Papers by Matthew J Delhey
Hegel-Jahrbuch
Hegel’s interpreters often regard his turn toward an institutional analysis of society and politi... more Hegel’s interpreters often regard his turn toward an institutional analysis of society and politics to be among his most important contributions to philosophy. However, precisely how to understand this institutional turn in Hegel’s thought and its success as a paradigm for social philosophy remain a matter of ongoing scholarly debate.1 In this paper, I aim to further our understanding of Hegel’s institutionalization of ethical life by reconstructing just one aspect of his institutional theory, namely, its account of institutional content as rational or vernünftig, insofar as it responds to Fichte’s account of institutional content being the product of arbitrariness or Willkür.
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Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2023
This article reevaluates Hölderlin's social and political thought in the 1790s. Against Georg Luk... more This article reevaluates Hölderlin's social and political thought in the 1790s. Against Georg Lukács, it argues that Hölderlin's politics of the new mythology, while utopian, are not mystical. In the Fragment of Philosophical Letters and the Oldest System-Programme of German Idealism, Hölderlin instead articulates two fundamental claims. Socially, the new mythical collectivity must elevate (erheben) the social relations produced
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This thesis examines Hegel’s critique of abstract labor in the Philosophy of Right and the sectio... more This thesis examines Hegel’s critique of abstract labor in the Philosophy of Right and the sections on objective spirit in the Encyclopaedia. Against both Frederick Neuhouser’s and Marxist interpretations, I argue that abstract labor, for Hegel, characterizes the specific kind of mechanical labor undertaken in the nineteenth-century factory. Such repetitive labor, Hegel claims, leads to the deadening (Abstumpfung) of the worker through the deforming of her ethical subjectivity, a social pathology he hopes will be resolved by machine automation. By developing two key aspects of Hegel’s social theory—that labor produces ethical subjectivity or education (Bildung) and that this education is the central locus of civil society’s ethicality—I argue that we ought to understand Hegel’s hope for machine automation as a critique of those forms of labor which prevent the worker’s rational participation in the totality of the labor process and thus fail to actualize her social freedom.
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Papers by Matthew J Delhey
Reviews by Matthew J Delhey