I.i. Necessity as freedom

Understanding what Hegel means by ‘insight into necessity’ requires understanding what he means by necessity itself, and for this recourse to the categories of his logic is needed. In general, Hegel there characterizes necessity as that which is inevitable; it denotes a state of affairs that is unavoidable and whose alternative is inconceivable (EL: §147). As such, necessity is distinct from contingency. Whereas contingency designates a circumstance permitting alternatives, necessity does not. Contingency denotes ‘an existence which has no greater value than that of something possible, which may as well not be’ (EL: §6). By contrast, necessity is that which ‘cannot be otherwise’ (SL: 549).

So conceived, Hegel’s conception of necessity is close to conventional understandings. Yet his own position is not conventional. On the conventional account necessity depicts forces operating in the physical world; at issue is a result that follows unavoidably from an antecedent cause or condition (EL: §153A). For Hegel, this is a merely preliminary characterization of the term. While any concept of necessity must include an account of casual relations, necessity proper cannot be understood—as with natural, mechanical or what Hegel calls ‘real’ necessity—as a relationship between an entity and an externally existent cause. So construed, necessity is a ‘relative’ concept, one defined not essentially and as it is in and for itself, but only in relation to something other than itself. Indeed, because necessity so understood depicts dependence on an exogenously given condition, it is not necessity at all but contingency. ‘What is merely derivative is what it is not through itself but through something else; and in this way it too is merely contingent’ (EL: §147). For an account of genuine necessity, attention must be paid to a form of conditioning intrinsic to the subject matter itself. Against external or relative necessity, inner or ‘absolute’ necessity is that which is self-grounding or self-conditioning (EL: §35A). Only that which contains its ground in itself is intrinsically necessary; only that is necessity itself (das Notwendige (EL: §149)).

On this account, true or genuine necessity is identifiable with freedom. To understand necessity as self-conditionality is to understand it in terms of the principle that the philosophical tradition has defined as freedom: causa sui. Whereas that which is exogenously or heteronomously caused reflects contingent or external necessity, ‘genuinely inner’ or self-causative necessity denotes freedom itself (EL: §35A). Freedom is ‘the truth of necessity’ (SL: 580).

Hegel’s position may be briefly compared to that of Kant. Like Kant, Hegel espouses two concepts of necessity, one of determinism and the other of freedom. Where Kant distinguishes between natural and free causality or phenomenal and noumenal necessity (Kant Reference Kant and Smith1929: A446/B474), Hegel distinguishes between relative and absolute necessity, external and internal causation. Yet the two differ in their understandings of causal necessity. For Kant, natural and free necessity both denote forms of such necessity. This accords with his professed admiration for the lawlike character of both natural and moral reality (Kant Reference Kant and Beck1953: 166). For Hegel, by contrast, there is only one form of causal necessity: causality through freedom: ‘Causality according to the laws of freedom is the sole form of causality’ (W: 20, 357). Necessity for Hegel is intelligible only as absolute necessity; only in regarding something as its own cause can one properly accommodate the concept of necessary causation. Hegel does not deny the reality of external causation, for Kant natural necessity. His point only is that external necessity is not necessity itself but contingency. True necessity is that which simultaneously is its own cause and its own effect.

Hegel’s position may be further clarified by briefly comparing it with Spinoza’s.Footnote ⁶ In as much as Hegel understands necessity as that which is self-conditioned, he also construes it as a form of totality, as an absolute that contains all reality within itself (EL: §36Z, §62). Hegel thus aligns his conception of necessity with Spinoza’s, which qua substance subsisting sub specie aeternitatis is also understood as a totality (SL: 536, 538). Hegel claims, however, that Spinoza’s is an inadequate conception of totality and thus necessity as well. Because Spinoza surmounts conditioned phenomena simply by relegating them to the status of accidents bereft of their own reality (a position Hegel calls acosmism (EL: §50)), his concept of substance simply negates such phenomena, which for Hegel means that it is delimited and thus defined by the very conditions it purportedly denies. Hegel moves beyond Spinoza by famously defining totality not just as substance but subjectivity as well. Here the absolute is understood as a self-reflective reality that actualizes itself as it knows itself in what appears other to itself. It is in this reflective self-objectification in otherness that the absolute defuses the force of external conditions and renders them a condition of itself. Attention to this logic of reflection further facilitates an understanding of Hegel’s notion of necessity as that which is both causa and effectus sui. But it also illuminates the dialectic of blindness and insight that further characterizes Hegel’s concept of necessity.

I.ii. Necessity, freedom and the dialectic of blindness and insight

The free character of Hegelian necessity, to be sure, should not be overstated. To say that freedom is the truth of necessity is not to say that necessity is identical with freedom. ‘Free necessity’ (SL: 725) cannot be equated with freedom itself, no more than can absolute necessity be equated with the absolute itself. It is telling that Hegel includes discussion of necessity in the Science of Logic’s objective logic (the combined doctrine of being and essence) and not the subjective logic, i.e., the doctrine of the concept, ‘the realm of freedom’ itself (SL: 582). Thus, to understand further what Hegel means by necessity, more clarity is needed on how it does and does not equate to freedom. Such clarification also facilitates understanding of how the core concept of insight into necessity undergirds a normatively conceived Realphilosophie.

The basic difference between freedom and necessity for Hegel revolves around the issue of self-knowledge and self-reflexivity. Although necessity is identifiable with freedom, it lacks the property most distinctive to freedom itself—the ability to know itself as free. In Hegel’s terminology, necessity is that which is ‘in principle’ or ‘in itself’ free but not yet free for itself. To the extent that knowledge is relevant to the phenomenon of necessity, it is via the contribution of the philosopher or theoretical observer who discerns the freedom inherent in necessity. As such, necessity lacks freedom’s capacity to comprehend itself as freedom, concretized in the latter’s nature as the self-comprehension of freedom. Whereas freedom is so for itself, necessity is free only ‘for us’.

In this context Hegel speaks of the ‘blind’ character of necessity (SL: 52)—its nature as a force operating independently of conscious human will and intention. Based on the preceding, however, ascribing ‘blindness’ to necessity may appear unwarranted. As a self-causative phenomenon opposed to external conditioning, necessity expresses a design and purposiveness that presumably would militate against its characterization as blind.Footnote ⁷ Yet acknowledging necessity’s character as a species of freedom does not, on Hegel’s account, preclude its blind nature. As noted, freedom connotes self-reflection, and this is just what necessity lacks. However much the latter may express a design, it is not one visible to the phenomenon in question. To the extent that a design is at all apparent, it is so only in the ‘external reflection’ of an outside observer (SL: 554). As it is in itself, necessity denotes a ‘reflectionless (scheinlos) immediacy’ characterized precisely as that which is ‘light-shy’ (Lichtscheu) (SL: 539f, 553).

None of this is to suggest that vision is simply juxtaposed to blindness, no more than is freedom simply juxtaposed to necessity. Both contentions ignore the dialectical nature of Hegel’s position. Consider first his understanding of the relationship of freedom and necessity. On the one hand, freedom presupposes necessity (EL: §158): it can be genuinely self-determining only if it expresses and maintains itself in circumstances alien to itself, those that would seem to restrict or constrain its autonomy. Freedom is indeed selfhood in otherness, that of necessity included. On the other hand, necessity requires freedom. As that which in principle is self-conditioning, necessity depends for its complete realization on its capacity to know itself as freedom; it fully actualizes its implicit freedom not only when it is free in itself or for us but for itself as well. Freedom is the truth of necessity, and in the emphatic sense of the adequation of necessity’s reality and its tacit self-conception. Nor is this a truth accessible only to the theoretical observer, a situation that would replicate the external determination foreign to an account of freedom. Instead, necessity must itself actualize its freedom. In line with an idea of freedom as that which is both in and for itself autonomous, necessity is actualized and validated as free only as it liberates itself from alien dependency. What Hegel calls ‘the transfiguration (Verklärung) of necessity into freedom’ must be understood, not as an external operation, but as necessity’s own internal self-development—its ‘self-deepening’ (Vertiefen des Seins in sich selbst) (EL: §159A, cf. §84). The ‘might of necessity’ is such that its transfiguration into freedom is its own accomplishment, just as freedom itself, consistent with its countervailing dependence on necessity, is nothing but the ‘for itself might of necessity’ (EL: §159).

A similar dialectic characterizes Hegel’s account of the relationship of blindness and insight. On the one hand, insight engages blindness. In line with a notion of (self-reflective) freedom understood as selfhood in otherness, insight depends precisely on a subject recognizing itself in the objective conditions of existence, shedding light on what may otherwise seem opaque and impenetrable. Conversely, blindness is intwined with insight. As associated with necessity, blindness, for Hegel, does not connote a congenitally incurable condition. It represents instead a deficient or impaired mode of self-perception, instantiating a failure on the part of a subject to grasp its proper nature. ‘[N]ecessity is blind only insofar as it is not comprehended’ (EL: §147A).Footnote ⁸ Appreciation of necessity’s true nature presumes that its manifest blindness is surmountable by cultivating an implicit capacity for self-clarification.Footnote ⁹

Consonant thus with the general transfiguration of necessity by freedom, the ‘revisioning’ of reality central to Hegel’s juxtaposition of insight to blindness is expressed above all in processes of self-enlightenment internal to the subject matter itself. The move to (reflective) freedom is one of immanent self-reflection, where necessity itself dissolves the constraints impeding its actualization. At issue is a phenomenon of self-manifestation (Erscheinung) where what presents as the appearance (Schein) of reality is sublated through internal self-reflection itself—the ‘Scheinen in sich selbst’ constitutive of its true being (EL: §159). Hegel says that freedom is ‘das Denken der Notwendigkeit’ (EL: §159), but that simply means that necessity assumes its status as free only in its thinking itself as free. In claiming that freedom is ‘insight into necessity’ (PM: §467), his point is that the former is actualized only as ‘blind’ necessity undergoes a process of self-elucidation enacting the self-comprehending insight that is freedom itself.

I.iii. Freedom, normativity and insight into necessity

These considerations permit return to Habermas’s claim that Hegel renews an ‘ancient necessitarianism’. As noted, Habermas is correct to accentuate the role played by necessity in Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel does espouse a notion of reason directed to revealing the necessity, and therewith the intrinsic rationality, of things. Both theoretically and practically, his thought is directed to ‘insight into necessity’. Yet this is not to say that Hegel simply sought to discern and acknowledge the rationality of existing historical and political arrangements. That is debarred not least by the concept of necessity itself, whose underlying principle is freedom itself. On this understanding, comprehending the necessity of things is to construe them as expressing the principle of self-determination, and thus to view them from the perspective of their possible self-conditionality.

To be sure, basic to Hegel’s renewal of ancient necessitarianism, according to Habermas, is its integration of the principle of freedom. Framed in terms of the logic of performativity central as well to the efforts of Hegel’s young Hegelian successors, that renewal is distinguished precisely by its appeal to the notions of conscious self-determination that Habermas links especially with the Kantian idea of self-legislation. Yet if Hegel conjoins his understanding of necessity with notions of freedom, he does so with reference to the autonomized self-movement of an absolute spirit whose worldly objectifications not only subsume the agency of actual human beings to forces beyond their political and historical control but engenders a notion of reason oriented to the contemplative reconciliation with existing reality. Later in this essay I examine this view of Hegel’s concept of necessity as it bears on his account of history and politics. Here I focus on his general concept of reason. Attending especially to Hegel’s idea of a Realphilosophie, I maintain that his concept of insight into necessity underwrites a notion of practical normativity able to question and challenge the rationality of existing reality.

We begin by noting that the approach adopted here resembles Friedrich Engels’s understanding of Hegel’s conception of freedom as ‘insight into necessity’. For Engels, Hegel’s philosophy is animated by the view that individuals are free only in so far as they comprehend the necessary laws of nature and thereby acquire the power to bend nature to their will (Engels Reference Engels1962: 157). Engels’s position is notable as it acknowledges the practical dimension of Hegel’s conception of philosophical theory, something absent from Habermas’s more contemplative account. Yet Engels construes necessity itself in terms of the mechanistic natural necessity against which Hegel juxtaposes true or ‘free’ necessity. He thereby fails to appreciate what Habermas does understand: Hegel aims to comprehend necessity, expressed in the performative self-movement of spirit itself, as itself a form of freedom, even if one at odds with the agency of actual human beings. But what Engels and Habermas both fail to appreciate is the ‘free’ character of the science of necessity itself, something expressed in the normativity of Hegel’s Realphilosophie and, for that matter, his conception of theory as well.

Hegel’s philosophy of reality may be described as a theory of normative reconstruction, one oriented not only to Nachdenken but Nachbildung itself (see Buchwalter Reference Buchwalter2012: 9–14; Reference Buchwalter, Dahms and Lybeck2016). In construing reality with reference to the principle of free necessity, Hegel seeks to restate and refashion assumptions and entities in ways that may be said to be self-grounded, purged of the contingent attributes foreign to their nature. In this way, the Realphilosophie does proceed from existing reality, eschewing the abstractions of Kantian approaches to normativity. Hegel’s aim though it is not to legitimize existing conditions and assumptions but to rearticulate them so that they might better conform to their proper concept. The task of a science of necessity is not ratification or corroboration (Beglaubigung) but validation (Bewahrung) (EL: §12)—indeed, the adequatio rei ad intellectus. ‘Objects are true when they are what they ought to be, i.e., when their reality corresponds to their concept’ (EL: §213A). Absent this correspondence, they are spurious and false, exposed as that which ‘is not, in fact, how it ought to be’ (EL: §6; SL: 799f).

Hegel’s Realphilosophie may also be termed a normative ontology (Buchwalter Reference Buchwalter2012: 11f; cf. Hartmann Reference Hartmann, Henrich and Horstmann1982). Characteristic of normative reconstruction is not just the process by which a genuine concept is juxtaposed to its spurious counterpart but one in which the genuine reality is so juxtaposed. In as much as that process conjoins a thing’s mere existence with its concept, it establishes and validates its true being; it forges its actuality (Wirklichkeit), defined precisely as the conjunction of existence and concept. In so doing it also exposes a given existence not only as potentially false but as defective and unreal as well – as ‘insubstantial and broken in itself’ (cited in Riedel Reference Riedel and Wright1984, 83). Hegel’s Realphilosophie engenders a realm of freedom, a self-conditioned domain of being that is genuinely necessary, while unmasking as semblance and merely contingent what may otherwise pass as necessary.

To appreciate Hegel’s approach to normativity, however, it is not enough to regard his science of necessity as a narrowly theoretical affair, one implemented by the philosophical analyst. His account of normative reconstruction is further conceived as one effectuated by the subject matter itself. For a philosophical science directed to ‘the necessity of the thing [Sache] in and for itself’ (PR: §2), the task is not just an adequation performed by an external observer, i.e., one obtaining ‘in itself’ or ‘for us’. At issue as well is a process enacted ‘for itself’, where the adequation is conducted by the subject matter itself. At least in the sphere of human affairs, attention is accorded a self-adequation process in which individuals singly and collectively come to recognize discrepancies between an existing state of affairs and their conception of what it should be and then proceed to its removal and rectification.

Undergirding this approach is the concept of freedom attached to the idea of genuine necessity. Articulating the principle of self-conditionality, a necessitarian approach to reality cannot be an alien operation externally performed on a given subject matter but must articulate the latter’s own self-development. As such, this approach also instantiates a process of self-reflection. As a process of autonomous self-development, freedom is concretely actualized not just when individuals may be deemed free but when they also know themselves as such. Part of the idea of rational autonomy informing a self-grounding science of necessity is a process of reflection that is internal to the subject matter itself.

The specific normativity of Hegel’s concept of necessity may be further clarified by considering its conjunction of actuality and possibility (SL: 550ff). As a principle of freedom qua self-conditionality, necessity denotes the conjunction of concept and existence connoting actuality itself. Necessity describes ‘the nature of what is to be in its being its own concept’ (PS: 34). Yet lacking consciousness of itself as free, necessity is not a complete mediation of concept and existence. A full account of actuality thus remains only a possibility for necessity. Comprehending necessity as it is in and for itself is thus already to regard it from a normative perspective: not as it is but as it can be—indeed, as the ‘negation of itself’ (SL: 551). Yet such negativity does not connote idle abstraction, a simple juxtaposition to existing reality; at issue is not mere possibility. As a concept already implied by necessity, possibility here is ‘real possibility’ (SL: 547). Attention in this case is thus to a ‘determinate’ rather than ‘abstract’ negation, one directed to actualizing the principle implicitly already present in necessity. That principle is freedom itself. Freedom however cannot just be actualized through an operation performed from without but instead must be effectuated by necessity itself. Likewise, its actualization cannot be construed as an act of external reflection; in keeping with the idea of freedom itself, it must be understood as its ‘reflection into self’ (SL: 552). As the dialectic of possibility and actuality, necessity charts a process of normative reconstruction in the form of an internal self-reflection whose very performativity is the actualization of its possible freedom.

These considerations bear on Hegel’s concept of philosophical science as ‘insight into necessity’. Such insight does not depict a rationality inherent in existing reality. Hegel’s focus is rather on a process by which such states of affairs are refashioned as modes of internal self-reflection, those for instance where affected individuals tendentially recognize and surmount the constraints restricting their autonomous self-identity. As noted regarding the transition from blind necessity to freedom proper, at stake is a process of enlightenment in which sight is progressively introjected into and, in the form of self-illumination, fused with necessity itself. It is a process whereby structures preventing necessity from actualizing its autonomous nature are cleared of their opacity and reimagined to express the self-reflective agency of affected individuals. What in his philosophy of history Hegel said of the life of spirit may be said of necessity as well: it is motivated by an impulse ‘within itself to break through the bond, the rind of natural and sensuous life, of whatever is alien to it, and to come to the light of consciousness, that is, to itself’ (LWH: 111). His position may be specified further by considering the role played by necessity in the account of history itself.

II.i. Right, world history, and the mediation of consciousness and will

The task of the Philosophy of Right is to detail the ‘Idea’ of right. For Hegel, this means that right, termed ‘the existence of the free will’ (PR: §29), must be construed not as a mere concept or principle but with reference to the conditions required for its concrete realization. In addition, the goal of the investigation, itself addressed to ‘the necessity of the thing’, is to establish the validity that right might possess ‘in and for itself’ (PR: §1R, §333). This validated account of the actualized notion of right, in line with the foregoing, is one whose legitimacy is understood and certified not just by the philosophical analyst but by affected individuals themselves. Nor can a comprehensive realization of right attend just to specific groups or individuals; it must address the whole of world history—fittingly, the theme of the concluding section of the Philosophy of Right. Moreover, the in-and-for-itself worldly realization of right must a limine be one in which the global human community—the spirit of the world—knowingly effectuates such realization. It is in this sense that world history is progress in the consciousness and self-consciousness of freedom. It is in this sense as well that such progress is one ‘whose necessity we have to recognize’ (LWH: 88). Consonant with Hegel’s concept of necessity as self-conditionality—here characterized as ‘infinite’ or ‘highest’ necessity (LWH: 89, 107), a legitimate account of history is one construed as a developmental process of humanity’s self-reflectively conceived collective self-determination.

In his reading, Habermas acknowledges that Hegel’s account of world history represents an effort to conjoin freedom and necessity. In his view, however, that effort depicts the anonymous and independent activity of an autonomized absolute subjectivity engaged in the self-objectification and self-reconciliation needed for its own affirmation. Little if no place is provided for the autonomous self-formation and self-constitution of actual human beings. For the latter, history is a necessitarian force operating over their heads and behind their backs even as it subjects them to its dominion. At best, Hegel presents an obfuscated account of the development of freedom, championing the principle even while withholding its reality from human agents themselves. Hegel may claim that history is actualized in the general will of a political community, yet that concretization attests only further to the mystified and mystifying character of his approach. His focus is not on the will of the community as a whole, but, consonant with a philosophy of the subject, the purportedly universal will of a monarchical individual vested with divine authority and constitutionally empowered to command the unconditional obedience of subjects.

In Section III I consider the necessitarian dimension of Hegel’s political philosophy. Here I do so regarding the philosophy of history. First, while Hegel does present an account of history that ascribes purpose and rationality to historical events, that ascription is not a mere philosophical construction. The philosophical historian does proceed from the ‘simple’ assumption that reason rules the world, but that assumption can be validated only when ‘proved’ by history itself (LWH: 79). Second, in line with an account directed to the necessity of its subject matter, proof here is not a matter of empirical investigation conducted by an external observer, but a function of history’s own reflective self-development. A philosophical account of world history is the phenomenon of world history itself (LWH: 67). Third, in asserting that history is the reflective self-development of the thing itself, Hegel is not referencing a hypostatized reality occurring independently of human thought and action. As progress in the consciousness of freedom, historical development depends crucially on the ‘self-awareness’ (Selbstgefühl) of actual participants. Empirical history may be a ‘slaughterbench’ on which the happiness of individuals is sacrificed (LWH: 90), yet an account of history as progress in the self-consciousness of freedom requires that it be ‘mediated by consciousness and will’ (LWH: 109), depending thereby on the agency of affected individuals. The point is evident from the place Hegel assigns to contingency in the historical process.

II.ii. Contingency and historical necessitarianismFootnote ¹⁰

A long-standing feature of Habermas’s critique is that Hegel overlooks the place of contingency in his account of history (Habermas Reference Habermas and Lawrence1987: 36, 54). Because history is the necessary self-movement of an autonomized and anonymous infinite spirit, it fails to assign a role to the experience of contingently finite human actors in explicating the course of historical development (AHP: 225). Yet it is doubtful that this estimation captures Hegel’s position. Even if the place of absolute spirit is accentuated, that does not derogate the contingent experience of conditioned human beings.Footnote ¹¹ Conceived as a differentiated identity ratified only in engaging what is alien to itself, an ‘absolute’ account must countenance the consciousness and will of finitely situated individuals and groups. Hegel makes the point generally about the nature of spirit, which ‘must encompass external actuality; […] [it must be] able to be realized in the worldly realm’ (LWH: 210). He does so, too, regarding necessity itself. As that which is genuinely self-determining, and thus able to establish itself in what is alien to itself, necessity is that ‘which determines itself as contingency’ (SL: 551).

It can be questioned, of course, whether Hegel does justice to contingency. It may be claimed, for instance, that any appeal on his part to historical contingency is undertaken not for its own sake but only to further the prerogatives of an objectified necessitarianism. This too is the position of Habermas, who asserts that Hegel’s attention to contingency is just a ‘means’ to facilitate the self-objectification of an autonomized notion of absolute spirit (AHP: 226f). Yet this view, too, does not reflect Hegel’s position. Against any simple instrumentalization of human agency, he is clear: those elements quintessentially expressive of the human spirit—‘morality, ethical life, religious piety’—are never construable just as means to an end but, exemplifying ‘an infinite right to be satisfied’, are also ‘ends in themselves’ (LWH: 97). This is not to say that human actors are not instrumentalized in the wider realization of freedom in the world. Yet such realization, qua progress in the consciousness of freedom, ultimately depends on relevant individuals and groups acquiring and enacting consciousness of their freedom, which in turn requires that they be regarded as ends as well as means. Here ‘the relationship of a mere means to an end disappears’ (LWH: 100).

Hegel does say that a philosophical account of history seeks ‘to eliminate consideration of anything contingent’; its task is to highlight a conceptual necessity subsisting beyond ‘contingent appearances’ and the haphazard course of human affairs (LWH: 157, 140). But this is not to say that in the end Hegel disregards the role of finite human agency in an account of historical development. Were that the case, he would only be supplanting one contingency with another—subordinating human agency to the external determination that defines contingency itself. If contingency in human affairs is to be eliminated, it is not by invoking extra-human forms of agency but by clarifying how human beings may themselves become subjects of the conditions shaping them. If a philosophy of world history does represent a removal of contingency from the domain of human affairs, it is only as human beings themselves contribute to the progress in the consciousness of freedom that is world history.

To say that removing contingency from human affairs is the office of historical actors (and not, say, a hypostatized absolute spirit) is, however, not to say that their actions may not remain gripped by a contingency of their own. Here we leave aside the obvious spatio-temporality of all such efforts. Mention may be made instead of Hegel’s contention, reflective of his determination to surmount abstract dichotomies, that the process by which human agents contribute to the necessary course of historical development is itself a contingent phenomenon. At issue is a philosophical notion of contingency distinct from conventional or naturalistic understandings. If contingency conventionally connotes chance and random causation, philosophical or ‘necessary’ contingency connotes freedom itself. A philosophical account may share with its naturalistic counterpart the view that an entity exists without there also externally existing a necessary ground or condition for it to do so. But that means, not that the entity is not necessarily grounded, but only that it grounds or conditions itself—that it is self-grounding or self-conditioning. Moreover, while this ‘absolute’ conception of contingency shares with its naturalistic or relative counterpart acknowledgement of the fact of change, the change in question is not the empirical mutability of natural entities, but, in line with a notion of self-conditionality, the conceptual progression through which an entity is first actualized as such (SL: 555, 551). It is in this experience of ontological self-becoming, and thus self-causation itself, that an entity attests not only to its necessity but its contingency as well. Hegel may construe human history as a developmental process whose necessity proceeds isomorphically by eliminating the role of contingency in human affairs, yet that very process depends on further actualizing contingency itself. Far from contraposing necessity and contingency, Hegel advances an account of human history predicated on their complex interconnection (SL: 546; EL: §149).

II.iii. Historical necessitarianism and the experience of Volksgeistern

Appreciation of the role played by contingency in Hegel’s account of history also allows appreciation of the role played by the notion of Volksgeist (LWH: 118, 140). An ‘offshoot of spirit’ (Sprossen des Geistes (LWH: 141)), a Volksgeist—in contemporary terminology, a societal form of life—instantiates multiple features of the general nature of Geist, itself programmatically defined by Hegel as the conjunction of substance and subjectivity (PS: 10). Among other things, Geist is a principle of selfhood fully articulated in the phenomenon of self-consciousness. It thus shapes a notion of Volksgeist understood as a principle of collective identity expressed above all in a lifeform’s consciousness of itself. In line further with Geist’s definition, the self-identity of a Volksgeist is reflected in its specific engagement with the geographical and cultural conditions confronting and shaping it. At issue is the experience of a community subjectively recognizing itself in the substantive conditions of existence. Such self-recognition also characterizes the autonomy of a community, which—consonant with Geist’s nature as an identity of identity and difference—consists precisely in the selfhood in otherness central also to Hegel’s notion of freedom. Consistent further with the internal reflexivity entailed by a conjunction of substance and subjectivity, such freedom consists not just in its objective reality but in its subjective self-consciousness as well—in a community’s awareness of itself as a unity of self and other. Nor is such freedom a merely static phenomenon. Consistent with a notion of Geist as the subjective ‘becoming’ of substantiality, Volksgeist additionally denotes the ongoing process by which a lifeform engages and re-engages the changing socio-historical conditions of its existence. Consonant further with a notion of Geist qua conjunction of self and other, one lifeform’s engagement with the given conditions of its existence is also engagement with the cultural resources bequeathed by previous forms of life. In this way every form of life contributes to historical change as it places its own imprimatur on a received set of cultural resources. Characteristic of historical development, however, is not change or variation itself (which also occurs in nature), but progress, which occurs only as one lifeform addresses the challenges bequeathed to it by a predecessor. It is in this problem-solving activity that one culture contributes to historical development (see Jaeggi Reference Jaeggi and Cronin2018: 87–172). Moreover, in as much as that development proceeds as one lifeform fashions a more enriched, variegated and comprehensive account of the relationship of mind and world, it also concretizes a notion of historical development understood as progress in the consciousness of the relationship of self and other that is freedom itself. It is fitting that Hegel characterizes historical progress as a process of memory or recollection (Erinnerung), for it is just in its engagement with an inherited legacy that one lifeform enacts the interiorization and reflexive self-deepening that drives advances in the self-consciousness of freedom (LWH: 149f).

To be sure, to say, as with this last point, that historical progress occurs through processes of recollection may lend support to Habermas’s claim that Hegel’s account of history is a merely contemplative exercise, one that disallows political agency on the part of affected individuals themselves. And in fact, Hegel does highlight the constraints on any human action, allowing that the latter, performed in ‘the field of external necessity’ (PR: §118), is enveloped by a facticity that precludes full self-determination. In addition, the process by which a community establishes and re-establishes its identity is subject to limitations of its own. A community performs this activity by perceiving itself in the received conditions of its existence. Yet such self-perception can never be complete, as the process of rendering the self an object of perception presupposes an unobjectified subject of perception, and so on ad infinitum. In this way, the self-comprehension process, far from forging self-identity, generates the very polarities it aims to surmount; learning and degeneration ‘always go hand in hand’ (RH: 61). To the extent that a more complete account of a particular form of life is possible, it is not through its own efforts but through those of a subsequent lifeform, whose historical remove better facilitates the holistic understanding its predecessor lacks. It is ‘a later form of Geist […] that […] knows what a previous one is’ (VR3: §260). From both a theoretical and practical perspective proper apprehension of a particular form of life is, undeniably, a post-festum affair.

Yet to acknowledge such retrospectivity is not also to say that lifeforms are incapable of meaningful prospective agency (see Buchwalter Reference Buchwalter, Illeterati and Miolli2022). While no individual lifeform can fully understand, let alone resolve, the aporias it confronts, it can still contribute to that task. Its limitations notwithstanding, a lifeform incorporates, as part of its sense of self, an awareness of those conflicts and the need for their resolution. Such awareness certainly is not accompanied by appreciation of the content of a resolution, something available, if at all, only to a successor. Instead, an existing form of life possesses only an inchoate apprehension of its rectification—a ‘vague foreshadowing of something unknown’ (PS: 7, translation amended). Yet if an existing lifeform cannot conceptualize the solution to its deficiencies, it is still acquainted with those deficiencies, whose parameters become apparent the more it gains in self-awareness. In as much as it does appreciate those deficiencies, it also recognizes the need for their correction, thereby contributing to the emergence of the new form of life that can offer correction. ‘Through knowledge spirit makes manifest a distinction between knowledge and that which is; this knowledge is thus what produces a new form of development’ (HP1: 54f). A particular lifeform can participate in ‘the labour of its own transformation’ (PS: 6). Even if historical advances occur only after ‘a shape of life has grown old’ (PR: 23), that shape still contributes to progress in the consciousness of freedom.

II.iv. Normativity, open-endedness, and historical necessitarianism

History, for Hegel, is progress in the consciousness of freedom. As such, it is not an autonomized phenomenon occurring independently of human agency. It advances only as groups and individuals acquire greater consciousness of freedom, which itself occurs as they fashion more expansive, variegated and far-reaching understandings of their relationship to their world and to one another. World history is an instantiation of ‘history’ (Geschichte), constituted precisely in the conjunction of the events themselves (res gestae) and their narrative comprehension (historia rerum gestarum) (LWH: 115). Deemed an object of ‘interpretation’ (Auslegung) (PR: §342; SL: 554), history denotes an evolving process of collective self-clarification and self-definition accompanying efforts by lifeforms as they establish and re-establish their identity in the face of changing social realities. Such efforts, to be sure, are always partial and incomplete, restricted as much by limitations in capacities for self-interpretation as by the force of circumstance itself. Yet, far from vitiating an account of historical freedom, this only attests to it further. Advances in historical development are propelled by ongoing efforts on the part of specific forms of life to master both current tensions and unresolved issues bequeathed by predecessors.

These considerations speak to the ‘necessity’ of Hegel’s view of world history.Footnote ¹² In a philosophical account, a necessitarian approach to history is not one dedicated to detailing objectified forces blindly shaping human events and experiences. Consistent with a conception of necessity as self-conditionality, it is one that construes events and experiences as expressing principles of freedom and self-determination. Nor are such principles themselves simply expressive, as with Habermas’s understanding of absolute spirit, of processes operating independently of the agency of human beings. However much the development of freedom is objectified in concrete practices and institutions, it qualifies as one of freedom only as affected parties know and experience themselves as free. Here, too, the validity, reality and, indeed, necessity of those practices and institutions rests on Selbstgefühl, the capacity of individuals to recognize themselves in the conditions of their existence.

In this regard, a necessitarian account of world history is a normative one. The advances driving it count as such only as affected groups and individuals fashion the requisite consciousness and self-consciousness of freedom. Only as they recognize and re-recognize themselves in the conditions shaping their existence can stages in history be said to be those of progress. ‘World history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom—a progress whose necessity we have to recognize’ (LWH: 88). That necessity is recognizable only as empirical phenomena expressive of a principle of freedom are concretized in ever richer and more variegated notions of selfhood in otherness.

Again, the modes of collective self-recognition driving historical progress are always imperfect and incomplete. Yet far from disputing the necessitarian nature of a history of freedom, this too only affirms it. Although necessity for Hegel connotes freedom, it does so only partially; it lacks the full self-reflectivity of freedom proper. As that which is in itself but not yet for itself free, necessity articulates, as noted, freedom’s potential but not yet its full reality. In the present context this means that a necessitarian account is one that is open-ended and addressed to the possibility for future change and transformation. Exemplifying equally the actuality and possibility of freedom, such an approach scrutinizes existing historical phenomena in terms of the capacity of relevant actors for advances in self-comprehension and self-formation. Hegel defines Geist as the process of distinguishing itself from itself, a phenomenon of ‘absolutely restless being’ (PM: §378A). He speaks similarly of world history itself—spirit’s ‘ceaseless conflict with itself’ (LWH: 109). Both claims mirror an account of historical lifeforms embodying modes at once of ‘alienation’ (Entäuβerung) and ‘transition’ (Übergang) (PR: §343).

Against Hegel’s necessitarian account of history, Habermas espouses a fallibilistic learning process propelled by modes of intersubjective interaction (AHP: 224f). In the next section of this paper consideration will be accorded the place of intersubjective relations in Hegel’s objective spirit. What I have suggested here is that as a general matter Hegel’s necessitarian account is not so far removed from a fallibilistically conceived learning process of its own. Rooted in an understanding of necessity as self-conditionality, such an account also gives voice to an ongoing, self-correcting process advanced by the efforts of participants to fashion, in the face of changing social and historical circumstances, more adequate accounts of their relation to their world and to one another. One can of course question the overarching justification for Hegel’s developmentalism, as one can also of Habermas’s.Footnote ¹³ But what I have sought to indicate regarding its account of history itself is that Hegel’s particular necessitarianism is supportive of a notion of practical normativity not only able to question the rationality of existing reality but to do so by appealing, however incompletely, to agency of the affected human beings themselves.

III.i. The circle of necessity and the Selbstgefühl of individuals

We now turn to the political philosophy, which for Habermas is also central to Hegel’s renewal of ancient necessitarianism. Owing to his commitment to a philosophy of the subject, Hegel, according to Habermas, advances a notion of the general political will instantiated in the higher-level subjectivity of a constitutional monarch to whom the will and knowledge of citizens is rendered subordinate. That subordination is further bolstered by an account of political community that, also owing to a philosophy of the subject, takes the form of an aggregation of private and egoistically isolated subjects who are unable to fashion a collective political will of their own, one that might also hold accountable the conduct of a monarchical state. It is in light of such considerations, Habermas observes, that Hegel terms the general sphere of ethical life ‘a circle of necessity whose moments are the ethical powers which govern the lives of individuals’ (PR: §145). Nor is such necessitarianism reflected just in individuals’ subordination to outside forces; it is manifest as well in their subjective acceptance and even endorsement of those forces, termed by Habermas the ‘insightful subordination to the wisdom of rational institutions and traditions’ (AHP: 220). Such subordination is in keeping with an ancient necessitarianism focused on insight into necessity. But it is also in keeping with the idea of ‘a circle of necessity’, which, in the specific form of an ‘ethical circle of necessity’ (PR: §148R), is distinguished from a system of purely natural compulsion precisely in its cognitive affirmation by affected parties.

Yet here too questions can be raised about Habermas’s reading. First, it arguably does not do justice to Hegel’s idea of a circle of necessity. While such necessity is intwined with its cognitive endorsement by affected parties, such endorsement does not consist in the simple acceptance of an already existent system of ethical relations. Rather, it is only in individuals’ ‘reflective endorsement’ (Pippin Reference Pippin2008: 67) that a system of ethical necessity assumes proper form and ‘actuality’ (PR: §145). Cognitive acknowledgement of an already existing rationality may involve the insight appropriate to an account of natural necessity. As regards ethical necessity, however, insight is constitutive of the necessity itself. The phenomena comprising a system of ethical necessity ‘are not alien to the subject. On the contrary, the subject bears spiritual witness to them as its own essence, in which it has its self-awareness [Selbstgefühl] and lives as in its element which is not distinct from itself’ (PR: §147).Footnote ¹⁴ While the rationality of entities in a system of natural necessity is accessible only through modes of external reflection, that proper to a system of ethical necessity is characterized by a ‘relationless identity’ in which reflectivity is intrinsic to the things themselves (PR: §147).

To be sure, Hegel also asserts that a system of necessity is reflected in a system of ‘laws and institutions that have being in and for itself” (PR: §144), suggesting—as Habermas does in referencing this passage (AHP: 236)—that the institutional mechanisms of a polity do possess an independent and autonomized reality that supervenes on the lives and experiences of societal members. Yet here, too, one must be mindful of Hegel’s terminology and in particular the significance he attaches to the concept ‘being in and for itself’. Intended by this concept is not acknowledgement of the ‘ethically commanding governmental authority’ imputed to Hegel by Habermas (AHP: 243). The locution denotes instead a reality integrated by an internal reflectivity that not only validates but properly constitutes it. This understanding is entailed in part by a view of spirit—objective spirit included—as the mediation of substance and subjectivity. On this view, a system of ethical necessity possessing being in and for itself is also one whose reality is properly constituted in the capacity of members of an ethical community to reflect upon and endorse the conditions of ethicality itself. ‘It is the self-awareness of individuals that constitutes [their] actuality’ (PR: §265A, §263).

Granted, Hegel does attribute to the circle of ethical necessity a ‘supreme sense of self-sufficiency’ (Selbstständigkeit) that ‘is infinitely higher’ and ‘infinitely more firmly based than the being of nature’ (PR: §146, §146A). This claim may be understood to assert that ethical necessity is distinctive precisely in that it denotes a form of an external compulsion rooted in a system of man-made constraints, like those of criminal sanction. This in fact is the view of Habermas, who contends that Hegel fashions a notion of objective spirit based on a model of criminal law and not the universalistic moral considerations that infuse the tradition of rational natural law, his seeming commitment to that tradition notwithstanding (AHP: 234). Yet it is doubtful this is Hegel’s actual position. Here we leave aside consideration of Hegel’s general account of law and its articulation of a notion of right indebted to the tradition of natural law.Footnote ¹⁵ Instead, it suffices to attend to the ‘self-sufficiency’ itself. Consistent with what has been addressed earlier, self-sufficiency references the self-conditioned nature of necessity proper. In the present context, it denotes an account of necessity whose rationality derives not from attention to a reason informing an already existent reality but from a mode of reflection that serves to constitute of the very reality of an account of ethical necessity. Such an account of necessity is self-sufficient—this is its ‘infinitely higher’ value—to the degree that community members can themselves regard the conditions shaping their commonality as reflective of their knowledge and will. As such, it is also an account reflective of the mediation of substance and subjectivity proper to a view of necessity as self-conditionality.

None of this is to suggest that what counts as ethical necessity is simply the construction of members of a political community. Central to Hegel’s idea of objective spirit is the notion that members of community experience themselves and their lives against the backdrop of a set of already existing laws, practices, and institutions. Such dependency on structures of external determination is for Hegel basic to the very idea of objective spirit’s notion of realized freedom. Characterized as selfhood in otherness, this freedom requires that the objective realities that shape the experiences of historically situated individuals can also facilitate the conditions for their self-determination. Especially important here are institutions and practices that promote social interaction. In as much as individual freedom, qua selfhood in otherness, is construed intersubjectively, its proper realization depends on the availability of institutions and practices that underwrite such interactivity. Even as an account of realized freedom, the circle of necessity entailed by the theory of objective spirit is one that confronts individuals as a system of already existing social structures.Footnote ¹⁶

Yet this is not to say that that system is not also dependent on the knowledge and will of affected individuals. For an account of rationality focused on what obtains for itself as well as in itself, such countervailing dependency is also a constitutive moment of its reality. A system of realized freedom is also one rooted in the ‘self-awareness’ (PR: §265A) through which a social member can regard the institutional realities governing its experiences as ‘its inward institutions, its own, and willed by it’. It is one in which the existing norms and practices through which individuals find themselves must ‘have their assent, recognition, or even justification in heart, sentiment, conscience, intelligence, etc.’ (PM: §503).

The point is especially apposite as regards the modes of intersubjective sociality that for Hegel shape institutional reality. While it is true that an account of realized freedom always presupposes an already existing set of social relations, those relations depend for their own viability on individuals affirming and embracing them as their own. This is in keeping with the reflexivity entailed by an account of mutual recognition, one in which individuals ‘recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another’ (PS: 12). On this view relations of mutual recognition are fuelled not just by agents’ reciprocal attention to one another. Important also is the awareness that their well-being is not only achieved through such relations but requires commitment on their part to foster the conditions needed to realize and sustain those relations. Part of the recognitive sociality is the recognition that the individual ‘has an interest in, and endeavours to promote, the less selfish end of this whole’ (PR: §253). On Hegel’s view individual freedom and self-identity depends on already existing relations of institutional sociality, even as those relations are also dependent on the activity of individuals who support and enact those relations (PM: §436).

This is not to say that in the end Hegel’s account of a polity relies, as with forms of liberal theory, on a pre-institutional notion of self-identity. Certainly, it does not entail the atomistic individualism that Habermas, referencing a philosophy of the subject, associates with Hegel’s view of modern citizenship. But it does say that for Hegel, who depicts recognitively conceived notions of selfhood in terms of a dialectic of ‘independence and dependence’ (PS: 111), the viability of any existing account institutional reality is intertwined with the agency of individuals who also shape those institutions.

III.ii. The circle of ethical necessity and political republicanism

We conclude by turning to claims Habermas makes regarding the substance of Hegel’s political thought. I focus on two implications of his contention that Hegel’s account of the political has been shaped by a necessitarianism renewed by the philosophy of the subject. Both speak to Hegel’s supposed failure to thematize the form of popular opinion and will-formation that Habermas asserts is required of a theory of objective spirit that properly detranscendentalizes Kant’s notion of autonomy: the identification of the constitutional monarch as the sole embodiment of a polity’s general will and the notion that citizens are encased in an egoism that, permitting at best only an aggregated notion of community, militates against their capacity to form a common political will of their own. In what remains I briefly question both claims.

Regarding the view that Hegel permits only an aggregated view of the citizenry, the text in the Philosophy of Right and elsewhere suggests otherwise. Important here is the account of the legislature. In Habermas’s reading, debate and decision-making by delegates in Hegel’s legislative assemblies attest precisely to the aggregative atomism in question (AHP: 239). Yet it is doubtful that this is Hegel’s position. Indeed, far from reducing legislative interaction to an expression of individual subjective preferences, Hegel here espouses a version of the deliberative will formation akin to Habermas’s own (AHP: 244). Focus is not on a form of decision-making that simply conglomerates already entrenched views and precommitments, i.e., one that conceives deputies merely as ‘commissioned or mandated agents’ (PR: §309). Instead, deputies are expected to ‘instruct and convince one another’ (PR: §309), and with the aim of forging consensus on matters of common concern—indeed, ‘the universal interest’ itself (PR: §301). The work of the legislature is at least in principle fuelled by processes of joint ‘knowledge, deliberation, and decisions’ (Mitwissen, Mitberaten, und Mitbeschließen) themselves rooted in ‘insight and reasoned argument’ (PR: §324, §316). With his notion of public opinion (öffentliche Meinung) Hegel does countenance a merely aggregative account of the public sphere, one akin to Rousseau’s volonté de tous. Indeed, more so than Rousseau, he notes how public opinion in modern societies has tendentially degenerated into the cacophonous arena of particularized private interests that he associates with civil society’s atomistically structured system of economic needs. With his notion of legislative deliberation, however, he maintains that public opinion can be transformed into what in a transcript of the Philosophy of Right he called the ‘universal rational will’ (NRPS: §131)—a version of the volonté générale identifiable with the idea of political public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) itself (see Vieweg Reference Vieweg2012: 446–48).

In promoting the idea of a public sphere, Hegel does not restrict his attention to the domain of parliamentary activity. Instead, he attends to a wide range of practices and institutions, not only the press but also public education, academic research, the arts and even religion (NRPS: §§155–58). Included here as well, however, is a capacious understanding of legislative practice itself. As against an institutionally formalized view, Hegel espouses of a view of legislative activity that draws on input emanating from extra- and sub-political domains. Attention to such input is needed for the legislative delegates themselves, who are expected to engage the general public and ‘the wider implications of public opinion’—those that also provide ‘an oversight and weighty judgment of their work’ (NRPS: §154). But it was required as well for the identity of the polity itself. Significant here are the corporations of civil society, those work-based cooperatives (Genossenschaften) that, together with the family, represent one of ‘the pillars on which public freedom rests’ (PR: §265). Hegel claims that such corporations are particularly suited to task of promoting a wider sense of community—he speaks of the ‘secret of patriotism’ (PR: §289A)—as they uniquely forge the mediation of individual self-interest and public concern emblematic of genuine polity. Here we leave aside the specifics of his idea of corporate representation, challenged though it is by Habermas.Footnote ¹⁷ More important in this context is the way corporate members enact the type of civic engagement deemed by Habermas to be disallowed through Hegel’s commitment to a philosophy of the subject. Consider the specific ethicality of corporate life.

In contrast to the system of needs and the administration of justice, the corporation is unique in civil society as it fosters a community’s recognition of individuals in terms of their distinctive particularity—the skills, talents, and capabilities they possess in virtue of their membership. Part of such recognition, however, is that members regard themselves as worthy of recognition. Such self-recognition, however, is not just an introspective affair, if it is that at all; it is above all an intersubjective one. It expects that the individual acknowledges his/her dependence on the recognition, individual and communal, furnished by others. Proper to the recognition of that dependence, as noted above, is a commitment on the part of individuals to support and nurture the practices and institutions that facilitate recognitive relations, including those promoting the social conditions enabling community members to participate meaningfully in public fora. Nor is such agency a merely instrumental phenomenon, one directed to establishing a community committed to promoting relations of cooperation and mutuality. Such commitment is also intrinsic to corporate agency itself. As individuals interact with one another in forging relations of mutuality, they facilitate those very relations. Corporate reality ‘is generated in the joint effort (Mitwirkung) of the members themselves’ (VR4: §230, 588). Pace Habermas, not only can citizens on Hegel’s view participate in their communal well-being, but they can do so in ways that performatively enact community itself (see Buchwalter Reference Buchwalter2023: 766–73).

Hegel’s account of corporations does depict a plurality of distinct entities, a situation that may attest only further, as Habermas suggests it does (AHP: 239), to an aggregated view of social and political life. Whether it does so attest or whether it may speak instead to an internally differentiated conception of shared political identity is a matter that cannot be addressed here. Instead, it suffices to note that, together with his broader conception of the public sphere, Hegel’s theory of corporation gives voice to what Habermas contends is absent in the Philosophy of Right: a notion of common will and identity rooted in the agency of affected individuals. Hegel’s position may be part of an account of ethicality understood as a circle of necessity, but the latter—directed to what is necessary in and for itself—is also one consistent with a republican account of political life.

None of these considerations denies the significance that Hegel does attach to the monarchy. Together with the executive and the legislature, it is one of the three powers (Gewalten) in his constitutional theory. In that regard, Habermas rightly distinguishes Hegel’s account of the political from that of Rousseau and Kant, both of whom he situates within the tradition of republican-democratic political thought (AHP: 243). Yet recognition of the role the monarchy does play in Hegel’s constitutional theory does not gainsay the more important one played by the legislature. Consider, for instance, that, unlike the sovereign and the executive, the legislature is ‘a part of the constitution’ and not merely subject to it (PR: §298). For Hegel a constitution articulates not just the formal rules and procedures that govern the life of a community but also the norms, values and practices that define, shape and ‘constitute’ a people. Thus to conceive the legislature as part of the constitution is to acknowledge that, in addition to addressing individual interests, it is also a sphere that contributes, in the expanded manner referenced above, to the formation, reformation and ‘renewal’ (Verjüngen) of a people’s collective identity, its ‘spirit’ as a people (NRPS: §134).Footnote ¹⁸ So conceived, legislative activity not only can forge a common political will; it can do so in a way arguably more concrete and more comprehensive than anything achievable through the singular will of a hereditary monarch.

Certainly, Hegel does ascribe ‘divine’ authority to the monarch (PR: 279R), lending support to the view that he does regard the latter as an instantiation of absolute spirit. Yet this should not be construed as evidence that Hegel assigns to the monarch a status superior to other political structures and institutions. Against this view, it must be remembered that Hegel is quite expansive in assigning divine status to elements of a polity, the legislature included. In as much as the latter contributes to a people’s self-constitution, it also possesses the ‘self-causative’ dimension that Hegel terms ‘something divine’ (ein Göttliches) (NRPS: §134). Indeed, far from subordinating the legislative branch to the divine authority of the monarch, he suggests that the former may possesses an even greater divinity. While the monarch, qua spirit realized in the world, is a form of divinity, it remains, he writes in the 1817–18 version of the Philosophy of Right, a ‘natural divinity’ hereditarily linked to the contingent circumstances of birth. As such, it possesses a constitutional status inferior to that of the legislature, which, in providing—via deliberative processes of public self-reflection—for its own foundation, articulates the form of a ‘rational divinity’ (NRPS: §139, amended translation; cf. Roupa Reference Roupa2020: 133–74).

True, the 1821 published version of the Philosophy of Right is more supportive of monarchical rule than are the earlier lecture transcriptions. Habermas is probably correct to assert that this version reflects a greater ‘focus on the reality of existing institutions’ (AHP: 238), including those oriented to the ‘historical reality of the Prussian monarchy’ (AHP: 231). Yet this itself should not be construed as evidence for the proposition that as a matter of general philosophical commitment Hegel supports monarchical autocracy. Instead, the explanation is closer to the one provided by Hegel’s liberal and left-wing students, its explicit rejection by Habermas notwithstanding (AHP: 231). If here Hegel is more supportive of a ‘conservative theory of the state’ (AHP: 239), that is more plausibly attributable to a political accommodation, wherein he downplayed rational or progressive principles to curry favour with current political authorities. Alternatively, one might say that such support represents a defensive manoeuvre on his part, one designed to circumvent pervasive state censorship in Restoration Prussia (see Vieweg Reference Vieweg and Kottman2023: 268f). In neither case, however, does such support denote expression of core philosophical commitments, be they articulated in a philosophy of the subject or something else.

None of this disputes the central role played by the concept of necessity in Hegel’s political thought. Calling attention to that role, here and elsewhere, is one of the virtues of Habermas’s analysis. What I have sought to do, however, is to advance an alternate understanding of that role, one rooted in Hegel’s identification of necessity—at least the inner or essential necessity that his logic terms ‘necessity itself’—with the idea of self-conditionality. From this perspective his claims about the state as a ‘circle of necessity’ assume a significance other than those identified by Habermas. Rather than reflecting a subordination of individuals to autocratic state power, it empowers the view that public policy and indeed the identity of the polity are answerable to and expressive of the knowledge and will of affected individuals and groups: their Selbstgefühl. This is so moreover not only in spite but also because of the distinctive feature of Hegel’s polity invoked by Habermas to support his necessitarian reading: its possessing reality in and for itself.

Habermas is certainly correct to assert that Hegel’s political philosophy is fuelled by an effort to obtain insight into necessity. Yet that effort is not motivated by a determination simply to affirm the rationality of existing reality. Attending again to the notion of necessity as self-conditionality, I have argued instead that such necessitarianism is informed by the process of normative reconstruction central to Hegel’s Realphilosophie, one that challenges and reimagines existing reality from the perspective of its own implicit concept. Nor is the reconstructive process enacted simply as the third-personal undertaking of an externally positioned theorist or observer, a circumstance that for Habermas discounts the first- and second-personal performativity of affected groups and individuals (AHP: 264ff). In the domain of human affairs encapsulated by the concept of Geist, the dialectic of existence and concept is also for Hegel that of substance and subjectivity, with the consequence that any reconstruction takes the form of a self-reconstruction—one accomplished as the subject matter enacts processes of internal self-reflection and self-adjustment.

Important as well is that for Hegel such processes are never fully completed. At least in the domain of the political, not only are acts of collective self-comprehension shaped and shaped anew by the reality of ever-changing historical conditions but the agents of such self-comprehension, on pain of infinite regress, can never make themselves a definitive object of reflection. Every such of comprehension thus propels itself beyond itself: ‘the completion of an act of comprehension is at the same time its alienation and transition’ (PR: §343). This is one reason why Hegel’s account of the political culminates in a philosophy of history. But it also reveals his doctrine of objective spirit—the purported instantiation of a ‘metaphysically anchored legal order’ (AHP: 251)—to have more in common with the fallibilistic learning process central to the post-metaphysical thinking invoked by Habermas against that doctrine (AHP: 252ff).