Abstract
This chapter focuses on the arguments of Hegel’s 1821 Elements of the Philosophy of Right, in particular Part Three, his account of ethical life (Sittlichkeit). The Chapter argues that the reason why Hegel’s ethical and political theory continues to be a resource for feminist thinkers, in spite of his misogyny, is twofold. First, it is because the conceptual categories through which his account of contemporary ethical life is organised are fundamentally relational and dynamic. Second, relatedly, it is because in his philosophy of right he exposes the fragile and conflicting conditions that sustain, but also threaten to undermine, the modern state and its subjects as the instantiation of freedom.
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Notes
- 1.
Hegel does not generally use the language of ‘modern’/ ‘modernity’/ ‘modernism’. In this article I use this terminology to capture the historical distinctiveness of the form of ethical life that Hegel associated with his own time in contrast to, for example, ancient societies as well as to indicate the ways in which his work has been read by contemporary Hegel scholars. For feminist readers of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel’s analysis captures aspects of the gendered dynamics of their own specifically modern condition. See discussion of Elshtain, Pateman and Benhabib below.
- 2.
The revisionist reading of Hegel’s social and political thought in Anglophone scholarship began in the 1970s with books such as Zbigniew A. Pelczynski, ed. Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Schlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), and has continued since, e.g. Stephen B. Smith, Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism: Rights in Context (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989); Allen Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Frederick Dallmayr, Hegel, Modernity and Politics (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993); Paul Franco, Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). For a more recent overview see: David James ed., Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
- 3.
See earlier examples of critical feminist engagements with Hegel in Patricia Jagentowicz Mills, ed. Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), including Carla Lonzi’s polemic originally published in 1970, “Let’s Spit On Hegel,” 275–297. Or more recently Alison Stone, “Gender, the Family, and the Organic State in Hegel’s Political Thought,” in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, ed. Thom Brooks, 143–164 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012). Postcolonial and decolonial engagements with Hegel’s work have been more recent: see Chapter 19 in this volume and, for example, Robert Bernasconi, “Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti,” in Hegel After Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett, 41–63 (London: Routledge, 1998); Michael H. Hoffmeier, “Hegel, Race and Genocide,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, Supplement, no. 39 (2001): 45–62; Susan Buck Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2009).
- 4.
For example, Smith, Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism.
- 5.
For example, Thom Brooks, Hegel’s Political Philosophy: A Systematic Reading of the Philosophy of Right (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
- 6.
See chapter on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in Terry Pinkard, Hegel: a biography, 469–494 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
- 7.
See Robbie Shilliam, “Hegel’s Revolution in Philosophy,” in German Thought and International Relations: the rise and fall of a liberal project, 88–118 (Basingstke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
- 8.
See Tina Chanter, “Antigone’s Liminality: Hegel’s Racial Purification of Tragedy and the Naturalization of Slavery,” in Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought, ed. Kimberly Hutchings and Tuija Pulkkinen, 61–85 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
- 9.
There is nevertheless a significant sub–literature on Hegel’s discussion of the family, in particular on its role in relation to civil society and the state, and in relation to Hegel’s views on marriage and love. See for example: David V. Ciavatta, Spirit, the Family and the Unconscious in Hegel’s Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009); “The Family and the Bonds of Recognition,” Emotion, Space and Society 13, no. 1 (2014): 71–79; Robert Gillespie, “Progeny and Property,” Women and Politics 15, no. 2 (1995): 37–51; Edward C. Halper, “Hegel’s Family Values,” The Review of Metaphysics 54, no. 4 (2001): 815–858; Axel Honneth, Suffering from Indeterminacy: an attempt at a reactualization of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, intro. B. Rossler, trans. J. Ben-Levi (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 2007); Douglas E. Jarvis, “The Family as the Foundation of Political Rule in Western Philosophy: a comparative analysis of Aristotle’s Politics and Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Journal of Family History 36, no 4 (2011): 440–463. Toula Nicolacopolous and George Vassilacopolous, Hegel and the Logical Structure of Love: an essay on sexualities, family and law (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); Laura Werner, The Restless Love of Thinking: the Concept of Liebe in G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy (Helsinki: Helsinki University, 2007).
- 10.
See Siegfied Blasche, “Natural Ethical Life and Civil Society: Hegel’s Construction of the Family,” in Hegel on Ethics and Politics, trans. Nick Walker, ed. Robert B. Pippin and Otfried Höffe, 183–207 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Friederike Kuster, “Vom Nurzwang zur Sittlichkeit: Stationen der Bürgerlichen Familien,” Hegel Jahrbuch (2008): 288–295.
- 11.
Note that for Hegel, ‘ethical’ does not connote individual conscience or moral standards, but is always fundamentally social, tied to shared institutions, norms and habits and embedded in complex relationships of recognition that transcend any particular subject position. See David Farrell Krell, “Lucinde’s Shame: Hegel, Sensuous Woman, and the Law” and Frances Olsen’s response “Hegel, Sexual Ethics, and the Oppression of Women: Comments on Krell’s ‘Lucinde’s Shame’,” in Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel, ed. Patricia Jagentowicz Mills (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 1996), 89–117, for a feminist debate over Hegel’s response to Schlegel’s novel. See also Seyla Benhabib on Caroline Schlegel in “On Hegel, Women and Irony,” in Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics, 242–259 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), discussed below.
- 12.
See Werner, The Restless Love of Thinking, 165–172.
- 13.
See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (London: Jonathan Cape, 1953); Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G. C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Judith Butler, “Longing for Recognition,” in Undoing Gender, 131–151 (New York and London: Routledge, 2004).
- 14.
See Patricia Jagentowicz Mills, Woman, Nature and Psyche (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); “Hegel’s ‘Antigone’,” in Mills, Feminist Interpretations, 59–88.
- 15.
See Benhabib, “On Hegel, Women and Irony,” 250.
- 16.
See Heidi M. Ravven, “Has Hegel Anything to Say to Feminists?” in Mills, Feminist Interpretations, 225–252.
- 17.
The main texts I am drawing on in this section are: Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Antigone’s Daughters,” Democracy 2, no. 2 (1982): 46–59; “Self/Other, Citizen/State: G. W. F. Hegel and Jane Addams,” in Meditations on Modern Political Thought: Masculine/Feminine Themes from Luther to Arendt, 71–84 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); Women and War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988); “Hegel, Marriage, and the Standpoint of Contract,” in Mills, Feminist Interpretations, 209–223; Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, Contract and Domination (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self.
- 18.
See, Martha Ackelsberg and Mary Lyndon Shandley, “Jean Elshtain on Politics and Families,” Politics and Gender 11, no. 3 (2015): 570–578.
- 19.
Elshtain, Women and War; see also Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).
- 20.
Elshtain, Women and War, 4.
- 21.
Elshtain, “Antigone’s Daughters”.
- 22.
Elshtain, “Self/Other, Citizen/ State.”.
- 23.
Ibid. 79.
- 24.
Ibid. 81. Elshtain is not endorsing war in her critique of Addams but following Hegel in pointing to the intimate relation between war and the nation-state and the role of patriotic norms in enabling citizens to identify with their political community.
- 25.
See, Sarah Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (London: Women’s Press, 1990); Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar, eds. Relational Autonomy: feminist perspectives on autonomy, agency and the social self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Martha Albertson Fineman and Anna Grear, eds. Vulnerability: reflections on new ethical foundations for law and politics (Farnham: Ashgage Publishing, 2013).
- 26.
Pateman, The Sexual Contract, 173.
- 27.
Ibid. 174; Pateman, “Hegel, Marriage and the Standpoint of Contract,” 213.
- 28.
Pateman, The Sexual Contract, 176.
- 29.
Ibid. 177.
- 30.
See, in particular, Tuija Pulkkinen, The Postmodern and Political Agency (Jyväskylä: SoPhi, 2000), 128–130.
- 31.
Werner, The Restless Love of Thinking, 165–172.
- 32.
Pateman, “Hegel, Marriage,” 217.
- 33.
Pateman, The Sexual Contract, 116–218.
- 34.
Pateman and Mills, Contract and Domination, 134–164.
- 35.
Benhabib, Situating the Self, 1–19.
- 36.
Ibid. 23–67.
- 37.
Ibid. 41.
- 38.
Ibid. 55.
- 39.
Ibid. 246.
- 40.
Ibid.
- 41.
Ibid.
- 42.
Ibid. 252–254.
- 43.
Ibid. 256.
- 44.
Ibid. 242–245.
- 45.
See, for example, Jane Dryden, “Hegel, Feminist Philosophy and Disability: Rereading Our History,” Disability Studies Quarterly 33, no. 4 (2013).
- 46.
Pulkkinen, The Postmodern and Political Agency, 121–140.
- 47.
Ibid. 128, 136.
- 48.
Ibid. 127.
- 49.
Ibid. 125.
- 50.
Ibid. 128–130.
- 51.
Ibid. 132.
- 52.
Ibid. 136.
- 53.
See Hutchings, “Hegel, Ethics and the Logic of Universality”.
- 54.
See Kimberly Hutchings, “Living the Contradictions: wives, husbands and children in Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right,” in Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right: a critical guide, ed. David James, 97–115 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
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Hutchings, K. (2022). Family, Civil Society and the State. In: Lettow, S., Pulkkinen, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Feminist Philosophy. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13123-3_13
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