Hegel is not today a figure of the history of philosophy about whom there is agreement. He is read, and in readings that contradict one another — down to the question whether his philosophy of right can be understood at all without his Logic. What follows is a survey of the positions that carry the present debate, with sources. For the historical reception — from Schelling through the Left and Right Hegelians to the international influence — see For whom was Hegel relevant?
The great divide: Hegel with or without the Logic
The non-metaphysical reading
One of the basic divisions of present-day Hegel scholarship. This line tries to detach the philosophy of right and the Phenomenology from the Logic: the insights into intersubjectivity, ethical life and recognition are to hold up even without absolute spirit and the logic of the concept, and to remain usable for post-metaphysical societies. The objection is obvious and is loudly made — that this deprives Hegel of precisely what he took his contribution to be.
Sources: Klaus Hartmann, „Hegel: A Non-Metaphysical View“, 1972 · Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, 1985 · Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society, 1979
See also The metaphysical reading, The Science of Logic
The metaphysical reading
The counter-position. It holds it a fundamental mistake to separate the philosophy of right from the Logic: freedom in Hegel is not in the first place a social phenomenon but a logical concept — being with oneself in an other — and only because the Logic develops the structure of self-determination can the state be grasped as the actuality of the Idea. Within this direction, however, there is fierce dispute about how much metaphysics is meant; the exchange between Pippin and Houlgate is the best-known case.
Sources: Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic, 2006, and Hegel on Being, 2022 · Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, 1989 · Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Naturalism, 2012
See also The non-metaphysical reading, Robert Pippin, Absolute Idealism
The Pittsburgh School
An influential and very independent reading, which takes Hegel through the lens of analytic philosophy of language. Concepts on this view are not metaphysical objects but social norms formed in the practice of inference and mutual justification — in the space of reasons. This yields a remarkably clear Hegel, and one who lacks a good deal that he himself held indispensable.
Sources: Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit, 1994, and A Spirit of Trust, 2019 · John McDowell, Mind and World, 1994 · Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, 1956
See also The non-metaphysical reading, Terry Pinkard
What freedom means: recognition or self-determination
Axel Honneth
The most prominent representative of modern recognition theory. In his principal work he reads the Jena writings and the Phenomenology as a theory of social pathologies and distinguishes three patterns of recognition that carry a successful identity: love in close relationships, right as recognition of the person, social esteem for one’s own achievement. Later he reconstructed the philosophy of right itself as a theory of social freedom. The objection against him is that his psychologically turned reading drops Hegel’s logical claim.
Sources: Axel Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung, 1992 · Leiden an Unbestimmtheit, 2001 · Das Recht der Freiheit, 2011
See also Recognition
Robert Pippin
A key figure of the idealist reading. For him the core of Hegel’s thought is self-determination: free is not the one who can choose, but the one who acts from reasons he acknowledges as his own. The philosophy of right then describes the institutions without which such action would not be possible at all. Against Honneth he insists that freedom in Hegel is not a social-psychological but a conceptual relation.
Sources: Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism. The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, 1989 · Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, 2008
See also The metaphysical reading, Freedom
Terry Pinkard
Defends, like Pippin, a systematic but not supernaturalist reading. Spirit for him is no cosmic subject but the space of social norms and reasons in which we live. The philosophy of right is then the reconstruction of how the norm of freedom came about historically, until in the institutions of the modern state it found the shape in which it is with itself.
Sources: Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology. The Sociality of Reason, 1994 · Hegel. A Biography, 2000 · Hegel’s Naturalism, 2012
See also The Pittsburgh School, Spirit
Between liberalism and community
Communitarianism
In the Anglophone debate of the eighties and nineties Hegel was brought up as a chief witness against liberalism. The charge was that liberalism starts from an abstract, unencumbered individual; Hegel’s ethical life served as the counter-image: a human being is always already embedded in family, occupation and people, and it is from there that his ends come. The appropriation was one-sided — Hegel nowhere gave up the right of subjectivity — and promptly called forth a liberal counter-reading.
Sources: Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society, 1979, and Sources of the Self, 1989 · Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice, 1983 · against them John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 1971
See also Ethical Life, The liberal reading
The liberal reading
The counter-movement to the communitarian appropriation. It stresses that Hegel’s state is no organic whole devouring the individual, but the institutional condition under which subjective freedom — conscience, choice of occupation, property — subsists at all. The evidence stands in Hegel himself: the principle of modern states has its strength precisely in letting personal particularity complete itself into a self-subsistent extreme (§ 260).
Sources: Alan Patten, Hegel’s Idea of Freedom, 1999 · Frederick Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory, 2000 · Klaus Vieweg, Das Denken der Freiheit, 2012
In the edition: § 260 · § 132 — see also Subjective Freedom, Communitarianism, Human rights
Human rights
A contested point. Critics reproach Hegel with subordinating individual rights to the state, and point to sentences such as the one that the highest duty of individuals is to be members of the state (§ 258). The defenders reply that abstract right — the right of the person to body, life and property — is the first and unsublatable foundation of the whole system, and that Hegel expressly knows inalienable and imprescriptible rights (§ 66). The state does not abolish these rights; in Hegel it is the one condition under which they are actual at all.
Sources: Ludwig Siep, Aktualität und Grenzen der praktischen Philosophie Hegels, 2010 · Alan Patten, Hegel’s Idea of Freedom, 1999 · critically: Ernst Tugendhat, Selbstbewusstsein und Selbstbestimmung, 1979
In the edition: § 36 · § 66 · § 258 · § 270 — see also The Person, Subjective Freedom, The liberal reading
Disputed questions in the philosophy of right
The rehabilitation of civil society
Marx radicalized Hegel’s analysis of civil society as the place of alienation. Recent scholarship turns it in another direction: it reads the sphere between family and state not merely as an economy but as what is today called civil society — associations, the public sphere, social movements. Hegel’s corporations then appear as the intermediate member that spares the individual the choice between isolation and the state.
Sources: Manfred Riedel, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft und Staat bei Hegel, 1970 · Jean L. Cohen / Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory, 1992
In the edition: § 182 · § 250 to § 256 — see also Civil Society, Civil society in the modern sense, Police and Corporation
The monarchy in recent debate
Hegel’s defence of constitutional monarchy counts for many as the most outdated piece of the philosophy of right. It is being read afresh, however: the „I will“ of the monarch is in Hegel no expression of arbitrary choice but the place at which grounding stops and a decision has to be made. The question is then not whether a monarch is needed, but where a modern democracy has that place — in the head of state, in the constitutional court, in the majority principle.
Sources: Karl-Heinz Ilting, introduction to Hegel. Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie, 1973 · Dieter Henrich / Rolf-Peter Horstmann (eds.), Hegels Philosophie des Rechts, 1982 · Bernard Bourgeois, Le droit naturel de Hegel, 1986
In the edition: § 275 to § 286 · § 279 · § 280 — see also The Power of the Sovereign, The Constitution
Cosmopolitanism and the state
Hegel’s external law of the state — war as a necessary moment, the league of nations as a mere contract — runs against Kant’s „Perpetual Peace“ and against any cosmopolitan order. The debate asks whether his thought is hopelessly stuck in the nineteenth-century nation state, or whether supra-state institutions can be thought with his means — recognition and sovereignty. In favour of the second possibility is that recognition is for him in any case the relation in which independence first subsists.
Sources: Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace, 1795 · Ludwig Siep, Aktualität und Grenzen der praktischen Philosophie Hegels, 2010 · Jürgen Habermas, Die postnationale Konstellation, 1998
In the edition: § 321 to § 340 — see also External Sovereignty, War
Criticism from outside
The feminist critique
It is directed at Hegel’s determination of the family, in particular at § 166, where he assigns woman to the principle of feeling and inwardness and denies her access to the universal — the state and science. The debate turns on whether this is a judgement of its time that can be struck out without damaging the system, or whether the exclusion is needed for the separation of family and civil society and falls with it.
Sources: Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract, 1988 · Seyla Benhabib, „On Hegel, Women and Irony“, 1991 · Patricia Jagentowicz Mills (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel, 1996
In the edition: § 158 · § 166 — see also The Family, Hegel and the other
Hegel and the other
Postcolonial criticism takes its start from Hegel’s account of world history: from the determination of Africa as without history and of the Germanic-Christian world as the summit. The dispute is whether his system is eurocentric at its core — because it always grasps the other as a subordinate stage — or whether it is precisely his dialectic of recognition that provides the sharpest tool for criticizing such relations. Both sides have text on their side; the question is treated separately on this site.
Sources: Susan Buck-Morss, „Hegel and Haiti“, in: Critical Inquiry 26 (2000) · Robert Bernasconi against Joseph McCarney, in: Radical Philosophy 119 (2003) · Domenico Losurdo, Hegel und das deutsche Erbe, 1989
On this site: Was Hegel a racist? — In the edition: § 341 to § 360 — see also World History, The World Spirit, The feminist critique
Post-Hegelianism
A collective term for the philosophy that after Hegel defines itself essentially by criticizing him. Three strands are the most important. The Left Hegelians and Marx reproach him with having sublated alienation only in thought, while it continues economically. Kierkegaard sees in the system the annihilation of the individual and in reconciliation a betrayal of suffering. Poststructuralism, finally, criticizes the claim of the concept to gather all difference and all otherness into a unity.
Sources: Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, 1843 · Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1846 · Jacques Derrida, Glas, 1974 · Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, 1941
On this site: Did Marx not finally set Hegel on his feet? — see also Alienation, Reconciliation
Slavoj Žižek
The most provocative of today’s readers of Hegel, who takes him through Lacan’s psychoanalysis. For him the most important thing in Hegel is not reconciliation and not the sublating of contradictions, but negativity itself. The state is for him no harmonious solution; the rabble is the part that belongs to no part — the remainder the system produces and cannot accommodate, and in which its untruth becomes visible. Whether one reads this for Hegel or against him is a matter of taste; that § 245 stands where it stands is not.
Sources: Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 2012 · Frank Ruda, Hegels Pöbel, 2011
In the edition: § 244 · § 245 — see also The Rabble, Contradiction
To listen to
The German strand in legal philosophy is presented separately: Hegel and German legal scholarship.