Abstract
Hegel’s defense of the welfare state retains appeal when grounded in dialogical human rights ethics defended as true normative ethical theory. His dialectic of trade passes through budding consumer desires in the once sovereign family and trade between households risking market-induced poverty, ending in market regulation by an external welfare state. The dialectic recurs on a higher level as we in domestic civil society turn to foreign products. Market-induced poverty generates an external global welfare state gradually visible in today’s international financial institutions Hegel did not see. The US has fallen subject to the dialectic of trade, with relative economic decline and a more dialogical relation with the outside world. Yet a welfare state does not replace the market, but protects it against from itself. Entrepreneurship remains key to fighting world poverty. Beside mini-loans, “mini competitive economic colonialism”—neither classical political colonialism nor monopolistic economic neocolonialism—creates new consumer markets in the poorest nations for the products of developed nations, and vice versa: developing nations are not made dependent on a single foreign power or international financial organization, nor forced to generate investment capital domestically by an authoritarian suppression of consumption and democracy, nor forced to sacrifice economic development.
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Notes
- 1.
G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on Logic (1831), trans. C. Butler (Bloomington: Indiana University, 2008), 124.
- 2.
An account of the dialectical method is given in Clark Butler, “Hermeneutic Hegelianism,” Idealistic Studies, 14, no.2 (May 1985): 121–135.
- 3.
Regarding the seven dialectical phases from abstraction to negation of the negation, see Clark Butler, Hegel’s Logic: Between Dialectic and History (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 3–4.
- 4.
“You yourself, honored teacher, intimated orally to me one day that you were entirely convinced of the necessity of new progress and new forms of the universal Spirit even beyond the form of science achieved by you, without, however, being able to give me any more precise account of these forms.” Christian Hermann Weisse to Hegel, July 11, 1829, in Hegel: The Letters (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 544.
- 5.
I understand “households” to include nomadic clans.
- 6.
G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press) [hereafter PR], §238.
- 7.
“[T]he god is only a figurative expression of the society.” Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976), 226.
- 8.
PR, §158.
- 9.
For an explanation of Hegel’s ontological historical materialism, see Clark Butler, “L'Hégélianisme interprété comme un matérialisme historique,” Hegel Jahrbuch, 1976: 257–62.
- 10.
PR, §171.
- 11.
PR, §185.
- 12.
PR, §238.
- 13.
PR, §183.
- 14.
PR, §193.
- 15.
PR, §180 Addition.
- 16.
PR, §188.
- 17.
PR, §188.
- 18.
PR, §189, Addition.
- 19.
PR, §189.
- 20.
PR, §244, Addition.
- 21.
PR, §244.
- 22.
PR, §242.
- 23.
PR, §241.
- 24.
PR, §244.
- 25.
Sir William Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services, Report Submitted to Parliament by Command of His Majesty, November 1942, accessed March 22, 2010, www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1942beveridge.html
- 26.
PR, §246.
- 27.
PR, §247.
- 28.
PR, §191, Addition.
- 29.
www.wto.org, accessed March 22, 2010.
- 30.
PR, §244, Addition.
- 31.
Global Trade Watch, accessed March 1, 2010, www.citizen.org/trade/nafta
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
PR, §249.
- 34.
www.wto.org, accessed March 22, 2010.
- 35.
PR, §242.
- 36.
PR, §258.
- 37.
Clark Butler, “World Governance, World Government,” in Human Rights Ethics: A Rational Approach. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2008, ch. 14.
- 38.
PR, §246.
- 39.
PR, §188.
- 40.
PR, §241.
- 41.
PR, §246.
- 42.
PR, §245.
- 43.
PR, §248.
- 44.
PR, §248, Addition.
- 45.
PR, §244.
- 46.
PR, §249.
- 47.
An example is a Spanish company that has organized the production of watermelons in the Senegal. Pascal Fletcher, “Senegalese Farm Shows Benefit of Targeted Aid,” International Herald Tribune, September 3, 2008, accessed August 29, 2009, archive.wn.com/2008/09/05/1400/accra.
- 48.
Ibid.
References
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Butler, Clark. 1976. L’Hégélianisme interprété comme un matérialisme historique. Hegel Jahrbuch, 257–262.
Butler, Clark. 1985. Hermeneutic Hegelianism. Idealistic Studies 14 (2, May): 121–135.
Butler, Clark. 1996. Hegel’s Logic: Between Dialectic and History. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Butler, Clark. 2008. World governance, world government. In Human rights ethics: A rational approach. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. Ch. 14.
Durkheim, Émile. 1976. The elementary forms of the religious life (trans: Joseph Ward Swain). London: George Allen & Unwin.
Global Trade Watch Accessed March 1, 2010. www.citizen.org/trade/nafta
Hegel, G.W.F. 1951. Philosophy of right (trans: Knox, T.M.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. 1984. The letters (trans: Butler, C. and Seiler, C.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. 2008. Lectures on logic (trans: Butler, C.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Butler, C. (2012). The Coming World Welfare State Which Hegel Could Not See. 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_8
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