Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
‘Community in Hegel’s Social Philosophy’
Simon Lumsden
The distinction between society and community was formalised in the late Nineteenth Century
by Ferdinand Tönnies. This distinction was also central to Heidegger, though with very different
politics, in the mid-Twentieth Century. Both these thinkers conceive community [Gemeinschaft] as
a form of shared understanding and communal life that is grounded in a commitment to place.
By contrast society is primarily an instrumental form of social interaction ‘where everyone is out
for himself alone and living in a state of tension with everyone else.’1 Hegel shares with these
figures an acute awareness that modern life has primarily produced an individualised freedom
that is incompatible with the communal shared projects that was, for example, at the heart of
Greek ethical life.
In the Twentieth Century interest in community emerges on a variety of fronts. Whatever
the diverse origins that led people, often with conflicting social and political agendas, to attempt
to reconceive this notion, all are seeking to provide some kind of alternative to the fragmentation
and isolation of modern society.2 Hegel describes civil society, with its origins in the bourgeois
market and the system of needs, as a sphere of particularity, that is, somewhere individuals
pursue private interests. While acknowledging many positive features in civil society, he argues
that the individualised freedom that comes to flourish in the peculiarly modern sphere of civil
society is limited. Despite Hegel’s reservations about civil society, he does not seek to remedy it
or challenge it by reviving a notion of community in the manner of Tönnies and Heidegger.
Tönnies claims that the modern state could not overcome atomisation and alienation and
establish a genuinely shared form of life since it primarily operates on a social contractarian
model of moderating competing self-interests. For Hegel the best prospects for overcoming the
atomisation of individuals in civil society is a state that can cultivate in its citizens a regard for the
universal such that individuals think and act in accordance with the universal and are thereby able
to transcend their particular allegiances and the self-interest cultivated by the competitive
elements of civil society.
In this context this paper addresses the following two issues: firstly, it examines if the
state overcomes these problems by establishing a successful political community. Following Axel
Honneth, I argue Hegel’s state is a limited model of political community because it inadequately
accounts for how we might be bound together as a participatory and communal form of life in and as
the state. Secondly, Hegel was well aware of the loss of community and is in some sense
nostalgic for it. He suggests the need for a shared form of life beyond the family, in which one
can enjoy communal life outside the individualised and instrumentalised domain of civil society.
1
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
However, the defining features of modernity (subjective freedom, self-determination, the critical
transformation of norms and so on) mean that community cannot be a structure of right.3 This is
as true of the 1820’s as it is of the early Twenty First century. Hegel is sensitive to the idea of
community, but does not invoke some form of community to counter atomisation in the modern
world. The state and civil society are the only structures that can respond to atomisation in a
manner that is consistent with modern social freedom. Community might provide comfort and
something to which we aspire to belong but it cannot be a sphere of right or justice since its
exclusivity is at odds with subjective freedom and the universalist aspiration of the modern state.
Overall I argue that Hegel’s thought addresses and negotiates these tensions around community
and modernity, without resolving them satisfactorily—perhaps because no satisfactory resolution
is really possible.
I. Substance, Individuality and Concrete Freedom
In the Philosophy of Right,4 and in his various lectures on history and philosophy from this period,
Hegel describes two broad forms of life. The first is ‘the principle of Greek ethical life’, which he
says is the ‘main thought’ of Plato’s Republic. Hegel characterizes it this way: ‘each individual
subject acts, lives, and finds enjoyment only within this spirit and the subjective has its second, or
spiritual, nature in a natural mode or as the custom and habit of what is substantial.’5 The
animating feature of Greek ethical life is a type of organic unity in which the citizen unreflectively
embodies the ethic of the city such that she does not understand herself as an independent judge
of those values. Shared forms of life have an unquestioned priority over the lives of individuals.
Who one is, is aligned immediately with the norms, values and customs of the community —
Antigone and Creon are Hegel’s archetypal examples.
Plato’s Republic describes a highly structured and rigid social and political order, explicitly
modelled on the harmony of part and whole in an organism (PR §185). The Republic captures the
principle of Greek ethical life but also its limitation, since it allows no determinative role for
subjective freedom or the self-reflective subject. This is corrected in the modern era.6 The
‘determination that stands over and against’ the ‘substantial’ model of ethical life is the ‘principle
of subjective freedom.’
Against this substantial relationship of individuals to customs — is the individual’s
subjective free will, the moral viewpoint that individuals [should] not perform their
actions out of respect and reverence for the institutions of state or fatherland, but that
they should reach their own decisions in keeping with the moral conviction and should
2
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
determine their actions according to their own decision and conscience. (LHP II 219220/V 52)7
The dualism of subjective freedom and substantial ethical life establishes an opposition that
Hegel confronts in his social and political philosophy.8 Hegel does not react against the atomistic
tendency of the modern age in his account of ethical life by reclaiming an unreconstructed Greek
ethical life. The subjective freedoms that the market economy affords are central to modern
ethical life and there is no retreat from this.
For Hegel civil society [bürgerliche Gesellschaft] is best conceived as an aggregate of
individuals pursuing their specific needs. Civil society is characterised by a heightened awareness
of one’s individuality and it develops an objective order — markets and forms of collective
organisation — in which that individuality flourishes. Civil society provides a plethora of social
roles and duties that are largely the product of complex social and economic relations. The
corporations and forms of association that represent collective yet particular interests denote,
however, an incipient movement away from the heightened particularity of modern subjects,
since they are collective forms of interest. The representative organisations of civil society are
however limited forms of communal life since they are focused on a common interest that is
largely reflective of the market and the interests of property owning classes. In these
representative organisations the singularity of the abstract persons that Hegel depicts in ‘Abstract
Right’ becomes something particular. Without becoming a member of one of the institutions of
civil society, with which one can participate in the commercial life of society, the subject remains
an abstract universal; that is, simply a private person with rights.
The paradox of the corporations is that they provide the individual with a sphere of
collective life but they also represent collective particular interests. Members recognise that their
particular ends, that is, their needs and their attempts to realize them, are ordered into something
communal.9 Through their participation in the commercial life of the city, individuals recognise
the interests of others and modify their own desires in the interests of an acknowledged greater
whole or at least in relation to those to whom they are selling or working with.10 The various
representative organisations of civil society cultivate the civic responsibilities that pertain to its
internal organisation and how it should conduct itself with other groups in civil society.11 That is,
for all the self-interest of civil society the pursuit of a common end is still a motivating concern
(see PR §254-5, LNR §121).
While the corporations and the estates represent particular interests, they nevertheless
provide the condition for a transition from the self-interested individualism that flourishes in the
market economy towards a more social form of existence, and is the necessary path to the
establishment of the collective life of the state. The fragmentation of society is in part overhauled
3
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
by the collective life that civil society organisations both require and enable.12 The communal life
of corporations and estates involves the development of roles and responsibilities within these
organisations. This, coupled with the care that these institutions take for the welfare of their
members, ensures that the ‘member of a corporation has no need to demonstrate … the fact that
he is somebody – by any further external evidence [such as income]. In this way, it is also recognised
that he belongs to a whole [Ganzen] which is itself a member of society in general, and that he has
an interest in, and endeavours to promote, the less selfish end of this whole’ (PR §253).
The corporations are structured to provide individuals with a sense of self-worth
independent of the vicissitudes of the market economy. They offer stability and security in the
radically unstable environment of the system of needs. In this role they are largely continuous
with various traditional institutions that pre-date the market economy, including the corporations
and the estates themselves, that were in part established to protect the members from the worst
effects of the various unpredictable disasters that could befall a person. Being part of a whole and
seeing one’s worth and dignity bestowed by one’s place in that whole is central to the transition
to the state. The important element in acknowledging the state as a rational and essential feature
of freedom is that the members of the corporations understand that there are a wide variety of
views and a diversity of organisations in civil society. The status and security of any single
organisation is only possible because of the laws and institutions of the state. Individuals become
aware that their ‘isolated trade’ has ‘an ethical status’ (PR §255) only because of the whole that
allows these organisations to operate; that whole includes both the state and the socio-economic
sphere that provides the opportunity for one to pursue a course of employment (PR §183).
Human beings can only realize themselves in a social whole (as family, estates,
corporations, and the state) and through social roles, status, meaningfully rewarded labour and so
on. Hegel focuses on the emerging modern forms of social organisation of civil society. The
transition from a feudal economy, the collapse of the guild system, the Napoleonic code — all
the well-known forces that lead to the collapse of traditional communal life — are marginally
referred to in the Philosophy of Right. The self-correcting logic of history means there can be no
return to pre-modern communities; the inexorable rise of rights and autonomous subjectivity has
made their resurgence in the west impossible.13 Nevertheless, the opening discussion of ethical
life begins a correction of the subjectivism of morality by showing the necessity of the relation of
the subject to the ethical sphere. It resituates the subject in relation to the whole.
Hegel’s various discussions of Socrates attribute to him the origin of moral reflection as a
consequence of the failure of Athenian culture to provide customs that the individual can
immediately recognise as good. While the Philosophy of Right’s presentation of ethical life is far
more reflective and rational than Antigone’s and Creon’s embodiment of customary law,
4
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
nevertheless Hegel preserves key elements of the ‘substantiality’ of Greek ethical life. Freedom of
the moral will requires culture, institutions and the state if it is to avoid a potential disjuncture of
the substantive (ethical life) and moral reflection, that is the division described at the end of
“Morality”.
Hegel’s appeal to organicism as the model of ethical life does not indicate a demand for a
mirroring of a natural order for the political state. There is a naturalistic sentiment at play in
ethical life that his use of the model of an organism to describe the relation of the individual to
the institutions of ethical life draws on. But interpreting the organicism of ethical life as a literal
model for how to see the relation of individual to the state would undercut the idea of the state
and civil society as historical developments that mark a collective achievement of selfdetermining subjects. The overwhelming description of the journey of spirit, which Hegel
presents throughout his works — as self-producing — affirms, in some sense, spirit’s
independence from nature. This cannot be undermined by his appeal to the metaphor of an
organism.14 There are not only two polarised alternatives for interpreting ethical life: either a selfdetermined freedom completely separate from nature or individuals as accidents of a social or
state substance. What spirit creates is a ‘second spiritual nature’. Unlike ancient Athens,
individuals in modern ethical life are conscious that the institutions of objective spirit have
shaped who they are and in turn that they have shaped it. There is an identification with the
whole that is felt, but it is not an unreflective immersion in the whole in the manner of Greek
ethical life.
The opening discussion of ethical life describes the notion of concrete freedom, that is,
being with oneself in otherness.15 This notion, in its initial formulation in the introduction
(PR§7), in ethical life (PR §144-148; §150-1) and in later descriptions of the state, which I will
discuss below, describe the relation of the individual to ethical laws as: self-awareness or selffeeling [Selbstgefühl], “actual living principle” Lebendigkeit, habit, second nature, Empfindung, to be
with oneself [bei sich]. These notions, which are explicitly tied to the description of concrete
freedom, continue throughout the third part of the book, and all evoke an important naturalistic
element: ethical laws and institutions are embodied expressions of human freedom. The way in
which Hegel describes the ethical as second nature (PR §150-§151) depicts a type of embodied
normativity by which norms get their force, not simply through explicit rational commitments,
but through the complex processes by which culture transcribes its customs onto the individual
such that their self-awareness [Selbstgefühl ] is mediated through them.16 I cannot explore the
details of this here beyond the broad claim that ethical life has to be conceived as a relation of the
individual to the whole such that the connection to that whole is grounded in the full depth of
human emotional, affective and intellectual life.
5
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
“Ethical substantiality” is the language that Hegel employs to capture the communality of
ethical life. Throughout the discussion of family, civil society and the state, Hegel makes
numerous references to community. Community is not something that Hegel theorises
extensively in the Philosophy of Right, though it is something that he aligns with these three spheres.
While it is not a term that Hegel examines with his usual scientific precision, it is however a
notion that is central to the substantiality of ethical life. Hegel employs an array of concepts to
express the notion of community in its various guises in his objective spirit.17 The family is an
ethical community based on love, civil society is an ethical community based on the organisations
of the system of needs, and the state is an ethical community based on the universal. Ethical life
describes the institutional structures of the economy, the architecture of the state, and the formal
structure of the family. These structural descriptions do not capture way in which it is a form of
life. The notion of concrete freedom, which Hegel uses to capture the relation of the individual
to the ethical law, is not simply a logical description. That individuals are at home with
themselves in the otherness of family, civil society and state requires love, complex social roles
with which people identify; a feeling that the corporation is like a ‘second family’ and patriotism.
The concrete freedom described in ethical life involves a disposition of the individual towards its
institutions that has a strong affective and emotional resonance, which Hegel explicitly links to
second nature (PR §287).18
Family, the corporations and the state broadly correspond to established ways of
considering community in political theory. Community is by its nature an ethereal and vague
notion that can describe the family or the state. Andrew Mason, in one of the few sustained
works on the topic, describes four essential attributes of community (all of which cohere with
Hegel’s account of community in the various lectures on natural right from 1817-19):19 ‘sharing
values, a way of life, identifying with group and its practices, and recognizing each other as
members of community.’20 I would add another criteria, which is that a communal way of life and
one’s commitments to it must be able to be inhabited — there must be material aspects of one’s
culture in which those values can be lived. The sensibility of belonging that is so important to
concrete freedom implicitly draws on these aspects of community. I will argue in the following
section that the state, in order for it to overcome the atomism of civil society, seeks to establish a
form of political community, but that it fails to make a subject at home, that is it fails as a
political community, because it is not an adequate expression of concrete freedom.
There is also a wider normative notion of community that is important in understanding
how successfully Hegel’s account of the state is able to reconcile individual and whole. It is
captured in Tönnies’ account of community, which is a form of communal life that exists in
parallel to civil society. Tönnies conceives it as an amalgam of physical location, customs that
6
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
bind individuals to one another and comradeship. It is a woolly notion but it is one that is potent
even in contemporary politics. Hegel appeals to this normative idea of community directly in
various passages in his objective spirit but he cannot make it a structure of right because it does
not correspond to the communities he describes as family, corporation/estate and the state. It is
a problematic domain but it is one that lives on into the present, the prevalence of which is
testament to the inability of the state to provide a satisfactory form of communal life.
II. The State as Political Community
Hegel’s account of the state shuns both the forced allegiance of nationalism and the Lockean
notion of the state as the adjudicator of conflicting self-interests. The state has a unique role in
developing the consciousness of the need for universality. The state develops a narrative about
universality that is central to overcoming the particularity of civil society, and in addition provides
the material conditions for securing and advancing civil society (as we will see this is an essential
element of patriotism). Hegel gives duty a specific role in fostering the universal interests of the
state. Hegel’s account of duty is not an abstract duty devoid from interest. There are no
universals in the sphere of objective spirit without interests. As Hegel remarks: ‘laws and
principles are not immediately alive … the activity that puts them into operation is that of human
needs, drives, inclinations, and passions’.21
The unifying role of the modern state could not establish a new Greek ethical life, in
which the individual will is unreflectively aligned with the will of the state. The modern state has
to acknowledge the rights, self-awareness and rationality of individuals; these are historical
achievements that cannot be revoked. Individual duties towards the state are successful only if
they feed back to the particular: ‘the individual, whose duties give him the status of a subject,
finds that in fulfilling his duties as a citizen, he gains protection for his person and property, consideration
for his particular welfare’ (PR §261R, my emphasis; cf. §264, LNR §132R). The duties of the citizen
to the state are dependent upon the state ensuring the vitality and security that her membership
of a corporation allows. Patriotism, as we will see, follows a similar pattern, its consolidation of
the interests of the state is contingent upon the state primarily protecting and enhancing the
interests of the institutions of civil society.
Patriotism extends the sense of the individual belonging to a whole that emerges with the
corporations. In patriotism the particularity and arbitrariness of the interests of individuals (and
the corporations themselves) is overcome in the recognition that ‘[an individual] labours for the
community [Allgemeinheit]’ (LNR §132R). The individual as a member of a corporation becomes
increasingly aware of her contribution to the whole and that the whole provides the structure in
7
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
which her self-realization is possible. This is why Hegel describes the corporations as ‘assuming
the role of a second family for its members’ (PR §253). In patriotism Hegel recognises the need
to see the state as a form of political community, that is, a universal sphere where we can be at
home with ourselves in the institutions of the state. He makes explicit appeal to patriotism as the
means by which political community is cultivated.
The distinctiveness of his account of patriotism comes to the fore in contrast to Fichte’s
approach in Addresses to the German Nation, which acknowledges that the atomistic nature of
modern life and the nation state are limited in their ability to develop community.22 The state he
describes in this work is a largely instrumental institution that facilitates the satisfaction of human
needs. It is not a sphere of freedom other than in the Lockean sense: a sphere that guarantees
individuals ‘live peacefully side by side’ and an ‘efficient means for realizing arbitrarily posited
[willkürlich] ends’.23 Fichte’s state is, in the language of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, a sphere that
administers the system of needs, it is an oversight authority that adjudicates contracts in society.
Conceived in this way the state precludes itself from having any higher or universal purpose; it
cannot be an expression of freedom but only a guarantee of social freedoms. The way Fichte
remedies this is by introducing a notion of ‘love of fatherland,’ which he contrasts with a ‘spirit
of calm civic love for the constitution and laws.’ Love of fatherland is not a rational affirmation
of the individual’s relationship to the state but is instead ‘the blazing flame of the higher love of
fatherland that embraces the nation as the vesture of the eternal, for whom the noble man
joyfully sacrifices himself and the ignoble.’24
Hegel’s notion of patriotism is not Fichte’s love of the fatherland. It has a much more
specific and modern meaning. The patriotism he describes in the Philosophy of Right is primarily a
commitment to participate in the institutional life of the modern state.25 Patriotism is described as
the political disposition [Gesinnung]
of trust …, or the consciousness that my substantial and particular interest is preserved
and contained in the interest and end of another (in this case, the state) and in the latter’s
relation to me as an individual [Einzelnem]. As a result, this other immediately ceases to be
another for me, and in my consciousness of this, I am free. (PR §268, my emphasis)
Hegelian patriotism is not a one-way street in which one’s allegiance to the state dissolves one’s
autonomy into the monolithic interests of the nation state. As this passage makes clear, the state
recognises and cultivates the individual’s capacity for self-determination. Patriotism requires the
state’s acknowledgement of the rationality and legitimacy of all the structures of right that
precede its description in the Philosophy of Right. Patriotism, far from being an emotive
identification with the state, is based on the rationality of the state, because rights, morality, and
the institutions of civil society are understood to be necessary and determinate features of it.
8
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
Patriotism describes our universal life, our investment in the institutions of the state —
independent national broadcasters, public health care, public education, parliament, the judiciary,
statutory authorities, etc., — as well as the way in which we concretely consider these elements to
be an expression of our freedom.
In the last sentence of the passage quoted above from §268 Hegel aligns patriotism with
being-at-home with ourselves in otherness; this is Hegel’s notion of concrete freedom. In this
context it describes a ‘disposition’ to see ourselves in the rational institutions of the state: our interests
are ‘preserved’ in the institutions of the state. For Hegel the family and the institutions of civil
society are spheres in which we have concrete, embodied attachments, the family being the most
immediate of these. The ethical import of these spheres, as well as morality and abstract right, are
preserved in the state. This is important to correct the excesses of Rousseau’s general will, which
detached humans from these ‘lesser spheres’ in order to achieve the ends of the state.
While Hegel’s state is clearly at the top of the hierarchy, its own strength is dependent
upon augmenting the attachment of individuals to the institutions of civil society and ensuring
the diversity of those institutions. Ultimately the ‘political disposition’ is dependent less on
respect for the universality of the state than it is on allowing the institutions of civil society to
flourish. One supports the state because it allows the individual to have honour and worth by
virtue of her place in an organisation: ‘the spirit of the corporation, which arises when the
particular spheres gain legal recognition, is now at the same time inwardly transformed into the
spirit of the state, because it finds in the state the means of sustaining its particular ends. This is the secret of the
patriotism of the citizens … for it is the state which supports their particular spheres’ (PR §289R, my
emphasis). By contrast in earlier passages on patriotism Hegel presents patriotism as ‘that
disposition [Gesinnung] which, in the normal conditions and circumstances of life, habitually
knows that the community [Gemeinwesen] is the substantial basis and end’ (PR §268R).26 This
passage, its addition, and the way in which he describes the state in the body of the paragraph
(quoted above) requires us to understand the state as a community. Patriotism has its basis in the
political community of the state.
These two claims are not contradictory. Patriotism can involve both aspects: the state as a
political community and a state that allows the particularity of civil society to thrive. He provides
considerable detail as to how the particularity of the diverse interests in society should be
conserved and cultivated by the state, which is a necessary condition for maintaining the ongoing legitimacy and authority of the state. ‘France lacks corporations and communal associations
[Kommunen] — that is, circles in which particular and universal interests come together. … The
proper strength of states resides in their internal communities [Gemeinden]. In these, the executive
encounters legitimate interests which it must respect’ (PR §290Z). He implores the executive to
9
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
‘encourage such interests’, because the whole will only be preserved when these particular
interests are cultivated. If individuals are just a mass of ‘scattered atoms’ then the state’s power
will not be legitimate and the state will become weak or tyrannical. Unless there are concerted
and organised forces — ‘circles within circles’ that are able to coherently and legitimately
represent diverse interests — the state will not be able to function adequately, because those
interests will not be understood by the state and will not be challenged or responded to in the
appropriate way.
Fichte, as we briefly saw, in Addresses to the German Nation, attends to the tension between
a state modelled on the administration of the system of needs and the necessity for a communal
life with a restricted and authoritarian account of patriotism. Hegel’s approach to overcoming the
loss of communal life that is caused by the individualizing tendencies of the market economy is
quite different. He attempts to correct the self-interest and fragmentation of civil society by
establishing the state as a form of political community. While the state has some limited
structures for collective participation its common purpose is primarily constituted through an
appreciation of the universal.
But it is the state that first supplies a content that not only lends itself to the prose of
history but also hopes to produce it. Instead of the merely subjective dictates of the ruler, which may
suffice for the needs of the moment, a community [Gemeinwesen] in the process of coalescing and
raising itself up to the position of a state requires commandments and laws, general and
universally valid directives. It thereby created a discourse [of its own development], and an
interest in intelligible, inwardly determinate, and – in their results – enduring deeds and
events.27
Only in the state is one in a position to articulate the universal in a manner that would allow the
transcendence of the particularity of the corporations and the estates, but also of natural
inclinations, one’s ethnicity, religion and so on.28 The salient issue is that the modern state is the
historical development that is in the best position of any institution in human history to cultivate
in its citizens knowledge of the universal such that citizens see their interest and their freedom in
the state and in willing the universal.29
The emergence of the modern state is a historical claim about the progress of reason; it
provides a unique situation in which subjects are able to recognise reasons as authoritative
(rational) only when they issue from universals not particularity.30 Consciousness of the universal
provides the conditions by which people can hold each other to account on the basis of
principles rather than inclinations or ‘subjective dictates.’ The state cultivates a universal
perspective that positively transforms the particularized freedom of civil society and the feeling
based communal life of the family, providing subjects with a perspective by which they can make
10
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
judgments on the basis of reasons and the good of the whole rather than individual interests.
Modern individuals direct ‘their will to a universal end and act[s] in conscious awareness of this
end’ (PR §260).
Where Fichte, in Addresses to the German Nation, conceives the state as a mediator of
potentially conflicting interests, Hegel by contrast presents the state as a distinct sphere by which
human self-understanding is transformed. Hegel’s dissatisfaction with the liberal opposition
between state and civil society, leads him to see the seeds of the collective life of the modern
state emerging immanently from civil society. The state is an extension of the social freedom of
civil society not a constraint on it. The state he proposes does not, as per Locke’s social contract
theory, stand over and against the citizens adjudicating the only genuine sphere of freedom —
society — but is instead objective freedom.
The state develops an essential component of how we should understand ourselves as
free.
The state is the actuality of concrete freedom. But concrete freedom requires that
personal individuality [Einzelnheit] and its particular interests should reach their full
development and gain recognition of the right for itself (within the system of the family
and of civil society), and also that they should, on the one hand, pass over of their own
accord into the interest of the universal, and on the other, knowingly and willingly
acknowledge this universal interest even as their own substantial spirit and actively pursue
it as their ultimate end. (PR §260)
It is hard to finder a stronger statement that the substantial strain that is at play in Greek ethical
life lives on in a modified form, as an expression of concrete freedom, than this passage. That
Hegel aligns substantiality here with concrete freedom, being-at-home with oneself in otherness,
is important, since it is a conscious and felt experience of a self-limiting in another—not the
accident of a property. Hegel describes the state as a form of public life: ‘Where life in and for
the universal is the aim, where substantive life has determinate existence, and where the
individual exists for universal life as a public person, in other words is a citizen [Citoyen]’.31 This
citizen-subject and her lived self-conscious relation to the state is a corrective to the conflicting
self-interests of civil society.
The state, if it is to overcome the fragmentation of civil society, has to be able to establish
some sense of a substantial communal life beyond knowing and willing the universal. The
development of the modern state required the creation of a new loyalty, one that deposed the
various traditional forms of community. The citizen of the state had to be made loyal to it in a
very different way to the immediacy that marked traditional communities. What is distinctive
about the modern era, for Hegel, is that that loyalty can be cultivated in the modern state because
11
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
the citizen ‘knows the state as their substance’ (PR §289R) rather than a felt sense of belonging to
an immediate unity that did not require explicit commitments or knowledge to engender
obligations. The state cultivates this in the modern era, as we have seen, by supporting the
diversity of institutions of civil society as a form of ethical life, insofar as it establishes a universal
standpoint — respect for the common good and a perspective that transcends particularity. The
need to know and will the universal emerges from the limits of civil society and is cultivated by
the state.
He says comparatively little in his various versions of the objective spirit about what
precisely this public person, the citizen who exists for the universal, necessitates. The state as an
expression of ethical life requires more than a knowledge of the universal or a new form of selfunderstanding, it requires pathways by which a shape of life can be a concrete form of existence
with others, in and as a state community. The way Hegel conceives the state restricts its capacity
to be a shared and participatory form of national life. Being a citizen is a form of ‘state’ life but it
does not represent a substantial world in which we are co-proprietors of the state or coparticipants in the state. Hegel does not develop structures of ‘state life’ beyond abstract
commitments and a limited participation in the affairs of the state through the vocational and
class based estates. The concrete structures in which citizens live their social freedom are only fully
articulated in civil society, and as we have briefly seen in the previous section, those organisations
are limited forms of community because they are developed on the self-interest of the system of
needs.
Axel Honneth has argued that Hegel’s state is incapable of providing an account of
political community with genuinely ‘public freedom’ because it is ultimately ‘an authoritarian
liberalism that grants individuals all the traditional basic rights but no chance to make a political
contribution to structuring their common life.’ Honneth sees competing strands in Hegel’s text,
between the historical diagnosis of the emergence of individual freedom and an affirmation of a
certain institutional structure, most cogently formulated in the state, in which individuals ‘attain
self-realization by means of communal, ‘Universal’ activities.’32 Honneth has a number of
justifiable concerns about the absence of a ‘political public,’ by which he means there is limited
opportunity for the direct involvement of the populace in the state other than through
representative corporations and the archaic structure of the estates, as well as through the
nebulous role of public opinion. Ultimately, Honneth argues that there is a disjunction between
the communal ends of the universal and self-determining subjects because there is no ‘space for
the ‘citizens’ to get together for discussions about the nature of the universal purposes.’33 The
capacity of self-determining agents to contribute to the determination of the universal or the
common good is indirect and severely constrained.
12
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
The estates represent the only other sphere of involvement in the state that might form
the basis for a participatory form of life but the estates are, in the context of the Philosophy of
Right, anachronistic. The political role of the estates is that they mediate between state and the
particular interests of society at large; they allow the state to gauge and respond to the various
interests in society. At the political level the first estate is structured to represent primarily the
elite interests of large scale inherited rural wealth. The second estate represents the successful and
prosperous trading classing. 34 The estates are supposed to be a ‘mediating organ’ through which
‘the state enters into the subjective consciousness of the people, and that the people begins to
participate in the state’ (PR §301z). This mediating function is fundamentally limited because the
estates represent particular interests that are either tied to vocation or rigid agrarian class
structures.
Hegel correctly sees modernity as producing fragmentation, which as we have seen, is
remedied in the limited communal life of the corporations, as well as through patriotism and
duty. The state is the highest and the necessary condition for human freedom. With regard to the
development of a consciousness of the universal we can understand this. The way the text
unfolds is, as we have seen, that concrete freedom culminates in the state. This is the being at
home in otherness in which we are also recognised by the state. The way the state cultivates the
diversity of civil society institutions meets some of this demand. But how we are at home in
Hegel’s state when, as Honneth describes, its reciprocal structures are so thinly drawn is difficult
to see. How are we bound together as the state without genuinely collective structures to which all
citizens could contribute? The state — even with its executive capacity to promote common ends
and patriotism — does not provide us with a communal life at the level of the universal. Our
commitments to universals such as the rule of law and so on do not make a political
community.35 The state as a political community cannot exist as an abstract universal. ‘The ethical
is not abstract like the good, but is intensely actual’ (PR §156Z). The state if it to be ‘my own
purpose’ requires that I have an interest in it; it must be lived in some form and that needs
concrete structures in which that interest can exist and thrive. Patriotism, military service, jury
duty and other statutory expressions of participation in the affairs of the state are very limited
forms in which that interest can be satisfied. Recognizing the state and our relationship to it as
essential to the development of a good life in which the rule of law and the cultivation of the
interests of the collective good is foremost in the judgment and actions of individuals is central to
Hegel’s vision of the freedom of the modern subject, but that we see the universal features of the
state as central to our identity as self-determining agents does not make it a form of communal
life.
13
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
Honneth’s argument is that ethical life is perhaps not quite as rational as it could be with
regard to the role self-determining agents play in their participation in the ‘political public’. This
challenges the claim made by Pippin that Hegel’s state is the structurally organised ‘form
appropriate to self-legislating, rational finite beings’.36 While one could argue with qualification
that Hegel’s state has the potential to be adequate to the modern age and modern subjects, as
both Pippin and Honneth conceive it, if the ethical life of the state developed appropriate
participatory structures. The issue that remains unresolved is how well Hegel is able to preserve
the substantiality of Greek ethical life in a liberal political setting. The emergence of individual
freedom and the structuring of the institutions and social roles of civil society around
predominantly economic concerns, require that the state be the only possible sphere in which our
communal interest can be lived as a social freedom without reverting to particularity (PR §121).
This is the modern reality that Hegel is trying to grasp. Hegel’s social and political philosophy,
after all it is not setting out to resolve this tension but to comprehend why freedom must be
considered as taking the form it does as ethical life, nevertheless that the state does not satisfy
completely the idea of concrete freedom marks an internal tension that Hegel cannot resolve in
the Philosophy of Right.
A Modern Community?
A possible response to the fragmentation and atomism of civil society is to see them as
irresolvable features of modernity. Modernity is incompatible with genuine communal belonging
and the only remedy is an alternative consideration of collective life. Heidegger argues that the
individual cannot be at home in modernity because civil society and the rise of instrumental
rationality has made us homeless. One can see in much of Heidegger’s writings an attempt to
contest society with a revised notion of community — tied to place, earth and a völkisch collective
life. This idea of community is normative, it shares much with Tönnies view of community, in
that it strives to capture a domain of ethical life that is a parallel form of communal life to civil
society, but which is far superior to it because it is devoid of the instrumentalising that
characterises society. In this sense it is a competitor to civil society as a form of ethical life.
Hegel had serious concerns that the growing importance of civil society had caused the
erosion of other forms of communal life. He lamented that in the increasingly instrumentalised
environment of modern life communal forms of association and vocation were being abandoned
and individuals were finding satisfaction increasingly in personal interests.
Previously enjoyment lay in what was communal [Gemeinsamen] and people did not amuse
themselves for themselves but in the community [Allgemeinen]. Now this spirit is undermined, so
14
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
that people are ashamed of their class, are unwilling to be seen as members of it, take pride in
themselves alone. (LNR §121R my emphasis)
The fundamental connectedness to others as participants in a communal project is, with the
emergence of civil society, displaced. This passage shows that Hegel is aware of important
features of premodern forms of communal life, such as collective forms of enjoyment and
collective understanding. In this Hegel anticipates the discussion of the distinction between
community and society in the iconic work on this subject by Tönnies.37 Despite the clear
appreciation of the distinctiveness and importance of community that such passages exemplify,
such attributes of communal life are not recoverable in civil society.38
While Hegel clearly laments this loss, his social and political philosophy is not concerned
to rehabilitate or refashion a notion of community to meet this need, it is rather redeemed only at
the level of the state. Hegel’s project is of a very different order to Heidegger’s, it does not seek
to reclaim a form of communal life that competes with civil society and contests the modern age.
Whatever ambivalence he might have towards modernity, the emergence of the modern family,
civil society and the state have collectively created a new form of human sociality that requires
human freedom be mediated through and embodied only in these institutions.
The transition from ‘Morality’ to ‘Ethical Life’ establishes fundamentally social, objective
structures of right that correct the highly individualised conviction of morality. The Philosophy of
Right develops a distinct model of freedom, a social freedom, in which subjects identify with, are
at home in [bei-sich-selbst-sein], and participate in the three key institutions of ethical life (family,
civil society, state). Ethical life is intended to capture the interplay between these three objective
elements of right and the way in which these spheres together form a social realm that structures
the subject’s self-awareness [Selbstgefühl]. In Sittlichkeit the institutions of state and civil society are
not constraints on freedom, but through the processes of cultural formation (Bildung) they come
to be understood as necessary embodiments of a new type of socialized human freedom that
Hegel describes as objective freedom. Frederick Neuhouser puts this succinctly: ‘social freedom
consists in certain ways of belonging to and participating in the three principle institutions of
modernity.’39 That we should see our freedom embodied in these institutions is an achievement
of the modern age. If the notion of a self-determining subject is the core idea of modernity, what
comes to be developed are the objective structures in which such a subject can be at home with
herself. Just why these institutions are the necessary expressions of this freedom is what the
Philosophy of Right develops.
Hegel, as we have already seen, acknowledges forms of communal life other than those
organisations associated with the system of needs and the estates of civil society:
15
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
the state is essentially an organisation whose members constitute circles in their own
right, and no moment within it should appear as an unorganised crowd. … The idea
[Vorstellung] that those communities [Gemeinwesen] which are already present in the circles
referred to above can be split up into a collection of individuals … leaves political life
hanging, so to speak, in the air; for its basis is then merely the abstract individuality of
arbitrary will and opinion. (PR §303Z)
This passage is concerned with a potential pathology for the state if civil society is fractured into
a multiplicity of individuals and disconnected self-interested organisations. Hegel thought
widespread individual participation in the selection and running of government would lead to
state rule based on the mass of subjective opinions. The effective functioning and the legitimacy
of the state requires not an aggregate of individual views, but communities — ‘circles in their
right’ — that are able to represent their diverse interests through coherent organisations.
While the distinction between community and society is not codified until later in the
Nineteenth Century, it is clear that Hegel is acutely aware of models of community that are not
structured around the private interests of the market or the class interests of the agrarian estates.
Hegel’s stress on diverse community representation for the proper functioning of the state
provides scope for the recognition and importance of forms of communal life other than the
corporations and the estates.40 These communities represented a potential model for a nonatomised sphere of sociality to which Hegel does not appeal. It might seem surprising that he
does not incorporate into civil society established communities, especially those that were not
structured around property, economic performance and social roles that reflected primarily only
the demands of the market economy. There are diverse and numerous references to community
throughout the Philosophy of Right and his earlier lectures on natural right but he does not examine
the nature and diversity of these communities in a sustained way, except insofar as they align with
the corporations or the estates. The reasons for this are twofold.
Firstly, as we saw above, the atomisation that the market economy produces is
ameliorated with the emergence of the institutions of civil society and the roles they allow its
members to occupy. Despite the way in which these organisations cultivate collective interests
and thereby temper the self-interest that is characteristic of society, nevertheless ‘the natural and
arbitrary particularity … of the state of nature’ is not entirely overcome in civil society (PR
§200R). The origins of the corporations in the private interests of individuals means that the
interests that those organisations serve cannot be equated with the good of the whole, although,
as we have seen, the corporations prepares individuals for understanding that their interests may
conflict with the others.41 The only prospect for overcoming this is the ordering potential and
16
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
power of the state, not a reversion to a model of communal life that was historically antecedent
to civil society.
Secondly, while Hegel refers to this diversity of communal interests and appears to
assume it without elaborating its origins or mapping that diversity, communities have no role in
civil society unless they are identified by the state as institutions of civil society: ‘community can
exist in civil society only if it is legally constituted and recognised’ (PR §253R). This passage
recognises the important social function of community, yet Hegel restricts the participation of
communities in civil society to those that serve the interest of the whole. To this end they are
required to have their actions overseen by the state. Within the tripartite social structure of
freedom, described above, communities must become corporations if they are not to serve
exclusively particular interest. ‘In our modern states, the citizens have only a limited share in the
universal business of the state; but it is necessary to provide ethical man with a universal activity
in addition to his private end. This … can be found in the corporation’ (PR §255z). Corporations
are distinguished from guilds because they are not self-serving. They have an ‘ethical status’ or a
universal purpose because they are ultimately in the service of a genuinely common end beyond
the immediate benefit of the corporation for its members. Corporations, as institutions within
civil society, are aware that their authority comes in part from the state, by virtue of the way in
which they mediate between their own interest and the states, that is, they contribute to the
state’s discernment of a universal purpose.
Coexisting with the self-interested organisation of the system of needs are important
elements of communal life. In Community and Civil Society Tönnies states that ‘the power of
community, even in decline, is maintained even into the era of society and remains the true reality
of social life.’42 These elements of communal life allow individuals to be bound to one another on
the basis of relationships that represent far more diverse forms of communal identification and
participation than the fairly narrow and hierarchical structures of the estates and the corporations
tied as they are to the contractual model of the market.
Community is a notoriously difficult notion to define. It is much easier to say what it is
not than what it is. The notion of community that Tönnies is trying to capture is a shared form
of life that exists in parallel with civil society: a sphere of complex social relationships that occurs
in the sphere between family and state. A form of human togetherness that is neither society nor
the nation state is, in modern life, something that is difficult to conceive in a way that is
compatible with the modern world. The modern quest for community may be a modern reaction
to the atomisation of civil society, representing a desire for a realm of values or social
relationships that is outside the sphere of social roles defined by work, instrumental rationality
and the market. It is an admittedly vague though evocative concept, a domain where we are
17
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
accepted without having to distinguish oneself. It is built on a shared understanding that is largely
tacit, a unity that does not require formal contractual agreement, a communal sphere outside the
family where one does not have to prove one’s worth as one does in the market. Community
entails sharing benefits among members regardless of contribution; entitlements ensue simply
because one belongs to it.
Community in this sense cannot simply be satisfied by abstract commitments such as
knowing that one is a citizen of a state with good laws. The case of Hegel’ rabble is instructive.
The rabble is alienated despite its ‘members’ being citizens; they do not have a social role with
any security, because they are unemployed or their work is precarious. In modern life they cannot
have concrete freedom, and Hegel certainly does not see them as being offered that in anything
like a community of the unemployed and their rights as persons are little consolation. The rabble
is just a remainder that demonstrates the failure of the system of need and the state to
incorporate them successfully into it. Any charity that might sustain them reinforces the limits of
their social freedom. Community could offer them consolation, providing a sphere of acceptance
that does not assert worth by virtue of a social role or the status from paid employment. But the
rabble even if they had a community cannot be considered as having social freedom since they
could not see the institutions of civil society as their own, since they are not participants in it.
This is probably as it should be—they might develop community but they do not have concrete
freedom since they are excluded from the significant objective structures of spirit.
A well functioning state can replace the community in providing citizens with the
certainty of the rule of law, possibly freedom from poverty and homelessness, and provide
education and health that might allow an individual to be freed from contingent circumstances of
their birth. Nevertheless, there is a need for a realm of non-economic values, and a sphere to
which one belongs that is not the state, the social and economic roles of civil society or the
intimacy of the family. Without some version of community in Tönnies sense we are left to either
the uncertainty of a good family or the innumerable pathologies that the atomisation of
modernity creates for us: insecurity, anxiety, amour-propre and so on. This normative sense of
community does not sit easily with modernity. And the politics of what such community might
entail, in its conservative manifestation, is possibly incompatible with the liberal state.
Hegel’s fleeting criticisms of pre-modern societies present them as quasi-naturalistic
orders in which people do what is ‘prescribed’, and the individual can break with these orders
only on the basis of ‘individual discretion’ (PR §150R). Only the modern state is in a position to
cultivate in its citizens a sense that communal ends should be their own and that there are good
reasons for thinking, as per Rousseau’s general will, that these interests may be required to be
adopted at the expense of the interests of a specific community. Pre-modern communities cannot
18
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
acknowledge universal reasons as justifications for actions because they are built out of dogmatic
tradition and natural order not a ‘free system of self-sufficient development and objectivity’ (PR
§150). The self-determining subject is reconcilable with the collective life of the modern state
because they cultivate the self-conscious willing of a universal.
The modern conundrum is that modernity requires us to acknowledge our self-producing
character and this ensures that civil society and the state are responsive to change and they reflect
the self-produced quality that allows for the on-going transformative of norms. The dependency
and comfort of Tönnies’ normative community is at odds with the requirement of modernity that
we must consider our beliefs, claims and reasons as tentative. This is just the modern condition
that there are no fixed norms, all of them can in principle be revised since their authority lies with
acts of collective self-determination not given orders of nature or God. The Philosophy of Right
attempts to conceive a way by which a subject could be at home in a world set in motion, where
belonging is difficult because the traditional certainties have been swept away. 43 Community in
Tönnies and Heidegger sense, for all its comfort and security cannot be reconciled with this ongoing demand for normative revision and self-correction, only the family is reconcilable with this
demand since it is grounded in love and it offers no norms of belonging that conflict with civil
society and the state, indeed its role in ethical life complements both spheres.
Pre-modern forms of community had their structural inequalities and where often built
on repressive customs that violently excluded those who were not members of the community.
Traditional community could apply great force to the individual to compel her to comply. This is
anachronistic in modernity; the state is needed to protect the individual against such conformity.
Hegel does not undertake any serious theorisation of community, because it is unable to be
integrated into modern life. This is indeed still something that is being worked through in
modern society, how to come up with a sense of belonging and inclusiveness that does not entail
the darker possibilities of traditional community, based on ethnic homogeneity or an attachment
to place, which can be exclusive and even violently policed.
These explanations for why Hegel does not consider community as a structure of right in
ethical life do not mean that the interest that it represents even in modern life has been
overcome. The modern age with its dynamic institutions and self-producing subjects is at odds
with traditional notions of community and yet the importance of the substantialist aspiration that
Hegel presents in Greek ethical life, and that runs throughout his objective spirit, is an
acknowledgement that the desire for a communal end is a central motivation in complex human
interaction. The modern state is unable to reconcile the strands of subjective freedom and
substantiality that run through the Philosophy Right. The elements of normative community, which
19
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
Heidegger and Tönnies describe, that are absent in the social organisation of the system of needs
are not resolved in the modern state.
Honneth’s approach assumes that the atomisation can only be corrected at the political
level by a participatory politics. He does not consider shared forms of life that are important
spheres of self-realisation beyond state, civil society and the family. Community that is
commensurate with civil society but not equal to is difficult to comprehend or is indeed
incompatible with modern life. But even if community is not a sphere of freedom in Hegel’s
sense, and is not easily reconciled with modernity, that does not mean that the aspiration for it is
not a determinate force in history. The need for the modern state to be an expression of concrete
freedom proves that aspiration, but does not satisfy it.
Community, in this normative sense, represents an important shared form of life that
Hegel recognises and that is an important drive in social organisation but which overlays, though
is outside the tripartite structures of modern freedom. How does one build a supportive culture
to which one can belong that is not exclusive and not built around economic self-interest? These
are concerns with which Hegel would be sympathetic but as of 1821 what such a sphere might be
is not conceivable in any straightforward way that is reconcilable with modern life. That this
desire for belonging is at odds with the institutional structures of modern ethical life does not
mean that the need has been removed. Hegel acknowledges that need throughout the objective
spirit but it is unlikely to achieve satisfaction in modernity. Whatever a modern version of
community might be is still something being worked through. Or perhaps Heidegger is right that
it is just incompatible in any formal sense with modernity.
While Hegel does not restrict our collective participation to the three iconic spheres of
ethical life, it is however only in these domains that we are at home with ourselves (and therefore
free). These are the rational structures of modern freedom. Civil society represents the new basis
of political power and its structure is central to the organisation of the state. But civil society and
community are conflicting forces and the tension between them is not resolved in the state,
unless one thinks that all the beneficial aspects of communal life, not available in society, are
present in a higher form in the state.44 The communal aspect of Hegel’s state, or the material
pathways through which it could be lived, is too thinly drawn to make this claim.
The tension between state and community remains a powerful yet under-theorised aspect
of modern political life. That Hegel did not offer a revised version of community is entirely
appropriate for a project of self-comprehension given that in the subsequent 200 years, its place
in the contemporary social and political landscape is almost as poorly understood and
indeterminate as it was in the Nineteenth Century. It may be that Hegel — correctly — thought
that whatever form a revised community might take, it had not shown itself even incipiently in
20
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
the early Nineteenth Century. One might well argue that this is still the case. The relation
between family, civil society and state has worked itself out into a formal relation in modern life
in a manner that reflects Hegel’s appreciation of them as modern social freedom. Community as
a shared form of life outside these domains has an uncertain place in modern life and this is
reflected in Hegel’s thought.45
Simon Lumsden
University of New South Wales, Sydney
s.lumsden@unsw.edu.au
1
Community and Civil Society 2001: 52.
2
See Richard Sennett’s classic study The Fall of Public Man 1977.
3
The term that Hegel uses most often in the Phenomenology is Gemeinwesen, translated by Miller as community and by
Pinkard as polity. Both terms have their advantages and disadvantages. Polity captures the normativity of communal
life and also evokes the way in which communities of this sort involve prescribed social roles. Describing the family
as a polity probably imbues it too much with the order of civil administration (See Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
§449).
4
Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Hereafter abbreviated as PR.
5
Hegel Lectures on the History of Philosophy, II 1825-6, hereafter cited in text as LHP. German edition Vorlesungen über
die Geschincte der Philosophie, Hereafter cited in text as V followed by volume number.
6
See Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science 1995: §141. Hereafter cited in text as LNR. See LNR §167 for Hegel’s
brief comments on why Plato did not incorporate Socratic morality into the Republic. See also Velkley 2006 and
Inwood 1984: 40-54.
7
‘The opposite to Plato’s principle … was given primacy, particularly by Rousseau’ LHP II 58/V 8 225.
8
For a detailed examination of the influence of Rousseau on Hegel see Neuhouser 2000.
9
LNR §170.
10
For a recent examination of these issues that situates the socio-political developments in relation to the major
economic theories of the day see Lisa Herzog 2013, especially: 76-8.
11
This is why Hegel locates the administration of justice in civil society.
12
See PR §201R and §252.
13
See for example Neuhouser 2000: 223 and Pippin 2008.
14
See Pippin 2008: 195.
15
I have benefited from discussion with Heikki Ikäheimo and Loughlin Gleeson about this notion. For a clear
discussion of concrete freedom see Ikäheimo 2014, Chapter 4.
16These
are sentiments reflected in numerous comments Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: I, 2011: 178-
9). Hereafter cited in text as LPWH I. References to the critical German editions on which this translation is based
are cited in text after the English translation. Vorlesungenmanuskripte II (1816-1831), ed. Walter Jaeschke Vol. 18 of
21
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
Gesammelte Werke: 158-9. Hereafter cited in text as GW followed by volume number. For discussions of normativity,
ethical life and second nature see Lumsden 2012 and Merker 2012.
17
He uses at least five terms for community: Gemeinwesen (polity), Gemeinsamkeit or Gemeinsames (the communal life of
corporations and estates, the commonality created through contract, a community of interests), Gemeinde (generally
but not exclusively used in a parochial sense to describe limited local, usually religious communities,) and
Gemeinschaft, (community, seldom used as a noun in the Philosophy of Right, but often used in the Phenomenology, see
Phenomenology §727 Pinkard translation,). It is most often used in the Philosophy of Right as an adjective to describe the
common will [gemeinschaftlichen Willens], communal interests or collectively owned property [gemeinschaftliche Eigentum]).
See LNR §141R . In §121 LNR he uses Allgemeinen for community in a way that accords with how modern writers
would use Gemeinschaft.
18
Pelczynski 1984.
19
See especially LNR §121 and LNR §141.
20
See the elaboration of these in Mason 2000: 26.
21
LPWH I: 91 my emphasis.
22
There are a number of recent compelling reappraisals of Fichte’s political philosophy that certainly present his
political thought as compatible with liberalism. See for example Nomer 2010.
23
Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, 2008: 106.
24
ibid, 107. Hegel’s view of the Fichtean state is not high. He describes it as a police state that produces ‘a world of
galley slaves, where each person is supposed to keep his fellow under constant supervision’ (LNR §119).
25
On patriotism see Lydia Moland’s Hegel on Political Identity 2009.
26
In Hegel’s case because he opposes the dualistic model of state and civil society that one sees in Locke for
example he wants to be able to show that civil society is the basis for the modern state. See the discussion of this in
Riedel 1984, see chap. 6, especially 148.
27
LPWH I 115-6/GW XII 193 my emphasis.
28
‘Freedom amounts to knowing and willing such universal and substantial objects as law and right, and producing
an actuality that corresponds to them — the state’ LPWH I 114/GW XVIII 191. See also Pinkard 2012: 193-5.
29
See Pippin 2008 for a discussion of institutional rationality, esp. 250-252.
30
See LPWH I 116/GW XII 193 and LPWH I 99/GW XVII 169.
31
LNR §72, my emphasis, see also §89. See also Terry Pinkard 2012: 158 and Franco 1999: 281.
32
Honneth 2010: 78.
33
Honneth 2010: 79.
34
See Knowles 2002: 331-5; Franco, 1999, 262.
35
See LNR §137R
36
Pippin 2008: 260.
37
‘Community life means mutual possession and enjoyment of goods held in common.’ Tönnies, Community and Civil
Society, 36.
38
See Sennett 1977: chap. 13.
39
Neuhouser 2011: 290, my emphasis.
22
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
40
PR §270. The only fully developed communal structures of right that he presents in the Philosophy of Right are the
estates and the corporations, and these are, as we have seen, somewhat restricted forms of communal life.
41
See the discussion in James 2013: 187-8.
42
Civil Society and Community, 258.
43
See Lumsden 2009 for a more detailed discussion of this issue.
44
For a superb analysis of the conflict between the unifying forces of the modernist state and communal forms of
life see James C. Scott 1998.
45
I am very appreciative to Alison Stone and two anonymous referees. Their detailed comments greatly improved
the paper.
23
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
References
Fichte, J.G (2008), Addresses to the German Nation, trans. Gregory Moore, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Franco, P. (1999), Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom, New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1991), Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood and trans. H.B. Nisbet,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1998),Vorlesungen: Ausgewählte Nachschriften und Manuskripte, ed. Walter Jaeschke
and Pierre Garniron, Hamburg: Meiner,, vol. 8.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1995), Gesammelte Werke, Hamburg: Meiner.
Hegel, G.W.F (2008), Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by T. Pinkard. Publicly available as an online
draft: http://terrypinkard.weebly.com/phenomenology-of-spirit-page.html
Hegel, G.W.F. (1990), Lectures on the History of Philosophy. The Lectures of 1825-6. Vol. 3. Trans. R.F.
Brown and J. M. Stewart. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1995), Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science: The First Philosophy of Right
(1817-1819), trans. J. Michael Stewart and Peter Hodgson, Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. (2011), Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Volume I [1822-3], trans. R.F.
Brown and P.C. Hodgson, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Herzog, L. (2013), Inventing the Market: Smith, Hegel, and Political Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Honneth, A. (2010), The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel’s Social Theory, trans. L. Löb,
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ikäheimo, Heikki. (2014), Anerkennung. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Inwood, M. (1984), ‘Hegel, Plato and Greek ‘Sittlichkeit’’ in Pelczynski, Z. A., (ed.) The State and
Civil Society: Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984), 40-54.
James, D. (2013), Rousseau and German Idealism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Knowles, Dudley. (2002), Hegel and the Philosophy of Right, London: Routledge.
Lumsden, S. ‘Philosophy and the Logic of Modernity: Hegel’s Dissatisfied Spirit’, The Review of
Metaphysics 65:1 (2009), 55-89.
Lumsden, Simon. (2012), ‘Habit, Sittlichkeit and Second Nature’, Critical Horizons 13 (2), 220-243.
Mason, A. (2000), Community, Solidarity and Belonging: Level of Community and Their Normative
Significance. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Merker, Barbara. (2012), ‘Embodied Normativity: Revitalizing Hegel’s Account of the Human
Organism’, Critical Horizons 13 (2), 154-176.
24
Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin
Moland, Lydia. (2009), Hegel on Political Identity: Patriotism, Nationality, Cosmopolitanism (Evanston,
Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
Neuhouser, F. (2011 ),‘The Idea of Hegelian ‘Science’ of Society’, in A Companion to Hegel, eds. S.
Houlgate and M. Baur Oxford: Blackwell.
Neuhouser, F. (2000), Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom. Cambridge Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
Nomer, Nedim. (2010), ‘Fichte and the Relationship Between Self-positing and Rights’, Journal of
the History of Philosophy, vol. 48, 4, 469-490.
Pelczynski, Z. (1984), ‘Political Community and Individual Freedom in Hegel’s Philosophy of the
State’, in Pelczynski, Z. A., (ed.) The State and Civil Society: Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and
Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pinkard, Terry. (2012), Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Pippin, Robert, (2008), Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Riedel, M. (1984), Between Tradition and Revolution, trans. W Wright, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Scott, J.C. (1998), Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Sennett, R. (1977), The Fall of Public Man, London: Penguin.
Tönnies, F. (2001) [1887], Community and Civil Society, trans. Jose Harris and Margaret Hollis,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Velkley, R. (2006), ‘On Possessed Individualism: Hegel, Socrates’ Daimon, and the Modern
State’, The Review of Metaphysics 59, no. 3 (March 2006), 577–599.
25