Our reception of Hegel’s theory of action faces a fundamental difficulty: on the one hand, that theory is quite clearly embedded in a social theory of modern life, but on the other hand most of the features of the society that gave that embedding its specific content have become almost inscrutably strange to us (e.g., the estates and the monarchy). Thus we find ourselves in the awkward position of stressing the theory’s sociality even as we scramble backwards to distance ourselves from the particular social institutions that gave conceptualized form to such sociality in Hegel’s own opinion. My attempt in this article is to make our position less awkward by giving us at least one social-ontological leg to stand on. Specifically, I want to defend a principled and conceptual pluralism as forming the heart of Hegel’s theory of action. If this view can be made out, then we will have a social-ontological structure that might be filled out in different ways in Hegel’s time and our own while simultaneously giving real teeth to the notion that Hegel’s theory of action is essentially social.

Of all the major episodes in Hegel's Rezeptionsgeschichte, British Hegelianism can seem the most foreign and outmoded, to have the least relevance to our current understanding of Hegel's thought. Even today, we are lead back to the Young Hegelians for the problems they pose in reading his work; we can sympathise with the concerns of Peirce, Royce and Dewey that drew them to him, and the interpretative picture they developed; we can take seriously the attempts by Croce and Gentile to bring about their “reforms”, given our contemporary ambivalence to his project; and we can see how in different ways the influence of Hegel on Kojève, Sartre, Lukács and the Frankfurt School have made some of his ideas central to our times. But few feel this sense of identification and illumination on encountering the work of Hegel's British interpreters from the turn of the century; rather, in their writings we seem to find a Hegel that is darker, more distant, more difficult for us to relate to contemporary concerns.

This is not true in every respect, of course. In particular, several recent commentators have stressed how far it is possible to find here a reading and assessment of Hegel's political thought that does connect directly with many current issues, and that in this respect the thought of T H Green, Bernard Bosanquet and Henry Jones is not dead, either as a tradition within political philosophy, or as an interpretative approach to Hegel's theory of the state. Nonetheless, even those who seek to defend the importance of British Hegelianism in this regard clearly recognize that this is a fairly modest claim: for it fails to resurrect and revitalize the more fundamental aspect of the their encounter with Hegel, which was with his metaphysics – on which, as for Hegel, their political theories were based, rather than being primary in themselves. Those concerned with the political thought of the British Hegelians have not tried to take on this wider issue, leaving unchallenged the assumption that in their appropriation of his metaphysics, the British Hegelians have little to offer us either interpretatively or philosophically.

First of all, I am very grateful to both commentators for the attention they have devoted to Hegel's Idealism; I am heartened by the kind words and humbled by the magnitude of the problems introduced by their criticisms. These criticisms both rightly refer to what is the heart of my interpretation, the Kant-Hegel relation, and, interestingly enough, raise objections from roughly opposite directions. Professor Pinkard, in effect, charges that I have made too much of that relation and thereby confused transcendental and speculative concerns. He argues here, as he does at greater length in his recent book (Hegel's Dialectic: The Explanation of Possibility), that the philosophically valuable core of Hegel is a ‘category theory’ limited to an ‘explanation’ of the conceptual ‘possibility’ of various judgments, practices, institutions, etc. Professor Harris charges, on the other hand (and with some irony), that I have made too little of the Kant-Hegel relation, or have construed it too narrowly, that the interpretation of Hegel's idealism which I provide thus either unfairly neglects, or does not have the resources to deal with, Hegel's full theory of the ‘whole’, or of Absolute Spirit, his account of the modern community's reconciliation with itself in time. I am thus alleged to have provided an interpretation that is at once too ambitious, and not ambitious enough, and I hope that such responses, at least for the Aristotelians in the audience, count as prima facie evidence that I must have said just the right thing.

My claim in Hegel's Idealism is that the well-known Hegel Renaissance, in post-war Western Europe especially, has still failed to produce a contemporary reconstruction of Hegel's fundamental position, his ‘identity theory’, his identifying the ‘self-actualization’ of the Notion with ‘actuality’, or his theory of the reality of the Absolute Idea.

Interest in The German Ideology has largely focused on the ‘chapter’ on Feuerbach—invariably the focus of the various abridgements in which the work is usually read. But this does not reflect the weighting of the text itself, which is dominated by Marx and Engels's critique of the radical egoist philosopher Max Stirner. Which begs the question: just why did they spend so much time and effort writing about Stirner? In this paper, I will provide an answer—which comes down to three related points. The first concerns the critique of reason; the second, egoistic self-interest. On both of these two points, Stirner makes a novel contribution—contributions which Marx and Engels feel clear affinities with. However, Stirner can ultimately be seen to get these two points, as it were, the wrong way around. This then leads to the third point: Stirner's misunderstanding of the nature of Communism. To clarify the nature of Communism, then, Marx and Engels were compelled to turn Stirner on his head.

The world we live in proves best understood as a cultural world. Cultural worlds are examined in this article regarding their aesthetic and ethical dimensions, with the help of Hegel and Husserl. The ethical realm is characterized by a tension between ethical conscience and cultural norms. Even Hegel, who is often conceived as a philosopher of customs, explores the significance of conscience in a detailed phenomenology. Husserl provides a curious perspective on ethics when he, under the heading of a renewal (Japanese Kaizo) of reason, provides an account of a vaguely dialectical development of reason as logos which goes beyond the division between the ‘descriptive’ and ‘ethical’. In the wider sense of ethics, it is also ‘good’ to write about the world we live in. Literature (Hermann, Wallace) will be treated here as an exemplary art-form that stands in close proximity to philosophy since both strive to capture in language the world we live in.

Hegel was attracted to the Greek ideal, but he ultimately rejected it as a model for the modern world. This article discusses four deficiencies he identified in ancient Greek ethical life: the immediate relationship between the subjective will of the individual and the ethical norms of the polis, the absence of institutions that mediated citizens’ private goals with the polis, the deficient conception of the human being which underlay slavery, and the granting of recognition on the basis of natural categories rather than politically integrative norms. These deficiencies explain not only why Hegel thought the Greek polis had to disintegrate under the onslaught of subjective particularity, but also why he rejected the Greek ideal as a model of social membership for modern ethical life. In addition, they illuminate his rejection of Fries and provide grounds for criticizing Rousseau. His account of the highly articulated modern state represents a response to the question of how the deficiencies of Greek ethical life can be overcome.

In his 2003 book Kierkegaard's Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, Jon Stewart challenges the classical interpretation of Kierkegaard's response to Hegelian philosophy. Stewart convincingly argues that Kierkegaard's work addresses Danish Hegelians rather than Hegel himself. However, in my view the conclusion Stewart draws from this — that Kierkegaard's thought on the whole has much less to do with Hegel than earlier commentators have presumed — goes too far in undermining the philosophical and historical significance of Kierkegaard's work, and, perhaps more importantly, closes down too quickly the question of his relation to Hegelian philosophy. The following passage exemplifies Stewart's position:

For politics to measure up to reason, two requirements have long been acknowledged: first, that the ends of political action be universal, and second, that the pursuit of such universal ends consist in political self-determination, that is, in self-government.

Aristotle set the stage for all further political inquiry by distinguishing political association through the universality of its end or good, while identifying the end of politics with political activity itself, an activity in which citizens rule over one another while presiding over all other associations, which fall under political dominion owing to the particularity of their pursuits. Aristotle joined the universality of politics with the activity of self-rule by recognising political activity to be an end in itself that is also a master end for the sake of which all other conduct is to be pursued. As such, politics was itself the highest good, making ethics possible by overcoming the hegemony of instrumental action, whose every end is devoid of intrinsic value, leaving conduct ultimately pointless (see Aristotle 1984b: Nicomachean Ethics, 1094a18-1094b12).

Two corollary difficulties, however, undermine Aristotle's enterprise. On the one hand, he is unable to give the universal end of political association a non-arbitrary content. Politics may claim universality by being both an end in itself and a master end, but this is just a recipe for ‘might makes right’, where any prevailing rule would be identical with the highest good. Appeal to a distinctly human function or to forms of rule that pursue the common good rather than the particular interests of some ruler can provide no remedy.

There is no precise record when and why T.M. Knox decided to translate Hegel's Philosophie des Rechts. In the corpus of the writings of the British Idealists (with which Knox was familiar) the work had not featured very much. Although the Idealists developed a distinct social philosophy based on Hegel's thought they drew their inspiration from his fundamental meta-physical and religious ideas rather than directly from Hegel's most important philosophical work dealing with social reality. According to his correspondence he discussed publication of a translation with a representative of the London firm of Methuen in 1935 so he must have started work soon after returning to Oxford. Whenever it was, the translation only flourished in the mare tranquil atmosphere of St. Andrews. On 16 April 1938 Knox wrote to the Clarendon Press - the academic branch of the Oxford University Press - offering them the translation almost ready for publication. He justified it by the need to make Hegel's work accessible to English readers, especially undergraduates, at a time when there were signs of a revival of interest in Hegel's thought (he mentioned Sidney Hook's and M.B. Foster's recent books in this connection), and when ignorance and prejudice clouded people's judgement. Knox pointed out that the only complete English translation of the work by the Canadian professor S.W. Dyde (1896) was defective, without notes and long out of print. The response of the Clarendon Press was somewhat lukewarm. There was doubt whether the work merited retranslation and whether there was really a market for it.

Hegel's Science of Logic tracks the self-contained and self-generated development of what Hegel calls the concept. My question is: can the concept in the Logic surprise itself? I argue that the answer to that question is yes—the concept can surprise itself when it rediscovers itself in a place it did not expect to be. I first clarify the kind of perspective that the Logic asks us as readers to occupy and its difference from the perspective inside the ‘opposition’ of consciousness. I then provide an example of the concept's self-surprise, namely, the transition from subjective to realized purpose in the Subjective Logic. I conclude by drawing out some implications of self-surprise for Hegel's method in the Logic and in the subsequent Realphilosophie.

In order to understand Hegel's gnomic oracle according to which the ‘I’ is a ‘We’, the notion of a personal subject is explained by its competence to perform personal roles in a pre-given partition of roles. Explicit divisions of labour by contractual promises are special cases that presuppose the general case of an already established social practice. On the other hand, methodological individualism is right to stress that we actualize joint intentions only via corresponding instantiations. In performing our parts, we form a plural subject, a we-group. The result of what each of us does is what we do, and the generic ‘We’ turns into the generic ‘I’.

This article proposes an interpretation of Hegel’s famous maxim in the Preface of the Grundlinien: ‘What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational’, not (as usual) as a politically conservative normative statement, but as an epistemological statement concerning the way in which philosophical discourse relates to reality. My aim is to take seriously Hegel’s claim that the purpose of philosophy is not to prescribe to the social world what it has to be but to define the mode through which it may be known.