Abstract
Hobbes and Hegel are political theorists whose general approaches to the philosophical understanding of political life are in significant ways distinct from one another. Peperzak and Siep have rightly emphasised the opposition between Hobbes’s naturalism and Hegel’s idealism.1 The major texts by Hobbes and Hegel on political theory, Leviathan (1651) and the Philosophy of Right (1821), express divergent conceptions of philosophy and political association. Nonetheless Hobbes and Hegel are at one insofar as they recognise that the world of values and social interaction in which human beings can be at home is a world that depends crucially upon the inventive, constructive powers of human beings. They share an understanding of the world in which the self is seen as above all a self-defining subject and in which political authority derives from the capacities of human beings.
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Notes and References
See L. Siep, ‘Der Kampf um Anerkennung: Zu Hegels Auseinandersetzung mit Hobbes in den Jenaer Scriften’, Hegel Studien 9 (1974).
See also A. Pepperzak, ‘Hegel and Hobbes Revised’, in A. Collins (ed.), Hegel on the Modern World ( Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995 ).
A. Buchwalter, ‘Hegel, Hobbes, Kant and The Scientization of Practical Philosophy’, in A. Collins (ed.), Hegel on the World ( Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995 ), p. 178.
See C. Taylor, Sources of the Self - The Making of the Modern Identity ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 ), p. 533.
J. Taminiaux, ‘Hegel et Hobbes’, in J. Taminiaux, Philosophie et Politique ( Bruxelles: Editions de l’Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 1981 ).
T. Hobbes, Leviathan ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 39. (All subsequent references to the Leviathan refer to this edition.)
N. Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and Spinoza’, in J. Burns (ed.), Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 ), p. 533.
S. Smith, Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism ( Chicago, Ill.: Chicago University Press, 1989 ), pp. 116–18.
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R. E. Flathman, Thomas Hobbes, Scepticism, Individuality and Chastened Politics ( London: Sage, 1993 ).
See J. Findlay, ‘Hegel’s Use of Teleology’, in W. Steinkraus (ed.), New Studies in Hegel’s Philosophy ( New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1971 ).
See also T. Wartenberg, ‘Hegel’s Idealism: The Logic of Conceptuality’, in E Beiser, (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 ).
PR: Werke 7, § 260; G. W. E Hegel, Elements in the Philosophy of Right ed. A. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
VPG: Werke 12 p. 74; G. W F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover Press, 1956), p. 54.
See A. Finkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986 ); and
David Gauthier, Moral Dealings: Contract, Ethics and Reason ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982 ).
R. Kraynak, History and Modernity in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990 ), p. 6.
R. Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), see esp. pp. 40–64.
M. Oakeshott, ‘Introduction to Leviathan’, in M. Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association ( Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975 ).
H. Brod, Hegel’s Philosophy of Politics — Idealism,Identity and Modernity ( Boulder, San Francisco and Oxford: Westview Press, 1992 ), p. 6.
S. Houlgate, Freedom, Truth and History — An Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy ( London and New York: Routledge, 1991 ), p. 37.
J. E Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984 ), p. 15.
R. Rorty, ‘The Contingency of Language’, in R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 ), p. 22.
N. K. O’Sullivan, ‘Political Integration, the Limited State and the Philo-sophy of Postmodernism’, Political Studies, vol. XL1 (1993), pp. 21–42;
J. Gray, ‘The Politics of Cultural Diversity’, The Salisbury Review, vol. 7 (1988), p. 38.
A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity ( Oxford: Polity Press, 1991 ), pp. 70–109.
F. Dallmayr, G. W. F. Hegel, Modernity and Politics ( London: Sage, 1993 ), p. 8.
J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987 ).
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© 1999 Gary K. Browning
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Browning, G.K. (1999). Hobbes, Hegel and the Modern Self. In: Hegel and the History of Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596139_4
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