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Hegel and Global Justice pp 49–64Cite as

Contra Leviathan: Hegel’s Contribution to Cosmopolitan Critique

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Part of the book series: Studies in Global Justice ((JUST,volume 10))

Abstract

For Hegel the chasm between cosmopolitan principles and the actuality of the emerging world order gave a sense of unreality to Kant’s political writings. The rights of man were subverted into a duty of obedience to the nation that granted rights. The extension of the rights of man to other European nations was fine in theory but in practice “wars of liberation” were bitterly resisted by invaded peoples. States learned to defend themselves militarily in the knowledge that legal arguments could not win wars and wars could be useful. The “right of hospitality” played its traditional role of serving as a pretext for European states to subdue “uncivilized” peoples who declined to provide the required hospitality to European “visitors”. Hegel acknowledged the visionary character of Kant’s cosmopolitan thought but Kant’s observation that every right is a right of coercion was a reminder to Hegel that every expansion of rights is also a re-invention of new forms of coercion. How Hegel pursued this insight, and what relevance it has for understanding our own global order, is the topic of this paper.

This chapter is a considerably revised rendition of an argument I have developed bit by bit in Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt (London: Routledge, 2001); “Kant’s Theory of Cosmopolitanism and Hegel’s Critique,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 29, no. 6 (2003): 609–630; and ch. 2 of Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge, 2007). I should like to acknowledge the valuable suggestions regarding this chapter made by Daniel Chernilo, Lydia Morris and the editor, Andrew Buchwalter.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. by Allen Wood, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) [hereafter PR], §340.

  2. 2.

    Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1990), “World Spirit and Natural History,” 338.

  3. 3.

    Hegel, PR, §343R.

  4. 4.

    Hegel, PR, §343R.

  5. 5.

    Hegel, PR, §209R.

  6. 6.

    Hegel, PR, §209R.

  7. 7.

    Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 1966), 31.

  8. 8.

    Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London: Unwin, 1984), 768–9.

  9. 9.

    Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), 273.

  10. 10.

    Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 27.

  11. 11.

    Hegel, PR, §257.

  12. 12.

    Hegel, PR, §258A.

  13. 13.

    Hegel, PR, §272A.

  14. 14.

    Hegel, PR, §260.

  15. 15.

    Hegel, PR, §260A.

  16. 16.

    Hegel, PR, §124R.

  17. 17.

    Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), 314; Adorno Negative Dialectics, 309.

  18. 18.

    Shlomo Avineri, Hegel's Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 240.

  19. 19.

    Drucilla Cornell et al., eds., Hegel and Legal Theory (London: Routledge, 1991); Fred Dallmayr, G.W.F. Hegel, Modernity and Politics (London: Sage, 1993); Michael Hardimon, Hegel’s Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Steven Smith, Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism: Rights in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

  20. 20.

    Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought, trans. David Green (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), 43.

  21. 21.

    Hegel, PR, §258R.

  22. 22.

    Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 239.

  23. 23.

    Andrew Arato, “A Reconstruction of Hegel’s Theory of Civil Society,” in Hegel and Legal Theory, ed. Drucilla Cornell, 301–320; K.-H. Ilting, “Hegel’s Concept of the State and Marx’s Early Critique,” in State and Civil Society: Studies in Hegel’s Political Philosophy, ed. Z.A. Pelczynski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 93–113.

  24. 24.

    Andrew Buchwalter offers a heterodox reading of the text in “Hegels Begriff des Staates als Irdisch-Göttliches,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie: 56, no. 4: 495–509.

  25. 25.

    Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 256.

  26. 26.

    Hegel, PR, 20.

  27. 27.

    Pippin Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, 269.

  28. 28.

    Hegel, PR, §1.

  29. 29.

    Hobbes construed the Leviathan as a secular divinity. Its laws can “never be against reason” and every member of society “must acknowledge himself to be the author … of whatever he that is already their sovereign shall do and judge fit to be done.”

  30. 30.

    G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (London: Dover, 1956), 452.

  31. 31.

    Hegel, PR §30R.

  32. 32.

    Hegel, PR §209R. See also PR, Preface, 20.

  33. 33.

    Hegel, PR, §258 footnote.

  34. 34.

    Hegel, PR, §258.

  35. 35.

    Hegel, PR, §5A.

  36. 36.

    Hegel, PR, §5A.

  37. 37.

    Hegel, PR, §5.

  38. 38.

    Hegel, PR, §108A. In the first half of the twentieth century the “Hegelian” philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, coined the term “totalitarian” to express the idea of “total freedom” in which the self-realisation of the individual is identified with the universality of a “comprehensive, all embracing, pervasive … total” state. See Richard Bellamy, Modern Italian Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1988). Gentile’s “actualist” philosophy exemplifies the error of abstract thought Hegel alerted us to: to elevate the concept of the state into an abstract ideal, raise the state to supreme status, and demand it be actualized.

  39. 39.

    See Robert Fine “Judgment and the Reification of the Faculties: a Reconstructive Reading of Arendt’s Life of the Mind,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 34, no. 1–2 (2008): 157–176.

  40. 40.

    T.H. Marshall wrote in a not dissimilar vein of a movement from civil rights to political rights to social rights that has characterised modern constitutional states. He assigned them broadly to the evolution of constitutional states in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His distinctive contribution has less to do with his much criticized evolutionary claims than with the argument that modern citizens are only full citizens if they possess all three kinds of right. We can view the idea of human rights as a further stage in the development of the idea of right itself. The emergence of human rights should not be understood as making obsolete less developed legal forms. It supplements civil, political and social rights associated with the nation state. See T.H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950).

  41. 41.

    Garrett Brown, “State Sovereignty, Federation and Kantian Cosmopolitanism,” European Journal of International Relations 11, no. 4 (2005): 495–522.

  42. 42.

    Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

  43. 43.

    Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone, 1981), 84.

  44. 44.

    Manfred Riedel, Between Tradition and Revolution: The Hegelian Transformation of Political Philosophy, trans. Walter Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

  45. 45.

    Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 175.

  46. 46.

    Hegel, PR, §333.

  47. 47.

    Hegel, PR, §331A.

  48. 48.

    Hegel, PR, §246.

  49. 49.

    Hegel, PR, §248.

  50. 50.

    Hegel, PR §268.

  51. 51.

    Hegel, PR, §145.

  52. 52.

    Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 132.

  53. 53.

    Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Elements of Justice: part 1 of The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. John Ladd (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 26.

  54. 54.

    Kant, Metaphysical Elements of Justice, Intro §B.

  55. 55.

    Hegel, PR, §29.

  56. 56.

    Hegel, PR §139.

  57. 57.

    Kant, Metaphysical Elements of Justice, §8.

  58. 58.

    Kant, Metaphysical Elements of Justice, §86.

  59. 59.

    Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

  60. 60.

    Kant, Political Writings, 50.

  61. 61.

    Kant, Political Writings, 114.

  62. 62.

    Hegel, PR, §209A.

  63. 63.

    Hegel, PR, §340, my emphasis.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK

    Robert Fine

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  1. Dept. Philosophy, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, 32224, Florida, USA

    Andrew Buchwalter

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Fine, R. (2012). Contra Leviathan: Hegel’s Contribution to Cosmopolitan Critique. 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_3

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