Hegel On History Politics And Philosophy – Gary Browning

The practical political task of dealing with discordant economic phenomena is of a piece with Hegel’s entire dialectical project of uniting concepts. In the Philosophy of Right Hegel depicts reason as the rose in the cross of the present, taking the project of philosophy to be one of reconciling mankind to actual, apparently disturbing developments.8 This project of critical philosophical reconciliation is what constitutes the dialectical philosophical task in considering the historically crucial but problematic working of the modern economy.

Hegel understands political economy within a holistic reading of the inter-connected character of the world; the world for Hegel is a social world that is to be understood in terms of connected patterns of behaviour.9 Hegel admires Smith as a political economist, because he traces connections between apparently discrete and disordered phenomena.10 Hegel, though, in conceiving of the world as an inter-connected whole and in aiming to achieve reconciliation with an apparently refractory world, recognises that the merely given cannot be equated with what is rational.

The rational for Hegel is the actual (wirklich) rather than the merely existent. Hegel perceives rationality to constitute the underlying essence of phenomena, and it is to be apprised by criticising appearances. Even at the end of his career, when he is taken by many commentators to be ultra-conservative, Hegel disparages the ‘common prejudice of inertia’ which he attributes to diehard conservative opponents of the English Reform Bill.11 Hegel recognises how the social world may require practical reform as well as philosophical clarification and endorsement.

Hegel’s approach to political economy reflects a dialectical method that connects and critiques concepts. For Hegel, brute particularity is unspecifiable. Any particular aspect of the social world affirming a localised identity presupposes an informing unity. Particularity presupposes universality and dialectical thinking reveals connective associations. This is not to say that the universal subsumes the particular. Just as particulars cannot be maintained as simply distinct, so unity cannot overreach itself so as to destroy particularity in a revolutionary transformation of particular things.

Hegel considers that a modern political economy is constitutive of a complex, internally differentiated identity, accommodating the generic, social nature of human beings and the particularities of individual self- expression.

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To submit a new proposal or hear more about the series, please contact Executive Editor Ambra Finotello at [email protected] OceanofPDF.com Gary Browning Hegel on History, Politics and Philosophy OceanofPDF.com Gary Browning Department of Social Sciences, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK ISSN 2662-6039 e-ISSN 2662-6047 International Political Theory ISBN 978-3-032-01778-9 e-ISBN 978-3-032-01779-6 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-01779-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2026 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.

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