Abstract
This chapter approaches Hegel’s views of globalization and global justice through Hegel’s treatment of civil society and state, which provides an alternative to Hobbes’s international state of war and Kant’s cosmopolitanism. Civil society is the locus of rights; as civil society spreads beyond Europe through commerce and law, so too do the rights of human beings. But, for Hegel, civil society on its own is unstable unless ordered and guided by the state; so the expansion of civil society needs to be matched by the expansion of political institutions that counter civil society’s shortcomings and make its globalization justifiable. Hegel also sees a growth of inter-state relations. As states recognize, interact with, and develop norms of common behavior with other states, they move beyond the (Hobbesian) sovereign’s arbitrary will and (sometimes haltingly, and without attaining Kant’s cosmopolitan ideals) towards international co-operation.
I owe two large intellectual debts for this chapter. Andrew Buchwalter encouraged me to undertake this paper, provided a panel on Hegel’s political thought at the 2008 American Political Science Association meeting as a venue for its first presentation, and talked with me extensively about the ideas in the paper. Jeffrey Church, as discussant on the panel, gave me three single-spaced pages of comments of the highest quality: generous, insightful, and unsparing. His suggestions about style, issues, and interpretations immensely improved my text. Vassar College provided financial assistance that allowed me to attend the conference.
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- 1.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. by T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942). All citations to The Philosophy of Right are in parentheses in the text, and to section, not page, number, preceded by “PR”: where the material cited is from the main text of the section, the section number alone is given; where it is from the “remarks” Hegel added to the text, the section number is followed by “R”; where it is from the “additions” that later editors appended to posthumous editions by collating student lecture notes, the section number is followed by “A.” The material in The Philosophy of Right is presented in briefer compass in G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace and A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); it is cited like The Philosophy of Right: in parentheses in the text, to section number, preceded by “Enc.”
- 2.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. XIII.
- 3.
Nor is it a straightforward anti-Kantian position, despite Hegel’s criticisms of Kantian ideals of perpetual peace, cosmopolitanism, and international federations. (By “Kantian ideals” I refer to the ideas in Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey [Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1983], James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, eds., Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal [Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997], and Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy [Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998].)
- 4.
In “Hegel as a Colonial, Anti-Colonial, and Post-Colonial Thinker,” in Europe and Its Borders, edited by Andrew Davison and Himadeep Muppedi (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 25–48.
- 5.
Of course, neither abstract nor moral rights can be asserted or exercised without limit: e.g., property rights are limited by law, regulations, taxation, and the demands of war; and similarly the moral right of conscience, to do only what you understand as good, is limited by the state’s determination of what is the common good.
- 6.
Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 94.
- 7.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations, Bk. I, ch. 4.
- 8.
Smith, Wealth of Nations, Bk. I, ch. 2.
- 9.
G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 149.
- 10.
Two brief notes: I do not here address the question, to what extent do existing states realize or live up to the standards or the concepts put forth in The Philosophy of Right; and I think that neither Hegel nor his readers should expect that civil society be perfect or free from flaws, because for Hegel any principles or practices of objective spirit present “finite” not “absolute” spirit (Aesthetics, 99).
- 11.
An excellent extended analysis can be found in Avineri, Hegel’s Theory, 147–54.
- 12.
Hegel does propose one means within civil society to solve the problems of overproduction and the rabble in civil society: overseas colonies, which can absorb excess production and excess population from the European country (PR, §§246-48). But colonization clearly has its limits because the world is finite: at some point European powers are going to run out of non-European areas to colonize. Moreover, and consistently with his principles, Hegel argues for the eventual freedom of the colonies (PR, §248A). Colonizing is clearly not a long-term solution to the problems of civil society.
- 13.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, Chap. 7, title.
- 14.
Or, as Hegel lectured in his introductory material about fine arts (Aesthetics, 98), “in a state which is really articulated rationally all the laws and organizations are nothing but a realization of freedom in its essential characteristics. When this is the case, the individual’s reason finds in these institutions only the actuality of his own essence, and if he obeys these laws, he coincides, not with something alien to himself, but simply with what is his own.”
- 15.
This short-hand version of the quotation is probably inaccurate; see G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 54 and 130–31 (and passim) for the themes of this paragraph.
- 16.
In a similar vein Marx makes the argument that his important category of “abstract labour” could not be discovered even by the greatest economist and thinker of antiquity, Aristotle, because for Aristotle there was the labor of slaves, of women, and of free men, but not homogenous (or categorically similar) human labour.
- 17.
See her argument about “the decline of the nation state and the end of the rights of man”: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, World, 1958), Chapter Nine, 267–302.
- 18.
I think for Hegel in this paragraph “abstract” is the opposite of “actualized” in practice and by “enforcement” – which leaves open the possibility that abstract and moral rights can gradually become more concrete (and enforceable) through human action.
- 19.
In an odd but important way, Locke’s theory of right now appears as the status quo stance; given that Locke thinks rights are natural and found out by human reason, the rights that Locke discerns in 1680 are, for him, the definitive rights of human beings. Hegel’s stress on the development of rights mean that the rights discerned and practiced in 1821 are not the final iteration of human rights.
- 20.
As with civil society, Hegel differs sharply from Marx: whereas Marx sees conflict. power, and oppression, Hegel sees international trade as on balance affirming and assuring rights and acculturating individuals to concerns broader than their own narrow self-interest. He does recognize that the market and trade draw men in and force them to attend to values and practices demanded by the market. So people may well find themselves in circumstances where they need to change their values; the spread of the market is a force for modernization (including modern rights and freedom). Hegel seems not to emphasize the dislocations produced by modernization, whether in Europe or elsewhere, because for him the benefits of rights and freedom far outweigh the costs of social and psychological dislocations from modernizing.
- 21.
These rights include the moral right to welfare, a right of civil society for Hegel. For him, men have claims against civil society for protection, care, and welfare: “Civil society is … the tremendous power which draws men into itself and claims from them that they work for it, owe everything to it, and do everything by its means. If a man is to be a member of civil society in this sense, he has rights and claims against it …” (PR, §238A). Presumably, those drawn into international trade can make parallel claims.
- 22.
I think “rights” should be read expansively in this quotation, to include rights from morality as well as abstract right. Regardless, because Hegel talks of “duties” it should be clear he is talking about more than only abstract rights.
- 23.
Two important points are worth noting. As I have argued, one important move that differentiates Hegel’s political theory from Hobbes’s and Locke’s (and Kant’s) is that, whereas they move from rights to the state, Hegel moves from rights through morality (and family and civil society) before he gets to the state. So it is not surprising that in some important ways Hegel’s political thought integrates moral rights (and family practices and the many dimensions of civil society). See my “Hegel’s Critique of Liberal Theories of Rights,” American Political Science Review 68, no. 3 (September 1974): 1086–92; reprinted in Robert Stern, ed., G.W.F. Hegel: Critical Assessments (London: Routledge, 1993) and in Michael Salter, ed., Hegel and the Law (London: Ashgate, 2003.) Second: given what Hegel says about the acculturating and civilizing aspects of trade and about the way in which domestic civil society flourishes because it integrates more than just abstract rights (or free trade) into its fabric, one obvious and important question is to what extent does Hegel think that a free trade globalization might well be driven to go beyond itself, such that the states that are party to the free trade agreement and the humans who are engaged in trade would both find free trade globalization inadequate, insufficient, or illegitimate unless the parties moved in a direction more inclusive of moral rights (like fair labor laws and environmental standards, and like corporations, national or trans-national, concerned with the status and well-being of their members or with the actualization of important values).
- 24.
I am using Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, ed. Robert Post (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); the dichotomies are presented by Robert Post in his “Introduction” on 2–7.
- 25.
As I argue in my “Hegel as a Colonial, Anti-Colonial, and Post-Colonial Thinker.”
- 26.
Although some would say that Hegel so transforms morality (from the individual determination of the good to the citizen’s comprehension that his modern constitutional state realizes the good in its principles and practices) and the other concepts so as to make them meaningless. Hegel’s response, of course, is that only by being transformed can they be made actual in the world – and gain purchase in the world for their intensification and expansion.
- 27.
Benhabib, 71.
- 28.
Benhabib’s formulation is particularly apposite to Hegel because it highlights the concern with plurality that runs through Hegel’s thought. Hegel insists that the modern world realizes universalistic norms; but it does so through vehicles (the state) that allow for plurality and difference, because each state realizes the universalistic norm in ways that respect local history, religion, memories, and aspirations. Hegel’s emphasis on the state’s transforming the universalistic norms, i.e., realizing the universalistic norm only by giving it a specific local content, means that Hegel sees the European community as one with common norms and culture but different political, social, and civic organization. Hegel seems to be trying to honor particularity and plurality, to realize universalistic norms in varying ways, and – in terms of cosmopolitanism – to suggest that sharing norms across states does not require abandoning difference and plurality across states.
- 29.
An international criminal court, for instance, seems not inconsistent with Hegel’s emphasis on treaties and mutual recognition among states: those states that recognize each other as supporting rights and as willing to commit to treaties under normal circumstances could adhere to an agreement to bring to an extra-state tribunal political actors who trample rights in obvious and egregious ways. The creation of such a tribunal means, for Hegel, that the rights of civil society have gained such actualized importance that (some) states are willing to band together to enforce them.
States may also claim “universal jurisdiction” as a reason to arrest and try serious criminals who have escaped penalties in their own country, perhaps because they were head of state: this claim of “universal jurisdiction” is an attempt to realize an international norm derived from the rights of civil society, has less standardization and publicity as of today than does the Hegelian Administration of Justice, and could lead to an international incident or war. So it is not far from Hegel’s description of international law, whose actuality depends on different sovereign wills (PR, §330).
- 30.
It is important to note that Hegel’s logical development always includes a moment of universality (but I do not wish to explore Hegel’s logic here) and that Hegel sees a plurality of universal institutions in objective spirit. (It is also worth noting, in this context, that for Hegel all universals of objective spirit are inadequate – and that even a realized cosmopolitanism would be: “Now, at a higher level, the life of the state, as a whole, does form a perfect totality in itself. … But the principle itself, the actualization of which is the life of the state and wherein man seeks his satisfaction, is still once again one-sided and inherently abstract …. It is only the rational freedom of the will which is explicit here; it is only in the state – and once again only this individual state – and therefore again in a particular sphere of existence and the isolated reality of this sphere, that freedom is actual. Thus man feels too that the rights and obligations in these regions and their mundane and, once more, finite modes of existence are insufficient; he feels that both in their objective character, and also in their relation to the subject, they still need a higher confirmation and sanction. … What man seeks in this situation, ensnared here as he is in finitude on every side, is the region of a higher, more substantial, truth, in which all oppositions and contradictions in the finite can find their final resolution, and freedom its full satisfaction. This is the region of absolute, not finite, truth” [Hegel, Aesthetics, 99]. Political cosmopolitanism is as finite as objective spirit.)
References
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Benhabib, Seyla. 2006. Another cosmopolitanism. In The Berkeley tanner lectures, ed. Post Robert. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Stillman, P.G. (2012). Hegel, Civil Society, and Globalization. In: Buchwalter, A. (eds) Hegel and Global Justice. Studies in Global Justice, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8996-0_6
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