemporary use.Footnote ²⁸ In sum, though emphasis on the value of political participation for citizens is certainly a defining feature of civic republicanism, this went hand in hand with a variety of restrictions on citizenship and thus participation. The most self-reflective civic republicans came to think that these restrictions were necessary to make meaningful participation possible.

Thus, it would be a mistake to understand civic republicanism as a view that prioritizes expanding the franchise or universalizing active citizenship – otherwise we wouldn’t have had the dilemma of its universalization which we saw Gourevitch explore in the previous section. Florentine republican writers were attempting to combat despotism – e.g., the sole control of Florence by the Medicis – but they primarily advocated a mixed constitution with different and restricted spheres of participation as a means of doing so. The goal of civic republicanism was participation for those who are able to participate, and they saw clearly that the institutionalization of meaningful participation is a hard problem. Of course, we needn’t accept the same restrictions under our own current conditions which are quite different, particularly when it comes to the spread and amount of property ownership as well as average levels of education (to say nothing of our different views on gender). But neither is it the case that these classical republican restrictions are a disingenuous attempt to undermine an otherwise democratic project of expanding the franchise; they are rather a sincere attempt to solve a real problem. Furthermore, we should not break our arms patting ourselves on the back, since the problem of meaningful political participation is one that we have not even come close to solving in twenty-first-century democracies.

If the civic republicans cannot be so easily understood as prioritizing the expansion of citizenship, Hegel can also not be so easily understood as arguing for its restriction; what restrictions there are in Hegel are designed to make such participation meaningful.Footnote ²⁹ In fact, Hegel had a long-running interest in promoting political participation by the citizenry, beginning with his early essay on the German Constitution (1798–1802), in which he extols the virtue of the Staatsbürger (citizen) through his 1821 Philosophy of Right all the way to the essay On the English Reform Bill published in the final year of his life (1831).Footnote ³⁰ We will have the most to say about the Philosophy of Right, particularly because that is the text upon which most of those who share Patten’s judgment on this point would rest their case. But it is worth delving into the German Constitution because it highlights a connection between restriction and participation that we see continued in modified form in the Philosophy of Right.

The German Constitution essay begins with the flat claim that “Germany is no longer a state” and attempts to give an explanation of why that is so, and to understand what it now is and what it could be. Most important for our purposes is the discussion of monarchy, since that is usually taken to be an essentially anti-democratic form of government. For this reason, advocacy of a monarchy is often taken to be a move to restrict political participation. But Hegel says exactly the opposite:

That Hegel is thinking this even about states such as Prussia or his native Württemberg which were much smaller than the united Germany of 1871 shows the thickness of interaction he expects for meaningful political participation.Footnote ³¹ The monarch, in securing the country and eliminating civil war, makes possible meaningful political participation by citizens within subsidiary bodies (what Hegel will later call “corporations”). We couldn’t even possibly all participate in decision-making at the highest level of the state, Hegel thinks, but securing sovereignty at that level makes possible participation where it is possible.

Here it is crucial to remember that in the eighteenth century, monarchy meant much more than rule by a prince; rather, it meant rule by a prince balanced by a system of orders and estates (including the nobility, the clergy, towns, and other corporations such as universities and monasteries). Montesquieu’s discussion can be taken as representative here: “Intermediate, subordinate, and dependent powers constitute the nature of monarchical government, that is, of the government in which one alone governs by fundamental laws” (SL II.4). Hegel is arguing that such a monarchy makes the political participation of the citizen possible by securing sovereignty and thus creating a space for real and effective decision-making at more local levels.Footnote ³² The contrast here is with what Hegel calls the “machine state,” which could take various forms – a monarchy that attempted to stamp out all local centers of power would be one form, but so would a pure democracy in which voting by atomized individuals was the only form of political participation.

We get a very similar combination of restriction and participation in Hegel’s most systematic presentation of his political thought in his Philosophy of Right. Hegel is quite skeptical of direct democracy or the value of voting as form of political participation:

No doubt any resident of a twenty-first-century democracy is all too familiar with the phenomena described here. But except for a few political philosophers, we inhabit a worldview in which there is no alternative to such mass elections and these consequences are necessary evils.Footnote ³³ Hegel and the civic republicans, however, inhabit a worldview in which the possibility space for constitutional arrangements is much larger than is our own, and in which these evils might be avoided. In general, we today are on the other side of a revolution in political thought which accepted representation as a substitute for participation, and representation is much broader in our democracies than it is in Hegel’s proposed state. But Hegel remains attached to a rich notion of participation and thus remains committed to the civic republican project of trying to determine the conditions under which such participation might be realized.

Hegel certainly thought that the average resident of a territory was not likely to have determinate insights into large questions such as the proper form of the constitution (e.g., PR§272 R & 317), so it can be hard for us to see that Hegel is actually quite optimistic about the potential for ordinary citizens to participate in more local elections and processes.Footnote ³⁴ And, interestingly, he is optimistic precisely because of one of the distinctively modern features of civil society, namely, the way in which the market economy organizes itself into sectors and corporations and thus already brings people together around issues of common concern. Some of Hegel’s thoughts on this connection are worth quoting at length:

That is, the chamber of the estates assembly which is to represent the estate of trade and industry is composed of deputies who are elected through the towns, workshops, and industries in which they live and work. Hegel thinks of those elections as extensions of the intense social life characteristic of these settings rather than as an infrequent, independent, and short-lived event. On the one hand, this explains why Hegel does not feel the need to add a property qualification for citizenship. On the other hand, it means that persons such as day laborers who are not integrated into these social networks are thus also not able to participate in the political process.Footnote ³⁵

The grounds for Hegel’s view are something that republican historiographers filed under the heading “humanist sociology” (Baron) or the “sociology of liberty” (Pocock, Reference Pocock1975, p. 91), namely, that Hegel understands citizenship through the lens of social differentiation rather than through the lens of individual natural rights:

In sum, mass democracy requires that we first render citizens as abstract individuals, stripping them of the social relations and particular investments that make them living individuals in the first place. But then the specific character of neither individuals nor society is represented by the political state, which is why Hegel refers to such a political system as a “machine state.” But the contrasting concreteness of Hegel’s state also entails that differences in social status are represented in the political system as well.

For Hegel, political participation is a hard problem that requires, first of all, taking people as they are and must be, namely, as leading particular ways of life that nonetheless coalesce around shared forms of work and communal living. The empirical diversity here is not a blooming, buzzing confusion but rather conceptually tractable and furthermore self-organizing. The state and the political theorist do not have to design these corporate institutions from scratch; they just need to recognize their value and existence. But this is a step in the civic republican direction of trying to conceptualize the citizen as a political animal and not merely as a rights-bearing individual. For all of these reasons, it is wrong to think of Hegel as arguing for a restriction of political participation; rather, he is arguing for an expansion of meaningful political participation in comparison with the options as he sees them.

Apropos of historical context, there is one more feature of Hegel’s thought on this point that is recognizably civic republican in its historical sense. Pocock has emphasized the way in which the original Florentine republicans were facing a time in which the demands for and of political participation were not matched by conceptual developments to enable that participation to be guided by knowledge. Machiavelli and the other Florentine writers felt called to conceptual innovation in order to match the historical innovations that they were experiencing. As Pocock puts it:

The same is true of Hegel’s time, which we discussed briefly in the introduction. Hegel was in a position relevantly similar to Machiavelli and the classical republicans in writing for political life facing an uncertain future and unable to make use of either past customs or even political experience to navigate the shifting waters. Partially as a result, Hegel is more interested in the design of political institutions than he is the content of particular laws, as he attempts to set out a political system that could manage change rather than conserve an ancient and natural law.

And yet, this play of contingent forces meant that political institutions might come to have different and even inverse functions once the background context changed due to historical events, which is the major theme of Hegel’s running commentary on the events of his native Würrtemberg in 1817–1818 (which had shifted from being a duchy within the Holy Roman Empire to an independent Kingdom in the German Confederation) as well as his late (1831) essay On the English Reform Bill.Footnote ³⁶

3.3 The Role of the Militia

In addition to the two differences noted by Patten – the first real but minimal, the second merely apparent – we must add a further substantial difference between Hegel and civic republicanism, which is the role of the citizen militia in creating the polity. This plays a no role in Hegel, whereas central to the civic republican vision is “the possession of arms as necessary to political personality” (Pocock, Reference Pocock1975, p. 386). There are two issues here. The first is the question of a citizen militia as opposed to a professional, standing army. The second is the specific function of bearing arms vis-à-vis the capacity of citizenship.

To begin with the first issue, Hegel is quite realistic about the presence of war in international relations and even thinks that war can play a specific positive role in the constitution and maintenance of sovereignty. Like Machiavelli, Hegel thinks of states as individuals who are necessarily in conflict with other individuals (PR§§321-4). But despite arguing that the defense of the state is a universal duty, he nonetheless argues that the size and complexity of modern states have made a standing army a necessity; no modern state can defend itself by militia (PR§326 R), much less by mercenaries (which was the relevant alternative for Machiavelli’s Florence and for many German states up through the time of the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century). And Hegel thinks that the estate of professional soldiers is precisely not a civil estate: It “does not have the aim of acquisition” but is “the estate of honor, that lives in the pure being recognized of estimation (Meinung) – not in property and right” (JR 272). Rather than emphasizing its connection to citizenship, he emphasizes its difference.

To take up the second issue, Hegel also identifies a social-psychological role for bearing arms; but it is rather different from and even opposed to the function of bearing arms which the civic republicans have identified. For the civic republicans, bearing arms was a way of identifying oneself as a responsible citizen who was therefore capable and deserving of a share in collective self-government. As the English republicans such as James Harrington thought about the issue, it was further connected to the possession of property. Citizens with property were fighting also for their own when they fought for their country, and by fighting for their country showed themselves to be worthy of possessing real property on a long-term, even hereditary, basis. But for Hegel, the importance of war is facing death on behalf of the distinctive nature of one’s country, and thus the recognition that each citizen is invested in greater and more fundamental principles than their own property or social status (PR§324). To put it somewhat metaphorically, for the civic republicans to bear arms was to solidify one’s social standing and possession of property; for Hegel war dissolves the significance of both that standing and that possession. For this very reason Hegel emphasizes that the rationality of such sacrifice requires that one think of the state as something different and more important than mere civil society. Hegel does not think that military sacrifice is rational if “its ultimate end is seen merely as the security of the life and property of individuals. For this security cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of what is supposed to be secured – on the contrary” (PR§324 R). Thus, the characteristic moral psychology of the soldiering estate is valor (Tapferkeit) as a “formal virtue, because it is the highest abstraction of freedom from all particular ends, possessions, pleasure, and life … ” (PR§327). Hegel does think that the soldiering life has an important value and is a form of free life, but that it is a limit case of such freedom. And in relation to the civic republican conception, his description of the moral psychology of the soldier is striking: “total obedience and renunciation of his own opinion and reasoning, and hence absence of his own mind, along with the most intense and comprehensive presence of mind and decisiveness at a given moment” (PR§328).Footnote ³⁷ To put it mildly, such a disposition is hardly ideal in a candidate for participation in collective self-government.

Having canvassed some potential divergences of Hegel’s thought from the mainstream of civic republicanism, we now turn to features for which there is more obvious similarity.

3.4 A Non-Religious Source of Freedom

What Patten means by this is quite narrow. As he explains, his proposal to use the term “civic humanist” to describe Hegel

As he explains a bit later on, the crucial thing that he wants to avoid is God playing “a pivotal role in the warranting narrative” (Patten, Reference Patten2002, p. 41). He explicitly allows that Hegel makes room for the possibility that God himself achieves freedom through modern ethical life, that a citizen might think of their duties not only as rational in themselves but also as contributing to the historical project of actualizing the religious community, and even that the practices of ethical life might make possible forms of religious awareness that we covered under the category of Absolute Spirit earlier in this section. But he wants to insist that the argument for these forms of ethical life – the most important of which are property and contract, on his view – makes no appeal to God or anything beyond the conditions of free human subjectivity.

This restriction is important to understand largely so that we can set this point aside without generating misunderstanding. Patten’s point is primarily opposed to philosophical reconstructions of the argumentative structure of Hegel’s political thought which make features of God into premises in the argument, and not to the religious significance of that thought. This is important because religion plays a significant role the history of civic humanism. Dickey has shown with respect to eighteenth-century Germany and Pocock with respect to sixteenth-century Florence as well as seventeenth-century England the extent to which certain eschatological themes provided fertile ground for the growth of republican ideas. As Pocock puts it, the “republic as millennium” weaves in and out of civic republican discourse, and apocalyptic language can interact with secularism in complicated ways (Pocock, Reference Pocock1975, p. 403). And Dickey has shown that Hegel writes against the background of a German context in which writers such as Christian Garve “tended to place the language of civic humanism in the service of a futurist program of religious recollectivization rather than a presentist defense of the status quo” (Dickey, Reference Dickey1989, p. 228). This allowed German writers including Hegel to integrate the Aristotelian understanding of man as a political animal which animated Machiavelli and the Florentine writers within the soteriological framework provided by protestant Christianity. Dickey’s patient reconstruction of Hegel’s context and early writings show that religion played a role that would violate even Patten’s very narrow stricture, but this is a complicated issue that we will put to the side.Footnote ³⁸ What we cannot put to the side and must take up in the next section is Patten’s view that the central norms of Hegel’s civic humanism – the premises in the argument that substitute for religious claims – are property and contract. This gives Patten an instrumental and liberal view of civic participation that is both incompatible with civic humanism and not Hegel’s view.

3.5 Full Freedom as Possible Only in the State

Here we come to the heart of the issue. As Patten nicely puts it, for Hegel,

Specifically, one helps to develop and preserve the recognition of property and contract rights, which are the essential conditions of freedom. And they are conditions of freedom in a full sense that involves freedom from the authority of desire because they are determined by pure reason alone.

There is a fundamental problem with Patten’s view both as an interpretation of Hegel and as a civic republican interpretation of Hegel, which is that it involves a de-socialization of the citizen and the conception of civic activities. In part we can see this already in the tension between Patten holding that Hegel thinks that we can achieve rational freedom only in the state but also holding that Hegel wants to restrict political participation. To hold both views, as Patten does, is to hold that most of what we are doing in the state is not political, or not participatory. The political relation then reemerges within the individual citizen, in the relation between their true self (reason) and external forces (desire). The root of the problem is the desocialization of the citizen to being a bearer of property and contract rights. This desocialization makes the view essentially liberal and Kantian, not civic republican and Hegelian, so it is worth parsing in some detail. Both the focus on property and contract, and the identification of desire as a form of authority, pull the interpretation in the Kantian and liberal direction as opposed to the civic republican and Hegelian.

To begin with the separation between desire and reason, this is, of course, the centerpiece of Kant’s moral psychology. For Kant, to act morally is to act from the motivation of pure reason alone, independent of and frequently opposed to one’s natural desires. In a two-step process, Patten attributes this moral psychology to Hegel and then assimilates it to civic republican concerns about domination.

The important move that is supposed to bring this within the civic republican orbit is the move to see an internal principle – our desires and inclinations – as exercising an authority over us that is objectionable for the same reason as is the authority of other people over us. It is a kind of domination – an internal domination – in which what is truly us (our reason) is dominated by something that is not truly us (our desires). There are two basic problems with this: The moral psychology is not Hegel’s, and the concern about the authority of reason over desires is very far from the concerns of civil republicanism in any historical sense. It is right that Hegel contrasts freedom and authority, but this is not understood in Kantian or Platonic terms – rather in the social terms that make it a form of civic republicanism.

To begin with the first problem (the moral psychology), Patten’s extension of this notion of domination requires attributing to Hegel a strongly Kantian view according to which reason is the true self and desires an external force trying to dominate us. But this is not well supported by the texts which Patten himself cites. Furthermore, the Platonism of Kant’s own view is grounded in an interpretation of reason as spontaneous as opposed to desire as a natural cause to which our will is subject, and this understanding of reason and desire is absent from Hegel’s thought. In fact, it is remarkable the extent to which Hegel’s own views about morality make essentially no reference to the difference between desire and reason and certainly never employ the language of the higher or lower faculties of desire as does Kant (KpV 5:22-25). Patten tries to marry a republican view to a Kantian moral psychology in order to find the authority relation within and without. But this project is doomed to failure, and in any event is not Hegel’s.Footnote ³⁹ In fact, Hegel holds that desire in the relevant, contrasted sense is a motivation which is expelled from the will by reason through the process of decision, not one that antecedently occupies a status outside the true agent (Yeomans, Reference Yeomans2015, pp. 29–32).

The important point to see is that Patten has transposed the social relationship between co-citizens into an intrapersonal relationship of hierarchy between reason and desire. This transposition is then connected to the following topic of property and contract, because Patten’s Hegel thinks that even when one abstracts away from all desires one still finds in pure reason alone a commitment to freedom, and thus a commitment to property and contract as conditions of the possibility of freedom, and thus to the state as the condition of property and contract. In acting as a citizen to uphold property and contract rights, I thus act from pure reason alone and thus manifest my true and authentic self in my political participation.

Property and contract are, of course, the central rights of the liberal tradition. As Patten reconstructs Hegel’s view, property and contract are the essential norms that make modern freedom possible, and so any citizen who is committed to such freedom is committed to these norms and to whatever makes them possible. It is rational to participate in the state because it is the sufficient condition for the stabilization of that institutional structure which is itself required to secure property and contract rights, and thus individual freedom (Patten, Reference Patten2002, pp. 186–187). On his account the problem with property and contract is that they are self-undermining in the absence of a self-sufficient institutional structure for their preservation, and the institutions of ethical life (including the state) are that structure (Patten, Reference Patten2002, pp. 182–185). Of course, this is not very far removed from Locke’s account. The basis for the value of civic life is still the fostering and protection of individual freedom, and it is hard to see civic participation as anything but an instrumental good which aims to realize the more fundamental value of individual freedom secured by property and contract rights. As Pocock notes, “to define the individual in terms of his rights and his duties, his property and his obligations, is still not enough to make him an active citizen or a political animal” (Pocock, Reference Pocock1975, p. 335). Furthermore, it is difficult to make sense of how a civic republican view could be built around contract rights, given the extensive worries about the corrupting effect of commerce on virtue that pervade the civic republican literature (which we will see in the following section). Finally, it is essential to Hegel no less than Machiavelli that the citizen is a citizen of Florence or Württemberg or some other specific place with its own distinctive cultures and traditions. Property and contract, in contrast, are what all states have in common.

But to turn this point from criticism to a more accurate presentation of Hegel’s view, we can briefly recall some of the features of Hegel’s view of property already presented in the previous two sections. First, note the way in which property and contract are presented by Hegel not as “natural rights” in the way that a liberal would understand them, but rather as “abstract right.” They are destined to be replaced by concepts which capture their significance in the concrete circumstances of our collective economic life, and those concepts are resources and the corporations. Second, we saw in the previous section the way that the organized form of economic life – the corporations – replaced the spot contracts associated with day laboring and craft production as the fundamental form of economic agreement. It is essential to the economic viability of what we now call firms or enterprises that they are not contractual. They are, instead, open-ended in two senses: content and time. They are contentfully open-ended in the sense that the tasks to be accomplished by the employee must be unspecified (or at least under-specified) in advance in order for management to be able to utilize labor power efficiently. And they are temporally open-ended in the sense that they are agreements to work until further notice. This is connected to the shift from “property” to “resources.” Whereas property is a piece of the spatiotemporal world which the subject dominates and can use according to their whim, resources are tied to productive networks and secure the long-term maintenance of families and corporations. The term translated as “resources” is Vermögen, which can also sometimes be translated as “capital.” For example, a piece of fixed capital such as a machine in a factory is primarily a resource for production. It is, of course, the property of the firm that owns it – but not of the shareholders who own the firm, who cannot exchange their shares for any particular piece of property owned by the firm. So though it is not false, on Hegel’s view, to call that machine a piece of property, its value and the rights and duties associated with it are not primarily derived from the category of property but rather that of resources.Footnote ⁴⁰

The important thing here is something we saw in the previous section: for Hegel as for the labor republicans and Marx as well, there is an essentially communal aspect to our economic lives which is not captured by the liberal categories of property and contract and which is essential to understanding how there could be a political valence and extension to that economic life. And in a move that is reminiscent of some of the labor republicans which we saw in the previous section, Hegel also thinks of the political functions of these corporations as educative, i.e., as a means by which more citizens can be made more capable of political participation. Kenneth Westphal has argued that Hegel’s thinking here is a response to Adam Smith’s worry that the working class is not in a good position to understand their own interests, and has emphasized the point that Hegel’s legislative assembly is itself more of an educative body than a law-making body (Westphal, Reference Westphal2022, p. 251). This is an extension of Westphal’s emphasis on the role of public reason, which follows on an extensive research program into Hegel’s investigations into the possibility of rational argument in non-formal domains. This is connected with the point we made earlier, namely, that political participation is a hard problem because political judgment in real time under new circumstances is very difficult. In this respect Hegel is close to the Machiavellian insight that innovative republics make their own morality. There is no possibility of derivation of actions from a set of basic principles, nor relying on past custom. And again, this is a feature of Hegel’s time – Koselleck’s Sattelzeit – which is matched by that of Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment.

But this also means that the communal activities of the modern state – paradigmatically in its corporations – are an open space for the renegotiation of social norms and political expectations. In our workplaces as well as in our local communities, participation matters because there are real options and the leadership of individuals as well as the interests of groups can make an effective difference in the decisions that are made. These are forms of political participation which are relevantly similar to that of citizens in sixteenth-century Florence or Venice. And in the bicameral estates assembly, we get forms of participation which are relevantly similar to the parliamentary participation advocated by English civic republicans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

3.6 Freedom as a Fragile Achievement

In this last of Patten’s points, we get one of the deepest ways in which Hegel is a civic republican. As Patten puts it, both Hegel and civic republicans believe that

This is certainly a civic republican theme, and the hostile forces mentioned are certainly of concern to traditional civic republicans. But at the same time, the forces mentioned are a small subset of those that have concerned republicans. Furthermore, Patten has modified them by the distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding motives which plays a far more prominent role in contemporary ethics than it does in civic republicanism.Footnote ⁴¹ Republicans have also worried about the defense of the republic against other states as well as the danger that political institutions will cease to be appropriate for the society for which they are the form of self-government. Even more generally, they worried about the presence of the republic in historical time, which brought with it contingent and particular events to threaten even well-structured republics. And we see the breadth of these sorts of worries in Hegel’s own statement of the theme:

In what follows first we will take up the threat of historicity as such to the durability of the state, then the threat of particularity as such, and then finally turn to commerce and corruption as principles of self-interest which threaten the republic. As it turns out, Hegel is not much worried about the threat of individualism, so long as we do not think of the state as existing for the protection of property and contract rights (contra Patten). But he does think that larger historical changes make it almost inevitable that the self-governing state which he identifies as the German polity will eventually make way for another political form.

First, the threat of historicity. Hegel takes this threat to be real, unavoidable, and insurmountable. In fact, when one looks at his lectures on world history, one sees him making a distinction between historical and ahistorical states that is in many ways parallel to the way in which Florentine civic republicans contrasted Florence – which had fallen into history – with Venice – the “most serene republic” which somehow escaped it. For Hegel, China and India play the role of Venice, whereas Persia and Greece play the role of Florence.Footnote ⁴² We will see what is different about the two groups of states shortly, but the important point here is that Hegel sees Persia and Greece as having played a distinctive and transformative role in world history and, as a result, as having vanished from the set of real possibilities once they transformed the conditions which gave rise to them. The question is, in which group do Hegel’s German states belong? There is every reason to think that they belong with Persia and Greece rather than China and India.

To begin with, the state is subject to war and potential domination by other states in the international arena. As Hegel thinks about the state, it has a formal right to be recognized as sovereign, but whether it is actually sovereign depends both on that recognition, and on having a form of government which is appropriate to its society – both of which are historically contingent facts (PR§331). This is a deeply republican thought which connects internal structure to external relations, and internal political structure to internal social structure. As we noted in our Introduction, the flux in the size, nature, and even existence of German states was a constant reference point for Hegel’s political thought throughout his career. We see this represented in the passage from PR§340 just quoted, which is the paragraph that ends by quoting Schiller: “world history [is] the world’s court of judgment.” And as Montesquieu writes immediately after discussing the Germanic origins of the English state, “Since all human things have an end, the state of which we are speaking will lose its liberty; it will perish. Rome, Lacedeaemonia, and Carthage have surely perished” (SL XI.6). Hegel’s German states have very much fallen into history.

Second, we turn to the threat of particularity as such, which is a very prominent theme in both Hegel and the civic republicans. Here Hegel has perhaps his most distinctive contribution to make, simply because he recognizes that particularity is a logical role rather than a specific historical phenomenon.Footnote ⁴³ Particularity can take different forms – and does not primarily take the form of self-regarding motivations. In China and India, Hegel thinks particularity is natural: family roles and caste differences, respectively. In Persia particularity takes the form of different nations within the empire with their own religious, legal, and ethnic characters. For the Greeks there is even more heterogeneity in culture and laws, resulting in wars between Greek city-states and also with the Persian Empire (with whom some Greek city-states were sometimes allied). Importantly, none of these forms of particularity are self-regarding forms of motivation, nor are they Kantian desires understood as natural causes. And as we have just seen, Hegel is adamant that “states function as particular entities in their mutual relations” (PR§340), so we should not lose focus on the fact that the state may be universal with respect to its citizens and yet particular with respect to other states.

And the form of particularity matters, because the conflicts that they bring differ. Hegel thinks that the conflicts that arise naturally from the Chinese (patriarchal) and Indian (caste) forms of particularity are real but more easily controlled than the conflicts that come from the Persian and Greek forms of particularity, which are national and religious and thus have to do with full-fledged forms of life. And Hegel thinks that this latter form of particularity is even more prevalent in his contemporary Germany:

The conflicts that the Hegelian state confronts are already ones that have been subjected to reflection, rational justification, and abstraction. They are not the natural principles of family or caste nor the pressing and potentially alienating external forces of natural desire. The conflicts which the state must manage are conflicts of conceptions of the good life but also of the nature of legitimate political authority itself. In Hegel’s own time this primarily took the form of disputes between advocates of the limited state (Rechtsstaat), of the social welfare state (Sozialstaat), and of the restoration of feudal privileges.

Finally, we turn to economics – to the corruption that commerce was thought to bring with it, most centrally by the Anglo-American civic republicans. Here we have the paradox that Hegel thinks that this form of particularity can largely be controlled. Germanic states will not live forever, but the economy won’t be what kills them.

This theme in civic republicanism has been traced beautifully by Pocock as he narrated the travels of civic republican ideas from fifteenth-century Florence to seventeenth-century England to eighteenth-century Britain and America. The journey more or less follows the three stages we have taken in this section and is easiest to see by focusing on the terms that are seen as the opposite of virtue. For civic republicans, virtue is both a political function and a moral quality; one’s status as participating in collective self-government and the force of personality required to do so. Designing institutions which could support both aspects of virtue required attention to those features which tended to undermine them. In the Florentine writers, particularly Machiavelli, the term for these undermining features was fortuna, i.e., the luck and fortune of contingent events as they impinged on a republic in historical time. This then gave way to concern about specific features of modernity which constituted corruption, but in a form that need not be economic. For example, for post-1675 neo-Harringtonian republicans in England, one of the primary forms of corruption was the presence of royal officeholders in the parliament, on the theory that they owed their allegiance to the crown and were thus not properly independent.Footnote ⁴⁴ And then finally by the eighteenth century the most pressing form of corruption was identified to be commerce. The political possibilities of a society founded on the distorting mirrors of credit and paper money and generating luxuries beyond measure seemed a shadow of those of a stable agrarian society founded on heritable, landed property.

As we saw in the previous section, Hegel is certainly not naïve when it comes to the modern economy. Precisely because of the free play of particularity and interests, he says that it “affords a spectacle of extravagance and misery as well as of the physical and ethical corruption common to both” (PR§185). More specifically, in On the English Reform Bill he attacks the English constitution for a level of bribery and corruption that has made public office into private property (ERB 236-7). And yet he thinks that modern states of the sort which he recommends have overcome this difficulty: “the principle of modern states has enormous strength and depth, because it allows the principle of subjectivity to attain fulfillment in the self-sufficient extreme of personal particularity, while at the same time, bringing it back to substantial unity, and to preserving this unity, in the principle of subjectivity itself” (PR§260).

The way that it does so (the corporations and the regulatory state) is connected to one axis of the development of civic republicanism which is noted by Pocock, namely, the successive development of a conceptual scheme for representing the contingent historicity that seemed to threaten virtue and the self-governing republic. Both the sixteenth-century Florentines and the eighteenth-century English saw civic virtue threatened by “a chaos of appetites, productive of dependence and loss of personal autonomy, flourishing in a world of rapid and irrational change,” but the Florentines could define this only negatively as an incomprehensible fortuna whereas the English could give it positively recognizable economic and political forms. And yet for the English, these forms “lacked an ethical content to the point where the history they rendered concrete remained essentially a movement away from virtue” (Pocock, Reference Pocock1975, p. 486). Nostalgic calls for heroic renewal rather than concrete political proposals thus characterized the projects of these English civic republicans, particularly as England became Britain, a world colonial and commercial power. Hegel represents a further development of this line of reasoning in the sense that his connection of political and economic structure, and discovery of a role for political participation within the latter, provides both a further conceptualization of this external force confronting civic virtue and one which gives it an ethical content. In this further development of civic republicanism, there is an opportunity to harness historical events instead of resisting or at best responding to them.

Hegel’s entry into this theme is through Montesquieu, who has a much more positive interpretation of the English system than even the English civic republicans (SL XI.6 & XIX.26). As Pocock puts it, Montesquieu does not argue “that a wisdom not grounded in commerce is needed to prevent the fantasies of speculation from corrupting society. He is saying that a free and fortunate society can absorb a great deal of false consciousness without suffering serious harm, and may use it in order to expand” (Pocock, Reference Pocock1975, p. 491). Hegel thinks this in an even broader sense than Montesquieu: He thinks that the right sort of political structure can allow the smoke-and-mirrors of such a commercial society to play a role in expanding the particularistic domain of human freedom, while also making use of its implicit and inherent organization to expand freedom’s substantial domain.

Because a self-governing republic is a fragile and likely temporary achievement, much thought must be given to the design of institutions which can make the republic as robust and long-lasting as possible.Footnote ⁴⁵ This leads us to the final and in many respects most important civic republican theme in Hegel’s political thought, which is his advocacy of a mixed constitution.

3.7 The Mixed Constitution

Finally, an essential connection between Hegel and civic republicanism is left out of account by Patten, and this is their shared advocacy of a mixed constitution. Recall from Section 1 that this is also one of the three central features of neo-republicanism as formulated by Philip Pettit (Pettit, Reference Pettit2012, p. 5). Here we add to the discussion of §1.2 by considering the mixed constitution in the civic republican, rather than neo-republican tradition. In the civic republican tradition this has primarily taken the form of different ways of incorporating the one, the few, and the many into the political process. Sometimes this schema was understood in a strictly quantitative way, but more often a qualitative distinction was overlaid. It is to be contrasted with single-system constitutions in which only one of the three was represented; in the ancient taxonomy these were the monarchy of the one, the aristocracy of the few, and the democracy of the many.

This is a theme of civic republicanism both of the Florentine and the English varieties. In many respects the prototypical Florentine civic republican mixed constitution was one in which a large subset of citizens voted on magistrates who received life terms and otherwise carried out the business of government among themselves and in relation to a chief executive: This is the system which combines the Consiglio Grande (the many), the Signoria (the few), and the Gonfaloniere (the one). As Pocock reconstructs Guicciardini’s project of tweaking these institutions, it is that of attempting to design the institutions of a genuinely public authority – and the question was what kind of citizenry and what mix of responsibilities of the one, few, and many could best preserve the Florentine tradition of self-government. Guicciardini is not attempting to model popular sovereignty but rather to find a way to depersonalize political power (Pocock, Reference Pocock1975, pp. 126–132).

In the English tradition, this paradigmatically took the form of the conception of a king-in-parliament, or the king (the one), the lords (the few), and the commons (the many).Footnote ⁴⁶ The English variant of the mixed constitution also rested on a conception of landed property that connected with the Machiavellian militaristic aspects of the vivere civile which we have already seen. As Pocock puts it, “the function of free proprietorship became the liberation of arms, and consequently of the personality, for free public action and civic virtue” (Pocock, Reference Pocock1975, p. 386). This characteristic function of the lords was thus also tied to the prevention of the establishment of a standing army, which was taken to be a fundamental challenge to republican liberty.

Following Montesquieu, Hegel originally had a great deal of admiration for the English system. But by his late writing on the English Reform Bill, he comes to think that its specifically political form has outlived its connection to social structures, particularly in rural areas, which had changed dramatically (ERB 235 & 246-8). Hegel’s mixed constitution is a constitutional monarchy, and it is worth noting that many at the turn of the nineteenth century saw quite clearly how mixed it was – both in the sense that the constitutional structure made this quite different from an absolute monarchy and also provided a different political dynamic than the conflicts within more traditional monarchies between the nobility and the monarch.Footnote ⁴⁷ Hegel characterizes the constitutional monarchy as a mixed constitution in explicit contrast to the ancient, pure taxonomy of constitutions, each corresponding to the one, the few or the many:

To apply the one-few-many distinction to Hegel’s institutional design, we have one monarch (PR§279), few civil servants, and many members of the estates assembly (PR§301). All work together in the process of legislation, but in an unexpected way: The bureaucracy proposes the legislation, the estates assembly advises on modifications and provides feedback on subsequent enforcement, and the monarch makes it law by endorsing it. Broadly speaking, then, we can think of Hegel’s state as including monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements within one mixed constitution. Hegel’s mixed constitution is thus fundamentally a system of mediation, in which each of the basic groupings of the citizenry exercises a distinctive role in the process of self-government, paradigmatically in the relation between the estates assembly and both the prince and the government bureaucracy (PR§302 & 312).Footnote ⁴⁸ It is for this reason that Hegel rejects a strict separation of powers in his interpretation of Montesquieu – his point is that we need cooperation rather than antagonism between the branches of government (PR§272 R). But in both of these cases, the project is similar to Guicciardini’s and has a recognizably Aristotelian provenance: The point of the design is to avoid the domination of some groups by others, i.e., the identification of power with any one group at which point it becomes private rather than public. Hegel’s institutional design is thus, as we have seen, essentially a way of giving each of the effective groups in society a role in government.

With respect to the English model, Hegel also saw a distinctive role for a chamber of the estates whose membership was determined by the hereditary possession of landed property (PR§306) in contrast to the other house, the house of commerce (Stand des Gewerbes), which represented the “mobile and variable element [bewegliche und veränderliche Elemente] of civil society” (PR§310).Footnote ⁴⁹ For Hegel, this is very much influenced by Montesquieu’s advocacy of a balanced constitution as a means toward moderate government.

In conclusion, the only fundamental disagreement between Hegel and the mainstream of civic republicanism concerns the role of the militia vis-à-vis the standing army. In contrast, many features of Hegel’s political thought are illuminated by seeing him as continuing the civic republican tradition.