Freedom in Hegel: Contra Pippin

2015 ◽  
Vol 97 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Englander
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Change ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Ethical Life ◽  
Rational Agency ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Social Attachments

Abstract:The Kantian concept of self-legislation plays a central role in Robert Pippin’s influential interpretation of Hegel’s theory of freedom. I isolate two competing notions of freedom present within Pippin’s own specification of the concept: freedom as reflective transparency and freedom as self-identification with one’s deeds. The former is compatible with Hegel’s own quasi-Spinozist conception of freedom and allows for historical conceptual change. It is also consistent with Pippin’s truly Hegelian contention that the justification of “modern ethical life” must assume the form of a historical, developmental account, and that a plurality of our moral and social attachments can be integral to our freedom. The ideal of self-identification. however, and Pippin’s development of it in terms of self-legislation and a theory of the normative social conditions of rational agency, involves a dichotomous conception of freedom that is incompatible with Hegel’s. Pippin’s ultimate privileging of self-legislation thus introduces a tension into his account and prevents him from achieving his distinctly Hegelian ambitions.

Equality as a Social Ideal

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-47
Author(s):  
James Lindley Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Social Conditions ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Political Inequality ◽  
Equal Status ◽  
Democratic Citizen ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
Empirical Sociology ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter discusses how the ideal of equal status connects to democratic aspirations, and why people should take that ideal seriously. Equality of status constitutes, and is constituted by, relations of an egalitarian kind. When people mutually recognize one another's equal status, they put themselves in an egalitarian relation. However, there are further connections between status equality and egalitarian relations, in that the recognition of equal status in various respects helps promote relationships among citizens free of hierarchy, domination, servility, and the like. These further connections are contingent, depending upon truths of empirical sociology and psychology—about how, in fact, humans tend to respond to certain social conditions, like material or political inequality. A similar structure holds for the ideal of political equality. The shared status of “democratic citizen” is constituted by a range of expectations that regulate institutions and individual practices. That status is properly recognized when institutions and practices meet those expectations. When citizens mutually recognize one another's status, they thereby engage in, and promote, valuable egalitarian political relations.

Under What Social Conditions Representative Government is Inapplicable

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Stuart Mill
Keyword(s):  
Ideal Type ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Representative Government ◽  
General Improvement ◽  
The Ideal

We have recognized in representative government the ideal type of the most perfect polity, for which, in consequence, any portion of mankind are better adapted in proportion to their degree of general improvement. As they range lower and lower in development, that form of...

On the Incalculable: Language and Freedom from a Hermeneutic Point of View

2004 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Ethical Life ◽  
The Ideal

In his celebrated "Letter on Humanism," Heidegger spoke of the need for an "original ethics" which did not submit itself to the ideal of something like a "subject" or the "human," two notions that he suggested were no longer serviceable for the task of thinking the problems of ethical life. The purpose of this article is to look at how Gadamer's hermeneutics might offer an avenue for developing this original ethics. To this end, Gadamer's discussion of language, in particular the relation of language and freedom, serves as the guideline for unpacking this claim.

A View from Somewhere

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony M. Nadler
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Professional Autonomy ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Strategic Response ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Journalistic Professionalism ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter analyzes how the ideal of professional autonomy came to prominence in U.S. journalism and why it came up against enormous pressures by the late 1960s and 1970s. Many perceptive journalism scholars have sought to explain the origins of journalistic professionalism and the idealization of objectivity. The chapter offers a synthesis of this scholarship, paying close attention to the kinds of evidence scholars have used to show different factors—cultural, political, economic, and institutional—as prompting the adoption of the objectivity ideal and the related commitment to journalistic professionalism. Sifting through this scholarship suggests that journalistic professionalism served as a strategic response on the part of media owners to new social conditions taking shape largely during the first half of the twentieth century.

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