Beautiful City, Lawful Empire, Rational State

2020 ◽  
pp. 43-110
Author(s):  
Will D. Desmond

Hegel’s exposition of the ‘rational’ state in The Philosophy of Right draws on ancient ethics, politics, and history, and cannot be fully understood without reference to his Lectures on the Philosophy of History. This chapter seeks to explore the many ‘moments of antiquity’ in the Philosophy of Right, when ancient practices or ideas infiltrate Hegel’s more abstract analysis of ethico-political phenomena. It does so by following the tripartite division of the Philosophy of Right: for example, the analysis of property in ‘Abstract Right’ is incomplete without appreciating Hegel’s response to ancient forms of slavery and the Roman ‘law of things’; the second section on ‘Morality’ is primarily Kantian, yet is also implicitly in dialogue with Socratic thinkers for its evaluation of virtue, the Good, and conscience; finally, Hegel’s innovative concept of ‘Ethical Life’ is significantly indebted to his understanding of the Greek and Roman families, ancient constitutional arrangements, and Justinian’s Code. Turning from these and other ‘moments of antiquity’, the chapter then offers a more continuous presentation and evaluation of Hegel’s understanding of Greek and Roman histories, explaining how his concept of the ‘beautiful’ Greek polis and ‘lawful’ Roman empire were for him the two historically necessary stages in the development of the modern ‘rational state’.

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 515-540
Author(s):  
Hauke Brunkhorst

AbstractIn a lecture that Habermas gave on his 90th birthday he ironically, but with serious intent, called a good Kant a sufficiently Marxist educated Kant. This dialectical Kant is the only one of the many Kants who maintains the idea of an unconditioned moral autonomy but completely within evolution, history and in the middle of societal class and other struggles. The article tries to show what Kant could have learned from his later critics to enable him to become a member of the Frankfurt School’s neo-Marxist theory of society.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Rocío Zambrana

Abstract Recent discussions of Hegel's conception of second nature, specifically focused on Hegel's notion of habit (Gewohnheit), have greatly advanced our understanding of Hegel's views on embodied normativity. This essay examines Hegel's account of embodied normativity in relation to his assessment of good and bad habits. Engaging Hegel's account of the rabble (Pöbel) in the Philosophy of Right and Frank Ruda's assessment of Hegel's rabble, this essay traces the relation between ethicality, idleness and race in Hegel. In being a figure of refusal in its affirmation of idleness, the rabble disallows the progressive revision of the project of modernity central to Hegel's philosophy. Hegel's discussion of the rabble is thus key to assessing the production of race within Hegel's notion of ethical life.


Author(s):  
Eric H. Pool

D. 41,2,3,21 turns on the issue of how possessio is to be divided. Understanding its content presupposes making a distinction that was self-evident for the Roman jurist but has never been made by later scholars of Roman law. They do not distinguish the varying ‘causes’ of possession (pro emptore … pro suo) which mark different types of lawful possession, and the ‘causes’ of acquisition (causae adquirendi) which justify obtaining possesion as by an owner. Taking a legally valid sale as an example the distinctive features of (possessio) pro emptore in contrast to emptio are established as well as their relevance for procedural practice. In particular there are no less than six forms of action in the law of inheritance for which these features are relevant. Next, the many negative effects of failing to make this distinction are indicated. There follows an in depth analysis and interpretation of the main phrases in Paul’s text: (i) quod nostrum non est; (ii) causae ad­­quirendi, in particular iustae causae traditionis; (iii) unum genus possidendi; (iv) species infinitae.


Author(s):  
Félix Duque ◽  

The aim of this paper is to investigate a crucial period in the development of the young Hegel (Jena, 1801-1803). Watching the decline and fall of the Holy German-Roman Empire and the Napoleonic Wars, Hegel laid a first theoretical foundation of the modern State through an allegorical interpretation of Orestes' myth (Eumenides, Aeschylus) as a sort of study-case of the "tragedy in the ethical life". Hegel atempts in this way to overcome the decomposition of the old classical ideals, which takes place at the time of the emerging egoism of the bourgeois capitalism. The proposed solution by Hegel in 1803 is the last attempt to build a new religion on the basis of the reconciliation of the People with their own destiny.


This chapter provides an overview of Book V of Augustine's The City of God. It analyzes how Rome has extended her imperial sway throughout Europe and the Near East in spite of the moral bankruptcy of the Roman state. It also reviews the solution offered by some philosophers about the expansion and consolidation of empire as the outcome of chance or fate. The chapter discusses how providence has endowed Roman leaders with traditional virtues that the aims of glory and honour for the individual, and dominion for the state that are at odds with Christianity's application of the virtues. It reviews the key to Augustine's philosophy of history, in which the Roman empire has spread and is maintained in existence by divine providence.


2020 ◽  
pp. 315-331
Author(s):  
Werner Eck

Sections of the leges municipales from at least forty different cities in Southern Spain have survived to us. These laws, understood as a powerful instrument by which Roman legal regulations were introduced into the provinces, are usually connected with Baetica. As a result it is too easy to overlook the fact that corresponding leges were issued wherever Roman or Latin cities were founded, and continued to be issued long after the Flavian era, the time to which most of the surviving fragments date. Documentary evidence has now made clear that leges municipales are a general phenomenon which continued to play a role in the second and third centuries CE. Fragments of city laws are known not only in the province of Alpes Maritimae, but also in Noricum (Lauriacum), Moesia superior (Ratiaria), and in Troesmis (Moesia inferior). The law for Troesmis is especially important because, in contrast to the laws from Baetica, it was issued for a Roman and not a Latin municipium. This demonstrates that specific Roman legal regulations, which were issued in Augustan times exclusively for Roman citizens, were still of relevance in the second century and also must have been used in the province of Moesia inferior. This material indicates that people had to obey Roman legal regulations more or less everywhere in nearly all provinces of the West. The leges municipales were thus one of the decisive means by which Roman law spread in the provinces—more so than has previously been realized—and could even be the basis for daily life.


Author(s):  
Paul J. du Plessis

The term European ius commune (in its historical sense) signifies that, from the fourteenth to the start of the sixteenth centuries, most of Europe shared a common legal tradition. Many local and regional variations on the law existed, but the terminology, concepts, and structure provided by elements of Roman law provided a common framework. This chapter traces how Justinian’s codification came to influence the modern world. The influence of Roman law in the modern world is immense: it constitutes the historical and conceptual basis of many legal systems throughout the world. Its impact has not been confined to those countries in Western Europe that historically formed part of the Roman Empire. Wherever Europeans went, they normally took their law (usually based to some extent on the principles of Roman law) with them.


Traditio ◽  
1955 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 381-394
Author(s):  
Hans Julius Wolff

The monumental volume with which we are dealing is the legacy left to his science by a man who will always be counted among the most distinguished and most influential scholars of Roman law and ancient legal history in the first half of the twentieth century. As early as 1902, when he first began to teach Roman law at the University of Graz, Leopold Wenger had conceived a plan of writing a history of the whole legal order of the Romans that would comprise the total of public, procedural, and private institutions in one great unit. He proposed to see his unit in the light of its general political and cultural setting and to interpret it as bringing to its climax and final achievement, under Justinian, the evolution of law and legal thought of all antiquity; antiquity itself he understood as one single historical process interrelating the multitude of peoples and civilizations of the Mediterranean area that grew and declined, succeeded and influenced each other, until they were absorbed into the Roman Empire and were thus enabled to transmit their common heritage to later centuries. Understandably enough, this gigantic project involved more than one scholar could accomplish in one lifetime. Wenger was not able to carry it out. He did, however, succeed in completing, in this detailed description and discussion of the sources, the first instalment, and happily lived to see its publication shortly before his death on September 21, 1953, at the age of seventy-nine.


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