Hostname: page-component-6766d58669-bkrcr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-18T05:05:58.187Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Community in Hegel’s Social Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2017

Simon Lumsden
Simon Lumsden*
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales, Sydneys.lumsden@unsw.edu.au
Get access

Abstract

In the Philosophy of Right Hegel argues that modern life has produced an individualized freedom that conflicts with the communal forms of life constitutive of Greek ethical life. This individualized freedom is fundamentally unsatisfactory, but it is in modernity seemingly resolved into a more adequate form of social freedom in the family, aspects of civil society, and ultimately the state. This article examines whether Hegel’s state can function as a community and by so doing satisfy the need for a substantial ethical life that runs through Hegel’s social thought. The article also examines why Hegel does not provide a detailed analysis of community, as a distinct sphere between the private and the public political sphere in the Philosophy of Right, and why it is not a key platform of his social freedom.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Hegel Bulletin , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , August 2020 , pp. 177 - 201
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 2017

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Fichte, J. G. (2008), Addresses to the German Nation, trans. G. Moore. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Franco, P. (1999), Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Hegel, G. W. F. (1995), Gesammelte Werke. Hamburg: Meiner.Google Scholar
Herzog, L. (2013), Inventing the Market: Smith, Hegel, and Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Honneth, A. (2010), The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel’s Social Theory, trans. L. Löb. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Ikäheimo, H. (2014), Anerkennung. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Inwood, M. (1984), ‘Hegel, Plato and Greek “Sittlichkeit”’, in Z. A. Pelczynski (ed.), The State and Civil Society: Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
James, D. (2013), Rousseau and German Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knowles, D. (2002), Hegel and the Philosophy of Right. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lumsden, S. (2009), ‘Philosophy and the Logic of Modernity: Hegel’s Dissatisfied Spirit’, Review of Metaphysics 65:1: 55–89.Google Scholar
Lumsden, S. (2012), ‘Habit, Sittlichkeit and Second Nature’, Critical Horizons 13:2: 220–243.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mason, A. (2000), Community, Solidarity and Belonging: Levels of Community and Their Normative Significance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merker, B. (2012), ‘Embodied Normativity: Revitalizing Hegel’s Account of the Human Organism’, Critical Horizons 13:2: 154–176.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moland, L. (2009), Hegel on Political Identity: Patriotism, Nationality, Cosmopolitanism. Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Neuhouser, F. (2000), Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Neuhouser, F. (2011), ‘The Idea of a Hegelian “Science” of Society’, in S. Houlgate and M. Baur (eds.), A Companion to Hegel. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Nomer, N. (2010), ‘Fichte and the Relationship Between Self-Positing and Rights’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 48:4: 469–490.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pelczynski, Z. A. (1984), ‘Political Community and Individual Freedom in Hegel’s Philosophy of the State’, in Z. A. Pelczynski (ed.), The State and Civil Society: Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pinkard, T. (2012), Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pippin, R. (2008), Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Riedel, M. (1984), Between Tradition and Revolution, trans. W. Wright. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Scott, J. C. (1998), Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Sennett, R. (1977), The Fall of Public Man. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Tönnies, F. (2001) [1887], Community and Civil Society, trans. J. Harris and M. Hollis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Velkley, R. (2006), ‘On Possessed Individualism: Hegel, Socrates’ Daimon, and the Modern State’, Review of Metaphysics 59:3: 577–579.Google Scholar