In a world where capitalism and the liberal state are (i) increasingly failing to provide decent living conditions for the working classes, (ii) continuing to reinforce different forms of racism, sexism and neo-colonialism, and (iii) carrying out an unparalleled destruction of the environment threatening all human life on this planet, what does Hegel have to offer us? If one starts from the premise that our current forms of social life need to be fundamentally reorganized to secure anything like a decent life for our species, it might be natural to suspect that Hegel—the quintessential philosopher of synthesis and reconciliation—would not be especially helpful in such a critical endeavour. Perhaps this is why, as Bart Zantvoort's introduction rightly points out, from the early analytical philosophy of Moore and Russell to the post-structuralism of Foucault and Deleuze, ‘the history of modern philosophy can be read as a history of resistance to Hegel’ (1).
One of the goals of Rebecca Comay and Bart Zantvoort's edited collection seems to be a productive response to this challenge, aiming to show that Hegel's thought on resistance does indeed offer something valuable for contemporary philosophy. It does this by collecting a series of essays exploring the theme of resistance in various aspects of Hegel's philosophy, from his method to the role he sees for resistance in politics.
After Zantvoort's scene-setting introduction, the chapters in Part 1 discuss Hegel's method. Frank Ruda's ‘Hegel, Resistance and Method’ argues that resistance is inherent to Hegel's method itself, with a particular focus on Hegel's discussion of the speculative sentence. Thereafter, Rebecca Comay's ‘Resistance and Repetition: Hegel and Freud’ compares the role of resistance in the development of consciousness in the Phenomenology to its role in Freudian psychoanalysis. Rocío Zambrana's ‘Dialectics as Resistance: Hegel, Benjamin, Adorno’ compares and contrasts the dialectics in the work of Hegel, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno.
The chapters in Part 2 examine different kinds of resistance in Hegel's philosophy, with Howard Caygill's ‘The Spirit of Resistance and its Fate’ exploring the role of resistance in Hegel's thought from the early theological writings to the Science of Logic. By contrast, Kirill Chepurin's ‘Subjectivity, Madness, and Habit: Forms of Resistance in Hegel's Anthropology’ looks at the role of resistance in Hegel's anthropology, with a particular focus on the embodied nature of the subject and its continuous resistance to madness. Completing Part 2, Bart Zantvoort's ‘Unthinking Inertia: Resistance and Obsolescence in Hegel's Philosophy of History’ discusses how the development of modern mostly-rational states can ‘lag behind the development of reason’ (123) and how irrational forms of life can resist change.
Finally, the chapters in Part 3 explore specifically political resistance in Hegel's thought. This part begins with Karin de Boer's ‘Freedom and Dissent in Hegel's Philosophy of Right ’, which argues that, contrary to what many seem to think, there is a role for resistance and even revolution in Hegel's philosophy. De Boer rightly points out that in his Philosophy of Right Hegel seems to ‘disregard the possibility of justified massive dissent’ (148), because in a (fully actualized) rational state ‘citizens would have no reason to oppose the government and would of their own accord identify with the interests of the society as a whole’ (148), but that resistance and revolution may be acceptable to bring about such a state. The concern she raises about the exclusion of resistance in a Hegelian rational state is that it fails to distinguish between legitimate opposition (e.g., human rights advocacy) and illegitimate opposition within the rational state (e.g., the capitalist practices of multinational corporations). After all, if we can't distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate opposition to the status quo, it would seem that any legitimate dissent that goes beyond seeking to change individual policies through officially approved channels is at worst left unaccounted for and at best simply ruled out. One can respond to this by pointing out that Hegel does allow some resistance to members of the executive seeking to misuse their powers (Hegel Reference Hegel1991: 334) and that because Hegel's rational state guarantees the rights of individuals, resistance to such a state ‘as a whole can thus only come from those who reject such rights (such as, perhaps, the ‘ruthless lobbyists’ that de Boer has in mind)’ (Houlgate Reference Houlgate, Comay and Zantvoort2018). This response captures something important in Hegel's political philosophy—if a state is rational, then it secures people's rights and any resistance against that as a whole would be irrational and therefore illegitimate—but I think it misses the practical thrust of de Boer's argument. If we accept the premise that any existing state is likely to be imperfectly rational—e.g., because its institutions lag behind rationality or because some irrational forms have managed to resist and persist—then even a mostly rational state should be one which is able to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate forms of resistance. Not offering us the tools to do this thus remains a major shortcoming of Hegel's social philosophy. One could respond to this by arguing that some particular existing state—say, the Netherlands or Norway—is in fact fully rational or likely to soon become so, but no such argument would stand up to minimal empirical scrutiny.
In contrast to de Boer, Klaus Vieweg's ‘Stages of an Inversive Right to Resistance in Hegel’ argues that Hegel's commitment to the inviolability of freedom and right in turn grounds a right to resist the violation of such rights. In other words, for every right, in Hegel, there is a corresponding right to resist those who violate it—on the condition that this resistance is done to safeguard or restore the right in question. Vieweg still agrees with de Boer, however, in maintaining that, for Hegel, there is no right to resist the rational state. Finally, Louis Carré’s ‘Does the Rabble Resist Hegel's Philosophy of Right?’ argues that Hegel's notion of ‘the rabble’ constitutes a resistance to Hegel's system of rights as a whole that threatens to overthrow it.
In general, these essays are clear and well-written. Those interested in resistance in general, Hegel's thought, and/or the intersection of the two, should find them very interesting—as I did. For those more interested in whether Hegel's philosophy has much to teach contemporary political philosophers grappling with the current political conjuncture, I have a concern not so much with the book's contents, but with a key premise of its project. In today's political and philosophical context, a focus on resistance is, I would argue, inherently regressive, even reactionary, for two reasons. First, it implicitly takes for granted the basic institutions that produced the society we have now—with all its crises, inability and refusal to address them. This in turn implies neglecting the need to look for new and better forms of social organization that are more compatible with free, democratic and ecologically sustainable modes of life. Second, it implies a kind of servility with respect to the status quo. It implies putting up some sort of fuss and opposition to the powers-that-be in the vain hope that they will then fix things for us, when what we need is something far more ambitious. Given the way our world is going and the massive changes that will be needed to secure a decent future for humanity, what then does Hegel's thought on resistance have to offer us?
It would be somewhat unfair to level this as a critique of a book whose stated goal is rather different and which, in any case, has significant strong points that stand on their own. However, it is still a legitimate question that is raised by the book's own explicitly stated concern, namely that of interrogating Hegel's importance to contemporary thought. In a similar manner to the first generation of Frankfurt School critical social theorists, I would contend that the present conjuncture does not merely require resistance to local injustices and recent social and political (mis)developments; rather, the state of current social reality requires a full-blown social revolution. Not coincidentally, contemporary social movements—ecologists, feminists, socialists and so on—are increasingly going beyond talk of resistance. They are talking about rebellion, revolution and reconstruction, because they recognize that that is what we need. To me at least, it is not obviously clear that Hegel's thoughts on resistance have much to offer the kind of politics we need now.
