Just when it seems as though Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie has finally become a defensible theory of modern political society and normative ethics, with strong new interpretations recently put forth by Robert Pippin and Axel Honneth, Frank Ruda comes along and pulls the rug out from underneath them. In Hegel's Rabble Ruda reads the entire Philosophy of Right from the perspective of the singularly dismissed figure which Hegel names the rabble [Pöbel], and what he is able to construct out of a few cryptic paragraphs is simply astonishing. The motivation behind this idiosyncratic interpretation is not to dismiss Hegel's analysis, but rather to follow with careful precision the antinomy of poverty and civil society within Sittlichkeit to its logical conclusion. The upshot of this investigation is that in order to make sense of the rabble in Hegel's own terms we are required to abandon the classical categories of right itself and to construct a theory capable of expressing the truth of the rabble, a truth shown to be both universal and necessary. For Ruda, this is exactly what the young Marx accomplished, and hence the book is framed with an introduction and coda on the relation between Marx and Hegel. While offering a close reading of many of Hegel's notes, lectures and published work spanning his whole career, Ruda's own analysis is heavily infused with concepts from Badiou, Agamben, Rancière and Žižek, often leading to tangential discussions of set theory, the unconscious, detached organs, and the un-dead. Despite such unnecessary indulgences, Ruda's account is commendable both for its philosophical depth and its political commitment.
The argument in short is thus. As Hegel points out in §241-244 of the Philosophy of Right as well as in many lectures he gave on the topic, civil society necessarily produces poverty. Although there are mechanisms at play to ameliorate it, Hegel considers poverty to be structurally irresolvable. The specific figure of the rabble emerges when a subjective disposition of indignation against society is produced alongside the objective condition of poverty. The rabble is made up of individuals who claim that they have been wronged and hence demand subsistence without work. Yet this claim and demand go against the very conditions of freedom which have been generated by the account of right itself, that is, by what is required for the free will to “give itself actuality.” These conditions are property, activity, habit, education, and attitude, amongst others. The rabble, lacking all these conditions, cannot be recognized by the very system of right that in fact produced them. Uncategorizable, inconsistent, and indeterminate, the contradictory figure of the rabble was taken by Hegel to be a merely negative presence, even evil. Opposing Hegel's judgment, Ruda argues that the rabble is right in their indignation, although their right is unrecognizable from within the categories of Hegel's system. To provide recognition for this indiscernible figure, the Philosophy of Right must be transformed into a political account of equality. On Ruda's account, Marx is the first to have seen this consequence of Hegel's project and to have begun, in 1843, to re-interpret the rabble as the revolutionary proletariat, “a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society.” Ruda concludes by briefly interpreting Marx's early humanism no longer as a dogmatic philosophy of man, but rather as a Hegelian inspired attempt to come to terms with the “non-being” of the rabble. Whether this thoughtful analysis of the rabble actually upends Hegel's political thought (or his entire philosophy, as remarked at one point) is, however, highly debatable.
After a gratuitous preface by Slavoj Žižek that is more about Freud than Hegel, the book begins with the “fiction” that we as yet do not know anything about the relation between Hegel and Marx (2), a fiction which allows us to rethink not only the transition from one to the other, but the relation between politics and philosophy as well. “The hypothesis of the book is thus that it is precisely the relation between philosophy and politics—politics being an irritation of philosophy—which helps us grasp the transition from Hegel to Marx” (3). Badiouian premises such as this one are repeatedly invoked to explain aspects of both Hegel and Marx, yet such premises are never really explained themselves. In the first chapter, Ruda describes why poverty is a particularly novel problem after the Reformation. Since Luther, poverty had lost its sacred status, and one's own condition is now taken to be a result of “one's own activity” (8). For Hegel, labour allows human beings to prove their freedom and to be recognized as members of a political community. Ruda rightly emphasizes this condition of freedom, for this is exactly what makes the rabble so problematic.
Following this, Ruda explains Hegel's view of the emergence and persistence of poverty in civil society. The central point, repeated ad nauseam here and throughout the book, is that civil society “inescapably” produces impoverished masses who are not able to live up to civil society's principle, namely, that one should earn one's own subsistence by means of labour (12). Although Hegel (and Ruda) take this contradiction as a given, it is by no means clear why this is the case. Ruda's axiomatic re-stating of the problem gets us no closer to explaining its conditions of possibility, which is all the more strange since Marx spent his entire mature career answering this question. Since, as Marx saw, the statement that civil society “causes” poverty explains nothing, he considered a more concrete, historical analysis of economic and social reproduction necessary to determine just why that is the case. However, Ruda's interest lies in showing how Marx used Hegel's particular description of the rabble to express the universal condition of the proletariat. By ignoring the wider political-economic question, Ruda misses an opportunity to show how the problem of poverty per se became a problem for Marx. This problem led Marx not merely to the ‘proletariat’ (if it did so at all), but also to the idea of political economy that occupied him for most of his life.
Having laid out Hegel's rudimentary account of poverty, Ruda discusses Hegel's account of the strategies that are used to combat it: support by civil society itself, begging, the right to distress, colonization, the redistribution of labour, the corporation, and the police. While commentators like Avineri and Honneth point to one or two of these alleged solutions, and even suggest that the problem could be solved from within Hegel's system, Ruda illustrates with clarity just how self-contradictory and doomed each effort truly is: either they contradict the very principle of civil society, or they ameliorate the effect rather than the cause of poverty.
In the next chapters (4-6), the analysis turns to the subject proper, the rabble. At the most abstract level, the rabble are those produced by civil society who do not earn their subsistence through labour, who have lost the dignity of being a recognized member of society, and who feel that they have been wronged. Hegel rightly notices that this applies both to a segment of the rich and to a segment of the poor, and Ruda establishes the specific logics of each. The rich rabble is the gambler par excellence, the one who lives through the contingency of winnings, needing nobody but his wealth, which he is always afraid will slip away. Above civil society, the rich rabble act like gods, dismissing the norms and values which bind people together, yet nonetheless depending on the right of private property to protect themselves. The poor rabble are those beneath civil society, who live not according to contingency but to utter necessity from day to day, like animals; whereas the rich rabble “choose” their fate, the poor rabble do not. All they contribute is a negative “disposition of mind” post facto, a subjective judgment on their own miserable position.
Using a whole host of Badiouian tools, Ruda describes the separate relations of contingency and necessity within the two rabbles in quasi-logical formulas. Although it sometimes obscures more than it clarifies the issue, these formulas bring out two concepts that Ruda takes as central. The first is the logic of double contingency which describes the rich rabble as those who, first, contingently opt to gamble and second, contingently win (48). The second concept, more central to Ruda's argument, is the logic of double latency. Since civil society necessarily produces poverty, anyone can become (and hence latently is) poor and anyone poor can become (and hence latently is) rabble if they come to resent their objective condition (46). The centrality of this second logic is hard to overstate for Ruda, for he takes it to signify the universality of the rabble, renaming it “the absolute rabble” (chapter 7). If anyone can become poor, and anyone poor can become rabble, then we are all latently rabble, potentially “un-binding” the very bonds which make up society as such. In Ruda's view, Hegel formulated his entire theory of the state in order to ward off the dire threat that the rabble poses to civil society (chapter 12). The questionable slide from “could become” to “latently is” does a lot of work for Ruda, grounding the entire argument that the rabble is a truly “universal” figure. The universality of the rabble, which Ruda likens to the “matter of ethical space” (95), provides the conceptual link to Marx's conception of the universality of the proletariat. However, Ruda's claim that the universalizion of the rabble that he takes to be implied by Hegel's account actually inspired Marx is unconvincing, especially given the fact that Hegel provides his own version of a “universal class” in section §202 of the Philosophy of Right: the civil servants that have no interests except the well-being of the whole. The similarity between this section and Marx's first description of the proletariat cannot be overlooked, even though Marx puts it to a very different use than did Hegel.
Between the account of the structure of the rabble and the conclusion that the state is constructed in order to prevent the rabble from emerging follow four chapters which share a similar form. First, Ruda discusses the conditions that according to Hegel make possible the actualization of freedom in the state, including habit (chapter 8), attitude (chapter 9), personality (chapter 10), and will (chapter 11). Second, each condition is shown to be lacking in the poor rabble, a figure whose only particularity is “absolute privation, absolute poverty, complete void of determinations, radical un-differentiation” (74). This hyperbole of (non)characteristics is partially justified, for Hegel indeed defines the rabble only negatively. Yet Ruda seems to be more interested in the formal categorization of the rabble than in the material problem of poverty itself. Indeed, the final chapters contain an excursus on “Intensional and Extensional” sets à la Cantor and the role of “inconsistent multiplicities” in Badiou, an analysis of “organs without bodies” à la inverted Deleuze, and a discussion of the paradox of names and signs à la Derrida and Žižek. By the end of the book, it seems as though the rabble consists not so much of actual human beings struggling to make ends meet as of meta-logical operators stuck in an infinitely recursive loop. Instead of seeing Hegel and Marx as politically engaged philosophers working to understand a complex social problem, Ruda sees them as two logicians struggling with “problems of categorization” (166) and ultimately claims that only Marx got it right. The problem with this approach is that it ignores the different motivations behind each of their accounts. The aim of the Philosophy of Right is not simply to get political categories right, but to present a rational account of the interlocking institutions and mechanisms which mediate the freedom of modern individuals with each other. Ruda faults Hegel for lacking the proper theoretical equipment to solve the problem of poverty, a failure that invariably leads to the inconsistent figure of the rabble. The Philosophy of Right, however, does not intend to eliminate the rabble nor to resolve the problem of poverty for the simple reason that both form a part of the social formation that Hegel is rationally reconstructing. Marx, at least in 1844, does not have this same goal; instead of giving a systematic account of how civil society understands itself, Marx presents a vision of human emancipation from civil society, grounded by a set of criteria wholly other than the values embodied in the institutions of modern life. In Capital (1867) however, Marx does embrace a method and goal that are similar to Hegel's Philosophy of Right in that Marx does not purport to solve the problem of poverty or the rabble, but rather thoroughly explains their emergence according to the immanent movement of bourgeois society itself. Although Ruda blurs the different intentions of Hegel and Marx, this does lead to some independently novel arguments about the difficulty in categorizing the rabble.
Perhaps the most interesting section of the argument comes in Ruda's analysis of habit and attitude (chapters 8-9), characteristics of which the rabble is deprived. Ruda seeks out the significance of these concepts by turning to Hegel's “philosophy of subjective spirit” in the Encyclopedia. Drawing on Catherine Malabou's The Future of Hegel, Ruda shows how the paradoxical structure of habit, which involves a self-conscious acceptance of unconscious repetition, is necessary for Hegel's account of individual freedom. By retroactively choosing to inhabit forms of social activity that were never chosen in the first place, habit builds a second nature into man, a spiritual nature necessary for any political community to function. Lacking such habits, the rabble is lazy [faul], rotting [verfaulen] like a severed organ in putrefaction [Fäulnis] (82). Ruda connects this observation with Hegel's comments on organisms, showing how that which is faul signifies an inadequacy between reality (the organ) and its concept (the organism). Hence, the rabble is faul not only in the sense of lazy, but also in the sense that they do not conform to the concept of the state as such. By ‘conforming to the concept of the state’, Ruda means that Hegel thinks individuals are not really complete or free without habituating themselves to the institutions and practices of the state. Since the rabble can never do this, for reasons outlined above, the rabble is out of place in the state like a severed organ is out of place in a body. The problem is that the rabble is somehow still stuck to the body from which it has been severed. To describe this paradoxical status of the rabble being connected to yet detached from the state, Ruda uses the neologism “un-organ”, a word that suggests something neither living (organic) nor dead (inorganic), but un-dead (86). Such clever uses of Hegel's own terms against him are littered throughout the text, but it is hard to say what they all add up to, besides a confirmation that the problem of the rabble and poverty really were a problem for him.
Hegel's Rabble provides at points an incisive look into the unconscious of Hegel's political philosophy, but it leaves open many questions on who actually make up the rabble. If they do not work at all, then how can they be identified with the proletariat? If the rich rabble are greedy, whimsical gamblers, how can they at the same time embody the ice-cold rationality of the bourgeoisie? Is not the rabble in general closer to what Marx calls the lumpenproletariat than the proletariat? Ruda dismisses these ideas in his endnotes with almost no argument, and the reason is clear. As the coda shows, he is ultimately more interested in justifying a Badiouian politics through Hegel and Marx than in recounting the actual, historical influence of the former on the latter. Nonetheless, this fresh take on Hegel's Philosophy of Right offers a welcome rebuke to its more recent apologetic reconstructions, such as Axel Honneth's Pathologies of Individual Freedom. Ruda, as opposed to such interpretations, does not pass over the hardest problem of Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie; rather, he sees in the rabble an invitation to think through the most contemporary of political issues, inequality, in a manner that Hegel inaugurated but did not follow through.
