The struggle for recognition together with the master-slave dialectic form Hegel's recognition narrative. Hegel composed several versions of this narrative throughout his career. This paper argues that the versions written after 1807 differ significantly from the well-known version found in the Phenomenology of Spirit. A major difference concerns the continuity of the narrative. Whereas the Phenomenology posits essential narrative continuity between the two events of struggle and service, the later versions cancel this continuity. Furthermore, the later versions argue that service alone is a condition for genuine freedom. Self-assertive struggle is analyzed as a defect of normal, healthy development, akin to derangement or crime. This differs markedly from the Phenomenology in which self-assertive struggle is posited as a necessary stage in the development of free rational agency. The paper argues that Hegel made this change in the narrative in order to stress its pedagogical significance, i.e., that the narrative could be read as a literal (if idealized) story of education.
Precisely in his social philosophy it becomes clear that Hegel's thought is far from being a system of pure rational thinking and is instead an attempt to grasp real human life conceptually by, as Hegel says, "comprehending what is." The first half of this paper examines in what sense the method of the Philosophy of Right requires engaging with the factically existing world. That method weaves together two inseparable projects: a conceptual development of the idea of freedom and a "looking around" in the real world to find social practices that realize freedom in its various guises. The Philosophy of Right seeks to present the diverse practices of modern social life as an organic unity whose guiding concept is practical freedom in its diverse forms, and in doing so it uncovers the rational ends that animate real social life. The paper's second half focuses on a specific existing social practice private property in order to demonstrate how philosophical comprehension proceeds and what must be shown about a social practice in order for it to count as rationally "comprehended." The early part of the Philosophy of Right locates the rational purpose of private property in its giving individual property owners a social space within which to realize their "abstract" freedom as freely choosing persons, mostly unbound by ethical constraints. In its later discussion of Sittlichkeit, property, in addition to realizing personal freedom, is shown to serve higher ethical ends that can be achieved only by participating in "substantial" social institutions such as the family (in love and mutual care) and civil society (through recognition of one's productive contributions to social wealth and in corporations, within which individuals establish bonds of solidarity and work together to achieve collective rather than purely individual ends).
Brandom recently criticized the existing interpretations of Hegel's chapter SenseCertainty as committed to a "bad argument" that rests on a confusion between three kinds of repeatability (epistemic authority of sensuous deliverance, types of indexical, and properties). As a stronger alternative, he offers two arguments with respect to two new kinds of repeatability (classificatory and recollective repeatability). In this article, I argue that Brandom's criticism of the "bad argument" is a straw man argument. It rests on an unwarranted assumption that types of indexicals are universals only by analogy with properties. As Koch and Heidemann suggest, types of indexicals can be universals in terms of Fregean sense or Kaplanian character. I go on to point out that Hegel's argument in the chapter "Sense Certainty" only concerns types of indexicals; the other two kinds of repeatability are unnecessary for his argument. Meanwhile, Brandom's two alternative arguments have difficulties of their own in interpreting Hegel's text.
Over the past decade or two, the historiographical category of 'classical German philosophy' has made a comeback in research on German philosophy from around 1780 - 1840. This article sets out to trace the history of its emergence. To this end, it proposes a contextual study of the work in which this expression first appears: Ludwig Feuerbach and der Ausgang der klassisschen deutschen Philosophie by Friedrich Engels (1886). The article reconstructs the historiographical landscape of German philosophy in the second half of the 19th century and the theoretical debates surrounding German social democracy in the 1860s and 1880s, in order to establish the context in which Engels' writing appeared. This reconstruction of the context leads to two main results: 1) we explain why it was reading C.N. Starcke's book on Feuerbach that led Engels to undertake a thorough historiographical and theoretical rectification aimed at Social Democrats, and why he sought to restore Hegel and Feuerbach to their rightful place in this history; 2) it is also shown that, in proposing his own version of the history of 'classical German philosophy', Engels is led to oppose (without necessarily realising it) another narrative in circulation at the time, the one with which the expression 'German idealism' is associated. Engels' book thus offers an interesting perspective on the way in which the 1 9th century wrote the history of philosophy between 1780 and 1840.
This article argues that Hegel understands the constitution of a state not merely as its fundamental laws, but rather as the way of life in that society. We should accordingly understand the constitution as a mode of inhabiting the social space of objective spirit. Societies without written laws can therefore also possess a constitution. The article explains Hegel's concept of the constitution through a dialectical double movement: on the one hand, the constitution objectifies and expresses human subjectivity; on the other hand, in its objectivity, the constitution manifests itself within (thereby also giving support to) the subjectivity of the individual citizens. The constitution of a state describes the dynamic by which the interplay between individuals' subjective attitudes and the objective state institutions shape a people's social life-world. Hegel's dialectical position is thus distinct from both simple constructivist and normative theories of society. Whereas these claim to determine what the supposedly correct constitution should be, Hegel's theory anticipates the position now known as "social constitutionalism."
