Hegel’s Revolution of Philosophy

Abstract

Over the course of the twentieth century the reception of Hegel in English-speaking academia has experienced a profound shift. From irrationalist, romanticist, Prussian nationalist and all round enemy of the ‘open society’ (Popper 1966), Hegel has slowly but surely been rehabilitated as a defender, if a critical one, of liberal democratic society (see Kaufman 1970; Pippin 2004). Hegel has become especially popular as a critical resource to expose the tensions between individual freedom and social cohesion extant in the modern condition (Taylor 1979; Steinberger 1988; Dallmayr 1993).¹ As a correlative to these investigations, Hegel’s related critique of Kant’s formalistic ethics has been used to question liberal cosmopolitan theories of human rights (Brown 1992: 65; Hutchings 1995; Morrice 2000: 234). Instead of positing, as the cosmopolitans do, an abstract universal right, Hegel’s constitutive approach posits the development and negotiation of rights through interactions between individuals within really existing societies (Honneth 1995; Frost 1996).² In this schema, freedom is not a pre-social value; rather, its value is dynamically created through frictional — although institutionalized — processes of social recognition (Shklar 1976; Smith 1989; Brod 1992). This idea of constitutive right has been extended to the arena of international law (Ringmar 1995); and it is with regards to the international reach of constitutive right where the dominant debate over Hegel in IR has taken place.