Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Hegel’s 1820 Philosophy of Right was a landmark in social, political, and ethical philosophy. It was alternately taken by some to be a grand statement of conservative, even reactionary politics and it was taken by Marx to be one of the great proto-revolutionary works of the age. In the heyday of Western Marxism and French phenomenology, it was regarded as inferior to Hegel’s youthful Phenomenology of Spirit, but it still exercised a strong hold on those thinkers. We will read all of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in this class, and we will also read the introduction to his lectures on the philosophy of world history (based on the last section of the Philosophy of Right). In doing so, we will read Dean Moyar’s recent and much praised book on Hegel’s political philosophy, Hegel’s Value. We will then end the course with Geoff Mann’s important recent book on Hegel, the French Revolution and John Maynard Keynes, In the Long Run We Are All Dead.