Hegel's Value

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dean Moyar
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Public Reason ◽  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
Close Relation ◽  
Living System ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Voluntary Consent ◽  
Philosophy Of Right ◽  
Theory Of Value

It has long been recognized that Hegel’s Philosophy of Right offers the only systematic alternative to the dominant social contract tradition in modern political philosophy. The difficulty has been to characterize Hegel’s view of justice as having the same kind of intuitive appeal that has made social contract theory, with its voluntary consent and assignment of rights and privileges, such an attractive model. Hegel’s Value argues that Hegelian justice depends on a proper understanding of Hegel’s theory of value and on the model of life through which the overall conception of value, the Good, is operationalized. Through an examination of key episodes in Phenomenology of Spirit and a detailed reading of the entire Philosophy of Right, Hegel’s Value shows how Hegel develops his account of justice through an inferentialist method whereby the content of right unfolds into increasingly thick normative structures. The theory of value that Hegel develops in tandem with the account of right relies on a productive unity of self-consciousness and life, of pure thinking and the natural drives. The book argues that Hegel’s expressive account of the free will enables him to theorize rights not simply as abstract claims, but rather as realizations of value in social contexts of mutual recognition. Hegel’s account of justice is a living system of institutions centered on a close relation of the economic and political spheres and on an understanding of the law as developing through practices of public reason.

Individual Right and the Living Ethical Order

Hegel's Value ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 37-77
Author(s):  
Dean Moyar
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Contract Theory ◽  
Social Contract Theory ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
Theory Of Value

This chapter gives an account of Hegel’s early Jena critique of social contract theory and the most important elements in his account of value and justice in the Jena Phenomenology of Spirit. It begins by laying out the essentials of the most important theoretical foil for Hegel’s account: J.G. Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right. The chapter sketches Hegel’s early attack on Fichte’s theory and the initial conception of life that is supposed to provide an antidote to individualist social contract doctrine. Hegel’s own mature treatment of recognition and life is first articulated in Chapter IV of the Phenomenology. The chapter outlines Hegel’s case for the isomorphism of self-consciousness and life in the Phenomenology and shows how that underwrites his theory of value and the emergence of value in the work of the servant. The chapter concludes with a treatment of Hegel’s account of immediate justice in the ancient Greek polis.

Value in the Development and Conclusion of Abstract Right

Hegel's Value ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 105-149
Author(s):  
Dean Moyar
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
External World ◽  
Main Concept ◽  
Property Ownership ◽  
Philosophy Of Right ◽  
The Right ◽  
Moral Will

This chapter is a reading of “Abstract Right” that demonstrates the centrality of value and inference to the account. Hegel’s account unfolds private property as the immediate expression of the free will in the external world. When the argument turns toward the use of property, Hegel’s account of value comes to the fore as the universality of property ownership that is implicit in the right to use what one owns. While dealt with only briefly in the published Philosophy of Right, value gets a much more extensive treatment in the 1824–1825 lectures, where it becomes the main concept for understanding the process and result of the alienation of property. The chapter shows that the transition from alienation to contract brings Hegel’s account of mutual recognition to the fore along with an inferential equivalence form of value. Equivalence of value is a central dimension of punishment, but that equivalence can be secured only with the transition to the moral will.

A Commentary Upon Derrida's Reading of Hegel in Glas

1988 ◽  
Vol 9 (02) ◽  
pp. 6-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Critchley
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
World History ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
De Se ◽  
Il Y A ◽  
Philosophy Of Right ◽  
First Philosophy

“Qu'est-ce qui cloche dans le système, qu'est-ce qui boite? La question est aussi boiteuse et ne fait pas question. Ce qui déborde le système, c'est l'impossibilité de son échec, comme l'impossibilité de la réussite: finalement on n'en peut rien dire, et il y a une manière de se taire (le silence lacunaire de l'écriture) qui arrête le système, le laissant désoeuvré, Iivré au sérieux de l'ironie.” Glas is a tour de force of Hegel scholarship. Although primarily concerned with the Philosophy of Right and the Phenomenology of Spirit, Derrida also offers detailed discussions of The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, the First Philosophy of Spirit of 1803-4, the 1803 essay Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, the Lectures on Aesthetics and the introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. In addition - and this list is not exhaustive - there are discussions of and references to the Logic, the Encyclopaedia, the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, the Differenzschrift, Faith and Knowledge, and abundant quotations from Hegel's correspondence.

scholarly journals Introduction: locating communities in the early modern Italian city

Urban History ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
FABRIZIO NEVOLA
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Close Relation ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Bell Tower ◽  
Urban Image ◽  
The Social ◽  
Italian City ◽  
City States ◽  
Art And Architecture

From late antiquity until the nineteenth century the Italian peninsula was made up of numerous states and city-states, governed as republics, or ruled by kings, dukes or popes. While diverse attempts were made to unify these disparate political entities through language and culture, or warfare and realpolitik, the dominant situation was one of intense rivalry and intermittent conflict. That uniquely Italian idea of campanilismo, or pride in one's own bell-tower, was borne of this continuous rivalry. It encapsulates an important concept, that local pride was inscribed in the physical fabric of the city, that a bell-tower could stand for a collective sense of one city's self-image and that this was expressed and calibrated in relation to neighbours, who were usually rivals. It is within this frame of references that much recent scholarship on urban image and identity has focused, teasing out the intentional distinctions that were drawn socio-politically and culturally, between the major centres of the peninsula. Such a process has significantly altered the view, dominant until quite recently, that style in art and architecture followed a single evolutionary route that passed from one place to another, as each lived a ‘golden age’ that defined a single ‘urban’ school – Siena, Venice, Florence, Rome, Bologna. In its place, a more nuanced view of how each centre fostered, reacted, responded and adopted innovation and change has come to the fore. In a generation of scholarship that followed Michael Baxandall's ground-breaking Painting and Experience, the idea that Renaissance Italians consciously fashioned urban images and identities has entered the mainstream. Scholars have put artworks and buildings back into close relation with the social contexts of their production and have asked how they worked in relation to their users and viewers.

Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist: Spirit’s Dictum

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Étienne Balibar
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Gospel Of John ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit

This chapter argues that while the category of “modernity” is differential, it is so in several senses that intersect and vie with one another. It introduces certain theses on modernity which aim to “deconstruct” the institutions, presuppositions, and discourses of modernity, arguing that they are always present at the heart of the philosophical expressions of modernity. The chapter discusses these concepts with respect to a problem of reading and interpreting a particular Hegelian utterance: “Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist” (hereafter, “IWWI”), taken from Chapter 4 of the Phenomenology of Spirit. In doing so the chapter also takes into account two models for Hegel's utterance: the theophanic utterances from the Gospel of John, and Rousseau's Social Contract.

Introduction: when ideas travel: political theory, colonialism, and the history of ideas

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Burke A. Hendrix ◽  
Deborah Baumgold
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
History Of

Ideas travel. The history of political thought as it has generally been studied is deeply interested in these forms of travel and in the transformations that occur along the way. Ideas of a social contract first crystallize in the England of Hobbes and Locke, and then travel in branching ways to Jefferson’s North America, Robespierre’s France, Kant’s Prussia, and elsewhere. In their travels, these ideas hybridize with others, are repurposed in new social contexts, and often take on political meanings deeply divergent from what their originators intended. Students of the history of political thought are acutely aware of these complexities in the development of European political ideas during the early modern and modern eras, given the centrality of such ideas for shaping the political worlds in which we now live....

Law and Public Reason

Hegel's Value ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 276-319
Author(s):  
Dean Moyar
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Public Reason ◽  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
The State ◽  
Court System ◽  
Legislative Power ◽  
Limited Role ◽  
Standards Of Evidence ◽  
Legal Positivist ◽  
The Law

This chapter provides an account of Hegel’s conception of the law and of the law’s realization within Civil Society and the State. It is argued that Hegel is a legal positivist because he holds that right is binding only when it has been promulgated as law, and that law can be valid even if it does not measure up to the standard of right. The chapter gives an account of Hegel’s contextualism and shows that he is committed to an essential but limited role for philosophy in determining the content of the law. Ultimately Hegel’s view is best understood as a public reason conception of the rationality of law. The court system is a prototype of public reason in that its goal is to guarantee standards of evidence and publicity in a setting of mutual recognition. The chapter argues that Hegel does believe in the need for a written constitution, and that his view of the legislative power is a further elucidation of public reason based on the idea of representative interests.

Natural Law and Public Reason in Kant's Political Philosophy

1996 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Weinstock
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Public Reason ◽  
The State ◽  
Legal Philosophy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Human Good ◽  
Natural Law Theory

My intention in this essay will be to explore the role that consent-based arguments perform in Kant's political and legal philosophy. I want to uncover the extent to which Kant considered that the legitimacy of the State and of its laws depends upon the outcome of intersubjective deliberation. Commentators have divided over the following question: Is Kant best viewed as a member of the social contract tradition, according to which the legitimacy of the state and of the laws it promulgates derives from the consent of those people over whom it claims authority, or should he be read as having put forward a secularized version of natural law theory, according to which the state and its laws are legitimate to the extent that they are attained by standards of sound reason and supported by an objective account of the human good?

Diversity, toleration and recent social contract theory

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (5) ◽  
pp. 539-554
Author(s):  
James W. Boettcher
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Public Reason ◽  
Contract Theory ◽  
Political Liberalism ◽  
Social Contract Theory ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Social Stability ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Experimentation

Ryan Muldoon has recently advanced an interesting and original bargaining model of the social contract as an alternative to Rawlsian social contract theory and political liberalism. This model is said to provide a more plausible account of social stability and the acceptance of diversity, at least as compared to those approaches that emphasize the traditional liberal idea of toleration. I challenge this claim by pursuing three criticisms of Muldoon’s new social contract theory. First, the principle of distribution that he proposes is likely to be rejected by some (or even many) members of the public, due to its indeterminacy or highly inegalitarian implications. Second, Muldoon tends to reduce the benefits of cooperation to gains from trade, ignoring other cooperative benefits that complicate his call for small-scale social experimentation. Finally, while motivating the acceptance of diversity is a commendable goal, distinguishing more defensible conceptions of toleration from less defensible conceptions requires attending to those elements of political liberalism that Muldoon seems to abandon, namely, standards of public reason and public justification.

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