Hegel’s Cartesian Grounding of Political Philosophy

Authors

  • Shterna Friedman University of California, Berkeley United States

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24310/Studiahegelianastheg.v8i.13969

Keywords:

Hegel, Descartes, political philosophy, totality, substance

Abstract

Hegel saw modern philosophy as internally divided between its metaphysics and epistemology, on the one hand, and its political philosophy, on the other. Descartes had developed a metaphysics of totality to ground the epistemological certainty of the cogito, treating true unity as a unity of opposites (a totality). But political philosophy, in its empiricist and formalist forms, relied on an impoverished conception of unity—treating it, respectively, as a mere aggregation of parts or as formal consistency. The Philosophy of Right thus attempted to rectify the deficiencies of political philosophy by grounding it on the Cartesian concept of totality.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Metrics

Metrics Loading ...

References

Works by Hegel:
- Lectures on the History of Philosophy: The Lectures of 1825-26, v.3, trans. R.F. Brown and J.
M. Stewart, with H.S. Harris, ed. R.F. Brown. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990.
- Natural Law: The Scentific Ways of Treating Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy, and
Its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Law, trans. by T. M. Knox. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975.
- Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H.B. Nisbet, ed. Allen W. Wood. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1991.
- Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, I-III, in TWA 8-10.
- Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
- Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Auf der Grundlage der ‘Werke’ von 1832-1845 neu edierte
Ausgabe, hrsg. v. Eva Molden¬hauer und Karl Mar¬kus Mi¬chel. 20 vols. Frankfurt/M:
Suhrkamp 1970 (Theorie-Werkausgabe Hegels). Cited as “TWA,” followed by the
volume number; the page number follows the comma.

Other References
Abazari, Arash: Hegel’s Ontology of Power: The Structure of Social Domination in Capitalism.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Published

2022-06-28

How to Cite

Friedman, S. (2022). Hegel’s Cartesian Grounding of Political Philosophy. STUDIA HEGELIANA. JOURNAL OF THE SPANISH SOCIETY FOR HEGELIAN STUDIES, 8, 137–154. https://doi.org/10.24310/Studiahegelianastheg.v8i.13969