Autonomy and Agonism in the Phenomenology of Spirit

2021

Both G.F.W. Hegel and Carl Schmitt took seriously the problem of political sovereignty entailed by liberal political theories. In Dictatorship (1919) and Political Theology (1922), Schmitt rejects liberal political theories that argue for the immediate unity of democracy and legality i.e., popular sovereignty. For he thinks they give rise to the liberal predicament, that is, to totalitarians tendencies by undermining political sovereignty. Hegel, on his part, argues that the immediate identity of the state and the division of powers in liberal political theories gives rise to a similar predicament. Yet given Schmitt’s negative assessment of Hegel their positions are seldom related to one another. I argue in this paper that Schmitt’s analysis of liberal political theories is similar to Hegel’s analysis of Rousseau’s liberal ideas. I contend, however, that Schmitt’s solution, which collapses the distinction between the executive and the legislative power in favor of the former, fails ...

European Journal of Political Research, 1993

Schumpeter argued that the norms of what he called the 'classical' theory were unrealisable within modern societies and offered what he believed to be a more realistic alternative. However, his critics accuse him of confusing 'is' with 'ought'. This paper seeks to save him from this criticism. It shows that Schumpeter's attack on the classical model rested on a correct appraisal of the constraints on individual autonomous action within modern societies. Unlike the 'competitive theory' of Downs and others, Schurnpeter's own alternative cannot be treated as a naive apologia for contemporary parliametary party democracy. He was well aware that such systems easily degenerate into oligopolies. Indeed he welcomed this development, viewing the party elections as means for moulding rather than responding to the people's will. Nevertheless, a series of procedural norms underlay his theory which are elucidated with reference to Wittgenstein's account of language.

Hegel Bulletin, 2015

Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2022

What makes democracy valuable? One traditional answer holds that participating in democratic self-government amounts to a kind of autonomy: it enables citizens to be the authors of their political affairs. Many contemporary philosophers, however, are skeptical. We are autonomous, they argue, when important features of our lives are up to us, but in a democracy we merely have a say in a process of collective choice. In this paper, we defend the possibility of democratic autonomy, by advancing a conception of it which is impervious to this objection. At the core of our account is the idea of joint authorship. You are a joint author of something when that thing expresses your joint intentions. Democracy may not make any one of us sole author of our political affairs, but it can make us their joint authors. It is in such joint authorship, we claim, that the intrinsic value of democratic self-government consists.

Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2008

The development of the theory of deliberative democracy has culminated in a synthesis between Rawlsian political liberalism and Habermasian critical theory. Taking the perspective of conceptions of freedom, this article argues that this synthesis is unfortunate and obscures some important differences between the two traditions. In particular, the idea of internal autonomy, which was an important, implicit idea in the ideology critique of the earlier Habermas, falls out of view. There is no room for this dimension of freedom in political liberalism and it has largely disappeared from the later Habermas. In so far as others have followed Rawls and Habermas, deliberative democratic theory has converged around a less critical and more accommodationist view of freedom. If we want to keep deliberative democracy as a critical theory of contemporary society, we should resist this convergence. Our starting point should not be 'the fact of reasonable pluralism' but rather 'the fact of unreflective acquiescence'. This article argues for incorporating internal autonomy in a complex theory of freedom to which deliberative democracy should be normatively committed.

International Philosophical Quarterly, 2013

According to Thomas Christiano, autonomy-centered arguments for democratic rights are not successful. These arguments fail to show that there is anything wrong with citizens who want to trade-off their political rights in exchange for more autonomy regarding their private affairs. The trade-off problem suggests that democratic participation is not necessary for leading a free life. My reply employs recent work in the republican tradition. The republican conception of freedom as non-domination supports the incommensurability of the public and the private aspects of autonomy. Christiano overlooks that trading-off the normative conditions of one’s public autonomy results in agents who are mere subjects to the dominating will of those citizens who retain their democratic rights. Since democratic decisions apply to all citizens, the privatized members end up being dominated, especially with respect to the collective determination of the very border separating the private from the public realm.

Philosophical Forum, 2000

Hegel-Jahrbuch, 2017

I discuss a problem that a prominent contemporary theory of action and agency is confronted with, namely the paradox of self-constitution. I submit a Hegelian attempt to solve that problem. The theory discussed is Christine Korsgaard’s constitutivist account of agency and practical identity. For the purposes of this talk I agree with most of the things that Korsgaard claims and my Hegelian response to the paradox is a friendly amendment to the constitutivist project. Actually, my impression is that there is much that Korsgaard’s Kantianism and contemporary interpretations of Hegel agree on. My main thesis is that the paradox of self-constitution can be overcome. Korsgaard, of course, agrees with this but presents a solution that is, to my mind, unsatisfactory. What needs to be done is to plug in Hegel’s unorthodox and complex account of action into the constitutivist’s equation. Once this is done, we see that the problems that Korsgaard encounters, when she tries to draw an analogy between animal und human self-constitution, disappear. My central move in order to achieve this goal is to suggest that the role that instincts play in the animal case must be replaced by a unique functional equivalent in the human case. The normative gap that our emancipation from instincts generates is filled by normative resources that emerge in our distinctly human condition, namely sociality and history.

Nearly every major philosophy, from Plato to Hegel and beyond, has argued that democracy is an inferior form of government, at best. Yet, virtually every contemporary political philosophy working today - whether in an analytic or postmodern tradition - endorses democracy in one variety or another. Should we conclude then that the traditional canon is meaningless for helping us theorize about a just state? In this paper, I will take up the criticisms and positive proposals of two such canonical figures in political philosophy: Plato and Hegel. At first glance, each is rather disdainful, if not outright hostile, to democracy. This is also how both have been represented traditionally. However, if we look behind the reasons for their rejection of (Athenian) democracy and the reasons behind their alternatives to democracy, I believe we can uncover a new theory of government that does two things. First, it maps onto the so-called Schumpeterian tradition of elite theories of democracy quite well. Second, perhaps surprisingly, it actually provides an improved justification for democratic government as we practice it today than rival theories of democracy. Thus, not only are Plato and Hegel not enemies of modern democratic thought after all, but each is actually quite useful for helping us develop democratic theory in a positive, not negative, manner. Follow Thom on Twitter - @thom_brooks

Hegel Bulletin, 2018

The leading question of Tatjana Sheplyakova's book is the connection between public freedom and individuality in Hegel's philosophy. This question is for the most part addressed with regard to Hegel's 1802-3 essay On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right (Naturrechtsaufsatz), a generally overlooked but in fact fundamental juvenile Hegelian work. However, the second half of the last chapter of the book broadens the focus by including the 1821 Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. The book is divided into three long and dense chapters preceded by a clear programmatic Introduction. Chapter 1 is dedicated to Hegel's diagnosis of his own time, Chapter 2 to his critique of the (Kantian) moral-juristic understanding of freedom, while Chapter 3 deals with the Hegelian pars construens. The inquiry begins with Hegel's early assessment of the condition of dissociation (Entzweiung) and depoliticization (Entpolitisierung) of modern society and modern human beings. Sheplyakova highlights very well the critical, even 'revolutionary' (67) tone of Hegel's diagnosis of modernity in the Naturrechtsaufsatz. On the one hand, Hegel questions the distinction of legality and morality, rooted already in Roman law and culminating in bourgeois society, because he takes it to lead to a 'privatisation of freedom' (51) and to the idea that the state is but an instrumental extension of individual right. On the other hand, Hegel does not only wish for a return of the classical model of the polis, which constitutes the counterparadigm to modernity. Both paradigms of freedom are, in fact, deficient, so that the diagnosis points out a 'double lack of true relationships' (114). In the Naturrechtsaufsatz, unlike Hegel's later thought, modernity is not conceived as the highest point in history but rather as a 'period of transition' (108). Briefly: in the classical model of the polis, individuals were not free as such, but only in so far as they belonged to a certain estate, which implied that ancient 'substantial' freedom was a 'freedom through inequality' (109). Modernity, conversely, realizes freedom as equality at the cost of a juristic-formalistic levelling of relationships and the disentanglement of individual rights and public sphere (121). As Sheplyakova effectively states, the problem for Hegel is not 'modern' individual autonomy as such but rather its merely juristic actualization, based on which individuals do not