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Hegel's Moral & Political Philosophy - From Socrates to Sartre (1979)

28:49 recording · AUTO · 1 speaker

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Brief overview

For Hegel, ethics is social ethics: the nation-state, not individual conscience, is the source of morality.

  1. No moral court of appeal above the stateHegel cuts off appeals to universal moral, legal or religious principles: beyond the state there is no higher court of appeal.
  2. Criticism borrows the culture's own idealsCondemning Watergate or the denial of voting rights draws on ideals the United States culture itself produced, which is why Hegel calls culture the substance of ethics.
  3. Substantial freedom against alienationIdentifying your will with the state's is happiness; failing to identify is alienation — meaningless voting, meaningless work, an empty life.
Executive Summary AI
  • The lecture opens by asking whether protesters against United States policy in the Vietnam War were justified, then answers that in Hegel's philosophy there is no moral authority above the state and no legal or religious principle that transcends it.
  • Against the objection that a culture can go wrong — the Salem witch hunts of the 17th century, McCarthyism in the 1950s, Watergate — Hegel replies that the ideals we use to condemn those events, such as the 15th Amendment's guarantee that the vote not be denied on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, are themselves produced by our own culture.
  • Hegel describes the individual absorbing the ethical substance of the culture through three dialectical stages: the family, its antithesis civil society, and their synthesis in the state.
  • In civil society, read through Adam Smith and the British economists, the cunning of reason turns private gain into public benefit but also polarizes society into a small wealthy capitalist class and a growing alienated proletariat — nearly Marx's picture, except that Hegel trusts the state to hold the conflict in check while Marx calls for revolutionary overthrow.
  • The state makes freedom possible in Hegel's sense of substantial freedom — identifying your own will with the will of the state, which he calls the condition of happiness — while its failure is alienation, the theory Marx and later Sartre inherit from him.
Key Quote
“everything that man is he owes to the state.”
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Key Quote
“no individual can step beyond the state.”
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Key Quote
“the nation-state is the divine idea as it exists on earth.”
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