1 Geist as Self-Conscious Life Manifesting Itself

It is an understatement to say that many people disagree about what Hegel was saying in his philosophy, but there is at least by and large agreement that Hegel’s philosophy develops an account of Geist and its various complications in thought, art, religion, and in history. Fine, but people also disagree about what Hegel means by Geist. (E.g., for Anglophones, is Geist “mind” or “spirit”?)

I am proposing that we adopt another, although still controversial choice, and use Hegel’s own synonym for Geist: “self-conscious life.” To take one example among several, in his Aesthetics, in distinguishing “soul” from “spirit,” Hegel says: “spirit is the being-for-itself of conscious and self-conscious life with all the feelings, ideas, and aims of this conscious existent.”Footnote ⁴ If in fact one substitutes “self-conscious life” for Geist in almost all of its occurrences in Hegel’s texts (except for one minor exception), it helps to throw much of what Hegel says into clearer light.Footnote ⁵ Part of the case for doing that will be, I hope, spelled out further in this piece, although a longer piece would be required to really make the case.

One of Hegel’s debts to Kant lay in his developing what he took to be Kant’s original insight about the necessity of self-consciousness to understanding human subjectivity and agency,Footnote ⁶ and from Kant’s practical philosophy, Hegel took over the idea of self-consciousness as self-determination but not, as Kant had done, as self-legislation. As Thomas Khurana has argued, the decisive question for Kant with regard to this kind of form-giving should be seen as not simply having to do whether a maxim is or could be a universal law – the purely legislative model of self-determination – but whether we can will it to become universal law, that is, by way of “a form of practical knowledge that knows something to be good by virtue of willing it in a particular manner.”Footnote ⁷ In light of that, Hegel’s move was to see that if life itself were to be conceived as self-organizing, it would be the mediating term between our organic nature (of the “soul” in which the bodily as bodily is taken up) and the self-conscious form we give ourselves in our practical lives. Instead of self-legislation alone, Khurana argues, Hegel turned to “self-constitution” (or Selbsthervorbringung, a kind of bringing forth of oneself) as the proper explication of “giving form to oneself.”Footnote ⁸

Crucially, Hegel also describes his account of Geist as existing in a web, in which items are linked to each other such that one comprehends each item only when one also comprehends the other elements of the web with which those items are linked. Moreover, some places in the web have a particular status. As Geist develops itself and sharpens its thoughts, in Hegel’s metaphor Geist ties various knots in the strands of the web that serve to hold the web together.Footnote ⁹ These knots provide not simply provisory points for going further in the develop of one’s thoughts. They are firm positions in the weaving of the conceptual web that we can simply assume as we go further, with some being a little more firm and others being a little more provisory.

The web also characterizes Hegel’s conception of historical development, considered philosophically. As self-conscious life develops itself in history in its various institutional formations and its practices of self-reflection (in art, religion, and philosophy), it develops these kinds of knots that get taken forward in new developments. (Examples are those of the introduction of the moral and political concepts of rights, rule of law, representative institutions, and so on.) Hegel’s web is also developmental in its character. In the historical web, affairs can proceed in all kinds of directions, but key events – social, political, intellectual, natural catastrophes, technological, and so on – sometimes lead Geist, self-conscious life, into tying firmer knots in the threads that afterward become hard to move not because they are at the center of anything like a spider’s web but because they are hard, although not impossible, to untie. Taken as a whole, Geist, self-conscious life, just is this web that it spins for itself both historically and in thought. This is why Hegel says repeatedly that Geist is its own product. Geist is, he says, “something active, and activity is its essence; it is its own product, and is therefore its own beginning and its own end.”Footnote ¹⁰

On the Hegelian view, the subjectivity of self-conscious life involves most crucially things self-consciously mattering to agents, and that self-conscious agency is always “doubled”: Subjectivity is part of the Hegelian web in which the “I” that is a “We” is always, already in a concrete world of being-together and is itself there as a singular individual in this being-together. Such being-together involves what might antiseptically be called “norms” that are shared and constitutive of the agents, and in practical matters, the relation to others in such being-together is the relation of “Right” (the German Recht, meaning both “the law” and “right”).Footnote ¹¹

This leads to Hegel’s claim that “the determinateness of the spirit is therefore that of manifestation … so that it does not reveal something, but its determinateness and content is this revealing itself.”Footnote ¹² As reflectively and not just pre-reflectively aware of itself, self-conscious life has its form as its content, and its form is that of manifesting itself – showing itselfFootnote ¹³ – in its thoughts and actions. It is thus not the Kantian conception of seeing oneself as an instantiation of a general concept (or rule) nor that of bringing oneself under the rule.Footnote ¹⁴ Geist’s manifestation is more like the way in which a language as a whole shows itself in the individual speech acts of its speakers along with the way the individual speakers manifest the language in their speech acts. As Wittgenstein remarked: “In order to describe the phenomenon of language, one must describe a practice, not something that happens once, no matter of what kind.”Footnote ¹⁵ No wonder that Hegel says in the Phenomenology that language is the very existence of Geist:Footnote ¹⁶ Language as a practice is the “universal,” which shows itself in all the particular acts of speech (and writing), and the particular acts thereby form the “concrete universal.”

2 Ethical Life as Being-Together in the World as We Find It

The “norm” underlying the modern form of life is that of freedom, of having the authority to set one’s principles for action for oneself. In itself, that is abstract and is even worse if taken as a determinate guideline for action. It must be filled out in terms of what would be rationally required in terms of institutions and practices that would make its realizations sustainable and satisfactory.

Hegel thus introduces his baselines for modern “Right” with two baselines that by 1820 were not particularly controversial. First, he argued that modern individuals whose self-understanding involved a kind of absolute commitment to their own freedom would be logically compelled to orient themselves around something like the Lockean triad of abstract rights to life, liberty, and property as the relatively obvious normative necessities to any of those living within the modern baseline of freedom. Second, since even in the most minimal institutional actualization of such abstract rights, there would be problems of justice in cases of theft, or in even good faith confusions about ownership, a neutral judge to rule on such matters, and some neutral body to enforce the ruling would also be required. That would require people to be able to take on an impartial stance within themselves, and only such people could be properly authorized to speak for the whole. In turn, this would require a more complex self-relation than that of a rights-holder, namely, the moral standpoint as a way of individually binding one’s will to the laws so that one judges and acts to an important degree independently from one’s own interests but instead self-consciously from a universalizable sense of duty. For abstract rights to be real, moderns will need “a justice freed from subjective interest and subjective shape and from the contingency of power,”Footnote ²³ which is to be found in the moral worldview.

Both abstract right and morality follow out a logic of obligation expressed in terms of obeying laws. However, taken together they fail to provide any real direction to agents, and they fail to provide enough motivation to hold the being-together really together. For that to happen, the agents in this form of life must be able to say with confidence that it really does matter to them to respect abstract rights and that it matters that each holds himself to the moral law – that a life lived out in those terms would be a better life than one without it since without rights and moral obligations of this sort, one would not have a free life. Or as we might put it more abstractly, the “Right” as expressed in those two has to be supplemented by the “Good,” which in what Hegel calls Sittlichkeit, ethical life, there are a set of practices and institutions that make such rights and morality effective. Abstract right and morality must be folded into the practical knowledge in Sittlichkeit is such that one knows the rightful and the lawful only in terms of living within a set of institutions – by sharing a form with other agents – that make the manifestation of the principle of freedom into something concrete.Footnote ²⁴

Hegel is not, it should be clear, claiming we must replace rights and morality with “ethical life” (especially if “ethical life” is wrongly interpreted as simply “life within existing institutions no matter what they are” or “life within the institutions of my community just because it is my community.”). “Ethical life” must be ethical. It too answers, as does “Morality,” to the claims of reason. Hegel’s own metaphor nicely sums it up: “Right exists only as a branch of a whole, or as a climbing plant attached to a tree which has firm roots in and for itself.”Footnote ²⁵

Hegel calls Sittlichkeit the “living good,” which he identifies (at least with regard to the moderns) with freedom.Footnote ²⁶ Morality as distinct from ethical life is more of a rulebook conception of what to do; the rules are absolute and unchanging, and one must be trained to learn what they are and to acquire the right set of dispositions to obey them. Nonetheless, Abstract Right and Morality are, because they are abstract, lacking the causal power to effect much of anything. Taken apart from what matters to a life well lived, they are like a game that is hard to get anyone interested enough to play it. They acquire this power only when they become concrete in the lives of agents living and working within a background set of institutions. As actualizations of freedom, these practices give concrete shape to a conception of the best lives to lead, a concretely free life. Ethical life follows a logic of attraction, not of obligation. The living good, as Hegel says, “takes the place of the abstract good.”Footnote ²⁷ Without the reconciling aspects of ethical life as the unity of the right and the good, we have live in a slightly disjoined modern world in which logic is often at odds with life, the “cold command” of morality over “warmth of heart,” in a world of “objective existence and experience” such that “spiritual culture, the modern intellect, produces this opposition in man which makes him an amphibious animal, because he now has to live in two worlds which contradict one another.”Footnote ²⁸

Hegel identifies this form of life with social “substance” as the whole set of institutions, practices, customs, ethos, and the like that constitute that particular form of life, and this “substance [is] made concrete by subjectivity as infinite form,”Footnote ²⁹ that is, not merely an additive collection, say, of dispositions to act in terms of the institutions and rules in which one participates, but instead a mode of freedom itself, of having one’s actions be determined ultimately by oneself and not by something external to oneself – to be bei sich, as Hegel always characterizes freedom – so that the contingent features of one’s social life become reconfigured as belonging to the sphere of the normative unbounded by anything but itself. From the standpoint of mere substance, each might seem to be an independent deontic fact correlated with others – as a member, say, of the ideal kingdom of ends – but one can actually be this deontic fact only as a member of a form of life in which each are “moments,” essential points that are what they are only as members of the whole but nonetheless not reducible to nor exchangeable with other such “moments.”

1 From the Early Left-Hegelians toward Pragmatism

It is almost certain that Hegel did not intend to have the Hegelian tradition taking the shape it did. Almost immediately after his death, the Hegelian school split into different factions, each excluding the other, and each claiming to be taking the master’s thinking in the proper direction. As a joke, one of Hegel’s students, David Friedrich Strauss, said that Hegel’s school had split into the left- and the right-Hegelians (playing on the way the French revolutionary government split into Jacobins sitting on the left side of the assembly and Girondins and others on the right side.) However, the more conservative so-called right-Hegelians (in terms of religion and politics) rapidly defected from Hegelianism and left little mark immediately afterward (although they appeared again in the twentieth century, but still left little mark).Footnote ⁴⁵

The left-Hegelians, on the other hand, took things forward several steps and left a large mark. First among them was the charismatic and deeply metaphysically inclined Friedrich Wilhelm Carové, Hegel’s favorite student from his Heidelberg years and the person Hegel very much wanted to appoint as his assistant in Berlin. However, the Prussian government at the time, which was always convinced that there were liberals and subversives lurking in every crack and crevice ready to restart Jacobin rule at a moment’s notice, had suspicions about Carové and thus banned him from all teaching in Prussian territory (which, given the agreement with other German states, effectively barred him from all German universities). Carové was thereby diverted into a career as an independent writer and activist in the cause of Hegelian freedom, and on January 23, 1848, Carové and a few others founded the Nationalverein für Abschaffung der Sklaverei (National Association for the Abolition of Slavery).Footnote ⁴⁶ Carové quickly became the leading antislavery activist and writer in Germany, and in 1849, easily persuaded the Heidelberg faculty into awarding an honorary doctorate to the African-American ex-slave, author, and abolitionist activist, James Pennington, which was conferred at an elaborate ceremony at the university.Footnote ⁴⁷ Carové also became a leading anti-racist activist and even publicly published pieces arguing for the moral necessity of reparations for slaves once the moral necessity of emancipation had made itself into reality. The first great impact of the Hegelian movement was thus an antislavery and anti-racist campaign in Germany and Europe at large. (Together with Jacob Grimm, Carové tried without success to introduce strong antislavery language into the proposed German constitution of 1848.)

Carové was a deeply metaphysical left-Hegelian, but the most famous of the early left-Hegelians was, of course, Karl Marx and, a bit later, Friedrich Engels – even if their membership in the category of left-Hegelians is still open to dispute. Carové was to have his successors in Britain, especially in the form of the highly metaphysical idealist ethical systems proposed by T. H. Green and Bernard Bosanquet (although there was no direct influence on Green or Bosanquet from Carové, as far as I can tell). But here I shall pass over all of them, especially with regard to Marx and Engels, since their own post-Hegelian path has already been so well covered and would require a whole book to do justice to it.

The other notable left-Hegelian contemporaneous with Carové was Eduard Gans, to whom more attention should be drawn.Footnote ⁴⁸ Besides being one of Marx’s teachers and a friend and inspiration to Heinrich Heine, among his many contributions to left-Hegelian thought was his highlighting the problem of poverty, already an issue for Hegel himself, but Gans brought it to the very forefront of Hegelian philosophy. He also discarded Hegel’s rather moralistic ideas about “the rabble” in favor of a more pointed, newer sociological term, “the proletariat,” and he brought the idea of “wage slavery” into the Hegelian repertoire. In a rather prescient piece in 1836, Gans effectively redrew the headlines of Hegel’s philosophy of history in his observation that

Gans’ formulation was later adopted and tweaked by one of Gans’ students, Karl Marx, in the introductory paragraphs of the Communist Manifesto.Footnote ⁵⁰ The result was that Gans initiated two different traditions in political thought, jumping off from Hegel, one leading to Marx, the other to a form of social democracy (and thus finally to Dewey).

2 John Dewey’s Pragmatism as Naturalized Left-Hegelianism

To some, it will sound odd, but one of the major left-Hegelians of the twentieth century was John Dewey. It is not usual to treat Dewey as any kind of Hegelian, although that has recently begun to change.Footnote ⁵¹ Dewey himself acknowledged that he began as a Hegelian idealist of sorts but that he gradually drifted away from it and shifted into his naturalistic philosophy, which he variously identified as pragmatism, instrumentalism, experimentalism, empirical naturalism, cultural naturalism, and naturalistic humanism. (His early Hegelianism was more akin to the then-contemporary British absolute idealism, but that is another matter.) However, after 1915, Dewey had few kind words to say about either Kant or Hegel, especially after his rather savage treatment of them in his book of 1916, German Philosophy and Politics, written in the hothouse atmosphere of the First World War.Footnote ⁵² Nonetheless, there has been a remarkable shift in opinion about the extent or depth of Dewey’s Hegelianism. Alan Ryan, in his Reference Ryan1995 book on him, classified him rather offhandedly as a naturalized left-Hegelian, and more recently, James Good has made a more convincing case that Dewey remained a Hegelian of sorts, although he definitely ceased to be any kind of British idealist.Footnote ⁵³ (Good argues that this distinction between “Hegelian” and “British idealist” has been deeply conflated in the literature on Dewey.)Footnote ⁵⁴

In his late recollections of his development, Dewey notoriously mentioned that “acquaintance with Hegel has left a permanent deposit in my thinking,” and although he also said that what he calls Hegel’s formal “schematism” was to be thoroughly rejected, nonetheless, “in the content of his ideas there is often an extraordinary depth; in many of his analyses, taken out of their mechanical dialectical setting, an extraordinary acuteness. Were it possible for me to be a devotee of any system, I still should believe that there is greater richness and greater variety of insight in Hegel than in any other single systematic philosopher.”Footnote ⁵⁵ He also described his graduate school mentor at Johns Hopkins, the American Hegelian, George Sylvester Morris, as somebody who “had no difficulty in uniting Aristotelianism with Hegelianism,”Footnote ⁵⁶ which given Dewey’s own account of Morris’ influence on him – “I should be happy to believe that the influence of the spirit of his teaching has been an enduring influence”Footnote ⁵⁷ – suggests an intriguing way of taking Dewey’s conception of philosophy and his key word, “experience” to involve his own development of a post-Hegelian system.

If one zooms way out and looks at the way Dewey and Hegel each structure their own system – with Dewey being much less monomaniacally systematic in his aspirations than Hegel – one notes a certain very generally shared purpose. Each is concerned with what it would take for philosophy to be a science, and, given their separation in time, each had a differing conception of science. Hegel puts his Logic at the basis of his thoughts, as does Dewey. However, whereas Hegel puts his worries about the Logic’s beginning in the introductory chapter (“With What Must the Science Begin?”) and concludes that it must be both a rather empty concept yet substantive enough to do the necessary work (just “being, pure being” as Hegel put it), Dewey, puts the general and at first indeterminate conception of “inquiry” at the basis of his thought and, Dewey phrased his version of the Hegelian question as “How can inquiry originate logical forms … and yet be subject to the requirements of these forms?”Footnote ⁵⁸ One could also line up Dewey’s Reference Dewey and Boydston1925 Experience and Nature with Hegel’s Naturphilosophie, and Hegel’s philosophy of subjective spirit would line up somewhat with Dewey’s various writings on what he called “psychology” (such as his Human Nature and Conduct). Hegel’s objective spirit pairs with Dewey’s writings on politics and culture, and, of course, both Hegel and Dewey had separate treatises on art, religion, and philosophy.

Dewey’s relation to Hegel was also thrown into greater light by the publication by John R. Shook and James A. Good of a forgotten manuscript by Dewey for a course on Hegel (dated Reference Shook, Good and Dewey1897; another almost identical manuscript was dated 1892).Footnote ⁵⁹ In it, Dewey gives a thoroughly pragmatist and very Deweyean account of volume 3 of Hegel’s Encyclopedia. Perhaps not surprisingly, in Dewey’s eyes, Hegel appears in this manuscript very much as a kind of proto-Deweyian.

Perhaps more importantly, though, is that although Hegel was fully aware of there being up to his time two great revolutions in modern European history, the earlier scientific revolution and (in his own lifetime) the political revolution in France, he only saw through a glass (very) darkly the emerging Industrial Revolution. Hegel lived through the French Revolution in his time as a student in Tübingen, and Dewey lived through almost all of the industrial revolution. In the year of Dewey’s birth, 1859, the United States drilled its first oil well, and the US Civil War was just around the corner. In the year when he died (1952), the United States had been triumphant in the Second World War, and it exploded its first hydrogen bomb. His life was already underway when the Civil War in the United States started (in which his father participated in the Union army, with John Dewey being born a few days after John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry), and at his death, the beginnings of the Cold War were underway. If philosophy is indeed its own time grasped in thoughts (as both Hegel and Dewey thought), one would expect from that alone that there would be some large differences in Hegel’s and Dewey’s systems of thought.

If we zoom further out on both Hegel’s and Dewey’s theories, the large-scale similarities and differences stand out. Dewey is a self-described naturalist who takes the natural sciences to embody the basic procedures for all rational thought, whereas Hegel – who also did not disparage the natural sciences – thought that philosophy has an autonomy from them all of its own and which is also even more basic than that of the natural sciences. However, both arranged their theories as having to do with problem-solving. For Hegel, that involved the dialectic that responded to Kant’s challenge of the possible emptiness of pure reason by developing a step-by-step method of showing how certain very basic conceptions generate contradictions that require the introduction of a new set of concepts that resolve them, turning a straightforward contradiction into an ineliminable tension within an organic unity.Footnote ⁶⁰ At this level of zoom, both Hegel and Dewey are concerned with a kind of method for problem solving that shows that retrospectively certain solutions were the ones called for to respond to a determinate and compelling type of problem.

If we move to an even higher level of zoom, both are versions of Wilfrid Sellars’ famous definition: “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.”Footnote ⁶¹ Dewey, of course, objected to what he characterized as Hegel’s “mechanical dialectical setting” and adopted in its place a structured but nonetheless holistic approach to philosophy. Hegel was straightforwardly systematic in his ambitions, whereas Dewey was also systematic but in a much more concealed manner, refusing to elaborate his philosophy except in terms of the problems he was directly addressing.

3 Dewey as a Naturalized Left-Hegelian: Continuities and Discontinuities

Dewey more or less accepts a basic core claim of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: The theory of moral obligations, as “the Right,” cannot fully explain the actual bindingness of such obligations, nor can it actually fill in the action-guiding content of such obligations except as an embedded element of some idea of “the Good” as an account of the best life to lead.Footnote ⁶² The “Good” follows a logic not of the command and authority structure of moral obligation but follows instead the logic of attraction in what Dewey called “a way of life.”Footnote ⁶³

Like Hegel, Dewey thought that philosophical theories and ideas were expressions of basic tensions in one’s own time. In one of his most often cited claims, Hegel said in his 1801 Differenzschrift that “the need for philosophy arises when unification has vanished from the life of [a] people,” and Dewey, although with no direct reference to Hegel, said “the distinctive office, problems and subject matter of philosophy grow out of stresses and strains in the community life in which the given form of philosophy arises.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Both Hegel and Dewey shared the conviction that filling-out the demands of morality requires us to confront the generality of moral principle with the world as we find it. For both Hegel and Dewey, this concept of the “Good” thus had to confront the “fact of pluralism,”Footnote ⁶⁵ so that a fairly detailed and differentiated conception of different lives and conflicting personal conceptions of the good had to be taken into account. For Hegel, this involves the Sittlichkeit of the family, bourgeois-civil society, and the state. Together, they form the variegated spheres of ethical life in which obligation is either submerged fully in the background of an attractive way of life (as in marriage and the family), more or less completely at work and even eclipsing ethical life (in bourgeois-civil society), with both obligation and ethical life coming together in the state proper as providing an attractive structure of social and political life with its attendant virtues.

In Dewey’s system, ethical life is articulated into the development of democracy as not so much a system merely of government but, as Dewey puts it, a “way of personal life.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Democracy as a political form is, as well known, mostly wholly absent in Hegel’s developed system. For Hegel, the conditions necessary for a democratic way of life were met only in ancient Greek life and were impossible outside of that, and Greek life had seen its day and could not be revived – whereas for Dewey, the idea of democracy as an institutional and practice-based realization of the Good appeared relatively early in his writings and persisted throughout. In his 1919 “Democracy and Philosophy,” Dewey identified democracy as having to do with “a conviction about moral values, a sense for the better kind of life to be led,”Footnote ⁶⁷ and he was constantly refining that idea until the end of his life. But why democracy?

It is intrinsic to both Hegel’s and Dewey’s conceptions that agency is deeply social. For both, for example, the individualism of modern life is itself a socially indexed way of conveying certain types of authority to “individuals” without “individualism” having been the aim of history from its beginning and only now being expressed as a timeless metaphysical fact. Likewise, Dewey, even more than Hegel, gives the primacy of practice into making sense of social and political norms. In Dewey’s outlook, the tendency of philosophical theory to look for one single principle to adjudicate among what seem like mutually incompatible principles at work in the lives of people – whether it be some kind of teleological, deontological, or virtue-base theory – has, Dewey says, as its “outcome … a gap between the tangled realities of practice and the abstract forms of theory.”Footnote ⁶⁸ In Hegel’s system, the three approaches (that of the Right, the Good, and Virtue) are integrated into the holistic account of a form of life in which each has a role to play. Dewey ends up arguing much the same thing, seeing each of the approaches as expressing a response to different but intrinsic problems of modern social life.

The Deweyan response to Hegel’s own view of “the world as we find it” is to give a historical argument for why democracy as a “way of life” can be the only appropriate form of Sittlichkeit for a certain kind of modernity – why after 1870 (an appropriate date for the explosion of the industrial revolution)Footnote ⁶⁹ any kind of updated Grundlinien had to encompass something different from Hegel’s view of the state and its relation to civil society.

Dewey begins with two broad ideas that also, at least on the surface, have a Hegelian ring to them. Like Hegel, he insists that agency is deeply social and that modern atomistic individualism is simply an abstraction taken out of a particularly modern shape that agency has taken and is asserted as if it were not in fact a social phenomenon but some kind of a priori fact about the world. Second, like Hegel, he sees this modern form of agency with its insistence on the ineliminable value of individuality and the rights that supposedly come with that value as the very determinate result of a line of historical development in which more modern shapes of agency emerge as the result of dealing with the failures of past shapes of agency. Unlike Hegel, he takes democracy as a “way of life” to be the universal shape that social agency has been driven to take, given the very determinate failures of pre-democratic shapes of modern life – particularly those of dynastic monarchical rule.

This result is, so Dewey argues, almost, but not completely, irreversible.Footnote ⁷⁰ But irreversible in what sense? Hegel sees the development of history as a series of events that on their own are contingent but which in retrospect turn out to manifest a certain logic that shows that the end result is required by virtue of the very determinate failures manifested by the earlier shapes and that therefore, although there is no guarantee of further progress, any relapse into an earlier shape or some other rejection of what had been required would not and could not be in any sense rational.Footnote ⁷¹ Even if history has manifested a certain rational shape to itself – in Hegelian terms, leading to the practical and institutional comprehension that “all are free” – there is nothing to guarantee that it will continue to be that way. History may collapse in terms of rationality – for example, if slave societies were to be reinstated, that could not count as progress.

Dewey asserts (with a kind of Hegelian confidence) that the primacy of democracy as a “way of life” is what he calls a permanent “deposit of fact” left by the development from pre-democratic to democratic life. That is Dewey’s version of what, in Hegel’s terms, is a “knot” that has been firmly tied in the flux and chaos of historical time.Footnote ⁷² In terms of Dewey’s “experimentalism” (as his own more or less favored term for his system) and fallibilist pragmatism, this means that the permanent deposit of fact functions as the background set of entrenched conceptions that have developed as prior solutions to earlier problems but which themselves may well be shaken and cut loose in the future. Yet he also claims that democracy (as a way of life) is an intelligible moral ideal only in the sense that it manifests “the tendency and movement of some thing which exists carried to its final limit, viewed as completed, perfected.”Footnote ⁷³ Seeing it as a tendency is an empirical observation and extrapolation from that. Seeing it as the logical development of a concept is a more phenomenological – in the Hegelian sense – conception of historical development. Dewey tended to vacillate between the two.

However, Dewey’s actual practice in giving his historical account of democracy as a way of life is actually closer to a kind of Hegelian phenomenology of social agency. There are the real struggles of flesh and blood individuals working within the sedimented shapes of life (“deposits” as Dewey would say) which involve all sorts of contingencies, and there is (“behind the back” of these formations, as Hegel would say)Footnote ⁷⁴ a kind of logic of shapes of self-conscious life working its way out in the concrete practices of the people involved, and without an embodiment in concrete practice, the logic of such shapes of life has no actuality.Footnote ⁷⁵ As Hegel notes near the very end of the Phenomenology, “for this reason, it must be said that nothing is known that is not in experience, or, as it can be otherwise expressed, nothing is known that is not available as felt truth,”Footnote ⁷⁶ and in another work, “laws and principles have no immediate life or validity in themselves. The activity puts them into operation … has its source in the needs, impulses, inclinations and passions of man.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Likewise, just as Hegel does, Dewey insists on the role of material bases – changes in technology, economic organization, and the like – in understanding historical development while not discounting the various ways in which agents socially and individually offer justifications for this, which in turn themselves have great practical effect in terms of the shape this development takes.Footnote ⁷⁸

4 Dewey as Naturalized Hegelian: Being-Together

For both Hegel and Dewey, morality and political philosophy both have to do, as we can put it, with our “being-together.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Abstractly taken, this involves the way in which we assume a variety of first-person, second-person, and third-person standpoints to each other, but both Hegel and Dewey hold that such abstractions, while important, require a reference to facts about the world – the world as we find it – if they are to have any motivating force or genuine content. Abstractions on their own are mere shadows of concrete practice. As Hegel remarks, “In thinking things, we transform them into something universal; but things are singular and the Lion as such does not exist,”Footnote ⁸⁰ and “For the individual exists as a determinate being, unlike man in general, who has no existence as such.”Footnote ⁸¹

Even as the deep sociality of agency remains a basic commitment on the part of both Hegel and Dewey, they also approach the concept of the “social” from a point of view which is the result of the “deposit of fact” (or the “knot”) in which individuality has come to be a key moral and ethical term in modern self-understanding, and both see that “deposit of fact” as marking a kind of moral progress over the past.Footnote ⁸² The problem for both has to do with the justification and the makeup of the modern “state,” the problems which it is supposed to address and to resolve, and therefore the appropriate limits of its power. For Hegel, this has to do with the existence of an increasingly marketized society under the conditions that came to be called after Hegel’s death “capitalism.” If “morality” as a set of commands backed up by the appropriate authority – as statements of “the right” – itself culminates in an abstract doctrine of “the Good” as that of the best life to lead, and if that “Good” can only be filled out without contradiction in terms of the world as we find it, then the centrality of capitalism to the world as we find it (particularly after 1870) makes it hard to see how a society organized around capitalist principles relating to self-interest as a key idea of the best life to lead could possibly be described as the best life to lead. Indeed, as Hegel explicitly notes, such a marketized society seems to be bereft of any sense of the ethical at all.Footnote ⁸³ For Hegel, this is supposedly resolved by means of the state as the self-reflection of civil society, in which the state is the institution that takes the shape of an independent organism that both cancels and preserves the self-seeking inherent to bourgeois-civil society. Otherwise, society threatens to remain formless and on the edge of complete breakdown under the conditions of self-seeking competition. As we might put it, for Hegel, capitalism becomes ethical only under the dominance of a constitutional monarchical state of representative government that, by providing the basis for an ethical relation of citizenship, brings an unethical marketized society back into the orbit of ethical life.

However, for Hegel, the state could not exercise this authority if civil society were perfectly formless (i.e., nothing more than a mere agglomeration of self-subsistent individuals), and as a matter of historical fact, civil society does spontaneously organize itself into various groupings (for which Hegel uses a relatively archaic term, Masse, to describe). The Masse are not the more or less formless, atomized “masses” of contemporary thought but the groupings of people around shared lines of interest and virtue that coalesced into the Estates of the medieval and early modern European world. These Masse can become Estates only when there is some kind of legal-political recognition of their status, and in Hegel’s conception, it is as members of Estates (and thus no longer formless) that the people of bourgeois-civil society become appropriate citizens of the state per se. In his lectures, although not in the 1820 printed text, Hegel distinguished the burgher (Bürger) of bourgeois-civil society, from the citizen of the state, using the French term, Citoyen, to mark that distinction.Footnote ⁸⁴

Social forces push the otherwise formless society into determinate shapes arranged around the kinds of activities, interests, and commitments within a way of life that make up an identifiable Masse, which in turn, or so Hegel thought, precipitate into the agricultural, the business-industrial and the bureaucratic estates of modern life.Footnote ⁸⁵ Without the bureaucratic estate, especially – the universal Estate, as Hegel calls it – the fracturing of bourgeois-civil society would completely undermine itself. The “people” alone cannot do that since the complexity of modern life requires a kind of expertise about the working of the state that is impossible for the “people” as a whole to grasp. Although they and their interests must be represented in government, democracy as self-rule by a formless or barely formed “people” is out of the question.

Dewey rejects Hegel’s conception of the state as both philosophically and politically inadequate, but he does so on what look like updated Hegelian grounds. If the purpose is to draw out from the world as we find it some conception of the “good” that does not collapse into communitarianism (with its either bland or more darkly authoritarian idea that “this is valuable simply because it is our way of doing things”), or into simply straightforwardly authoritarian government with a strictly enforced morality, or into some kind of civil war such as the seventeenth century European wars of religion, then we need something other than Hegel’s own specific conception of Sittlichkeit but which would play the same role as Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, and Dewey finds that in his conception of “the Public.”Footnote ⁸⁶ A “Public” is a group of people that find themselves facing a common problem or set of problems and thus begin to form a conception of themselves as a “We,” as “that public” who faces those problems as a “We” since each recognizes that it is only collectively that the problem can be addressed.

A “Public” in the Deweyean sense thus originates similarly to a Hegelian Masse, since Dewey notes “in itself [the public] is unorganized and formless. By means of officials and their special powers it becomes a state.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Or, to shift matters back into Hegelian terms, the “public” emerges as an initially formless shape of self-conscious life (i.e., Geist) pragmatically giving determinate shapes to itself in light of very specific problems it faces. A “Public” is thus a political form of being-together. Dewey seems to share Hegel’s own, previously mentioned, characterization of the historical development of self-conscious life (i.e., Geist): “The solution of spirit’s problem creates new problems for it to solve, so that it multiplies the materials on which it operates. Thus we see how the spirit in history issues forth in innumerable directions, indulging and satisfying itself in them all.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Hegel speaks very similarly about how the different Massen generate themselves out of a shared set of problems, outlooks and ways of living. In Dewey’s terms, they become a “Public” and in Hegel’s terms, when they become legally recognized as such a public, they become an Estate with entitlements to representation in the state’s government.Footnote ⁸⁹ Crucially, though, for Dewey the formation of a modern “Public” requires it to form itself into a democratically organized “Public,” since only as a “way of life” can a democratic public solve the problems that are posed to it in relation to the kinds of principles and shapes of life already found in “Abstract Right” and “Morality” (which form part of what Dewey calls a seemingly irreversible “deposit of fact” in the history of the kind of publics about which he is speaking).Footnote ⁹⁰ If the “Public” plays the role of a Hegelian Sittlichkeit, then the “Public” has to give itself a determinate shape that is adequate to the problems it faces and must do so without alienating its members. It does this in developing itself into a democratic way of life, and in the history of this development of the democratic ideal, it does so mostly non-teleologically – with no final aim in mind – and where any suggestion of teleology comes in after the development is already underway and where collective intelligence begins to try to devise ways steer it – as a retrospective account of what would justify what has developed.Footnote ⁹¹ The teleology at work is a “progress from” (in terms of solving problems) and not “progress to” (in the sense of an end in view).Footnote ⁹² What Dewey calls the “method of democracy” is that of “a positive toleration which amounts to sympathetic regard for the intelligence and personality of others, even if they hold views opposed to ours, and of scientific inquiry into facts and testing of ideas,”Footnote ⁹³ and “the democratic ideal poses, rather than solves, the great problem: How to harmonize the development of each individual with the maintenance of a social state in which the activities of one will contribute to the good of all the others”Footnote ⁹⁴ – in other words, how to form an I that is a We, and a We that is an I. (Dewey also thought that for that to fully work, we would have to transform the “Great Society” into the “Great Community”: a pluralistic order of individuals united in smaller publics in a further unity centering on a common ideal of democratic citizenship as a common public.)

For a democratic public to actualize itself – make itself real and not just an ideal – it must therefore structure itself into determinate institutions and hone and adjust its existing practices so as to give reality to its own solutions to the problems it faces and which it has also set for itself in terms of achieving its goals. To do this, it has to organize itself into a whole, and to do that, it must establish itself as a state. But what is this state? Dewey’s reply is that “the only statement which can be made is a purely formal one: the state is the organization of the public effected through officials for the protection of the interests shared by its members. The state, that is, is only one among many devices that an organized public establishes to solve the problems which are posed to it and by it.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Hegel thought that the state could only play this role if it had a will of its own, even though that will was metaphysically the “general will” of the “public” at large. To see why Dewey rejected that view, it is necessary to extrapolate from his own stated views what his argument against Hegel’s view of the state really was and what his own view implies. The issue really at stake is the account of freedom and of Dewey’s reception of and transformation of Hegel’s concept of freedom.

5 Freedom, the Public and Geist

There are two passages in which Dewey signals his left-Hegelian critique of voluntaristic accounts of freedom. In discussing international relations, Dewey remarks “The very doctrine of ‘Sovereignty’ is a complete denial of political responsibility.”Footnote ⁹⁶ In another passage, Dewey states quite straightforwardly that the problem in thinking about the state is that people have confused authorship with authority. Just as Kant claimed that an agent could only be subject to a moral law of which it “can regard itself” as the author,Footnote ⁹⁷ the state in issuing its edicts must also be regarded as their author, and this tempts one to see the state as a kind of entity unto itself having a will of its own. However, since all acts are in fact issued by and carried out by specific people, people have been misleadingly led to conclude, so Dewey says, that either that the state or even the public itself can only be a “fiction, a mask for private desires for power and position,”Footnote ⁹⁸ or that the state is some kind of independent organism on its own with a will of its own. Neither is true. The state is a device, one among many institutions that the public has created to solve the problems it faces, and it is staffed by people who acquire the authority they have – itself socially bestowed through the complex bestowal of statuses Hegel called “recognition” (Anerkennung)Footnote ⁹⁹ – to make those judgments and carry out those policies. The state just is such a “device” carrying that kind of normative authority, and the state was therefore to be evaluated in terms of its usefulness – the consequences of having that kind of institution – not in terms of what was guiding its will, since (except metaphorically) it had none.

Underlying this dismissal of sovereignty and the claim that past theorists of the state had confused authorship with authority was Dewey’s left-Hegelian conception of freedom. Dewey rejects the concept of the free will as anything other than a fictional device for speaking about choice and similar matters. The “will” is something more like a façon de parler. The “will,” he says, has been historically construed as “an unmotivated power of choice, that is an arbitrary power to choose for no reason whatever except that the will does choose in this fashion,” even when the will is supposedly unconditionally giving itself a law.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Given Dewey’s version of left-Hegelian naturalism, however, there is no reason to think that there is any such thing as “an unmotivated power of choice,” nor is there any real ground to worry that some form of causal determinism threatens our freedom, since “no argument about causation can affect the fact, verified constantly in experience, that we can and do learn, and that the learning is not limited to acquisition of additional information but extends to remaking old tendencies,”Footnote ¹⁰¹ and “freedom in the practical sense develops when one is aware of this possibility and takes an interest in converting it into a reality.”Footnote ¹⁰² In one place, he simply equates the will with “deliberate activity.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Like Hegel, Dewey thought that one is free only if one knows one is free.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Hegel, of course, very explicitly spoke of the “free will,” introducing it early in the Grundlinien as the very basis of right (Recht) itself.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ However, he immediately qualified this by speaking of it not as some kind of “unmotivated power of choice” – that at best would be Willkür – but instead as “a particular way of thinking – thinking translating itself into existence [Dasein], thinking as the drive to give itself existence.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This kind of thinking involves self-consciousness and thus the infinitesimal gap between knowing what one is doing and knowing that one knows it. Dewey repeats this, although without remarking on how closely he is following Hegel. For Dewey, action (or “conduct” in his term) has three levels or stages to it: First, impulse (something like Aristotelian appetitive desire), which is action of a lower order with none to little idea about what one is doing. (On Dewey’s scheme, newborns act purely on impulse, but with maturation, impulse becomes slightly more self-conscious.); second, habits (which Dewey says are “second nature and second nature under ordinary circumstances as potent and urgent as first nature.”).Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Dewey’s “habits” are more like a version of Heideggerian attunements which are taken up without much self-conscious agency really at work in taking them up but which nonetheless exhibit an apperceptive quality, a consciousness of knowing what one is doing while one is doing it, even though without a separate reflective act; third, “intelligence” (or what Dewey sometimes also calls “reflective thought”), which is more clearly apperceptive. Self-determination of a sort only enters when only all three elements are coordinated by reflective thought, the third of the triad.

Giving up the idea of the “unmotivated free will” was part of Dewey’s reworking of Hegel, but it also functions as a reformulation of what Hegel should have been saying all along. Hegel’s criticisms of Kant’s idea of pure practical reason exercising a form of transcendental freedom already indicate how he was keen to move from the Kantian idea of the will and more in the direction of a Kantian idea of self-consciousness expressing itself in action. For Hegel, self-determination is not so much the Kantian idea of giving a universal form to one’s particular willing – where once again the idea is not that of authorship but of authority, which in Kant’s case is that of giving oneself a maxim of a certain form that commands respect because it is universalizable to all rational creatures – but, as Thomas Khurana has argued, that of giving form to and actualizing a comprehensive conception of what it is to be a free living creature, something which is fundamentally social and historical in nature as well as being thoroughly holistic in its comprehension.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ As a self-conscious life, agency is a matter not of an “unmotivated power of choice” nor is it self-construction. It is rather a kind of “bringing forth as producing” of the self, a Selbsthervorbringung.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Geist, self-conscious life, develops itself into various structures, and in the modern and especially industrial period into something like a public, an intelligible but nonetheless subjectless way of being-together that exists as a circulating set of sensing of something being required to resolve its collective problems. For Hegel, this modern public arises only against the background of abstract rights and (what Hegel calls) morality – that is, growing out of the abstractions of freedom and equality – which in turn have no genuine reality to themselves without such a public giving concrete shape to them. Dewey’s “Public” thus has a kind of Hegelian circularity to itself: The individuals comprising such a public are what they are only as members of that shape of self-conscious life, but that shape of self-conscious life does not exist without the individuals who make it up thinking of it and themselves in that way. As Hegel says of his concept of the state, “The state itself is an abstraction which has its purely universal reality in the citizens who belong to it; but it does have reality, and its purely universal existence must take a determinate form in the will and activity of individuals.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ In terms of Hegel’s system, this is the part of the logic of showing and saying that is itself the logic of Geist, or, to use Hegel’s own term, that of “manifestation.”Footnote ¹¹¹

To return the question in more Hegelian terms: Why then does Dewey claim that the genuine determinateness of the shape of self-conscious life as a modern public have to be that of democracy? In Dewey’s terms, democracy is a way of life (a kind of ethos), but what he seems to mean is something more like a form of life.Footnote ¹¹² It is not just a typical way of going on as a kind of empirical regularity – although forms of life do exhibit empirically observable regularities – but a formal quality of the shape that such a “way of life” takes. For Hegel, agency is to be construed developmentally as manifesting a certain form to itself relating what it means to be that specific kind of agent. What is particularly distinctive about this form of life is that creatures who make up this form of life act in ways that exhibit a conception of their own form, which shows itself in their actions and which explains what they do. Their conception of their own form (as self-consciousness) is actual, wirklich, at work in their behavior. The concept of the development of a human as having this form of self-consciousness, as Andrea Kern nicely puts it, “characterizes, not a particular vital activity of a human being that sets in at a particular moment in its life-time, but the distinctive form of development that makes up the unity of an individual that exhibits a minded form of life.”Footnote ¹¹³

Dewey, of course, characterized his version of left-Hegelianism not as Hegelianism at all but as a philosophy based on “experience,” and that licensed him as he took it to describe all of his findings as empirical. However, Dewey’s concept of “experience” is very much like Hegel’s concept of Erfahrung in the Phenomenology, such as it occurs in the original title of the book as “the science (Wissenschaft) of the experience of consciousness,” which comprehends within itself “the whole realm of the truth of spirit” and in which therefore “the moments of the whole are shapes of consciousness.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Dewey scholars have long remarked on Dewey’s suggestion for the second edition of Experience and Nature that “culture” should have been exchanged for “experience” in the title, and he explained that “‘Experience’ is a word used to designate, in a summary fashion, the complex of all which is distinctively human.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ That much could also be said of Hegel’s concept of Geist. Given what else Dewey said about “experience,” then perhaps the better title for Dewey’s book should have been “Self-Conscious Life and Nature,” which in its more obviously Hegelian light would carry the subtitle, “The Science of the Experience of Self-Conscious Life.”

Dewey, on the other hand, presents his own version of the science of the experience of consciousness as that of seamlessly moving from the science of nature to the science of society (even while he also notes the discontinuities). However, what Dewey lacks is the Hegelian concept of negation, that is, of self-consciousness as “form consciousness” – in the sense that self-consciousness is consciousness of the form of life to which I belong, and thus minded (geistig) creatures act in light of a self-consciousness of their own form, which both expresses their nature and explains what they do.

Self-conscious life both identifies with and distinguishes itself from nature, or, as Hegel puts it, in knowing that you know “no new content is produced, but yet this form is a huge difference. It is on this distinction that all of the distinction in world history rests.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ The nature of subjectivity in its individual and collective shapes has to do with the way in which self-consciousness inflicts a “wound” into consciousness, tearing it in two without separating it. We are both in the world – partial and limited – and are looking at the world as a whole, unlimited and impartial, which seems to place us in an impossible place to be, since nobody can occupy a standpoint beyond the world.Footnote ¹¹⁷ (It would be in the now iconic phrase from Thomas Nagel, the view from nowhere.) To bring in again Hegel’s lively metaphor, we are thus amphibious animals.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Zooming back out, we can see the broad outlines of how such a naturalized left-Hegelianism transforms the older idealist Hegelian system while remaining allied with it. Both Hegel and Dewey understand their philosophies as progressive problem-solving enterprises in which simple concepts generate problems that logically compel us to more determinate and complex ones. For Hegel, as Hegel himself might put it, self-consciousness is the “simple concept” which unfolds itself into a complex, historically determinate world. For Dewey, his “empirical method,” as he calls it, takes the “inclusive integrity of ‘experience’ … this integrated unity as the starting point for philosophic thought … its problem is to note how and why the whole is distinguished into subject and object, nature and mental operations.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Both operate holistically.Footnote ¹²⁰

On this account, both Hegel and Dewey are offering a set of comprehensive Grundlinien for the modern world. Neither is simply describing the world as they found it. They are rather looking at the deeper conceptual commitments within the ongoing practices of their time to see what follows from the more basic commitments and what follows from the more fluid ones. In each case, both draw from a revolution in practices that changed the kind of theories that are needed for such a comprehensive orientation. For Hegel, that was the French Revolution, the growth of a marketized bourgeois-civil society, the formulation of this in Adam Smith’s ethics and economics, all of which together changed the basic terms of engagement in social life and which also in the hands of the progressive thinkers of the time was developed into a vision of a masterless society (in sharp contrast to the crumbling feudal order) that, so it seemed, could be actually be put into practice by following out the logic of both revolutions.

For Hegel, the Grundlinien, as it were, of this new emerging social order would put the new capitalist political economy into the service of universal emancipation. In this emerging egalitarian vision (which was very specifically non-utopian in the imagination of the theorists of the time), the preindustrial world could in principle look forward to a world of independent farmers and artisan producers in which, in principle, each person would be self-employed and would be caught up in a fine web of mutual responsibilities with others that Hegel brought under the umbrella term of a modern Sittlichkeit. The market economy would be the whole that (as if guided by an invisible hand) would spontaneously produce the necessary social entanglement to make such a world both realizable and sustainable. Hegel saw that this was possible only if the market economy itself was kept in balance (or “brought back to the universal,” in his terminology) by a state run by enlightened civil servants who would themselves be independent agents by virtue of having their incomes produced and guaranteed by the state itself, with the state itself operating under the rule of law, guaranteeing that independence.

That Hegel was still so deeply tied into the eighteenth-century vision of a masterless world of self-employed individuals held together by a deeper sociality of institutions that secured it was manifested in his discussion of a bourgeois-civil society led by the market as a “system of needs.” In the imagined world of self-employed artisans and farmers, perhaps the market system would be such a system. However, in the world that took shape in the nineteenth century, the reality of the market revealed itself for what it was. As already noted, markets do not respond to needs; they respond to money. If you need something and you do not have the money to get it, the market ignores you. You can meet your needs by spending money, but if you have no money, the market alone provides no help.Footnote ¹²¹

It was nonetheless Hegel’s major point that this all-sided independence of each of the three components of the new order (agriculture, artisans, and the bureaucratic “rule of law” political state) would be both possible and sustainable only in terms of an all-sided dependence of each on each. Fetishizing one side – independence against dependence – of this social whole at the expense of the other only produces pathologies and false developments because of its irrationality. Fetishizing independence leads to the atomization of the polity and to the negative personal, social, and political consequences that follow from it. Fetishizing dependence leads to a paternalistic tyranny or (to be anachronistic) totalitarian rule. Dialectic is necessary to avoid such one-sidedness.

For Dewey, however, the industrial revolution upended once and for all the dream of the early egalitarians (including Hegel) about the real possibility of establishing a masterless society by way of the eighteenth-century conceptions of overcoming feudalism through the establishment of self-regulating market relations. After the industrial revolution, Hegel’s own conception of a world populated by self-employed farmers, town dwelling artisans and independent university trained civil servants turned out instead to be a world of employers and employees in which the latter quickly began to characterize themselves as “wage slaves” seeing the former as having become the new “masters.” (The new term to capture that was derived from Dutch, “boss.”) It was as if Hegel’s own dialectic had caught up with him, finding the negativity inherent in Hegel’s unifying positive vision which in turn undermined the world Hegel thought had emerged. As that new world took shape, labor itself became marketized and thereby commodified, and it was this world to which Dewey responded with his radical egalitarian update of Hegel’s bourgeois-civil society and Hegel’s view of the “state as organism.” In Dewey’s Aufhebung of Hegel, the new world of wage slaves and capitalists would be superseded by way of Dewey’s conception of radical egalitarian democracy as fulfilling the demands for a modern Sittlichkeit. Since democracy was already on the books, already taking shape as a “way of life,” and was claiming to be the actual practice of the living social order, this was no utopian plan on Dewey’s part but the working out of some parts of his own Grundlinien for what was already really at work in modern life. To put words into Dewey’s mouth: The Hegelian concept of the modern “Public” has as its inherent trajectory the project of being the Aufhebung of bourgeois-civil society and the state as an organism. However, for Dewey that project did not need Hegelian dialectic but only a kind of holism about what seemed to be antagonistic terms, in which what looked like contradictions were in effect only tension-filled aspects of a whole to which those tensions essentially belonged.

Seen in that light, both Dewey and Hegel share, broadly, a conception of ethical theory: They are (1) Both pragmatic (as engaged in problem solving, with Hegel more metaphysically-logical and Dewey more experimentalist); (2) Both hold that norms are revisable in history as needs change. Our own times grasped in thought depends on the economic, technological and political tools available to us; (3) both are holistic (taking account of many considerations as part of a whole); and (4) they are both contextual thinkers (in which ethics varies as circumstances change and new challenges emerge, with each of them having a progressivist story to tell about that.). Both accept some version of the pragmatist commitment to the idea that abstract meanings are not fully understood unless we see how the use of concepts reshapes their meaning in various determinate social settings. As Hegel puts it in his own distinctive terms: “The shape which the concept assumes in its actualization, and which is essential for cognition of the concept itself, is different from its form of being purely as concept, and is the other essential moment of the Idea”Footnote ¹²² – where “Idea” is in Hegel’s Logic the unity of concept and objectivity, Hegel’s own proto-pragmatist conception (corresponding to Dewey’s insistence on pragmatism demanding that concepts be subject to inquiry in terms of the consequences of their being put to use in practice). Both Hegel’s and Dewey’s views are thereby developments of “their own time grasped in thoughts.”

6 Social Democracy as the Living Good

Dewey became quite clear that his conception of a radical egalitarian democracy had to be what he himself took to calling social democracy. It is however, a little unclear how Dewey related this to European social democracy. The phrase “social democracy” appears in an essay in 1916 (“The Need of an Industrial Education in an Industrial Democracy”),Footnote ¹²³ but there is no mention of the European discussions. Dewey described any number of times some of his commitments as “socialist,”Footnote ¹²⁴ but he never really fully committed himself in print to that idea, such that even the Dewey scholars who wish to make him a fully committed, anti-capitalist socialist have to acknowledge that this requires some interpretive freedom on their part.Footnote ¹²⁵ Dewey also described himself any number of times as a liberal, although he also gave that a somewhat personalized and slightly nonstandard interpretation, meaning something more than just a left-New-Dealer. (Dewey was very critical of Roosevelt’s New Deal for not going far enough in the direction of social democracy.) Yet, in 1934, in a very short piece (first published in People’s Lobby Bulletin 4), he noted rather unequivocally that “We cannot achieve a decent standard of living for more than a fraction of the American people, by any other method than that to which the British Labor Party and the Social Democratic Parties of Europe are committed—the socialization of all natural resources and natural monopolies, of ground rent, and of basic industries.”Footnote ¹²⁶

Dewey’s inclinations to identify himself more completely with social democracy comes out in the lectures he gave in China in 1919 during his two-year stay (1919–1921) there. Dewey’s own manuscript for the lectures was only recently discovered (although there had been a translation in English from some Chinese notes taken by an attendee of the lectures). In the lectures, Dewey is clearly trying to work out some of his more recently formulated ideas for his Chinese audience, taking into account the great upheaval of the revolutionary May Fourth Movement among students (which had started right as he arrived in China).Footnote ¹²⁷ In those lectures, he rather straightforwardly states his affinity for what he calls “social democracy”: “This basic problem of industrial society is to establish conditions that will place all men in their labor on the plane which the small class of scientists and artists now occupy. Then there will be a real consummation of social life in full freedom. There will [be] a true social democracy.”Footnote ¹²⁸

In doing so, Dewey was echoing similar themes found in Marx’s early writings (the so-called Paris Manuscripts or 1844 Manuscripts), which at that time were not yet discovered (much less published), and which had to do with the alienation of the worker in modern capitalism. The theme of alienation was developed by Marx in his rebuilding of Hegel’s epochal treatment of it. For Marx, in industrial capitalism, the worker’s labor power becomes a mere commodity in the sense that it is (like some forms of grain or metals) a good with typically little difference in quality among other examples, and thus the only thing distinguishing one worker’s labor power from another is the price that the capitalist is willing to pay for it. In a competitive market with no protections for workers (or in other words, in a market where “bourgeois” laws structure the market), that price will be forced lower and lower only until the point where there are so few workers alive that labor power becomes a more rare commodity. In these conditions, the worker is alienated from his or her labor since it is, in terms of the market, just one more commodity whose value is determined by its scarcity or abundance. It is also a power that does not involve any higher skill formation, nor does it lead to any kind of social mobility. It is more like Charlie Chaplin’s famous portrayal in Modern Times of the alienated, exploited man on the assembly line, essentially driven a bit mad by the conditions, the pace, and the meaninglessness of it all.

Elizabeth Anderson has argued that, despite Marx’s reputation as a ferocious revolutionary, his portrayal of the alienated, exploited industrial worker also carried no small bit of nostalgia with it. The old fashioned artisan who cultivated his skills in making products that others would gladly buy – such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s father (Issac), who was a celebrated and skilled watchmaker – was very likely not in Marx’s sense an alienated worker, but as a class, he was doomed to be replaced by the modern industrial worker whose skills were supposed to be completely interchangeable with all other industrial workers. The industrial machine made cheaper though not necessarily better versions of what the skilled artisan could do. (That this was something of an ideal type was recognized by Marx and Engels; they knew that workers with certain skills involved in running machines were worth more than completely unskilled labor, but they were still all only agents whose labor power had been commodified.) Even in Marx’s own day, many clerical workers and professionals who were certainly not “capitalists” in any deep sense enjoyed their work as they developed and sharpened their skills and thereby also benefited others as they earned their living – just as today the same holds for many such professionals (such as professors). Dewey’s statement in the lectures (quoted earlier) that the basic social and political problems having to do with industrial work are to create “conditions that will place all men in their labor on the plane which the small class of scientists and artists now occupy” is a statement that, if it were attributed to the young Marx and not to Dewey, would raise few eyebrows.

But Dewey, for all the concerns that he shared with Marx, was always fairly clear that he was not a Marxist. (Nor was he a cold war anti-communist as he was made out to be by so many cold warriors in the 1950s and early 1960s.) Like Marx, he too was focused on issues of justice and class, but as he made it clear, he was opposed to what he took to be the Marxian insistence on class warfare to lead to the solution of the problems in capitalism that he saw very similarly to (again, what he took to be) Marxist thought.Footnote ¹²⁹ Like Marx, he too emerged out of Hegelianism and developed a more naturalized version of it while also claiming to have finally rejected it, and both he and Marx were responding to the problems brought on by the industrial revolution and wanting to fashion an account that would be part of a progressive move away from those problems.Footnote ¹³⁰

In the China lectures of 1919, Dewey began by more or less redrawing in his own terms some of Hegel’s discussion in the “Preface” to his 1820 Philosophy of Right. Hegel distinguishes his own view of philosophy as its own time grasped in thought with those who see their own time as corrupt and seek a viewpoint outside their own time in order to reform the existing order. He gives Plato in his Republic as one example and concludes that “it is just as foolish to imagine that any philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as that an individual can overleap his own time or leap over Rhodes. If his theory does indeed transcend his own time, if it builds itself a world as it ought to be, then it certainly has an existence, but only within his opinions – a pliant medium in which the imagination can construct anything it pleases.”Footnote ¹³¹

Likewise, Dewey says to his Chinese audience that we can distinguish three different approaches to understanding the practical influence of philosophical theories, and the first of these is that of those who “are idealistic, if not romantic, utopian, in tone. They find the true standards and models of life in something apart from and beyond existing affairs.”Footnote ¹³² (Like Hegel, Dewey cites Plato’s Republic as an example.) The other type, as Dewey puts it, takes the existing order as essentially already in order and seeks to transform people’s attitude into conforming to its norms and practices. (He gives Aristotle, Confucius, and Hegel as exemplars of this conservative approach.) Neither of these has the power to change things for the better since the former lacks any link to the existing motivations of people and thus cannot supply effective reasons for them to act, whereas the latter lacks any link as to why people should look for motivational efficacy outside of their already existing set of dispositions and accepted reasons. The former can only appeal to reasons that are external to the motivational makeup of the people it is addressing without any way of linking to their already existing motivations (and thus fall into the trap of moralistically wagging their fingers as they tell everybody else they are doing it wrong), and the latter can only appeal to the existing internal motivational makeup of the people it is addressing and thus have no way of proposing any effective reasons for those people to change (and thus they find themselves wagging their fingers at their audience and telling them just to get used to it). Thus, there is a typical dialectical opposition between what is internal to the reproduction of society and what is external to it.

The Hegelian impulse is to look for the “determinate negation” of those opposing poles as a way of dealing with the one-sidedness of such oppositions. Echoing the young Marx (but surely without intent since Dewey could not have read Marx’s unpublished 1844 manuscripts), Dewey gives his version of the required dialectical move not by looking for the Hegelian “determinate negation” but in “inquiry” responding to the idea that “what humanity needs is ability to shape and direct the changes that are bound to occur.”Footnote ¹³³ For his part, Marx had argued that we need an “immanent” account of what would motivate people to change things for the better (and thus the appropriate philosophy would be an “immanent critique”). In Marx’s case, this would be found in the existing proletariat for which the existing order of advanced capitalism would instill in them the motivation to change it, since without such change, the exploitation and alienation endemic to the system will eat them alive, and there is no other alternative except to abolish the capitalist system itself. Because of all that the proletariat will also be motivated to look for reasons that are from one point of view external to its present set of reasons, which it will find in the “immanent critique” proposed by the philosophers. It will have an internal reason to look for external reasons.

Dewey argued otherwise. He fully accepted the judgment that workers in advanced industrial capitalism were alienated and exploited in a system that was radically unjust, but he did not think that the proletariat had a special and privileged place in that system as the one group that was internally motivated to find reasons external to the given order. Dewey also says that the Marxist “claim to universality is absurd when the whole range of human affairs is taken into account. [It amounts to] only a deification of local and possibly temporary circumstances.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Nonetheless, Dewey additionally held up until the early 1930s that the violence of the Russian Revolution may in fact have been justified.Footnote ¹³⁵ There, Dewey is falling back on his more general view that there are no general laws of history in the way that the so-called dialectical materialists of his time claimed.Footnote ¹³⁶

Class conflict was only one type of conflict that prevented social life from achieving its full possibilities. Class division is one way of being-together – what Dewey calls a “form of association” in the China lectures – and all those different ways of being-together is a manifestation of the way in which human agency gives itself a shape: “Human nature has a variety of interests to be served, a number of types of impulses that have to be expressed, or instincts that form needs to be satisfied, and about each one of the more fundamental of these some form of association, of living together or of acting together continuously or repeatedly and regularly (as distinct from mere chance and transient contacts).”Footnote ¹³⁷ Those interests themselves are not all given at once as if “human nature” was fixed in its interests and only had to deliberate on how best and most efficiently to satisfy those given interests. Obviously, some are very general (such as the need for food and water), but others are indexed to their time and place, and both originate, develop, change, and disappear over historical time. When one of those forms of association – what Dewey tellingly there calls “forms of life”Footnote ¹³⁸ – exercises too much influence such that the whole is thrown out of joint, a kind of one-sidedness sets in.Footnote ¹³⁹ (One cannot help but notice the way even in this advanced stage of his career, Dewey is still relying on key Hegelian terms, such as “one-sidedness,” to make his points.)Footnote ¹⁴⁰

A form is out of joint when it privileges one feature of self-conscious life over the others in a concrete form of life, and which thus prevents what Dewey calls “growth” (a term he unfortunately never really fully pins down).Footnote ¹⁴¹ As Emmanuel Renault has argued, it is all too tempting to twist Dewey’s concept of “growth” into an idea that Dewey is some partisan of Aristotelian perfectionism or Eudaimonism of some sort or that he is putting forth a “Hegelian” conception of self-realization. However, at least the later Dewey is no more a theorist of self-realization than is Hegel.Footnote ¹⁴² For Hegel, what is at stake is a certain human power (a power of Geist) – that of freedom – which can only be fully real (actual, effective, wirklich) when it is exercised in a way that does not ultimately undermine itself. It is not, for example, a matter of the real self actualizing itself over and against or above the unreal self (as some of the British absolute idealists claimed).Footnote ¹⁴³ Dewey, like Hegel, is concerned with the actualization of a power of Geist, not self-realization (which supposes that there is a prior or “essential” self there to be “realized” – if there is no prior or essential self, there is nothing to be actualized. Nor are Dewey or Hegel especially concerned with anything like “authenticity”).Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Nor is Dewey a perfectionist of the Aristotelian stripe: Dewey does not think that there is one good which makes other things goods and thus choice worthy in terms of their being a means to its end. For Hegel, it is the actualization of freedom that is at stake, and for Dewey, it is the actualization of some basic powers with the principle of freedom as the basic power guiding the others. Dewey says, for example, that “the road to freedom may be found in that knowledge of facts which enables us to employ them in connection with desires and aims. A physician or engineer is free in his thought and his action in the degree in which he knows what he deals with. Possibly we find here the key to any freedom.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Dewey expands on what that “key” is in his Reference Dewey and Boydston1932 Ethics:

Hegel was aware, as was Dewey, that there were technical issues about which only experts could freely speak (ranging from wheelmakers to plumbers to lawyers and beyond), but when it came to understanding how one is to live (in being-together), nobody rightfully functions as that kind of expert to another person. In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel spoke of how “society has a right to follow its own tested views on such matters, and to compel parents to send their children to school, to have them vaccinated, etc.”,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ and Dewey spoke of the “freedom” of the engineer and the social policy maker. Both Hegel and Dewey believed that to be free, you must know that you are free, and both that in our modern times, there was no rational basis whatsoever for denying that there was any special class of people who in principle incapable of knowing that they are free with regard to the ethical dimensions of their lives. That is where Hegelian and Deweyean equality lies.

Dewey’s “growth” is thus a left-Hegelian branch of Hegel’s conception of Bildung as guided by the Idea – both the concept and the institutional reality – of freedom.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Hegel had spoken of how “the religiosity and ethicality of a restricted sphere of life (for example, that of a shepherd or peasant) … have infinite worth … This inner focal point … remains untouched [and protected from] the noisy clamor of world history,”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ even though the “noisy clamor of world history” was necessary for that “infinite worth” to be actual and not merely be a possible development of the subjectivity of being-together. In the China lectures, Dewey, like Hegel before him, turns to a historical and social conception of the originally Kantian idea of people as ends in themselves: “Every individual is a center of self-conscious life, of happiness and suffering, of imagination and thought. This is the final principle upon which democracy rests. But this conscious life cannot be developed or realized except in association with others, interchange, flexible intercommunication. The relations of friends illustrates the meaning of this.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ (Compare that too with Hegel’s observation in speaking of his own conception of freedom: “This, then, is the concrete concept of freedom, whereas the two previous moments have been found to be thoroughly abstract and one-sided. But we already possess this freedom in the form of feeling, for example in friendship and love.”)Footnote ¹⁵¹ This conception of democracy as “the good” that makes the abstract right and the moral life genuinely real (i.e., wirklich) is democracy as a way of life, in which “education, companionship, the breaking down of class and family walls and barriers make it [i.e., social democracy] actual.”Footnote ¹⁵² For Dewey, whereas it has always been true that “every individual is a centre of self-conscious life,” it is only recently in modern democracy that this “centre of self-conscious life” has assumed the unshakeable importance of value it now has.

Dewey’s extension of democracy to all areas of life shows up dramatically in his account of the role of the family in “democracy as a way of life,” as a living form of the egalitarian ethos to which democracy in its political sense (as a form of government) is beholden. His most extensive treatment comes in his Reference Dewey and Boydston1932 Ethics.Footnote ¹⁵³ Whereas many ethicists and political philosophers until recently more or less ignored the family (except to note perfunctorily that it was important, maybe even crucial), Dewey, like Hegel, argues that the family serves as a model of the attractiveness of a certain kind of life. However, Dewey takes a different direction than Hegel. Given the enormous changes brought about by industrialization and therefore crucially the inclusion of women in the workforce, a much more egalitarian conception of the family has to replace Hegel’s own, thus creating new problems to be solved. In particular, as Dewey notes, “these more radical questionings of the institutions of marriage and family spring from (1) an increased emphasis upon sex, and (2) an expansion of individualism, already powerful economically and politically, to a new significance in personal relations, particularly those of sex.” (p. 447) More particularly, Dewey notes, “The woman of today does not care to live in ‘The Doll’s House.’ In another respect, economic conditions have improved with the general advance of woman to suffrage and citizenship, namely, in provision for a proper distribution of family income between husband and wife without the necessity for the wife’s ‘asking the husband for money.’” … Along with educational and political emancipation has come the possibility of freer recognition of woman’s sex life.” (p. 458) Needless to say, Dewey’s views on the necessity of active education for children and the changing roles of the emotional economy of the modern family play a role in his account of marriage and the family. In his 1919 China lectures, Dewey is a bit more to the point: “One of the most marked movements of the later nineteenth century and present day is feminism – the movement for the rights of women, the emancipation of woman. Rights to an education, to a place in industry or economic independence, to engage in professions previously engrossed by men, to take part in making laws and administering them.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ (Hegel would no doubt be personally perplexed by the very idea that “feminism” was the successor to his concept of the bourgeois family and women’s role in it, but here Dewey is being a bit more dialectical than Hegel.) Family, civil society and state as forms of Sittlichkeit appear in Dewey’s work, but with each now interpreted in terms of the more comprehensive good of democracy as a way of life.

1 The Left-Hegelian Legacy

Dewey, as we noted, began his intellectual career as a Hegelian but very self-consciously departed from Hegelianism early on, replacing his earlier commitment to “absolute idealism” with his new form of pragmatism (also characterized by him as experimentalism, instrumentalism, empirical naturalism, cultural naturalism, and naturalistic humanism). What he kept from his earlier Hegelianism was an anti-dualist holism, which he then put to new use.

I have argued here that he also kept a lot more of Hegel in his later works than he let on and more than even those who grant that have been ready to argue. One of the things Dewey took over from Hegel (although I have not been able to find any textual evidence for this) is the rejection of the more Kantian dualism between the a priori and the a posteriori. In the “Introduction” to his Science of Logic (a book the younger Dewey studied intensely), Hegel notes, rather offhandedly, “The objective logic is therefore the true critique of such determinations – a critique that considers them, not according to the abstract form of the a priori as contrasted with the a posteriori, but in themselves according to their particular content.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Dewey could have taken his view of inquiry as ignoring the “a priori” and “a posteriori” distinction from that, especially once he had, under the influence of his appreciation of Darwin, jettisoned the British Idealist conception of the necessity for a kind of cosmic mind holding the world together. For Dewey, like Hegel, it was the “content” of the concepts that was at issue, and that content was to be linked to a kind of problem-solving procedure.

The lens through which many people nowadays see Dewey has been through Richard Rorty’s characterization and valorization of Dewey as the quintessential philosopher of ironic appreciation of contingency. Since it is impossible to ignore Hegel’s repeated claims about the “necessity” of his views and the necessity of “the Concept,” the difference between Dewey and Hegel might seem too much to ignore. However, what unites both Hegel and Dewey is the idea that certain forms of life require certain kinds of institutions, practices and virtues if they are to hold themselves together. In Hegel’s case, he seems (as many commentators have noted) to be building off Montesquieu’s observation that the “spirit of the laws” has to be consistent with the people for whom they are laws, consistent with the government that they have, consistent with the climate, consistent with their religion, and so on. In other words, a form of life must be regarded holistically, and not all social arrangements will work within all such forms of life. There is not a simple contingent agglomeration of elements within any specific form of life. Likewise, Dewey accepted much of that. Dewey, for example, devoted a good portion of his writing to developing accounts of what kinds of virtues, what dispositions and habits and so on, must be cultivated if “democracy as a way of life” was to be real. Hegel and Dewey remain different philosophers, but Dewey’s account of democracy is to be rightfully seen as post-Hegelian, not anti- or non-Hegelian. From Carové, Gans, and Marx, Dewey too stands in a line of left-Hegelian development.

2 Left-Hegelian Remnants

When Dewey died in 1952, he could be partially happy about his role in refashioning democracy. In the 1930s and 1940s, Franklin Roosevelt had planted the seeds of a form of social democracy in the United States, although Dewey was disappointed with some of this since in his eyes Roosevelt’s version fell far short of the kind of radical social democracy Dewey had long championed. As Dewey put it in Liberalism and Social Action in 1935, “there is an undoubted objective clash of interests between finance-capitalism that controls the means of production and whose profit is served by maintaining relative scarcity, and idle workers and hungry consumers,”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ although at that time, he also still claimed that he was committed to a very left form of liberalism. However, by 1945, the difficulties of establishing any kind of ethical capitalism began to become clear. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” were replaced with Truman’s “Three Freedoms,” with “free enterprise” replacing “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear.”

For reasons we are still disputing, starting after the 1973 oil shocks, the kind of post-Hegelian secular social democratic form of capitalism that Dewey championed itself fell rapidly out of fashion and with it, so it seemed, the last remnant of Hegelian theory apart from Marxism also fell out of favor. (Marxism had to wait for its life-changing shock until 1989). Although Dewey’s social democratic program arguably reappeared in even better form in John Rawls’ 1971 “Kantian” update of pragmatic political theory, A Theory of Justice, and although in good Hegelian fashion, however, as those who were around at the time were all eagerly scooping up copies of Rawls’ work at various book stores, various Hellenic owls were also spreading their wings around the new egalitarian theory. As Stefan Eich comments, “In 1971, the US trade account turned negative for the first time in the twentieth century. The pressures and tensions inherent in the Bretton Woods system were rapidly mounting. On 15 August 1971, just as Rawls put the finishing touches to the preface to A Theory of Justice, President Richard Nixon announced the suspension of the dollar’s convertibility into gold that had been at the heart of the Bretton Woods monetary system. Having been in the works for nearly twenty years, the publication of Rawls’s book coincided precisely with the collapse of the certainties of the postwar economic order.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The owl of Minerva, Hegel told us, only takes wing when a form of life has grown old.

By 2000, Hegel had at least partially returned to favor in philosophy, and Dewey (perhaps not surprisingly) was also returning, although mostly in his slightly updated Richard Rorty-inspired form of ironic pragmatism. It should have been no surprise, but in 2001, in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Rawls explicitly associated his enterprise more closely with Hegel’s as an exercise in “reconciliation”: Rawls noted “political philosophy may try to calm our frustration and rage against our society and its history by showing us the way in which its institutions, when properly understood from a philosophical point of view, are rational, and developed over time as they did to attain their present, rational form.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ But did our circumstances have a rational form? In 2008, the neo-liberal world economy almost broke down completely, leading the more optimistic to hope that would open political and social thought up to new possibilities. On that, so we might say, the jury is still out.

Remnants of course sometimes still have life. Sometimes they catch fire, but sometimes they just flicker out, and “vanish like a shapeless vapor dissolving into thin air.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ When that happens, then as evening falls, Minerva’s owl just flies on by. However, the idea of a modern world anchored by rights together with an understanding of morality as freedom, actualized within an institutional setup – a Sittlichkeit – that would provide a non-alienated yet prosperous and egalitarian life of course still has its attractions. Dewey’s version of left-Hegelianism opens the possibility of something that for most commentators seemed impossible: Hegelian democracy.

In one of his last (and in his lifetime, lost and unpublished manuscript done in the early 1940’s), Dewey quoted approvingly Matthew Arnold’s version of Hegel’s observation that we perhaps lived in a time when a form of life had grown old and that something new seemed to be stirring in the air. Arnold spoke in his poem “Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse” of modernity as “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, /The other powerless to be born”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ (an idea later to be given a different version by Antonio Gramsci). Dewey found this gripping. It seemed to capture all the conflicts his work had addressed. Yet Dewey nonetheless remained professionally optimistic about this. As he noted, “democracy will come into its own, for democracy is a name for a life of free and enriching communion,” which, he said, “had its seer in Walt Whitman.”Footnote ¹⁶¹

And what did the poet Walt Whitman as the “seer” of democracy have to say? Whitman: “I rate Hegel as Humanity’s chiefest teacher and the choicest loved physician of my mind and soul,” and “Only Hegel is fit for America – is large enough and free enough.”Footnote ¹⁶²