Logic and Social Theory: Hegel on the Conceptual Significance of Political Change

Abstract

This chapter concerns thinking about politics as it arises in Hegel’s thought; specifically, the problem of the relation between Hegel’s logic—his theory of what thought itself is—on the one hand, and his political philosophy, on the other hand. With respect to this relation many scholars have taken the view that there is no important relation between Hegel’s logic and political philosophy. And yet concepts explained in Hegel’s logical writings clearly play crucial roles in his arguments regarding political issues. On the other hand, scholars have thought that if there is to be such a connection, thought must be in the driver’s seat, and so Hegel’s political philosophy must be a logical derivation of his position. But this seems to show either that Hegel’s political philosophy fails spectacularly, or that politics as we know it is impossible. How, then, can we find a middle way that will preserve thinking about the subject at hand—politics rooted in place and time—while simultaneously doing justice to the determinate structure of thought itself? The key to Hegel’s answer is to see politics as the working-out of the concept—the concept of freedom. But to make this answer plausible one must see the complexity of the concept of freedom, and specifically the way that the concept itself contains three distinct perspectives on the significance and proper form of freedom. Politics as the working out of the concept of freedom is the continual communication of one perspective with another, tying them together. Such communications must be made in all directions, and continually rather than in any particular temporal order, and these two features give political communications its conceptual form. This is another way in which Hegel thinks of synchronic diversity as a long-running and positive resource for managing diachronic diversity, rather than a new phenomenon of distinctively modern societies. And if the same basic conceptual structures secure diachronic understanding as synchronic understanding, then all that is solid does not melt into air, and the specifically temporal dimension to politics constitutes a less fundamental barrier to philosophical thinking than appeared at first.