Hegels Idea of A Criticsl Theory

Hegel's Idea of a Critical Theory
Author(s): Steven B. Smith

Source: Political Theory, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Feb., 1987), pp. 99-126
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
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HEGEL'S IDEA OF A
CRITICAL THEORY
STEVEN B. SMITH
Yale University
H EGEL IS OFTEN regarded as a central figure in the develop-

ment of the school of modern Critical Theory. ' Yet while his contribu-
tion to this school is often acknowledged, his own practice of critique is
seldom given the attention it deserves. The reason for this lack of
attention is not hard to understand. Unlike Kant, whose most important
works take the form of a Kritik of human reason in both its cognitive
and practical aspects, and unlike Marx, whose major works bear the
subtitle The Critique of Political Economy, Hegel nowhere describes
himself or his works as critical.2
Despite this fact, Hegel's work, especially the Phenomenology of
Mind, reveals a conception of critical theorizing that would have at least
two important implications for the development of that tradition. First,
whereas Kant meant by critique an inquiry into the nature and limits of
rationality as such, for Hegel it took the form of an internal or immanent
examination of the various sources of deception, illusion, and distortion
that the mind undergoes in its journey to Absolute Knowledge. Such an
activity is critical, or in Hegel's term "negative," precisely because it
entails a conception of liberation from those historical sources of
domination and coercion. Like Marx, Nietzsche, and, later, Freud,
Hegel sought to free human agents not only from the coercive illusions
that inhibit their capacities for free thought and action, but from the
forms of social life within which those coercive illusions thrive and find
expression. Philosophical critique necessarily spills over into social
theory.
Second, underlying the Hegelian conception of critique is the belief
that human history expresses an immanent telos the aim of which is the
liberation of both the individual and the species from a system of
POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 15 No. 1, February 1987 99-126

o 1987 Sage Publications, Inc.
99
100 Political Theory / February 1987
constraints that are at least partially imposed by the minds of the agen
to whom the theory is addressed. Hegel's argument depends upon the
assumption that human agents are driven by a powerful common
interest in freedom that persists through the interplay of their passions
and actions. This conception of an immanent telos in history, while
crucial to some later versions of critical theory, has also given rise to a
powerful countertrend pointing in exactly the opposite direction. For if
the Hegelian idea of a rational movement in history can no longer be
supported then we cannot be confident that the method of immanent
critique can foster absolute truth. The question remains then: What can
be salvaged of the project for human emancipation once our forms of
life are no longer believed to possess a stable ground of intelligibility?
The various successors to Hegel-Nietzschean aestheticism, Deweyan
pragmatism, Heideggerian deconstruction-have all been inspired by
what they regarded as Hegel's inability to resolve the dilemmas of a
critical theory.3
My aim in this article is to reconstruct Hegel's practice of critique
along four stages. First, I would like to examine Hegel's account of the
necessity for an immanent critique of historical forms of consciousness
in their own terms; second, his theory of determinate negation or the
moment of negativity where these forms of consciousness are shown to
contain incoherences, anomalies, and contradictions that undermine
their own certainty; third, his belief in a rational necessity or progressive
deepening and enrichment that the mind undergoes along the road to
higher and more adequate modes of reflection; and fourth, Hegel's claim
to have achieved Absolute Knowledge, the point at which all future
historical development would cease. To anticipate my conclusion, I
want to suggest that despite the failure of Hegel's teleology, his critique
of traditional epistemology remains a vital and important source for
reflection on some of the fundamental alternatives facing political
theory today.
THE THEOR Y OF IMMANENT CRITIQUE
Hegel's approach to critical theory begins by rejecting what is

sometimes referred to as "the problem of knowledge," namely the search
for a set of timeless guarantees or foundations on which our cognitions
can be grounded. His replacement of the traditional enterprise of
epistemology by the phenomenological self-reflection of mind is
Smith / HEGELS IDEA OF A CRITICAL THEORY 101
announced already in the "Introduction" to the Phenomenology, the

opening sentence of which reads as follows:
It is natural to suppose that, before philosophy enters upon its subject proper-
namely, the actual knowledge of what truly is-it is necessary to come first to an
understanding concerning knowledge, which is looked upon as the instrument by
which to take possession of the Absolute, or as the means through which to get a
sight of it.4
Hegel's starting point in the Phenomenology seems, then, entirely

traditional. It is the program of modern epistemology from Descartes to
Kant. According to this tradition, before we can acquire directly this
"actual knowledge of what truly is," we must first inquire indirectly into
the faculty of knowledge. What kind of knowledge will be best suited for
our purposes and what are the nature and limits of that knowledge? But
here already we run across a difficulty. For traditionally, knowledge has
been treated either as "an instrument by which we apprehend reality" or
"a medium through which the light of truth reaches us."5 In either case,
the result will be problematic. If knowledge is indeed an "instrument," it
cannot help but reshape the object, the "Absolute," which it seeks to
grasp. And likewise, if we consider it only as passive "medium" through
which reality is filtered, as light through a prism, it cannot but leave it
different than what it was before. The result of either approach would be
to produce a kind of skepticism about the possibility of ever reaching the
truth or reality in itself.
From this passage in the "Introduction," it is perhaps not altogether
clear to what or whom Hegel is alluding. It is possible that his reference
to thinking as a tool is an oblique allusion to Aristotle's organon theory
of knowledge, the aim of which was to provide the logical foundations
for the various special sciences. More likely, however, he is referring to
Kant's approach in the Critique of Pure Reason for whom knowledge of
the external world is always filtered through the categories of intuition
and understanding, of space, time, and causation. These categories are
not discoverable in experience but are the a priori conditions necessary
for any possible experiences. Since we cannot even begin to think of an
experience that is not spatially and temporally bound or limited by the
laws of physical causation, the result is to open up a gap between things
as they appear and things as they are in themselves. It is this peculiar
form of Kantian skepticism with its bifurcation between phenomenal
and noumenal, appearance and reality, that it is the task of Hegel's
Phenomenology to overcome.
102 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1987
Hegel's argument, it should be said, is not limited to Kant alon

is intended to extend to the whole tradition of modern epist
beginning with Descartes. This tradition had attempted to di
some unassailable foundation or starting point on which kno
could be based. Without such a starting point, it was believed, our
standards for truth and certainty would fall prey to some form of
relativism, skepticism, or even worse. Thus Descartes and the rationalist
approach sought a ground for certainty in the thinking ego (ego
cogitans). Only what appeared to this ego as singularly free from
inherited prejudice, opinion, and tradition could count as true. The
same basic concern holds for the empiricism of Locke and Hume. Only
what is traceable back to sense-experience has a claim to cognitive
validity. Even our most complex ideas, on this account, must be
grounded in relatively simple experiences without which they would
threaten to lose contact with the reality they purport to explain.
While Hegel regarded Descartes as a profound philosophical mind
and the cogito as "the principle about which revolves the whole interest
of modern philosophy," he cannot but doubt the veracity of Cartesian
doubt.6 Descartes began the Meditations by resolving to doubt all
inherited knowledge and received opinion. But this resolve turned out to
be only half-hearted for what he had decided was not so much to doubt
these as to put them on a more secure foundation. Underlying, then, the
apparent radicalism of Cartesian skepticism there is a hidden conserva-
tism. Likewise, Lockean empiricism has established "a far ranging
culture (Bildung)," which has become "the philosophy of the English
and the French, and even, in a certain sense, now of the Germans," but it
too failed to perceive the truth.7 Locke and Hume had both confused the
truth of an idea with its conditions of origin. That ideas have their origin
in experience Hegel does not doubt. The point, however, is not to give a
temporal account of what has happened, but, as we shall see later, a
rational reconstruction of how things have happened. "Philosophy is
not supposed to be an account of what happens, rather it should be a
knowledge of what is true in events," that is, by providing an intercon-
nected grasp of experience as a whole.8
Hegel's point is not only that the search for origins or foundations
commits some version of the "genetic fallacy" but that the whole
enterprise presupposes a circle. The theory of knowledge (Erkenntnis-
theorie) as traditionally practiced claimed to be not merely one form of
knowledge among others but an enterprise concerned with the founda-
tions of all possible knowledge. As such, it claimed a privileged insight
Smith / HEGEL'S IDEA OF A CRITICAL THEORY 103
into the presuppositions of knowledge prior to any actual cogniti

Hegel's point is that any such claim about the foundations of kno
is already a claim to knowledge and thus presupposes what it need
prove. The result is a claim to investigate the faculty of knowledge
to knowing. The above is well-stated in a passage from the Lesser
Kant demanded a criticism of the faculty of cognition as preliminary to its exer

That is a fair demand, if it means that even forms of thought must be made
object of investigation. Unfortunately there soon creeps in the misconception
already knowing before you know-the error of refusing to enter the water
you have learnt to swim. True, indeed, the forms of thought should be subjected
a scrutiny before they are used; yet what is this scrutiny but ipso facto a cogniti
The argument here is, I believe, conclusive. It is directed agains

claims of epistemology or theory of knowledge to provide unassai
foundations for knowledge. Hegel wants to argue that either t
foundations are already a form of knowledge, an "actual" cogni-
tion, which results in circularity or that they need to be justified by a
further set of foundations, which results in infinite regress. He denies,
however, that the contradictions into which the theory of knowledge
falls must necessarily lead to doubt and despair. He continues in the
"Introduction":
Meanwhile, if the fear of falling into error introduces an element of distrust into
science, which without any scruples of that sort goes to work and actually does
know, it is not easy to understand why, conversely, a distrust should not be placed
in this very distrust, and why we should not take care lest the fear of error is not just
the initial error. As a matter of fact, this fear presupposes something, indeed a great
deal, as truth, and supports its scruples and consequences on what should itself be
examined beforehand to see whether it is truth.'0
Hegel's answer to the problems inherent in traditional philosophy is

his theory of immanent critique. By an internal or immanent examina-
tion of knowledge, I mean one that seeks criteria of validity within
existing forms of knowledge. As opposed to the claims of a Kantian
"first philosophy" ( Ursprungsphilosophie), which seeks to delimit once
and for all standards of cognitive acceptability, Hegel maintains that
these standards are already at hand within existing modes of cognition.
There is no point, then, in trying to determine a priori rules of evidence
for what is to count as knowledge or how it is to be verified. The idea of
an immanent critique or phenomenological self-reflection means rather
that we need only test the knowledge in question against itself.
The idea that knowledge can be tested against itself is obviously not a
translucent one. Hegel's point is that any such standard or "yardstick"
against which we judge knowledge is already a form of knowledge, that
is, something that has already been posited by consciousness. It is not a
matter of judging or comparing consciousness to something outside
itself for the simple reason that the distinction between subject and
object, inside and outside, is a distinction posited by consciousness.
There is no "out there" to which thought refers. Consciousness is all
there is. "Consciousness," Hegel writes, "furnishes its own criterion in
itself; and the inquiry will thereby be a comparison of itself with its own
self; for the distinction, just made, falls inside itself."'I1
The Phenomenology, as we shall see, charts the development of the
various modes or forms (Gestalten) of consciousness by a process of
internal self-examination and reflection. Beginning with rudimentary
"self-certainty" Hegel, too, wants to show how "science" ( Wissenschaft)
is possible. What he wants to show is the journey traversed by
consciousness both at the "macro" level of the species as well as the
"micro" level of the individual. In this sense, the work has been justly
compared not only to Rousseau's Emile with its pedagogical function of
leading a youth from an untutored "natural consciousness" to full adult
maturity but also to Goethe's Werther and the whole genre of the
Bildungsroman.I2 The Phenomenology is not only a theoretical but a
practical treatise whose terminus is complete not when our concepts
correspond to an independently existing objective world as with
empiricism, or when this objective world is filtered through the
transcendental structure of consciousness as with rationalism. Rather
the Bildungsprozess stands complete when consciousness corresponds
to itself, that is, when "knowledge is no longer compelled to go beyond
itself."'"3 Only when all traces of disharmony and dissonance have
disappeared will the Phenomenology of Mind be complete. When this
stage is reached we will have attained to science or what Hegel calls
Absolute Knowledge.
It is, then, "this dialectic process which consciousness executes on
itself" that Hegel terms experience or history. 14 By trying to present the
various forms of experience from within, as they have appeared in
history, Hegel feels himself able to avoid the problems of the theory of
knowledge. Since any form of experience will contain within it some
standard of adequacy, it is only necessary to compare it against itself to
see whether it is as it ought to be. Hegel even suggests that it is not "we,"
the philosophical onlookers, who do the testing to see whether the
experience in question measures up to our criteria of adequacy, but

rather the experience that does the testing itself.
The essential fact, however, to be borne in mind throughout the whole inquiry is
that both these moments, notion and object, "being for another" and "being in
itself," themselves fall within that knowledge which we are examining. Conse-
quently, we do not require to bring standards with us, nor to apply our fancies and
thoughts in the inquiry . . . in this respect, too, since consciousness tests and
examines itself, all we are left to do is simply and solely to look on.'5
Hegel's response to the traditional problem of knowledge might at

first blush appear to raise more difficulties than it solves. First, if he is
serious, as he clearly is, that there is no external standard or yardstick
beyond consciousness by which to judge and evaluate our knowledge
claims, we would be forced to accept existing cognitions at their face
value. The result of Hegel's immanent critique of consciousness would
seem to yield an uncritical relativism where we have no independent
standpoint from which to judge the validity of knowledge. Second, it is
arguable that Hegel's apparently innocuous "we" who only "look on"
while consciousness tests itself carries with it a freight of normative
baggage. On one reading, Hegel's purely "phenomenological" or
"descriptive" method, as Alexander Kojeve has called it, conceals
certain assumptions-about what a satisfactory system of thought or
form of life looks like-that need to be examined.'6
THE LOGIC OF DETERMINATE NEGATION
The first objection, then, to Hegel's rejection of traditional e

ogy is that it rules out the possibility of providing any truly critical
insights or judgments. Indeed, the suggestion that we only understand
something not when we test it against some absolute standard of beauty,
truth, orjustice, but when we attempt to grasp it from within in terms of
its own self-imposed standards of adequacy is central to the whole
tradition of interpretive hermeneutics from Schliermacher to Colling-
wood.17 On this account, the aim of interpretation is to recapture the
thought of the past as it was understood or intended by those for whom
it had meaning. We can do this through an act of sympathetic
reenactment where we try, so to speak, to step into the shoes of another
and see the world as he might have seen it. Only when we succeed in
rethinking or reproducing the thoughts of another in terms that would

be intelligible to them can we avoid the more egregious forms of
"presentism" or ethnocentric prejudice. Thus by relativizing or histori-
cizing the view of knowledge adopted by the tradition, it would seem
that Hegel is only able to engage opposing systems of thought or forms
of life in their own terms.
Hegel's response here, I believe, would be to say that while we must
begin by understanding a previous or alien form of life in its own terms,
that this is not where we must end. The hermeneutic recovery of
meaning is not the telos of the Phenomenology. The point is not simply
to understand the thought of another as it was intended to be
understood, but as we saw earlier to test it for internal symptoms of
stress, weakness, and contradiction. Hegel's phrase for this testing, "the
labor of the negative,"'8 beautifully expresses his intention. The activity
of self-examination and reflection is laborious because it is hard and
unremitting. It is negative because it progresses by ruling things out, by
discarding what cannot be adapted and accommodated, by rejecting
things. The aim of Hegel's critical dialectic is not to reaffirm familiar
knowledge but to destroy the comfortable certitudes of life. To "do away
with its character of familiarity" is what counts for the reason that
"whatever is familiarly known is not properly known, just for the reason
that it is familiar."''9
This process of testing knowledge against itself implies, then, a kind
of "negative dialectic" in which existing forms of consciousness are
shown to contain the seeds of their own destruction. That each form of
consciousness will be shown to be inadequate or contradictory is
necessary for the possibility of dialectical development. It is precisely the
negative or contradictory character of consciousness that allows us to
traverse the long road from the immediacy of the "natural conscious-
ness" to the heights of Hegel's own elevated perspective. Hegel had no
illusions that the road traveled by consciousness will be an easy one.
"This pathway has a negative significance," he writes. "The road can be
looked on as the path of doubt, or more properly a highway of
despair. "20 The process of destruction and dissolution that accompanie
"the process of training and educating consciousness itself up to the leve
of science" involves adopting an essentially negative or antagonistic
attitude to what exists quite different from the claims of sympathetic
reenactment mentioned above. Indeed, the procedure of "unmasking"
the various forins of self-deception, delusion, and mystification that
consciousness suffers along this road looks very much like the kind of
Ideologiekritik practiced later by Marx, Nietzsche, and members of

Frankfurt School.
Hegel's own practice of dialectic owes a great deal to earlier thinkers,
especially the ancient skeptics to whom he attributes the discovery of
negative or critical thinking. In an early work on The Relationship of
Skepticism to Philosophy, he remarks that "skepticism is one with every
true philosophy."2' The "truth" of skepticism resides in the fact that it
dissolves the certainties of the world of commonsense thinking and
everyday experience. Skepticism thus renders fluid and mobile what to
the ordinary mind appears as fixed and concrete. Thus Hegel remarks
that skepticism is directed not at all against philosophy but against
"common sense or the common consciousness which clings to the given,
the fact, the finite ... and sticks to this as something certain, secure, and
eternal." The great virtue of skepticism is to show "the unreliability of
such certainties."122
In particular, Hegel distinguishes the more radical form of ancient
skepticism from the less intransigent modern form. As we have seen,
modern philosophy beginning with Descartes attempted to doubt
everything, to throw everything into question. But this doubt, Hegel
maintains, was not serious since it was introduced only to establish
firmer grounds for certainty. Everything was doubted except our
capacity to doubt and, leaving this door open, Descartes went on to
reestablish the fixity of the everyday world. Unlike modern skepticism,
then, where suspicion extends only to our cognitive ability to grasp
reality, the ancient dialecticians resolved to doubt the very existence of
reality itself. Hegel thus refers modern skepticism "with its certainty
about the facts of consciousness" back to its origins in the ancient
dialectic of Parmenides and Zeno.23 Hegel even returns to this theme 25
years later in a passage from the Encyclopedia where he takes Hume to
task. "The skepticism of Hume," he notes there,
should be clearly marked off from Greek skepticism. Hume takes as the basis of
truth the empirical element, feeling and sensation, and proceeds to challenge
universal principles and laws, because they are not justified on the basis of sense-
perception. So far was the ancient skepticism from making feeling and sensation
the canon of truth, that it turned against the sensate first of all.24
The same attitude toward the inadequacies of common sense and the
rigid concepts of the understanding (Verstand) are found again in the
Phenomenology. The opening chapter of the text, the dialectic of sense
certainty, begins with the destruction of the horizon of everyday

Originally, the mind seeks grounds for certainty not, as Descartes
believed, in the autonomy of self-reflection but in the sheer immediacy
of sense experience. Hegel appears to agree more with Locke and the
empiricists that we can feel before we can think. And the feeling of
certainty, of something immediately "here and now"-this table, this
chair, this pen-provides the basic experience or ground of conviction.
Indeed, the attitude that Hegel attributes to the natural consciousness is
not unlike the program of the logical positivists who sought foundations
for scientific judgments in "brute data" or "atomic facts" uncontami-
nated by reflection.
Hegel's point is that as soon as this mute experience is made to prove
itself, to verify its certainty, it is immediately thrown into doubt. Proof
requires language, concepts, which by their very nature point beyond
immediate singular experiences. Even to speak of tables, chairs, and
pens is to universalize, to establish general rules for ordering and
classifying experiences. Like Wittgenstein and later linguistic philos-
ophers, Hegel believes that experience takes place both in and through
language.25 Since language performs many functions apart from bare
"ostensive definition," to interpret experience is necessarily to change it.
Thus the conception of some kind of original prelinguistic experience
that forms the grounds of certainty is as much a fiction as Rousseau's
depiction of the state of nature in the Discourse on Inequality. And just
as Rousseau understood the impossibility of returning to an original
pristine state of innocence, so did Hegel try to avoid what Gadamer has
called "the fallacy of immediacy," the attempt to uphold immediate
experience as a touchstone of truth, a fallacy the error of which becomes
evident simply by articulating it.26
Hegel's respect for the ancient skeptics and their destruction of
empirical certainty is expressed both later in the Phenomenology and in
the Berlin Lectures on the History of Philosophy. In the chapter on
"Skepticism" in the Phenomenology, he congratulates the skeptics for
adopting an essentially "negative attitude toward otherness."127 Under
the influence of skepticism, "thought becomes thinking which wholly
annihilates the being of the world with its manifold determinateness."s28
Pyrrhonic skepticism is extolled not only because it makes "the
objective as such to disappear" but because "what vanishes is what is
determinate ... no matter what its nature or whence it comes."29
Finally, if further evidence is needed, the same attitude is evinced in
his later Lectures on skepticism. "The essential nature of skepticism," he
says there, consists in "the disappearance of all that is objective, all that
is held to be true, existent, or universal, all that is definite, all that is
affirmative."30 Ancient skepticism carries out this "annihilation" of the
existing world, however, through a purely subjective withholding of
assent, the refusal to affirm or deny any positive statement. Hegel even
cites the maxim of Sextus Empiricus to "determine nothing" for nothing
is either true or false in itself.3' All propositions are alike in trustworthi-
ness or untrustworthiness. The cast of mind that this skepticism
obviously recalls is not unlike that of modern nihilism, for when we lose
our certainty that the objective world is fixed, stable, or determinate, the
result is that "self-consciouness itself loses its equilibrium and becomes
driven hither and thither in unrest, fear, and anguish."32 The result of
this purely "subjective liberation" from the "unconscious servitude in
which the natural self-consciousness is confined" turns out to be the
affirmation of a kind of empty formalism in which thought is cured "of
having a content such as this established in thought."33
Yet, for all his respect for the ancient dialecticians and their
dissolution of the familiar, Hegel's praise should not be mistaken for
endorsement. The virtue of skepticism, we have seen, consists in its
"negative attitude," which means that it shakes up the complacency of
everyday empirical or commonsense thinking. The maxim "affirm
nothing" is a useful corrective to the "dogmatism" of the understanding
that identifies seeming with being or that takes what appears to be the
case with what is the case. But precisely because it remains a purely
"subjective liberation," the liberation engendered by skepticism remains
empty; it is productive of nothing positive. It is hardly surprising, then,
that the only virtue admired by the ancient skeptics was the purely
formal one of ataraxia, imperturbability in the face of experience. There
is, then, at the heart of skepticism a sort of inability to learn from
experience. "In skepticism," Hegel remarks, "we now really have an
abrogation of the two one-sided systems [i.e., Stoicism and Epicurean-
ism] that we have hitherto dealt with; but this negative remains a
negative only, and is incapable of passing into an affirmative."34 And
later on he adds that "skepticism deduces no result, nor does it express
its negation as anything positive."35
The problem with ancient skepticism was that it was insufficiently
developmental. It could destroy but it could not create. While Hegel
regards the purely negative, destructive view of skepticism as an advance
over the naivete of the natural consciousness, it is still an incomplete
advance. His own dialectic might be called by contrast a positive
skepticism as it tries not only to negate but to establish and aff

himself refers to it as a form of determinate negation. A determ
negation is not merely oppositional or adversarial. To negate
shows, is always to negate something, something with a determinate
content and limit. Negation is thus determinate because it is defined and
limited by what it negates. Hegel's point here, like that of Spinoza, is
that all negation is in fact a form of determination or affirmation (omnis
determinatio est negatio), that every form of consciousness is the
product of a critique or "negation" of some previous form of conscious-
ness.36 Hence, all historical change arises out of a negation of some
previous negation. As he puts it in the "Introduction" to the
Phenomenology: "When once ... the result is apprehended as it truly is,
as determinate negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen."37
Or as he puts it later in the Science of Logic: "Because the result, the
negation, is a specific negation it has a content. It is a fresh Notion but
higher and richer than its predecessor for it is richer by the negation or
opposite of the latter."38 The result of this process of determinate
negation is a continual deepening and enrichement of both life and
thought that becomes increasingly more comprehensive and coherent
over time.
The logic of determinate negation has both a critical and a
constructive aspect. It is critical because it does not merely accept what a
body of thought, a philosophical system, or even an entire culture says
about itself, but is concerned to confront that thought, system, or
culture with its own internal tensions, incoherences, and anomalies. It is
constructive because out of this negation or confrontation, we are able
to arrive at ever-more complete, comprehensive, and coherent bodies of
propositions and forms of life. There is, then, a dynamic developmental
structure to the Hegelian determinate negation by which human
arrangements become progressively more adequate as a result of the
tensions and contradictions that brought them into being. All science,
just like all society, is the result of a cumulative process of negation
whereby both thought and life are tested not against some externally
imposed criteria of adequacy but against their own self-imposed
standards of truth. The true system of thought, like the rational form of
life, does not stand over and against the others like a "lifeless universal,"
but grows out of a progressive deepening and enrichment where nothing
is ever lost or wasted but is overcome and preserved in a newer, more
comprehensive whole. This is the famous Hegelian Aufhebung in which
lesser and more inadequate forms of life are both annulled and
preserved in a higher one.39
RA TIONAL NECESSITY
The above, of course, raises one of the most difficult problems of the
entire Hegelian philosophy. Hegel speaks of the process of determinate
negation as embodying a certain "logic" or necessity.40 But what kind of
logic or what kind of necessity? This is a hotly disputed question. On one
account, when Hegel says that "the completeness of the forms of unreal
consciousness will be brought about precisely through ... the necessity
of their connection with the others,"'41 he means no more than a kind of
hermeneutic or logographic necessity in which "every part of the [text]
must be necessary for the whole" and "the place where each part occurs
is the place where it is necessary that it should occur."42 This is the
necessity formed by the hermeneutic circle in which one can only
understand a whole text in relation to its parts and its parts by reference
to the whole. Necessity should be taken here not in the strict sense of
logical necessity or causal necessity but in the relatively looser sense of
not arbitrary or not accidental. The whole can be said to be governed by
this kind of necessity if it makes sense or simply hangs together in the
broadest sense of the term. The fault here is that this sense of necessity is
too loose to satisfy Hegel's more stringent criteria.
This leads us to a second kind of necessity that may be called practical
necessity.43 Practical necessity is concerned with those events or states of
affairs that it is within our power either to produce or prevent. This sense
of the term is clearly tied to a much older usage where to discover the
cause of something meant to provide grounds for the ascription of
praise, blame, guilt, or responsibility as when we ask "Who was
responsible for the war?" On this account, to discover the necessity for
something means (a) to disclose the initial condition or state of things
known or believed to exist by some agent or group of agents, and (b) the
desire or will on the part of those agents to bring about a change in this
state of things on the basis of their intending or meaning to. If either of
these two conditions is absent, the necessity in question cannot be of the
practical sort. The crucial factor here is that which causes is under
human control. If it were not, as when we act in a hypnotic trance or
ascribe responsibility for our actions to "fate," "karma," or "destiny,"
then we are no longer speaking of a case of practical necessity. This is
one, to repeat, where a human agent chooses to bring about some state
of affairs different from what is on the basis of his understanding of his
situation and his forming an intention to change it.
There is, however, a third and more distinctively "Hegelian" sense of
the term that might be called rational or teleological necessity. By
teleological is meant that history as a whole expresses a sort of

cause that must be distinguished from the purposeful plans and
individual actors.44 Individual actors and their actions are not the
fundamental causal factors of history as they are when considered under
the aspect of practical necessity but are rather evidence of a deeper
underlying ground of history. Teleological necessity operates, then, on a
fundamentally different level from that of finite empirical individuals.
Hegel even believed that starting with finite empirical individuals, it is
possible to demonstrate that history as a whole, the totality of human
deeds, expresses a plot, plan, or rationality of its own that no one
individual ever intended but that is rational nonetheless.
Hegel's argument for a rational or teleological necessity is based on
the assumption that human agents are driven by a powerful common
interest in rational freedom, or in the words of a recent commentator,
that "whether they recognize it or not . .. everyone exhibits a certain
tropism for rationality, and this tropism persists through the interplay
of a person's own impulses and desires."45 Hegel's own argument is
drawn from an analogy from individual actions. Just as individuals and
even lower organisms express purposiveness, it would seem unreason-
able to deny it to the whole.46 To the casual observer, the spectacle of
human events is disordered, chaotic, with little relation between
individual intentions and final outcomes. Furthermore, those for whom
"universal purposes, benevolence, and noble patriotism" have been
primary motives have invariably come to grief.47 History would appear
to be a "slaughterbench" engendering a "revolt of the good will."48 And
what Hegel says is true of ordinary actors holds also for those leading
figures whom he calls "world historical individuals," men like Alex-
ander, Caesar, and Napoleon, who have sought to bring about major
epochal changes. While these historical figures act, to the best of their
knowledge, out of their own volition, they are in fact fulfilling the telos
of a kind of historical rationality that is somehow encoded in them.
It is to explain the apparent anomaly between individual motives and
objective consequences that Hegel enlists the idea of a rational necessity
at work in history. While it has become fashionable to reject this idea as
part of a residual theodicy in which apparent evils are explained (and
justified) in terms of the good consequences that come from them, some
such notion is important for any theory that wants to accord a role to
unconscious motivations in history.49 Thus Ernst Bloch50 has traced its
origins to Adam Smith's "invisible hand" and to de Mandeville's fable of
the bees, while Jon Elster5l has compared it to the persistence of
functionalist explanations in the social sciences. Elster goes on to

distinguish between a "weak" and a "strong" functionalist paradigm.
The weak (and, therefore, unobjectionable) model simply states that an
institution or pattern of behavior may have consequences that, although
unintended by the actors who bring them about, still confer some benefit
on them. However, Hegel is said to have subscribed to the strong
functionalist view according to which all institutions and behavioral
patterns have a function that explains them.
The latter view cannot legitimately be attributed to Hegel. While his
conception is that nothing in history can exist in the long term that
blocks or inhibits our interest in freedom, he is also deeply concerned
with the subjective motives, intentions, and purposes by which that
interest is secured. Put another way: While the ends of reason may be
given, the way we achieve those ends is not. Thus whether those ends
are achieved peacefully or by "conflict," "destruction," "opposition,"
"danger," or "harm" is by no means irrelevant to history.52 Unlike
proponents of strong functionalism, for Hegel, human beings do not
only serve purposes, they do also have purposes. While he may
frequently speak of human agents as "instruments" of some larger
historical cause of destiny, Hegel regards as inadequate any theory that
abstracts from the elements of inwardness, choice, and intention that
human actions display. It is this relationship between intentional actions
and the unintended consequences that those actions help to cause that
Hegel tries to grasp in his concept of the "cunning of reason" (List der
Vernunft):
It is not the general idea that is implicated in opposition and combat, and that is
exposed to danger. It remains in the background, untouched and uninjured. This
may be called the cunning of reason-that it sets the passions to work for itself,
while that which develops its existence through such impulsion pays the penalty,
and suffers the loss.53
What Hegel means by rational necessity, then, is the ability to

discover some point, meaning, or order behind the apparently random
chaos of events. To elucidate this idea, Hegel compares the field of
history to the solar system and the philosopher to Kepler.54 Just as
Kepler's knowledge of mathematics enabled him to explain planetary
motion in terms of a few simple laws, so does knowledge of history
reveal a set of lawlike regularities immanent in human affairs. But
whereas Kepler and the other founders of the modern scientific
enterprise sought to expel any sense of human interest or "

from nature, Hegel took the final purpose of history to be a d
moral one: the realization of freedom. By freedom is meant here not
merely negative or bourgeois liberty, but rather humanity's self-
awareness that it is both separate from and sovereign over nature where
nature indicates both our external environment and our internal drives
and inclinations. Freedom is thus rational freedom as it requires not
merely the absence of impediments to action but a certain kind of
knolwedge or self-awareness that, we shall see in the next section, Hegel
called Absolute Knowledge.
We can now begin to see, I think, that Hegel's conception of rational
necessity engenders a paradox. History, Hegel hopes to show, must take
the form of a rational theodicy in which evil can be explained in terms of
the good that comes out of it. Failure to determine this good does not so
much reflect on the events but on the observer's ability to discover their
purpose. History can only accomplish its goals through using the base
side of human nature:
Passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires are ... tremendous
wellsprings of action. Their power lies in the fact that they respect none of the
limitations which law and morality would impose on them; and that these natural
impulses are closer to the core of human nature than the artificial troublesome
discipline that tends toward order, self-restraint, law and morality.55
The paradox is not merely that good consequences can result from
selfish or self-serving actions; that actions have unintended conse-
quences had been explored already in the writings of Smith and de
Mandeville. The paradox is that even on Hegel's own terms, it is difficult
to see what comprehension of rational necessity is supposed to do for the
moral agent. On one level, it is supposed to enable the agent to believe
that his good efforts will not go for nought. On another, however,
Hegel's assurance that other people's selfish actions may unwittingly
turn out to have good results may only serve to undermine one's
confidence in the need for morality. One might be justifiably alarmed at
what appears to be such a blatant council of irresponsibility. Rather
than encouraging the virtuous to persist in their good efforts, Hegel's
belief in a rational necessity tends to absolve the agent of all moral
responsibility. The result is that as individual moral actors, Caesar and
Napoleon are blameworthy for the harm they cause, but as agents of
history, they are praiseworthy for helping to further a higher moral
purpose.
There are evident difficulties with Hegel's ascription of an objective

teleology to human actions. First (and perhaps most difficult) is the
belief that nothing can persist that perpetually frustrates the ends of
reason. Such a view assumes an almost unlimited faith in historical
progress that the experiences of the twentieth century have done much
to undermine. In this context, the empiricist's demand for refutability o
falsifiability is perfectly in order. It is hard to see how genocide on a
massive scale, concentration camps, and nuclear weapons serve our
interests in rationality. Of course, one could argue that the experiences
of Nazism in Germany and Fascism in Italy, Spain, and Japan made
possible the emergence of more liberal rational regimes that otherwise
would not have been forthcoming. But, at most, one is entitled to say
that things just have turned out that way; there was no necessity for them
to do so.
Second, the Hegelian idea of a rational necessity in history appears to
be a wholly a priori construction that does not pay sufficient attention to
the facts. Hegel, it can be charged, makes use of historical materials only
insofar as they illuminate his moral scheme but no further. Furthermore,
the necessity of which Hegel speaks works not at the level of empirical
data but at some deeper underlying supersensible reality. But how do we
gain access to this reality? If it is not available to the commonsense
understanding that merely stays at the level of empireia, how can we
plumb the depths of historical reason? Whereas Kant had more
modestly assumed that moral purposiveness in history was an "idea of
reason," that is, something not necessary to explain events but to give
them value, Hegel contemptuously dismisses this formulation by
asking: "Would one ever have thought that philosophy would deny
truth to intelligible entities because they lack the spatial and temporal
material of the sensuous world?"56
Hegel's answer to the charge of a priorism is not altogether
consistent. At times, as in the query cited above, he seems to imply th
knowledge of necessity cannot be gained by ordinary empirical means
but must rely on the method of the philosopher who presumably has
some kind of noetic insight into "intelligible entities" existing outside of
space and time. At other times, however, he writes as if there were no
method distinctive to philosophy but that it is only necessary to
"abandon" oneself to the "content" one is studying to discover its truth.
Thus in the "Introduction" to the Phenomenology he says that "true
scientific knowledge ... demands abandonment to the very life of the
object, or, which means the same thing, claims to have before it the inner
necessity controlling the object, and to express this only."157
On the basis of this passage, some interpreters have suggested that

Hegel's famed dialectical method is not really a method at all but a call
to abandon methodology. Kojeve, for instance, suggests that "when all
is said and done, the 'method' of the Hegelian scientist consists in having
no method or way of thinking peculiar to his science" and that qua
scientist "his role is that of a perfectly flat and indefinitely extended
mirror."'58 From this he goes on to aver that the Hegelian method is
purely "empirical" or "positivist" concluding that "Hegel looks at the
Real and describes what he sees, everything that he sees, and nothing but
what he sees."59
This seemingly innocent description of Hegel's dialectic raises in
spades the question alluded to earlier, namely, whether his own account
of his method as phenomenological or descriptive does not presuppose
more than he admits. The suggestion here that philosophical critique
need only describe falls afoul of Hegel's own claim to have discovered a
hidden rationality working its way out in history. Thus despite
statements like the above, the contemporary positivist's distinction
between description and prescription, facts and values, is foreign to
Hegel's way of thought. Kojeve's description of this method as purely
"empirical" misses the point that, for Hegel, empiricism fails to
distinguish what is rational and necessary from what is arbitrary and
contingent.60 The task for the Hegelian phenomenologist is not simply
to describe "everything that he sees, and nothing but what he sees," but
to show how what he sees contributes to the development of progres-
sively more rational systems of thought and forms of life.
ABSOLUTE KNOWLEDGE AND

THE END OF HISTORY
Hegel describes his philosophy in the Phenomenology as the

achievement of Absolute Knowledge. The very end of the "Introduc-
tion" reads as follows:
In pressing forward to its true form of existence, consciousness will come to a point
at which it lays aside its semblance of being hampered with what is foreign to it,
with what is only for it and exists as an other; it will reach a position where
appearance becomes identified with essence, where, in consequence, its exposition
coincides with just this very point, this very stage of the science proper of mind.
And, finally, when it grasps this its own essence, it will connote the nature of
absolute knowledge itself.61
In describing his philosophy as knowledge of the "Absolute," Hegel is

not making the preposterous claim that he possesses knowledge of
everything that is. Such a claim would be demonstrably false. Rather,
what Hegel claims to possess can be understood in a relatively weaker
sense as entailing (a) that history is a "rational process," (b) that this
process has a distinct telos or end, and (c) that this telos is freedom.
What Hegel claims to possess is, then, a knowledge of the general
structural principles or patterns that make history an intelligible whole
rather than a random set of events. It is not the totality of all the
properties or aspects of history but only those properties or aspects that
make it an organized structure.
Even this weaker sense of the term absolute will appear too strong for
many. As I indicated earlier, this claim assumes that history is an
intelligible whole and is moving in a progressive direction toward
greater degrees of freedom for ever-larger numbers of people. Yet, one
need only think of the experience of two global wars, the rise of
totalitarian states and ideologies, and the existence of evil on a
previously unimagined scale to believe that Hegel's faith in the
rationality of history has been massively contradicted by the facts.
Furthermore, Hegel's claim to Absolute Knowledge assumes not only
that we are now in possession of an intellectually satisfying form of
knowledge but also a morally satisfying form of life. Absolute Knowl-
edge can only be finally achieved when the philosophic demand for
harmony and coherence coincides with its realization in the institutions
of a community and its form of ethical life. For Hegel, it was the modern
constitutional or liberal state produced by the French Revolution and
the Napoleonic aftermath that alone can provide for this rational
harmony.62 Only in such a community where all the contradictory facets
of life and thought have been "sublated" will the need for further
speculation cease. It is the claim that the coincidence of Hegelian
philosophy and the institution of the modern constitutional state
constitutes an "end of history" that we shall return to later.
Before turning to these problems, there are a number of formal
features implied in Hegel's account of Absolute Knowledge that we
must examine. First, Hegel did not regard Absolute Knowledge as some
qualitatively new mode of thought or system in opposition to those that
preceded it. It is, so to speak, a compendium and completion of all
previous knowledge, a synoptic survey of the whole. One could almost

say that Absolute Knowledge is to all previous knowledge the way
Aristotle described the virtue of magnanimity as being to all the other
virtues: a kind of crown that puts the others in their final form and,
therefore, adds its luster to the whole.63 Absolute Knowledge is, then, a
kind of retrospective reconstruction of all previous forms of conscious-
ness. It is not simply an intellectual history but a rational reordering of
those forms of thought that have most decisively contributed to the
formation of Hegel's own standpoint.
Second, Hegel's emphasis on the emergent character of Absolute
Knowledge brings out another implication. Unlike philosophers such as
Kant who sought to delimit what is to count as knowledge and then
specified some particular branch of knowledge, such as physics or
mathematics, as satisfying those criteria, Hegel tries to abjure any
prejudgment about what is to count as knowledge. Accordingly, he tells
us, the truth of any set of categories cannot be taken out of context and
studied in isolation "as if shot out of a pistol" but must be seen as the
result of a formative process out of which truth progressively emerges.64
Thus Hegel opposes his view to that of the "ordinary mind" that "takes
the opposition between true and false to be fixed." "The diversity of
philosophical systems" should be seen as depicting "the progressive
evolution of truth."65
Hegel's point here is that knowledge cannot be considered apart from
its genesis, how it came into being. Thus he describes as "dogmatism"
the view that truth and falsity have a completely fixed nature and,
against this, remarks that "truth is not like stamped coin that is used
ready from the mint and so can be taken up and used."66 Therefore, one
ought not to discard as merely false or illusory the thought of the past
but regard it as contributing to the gradual emergence of higher and
truer forms of consciouness. What Hegel is here warning against is the
tendency to draw sharp metaphysical distinctions dividing truth from
falsity, good from evil. As we have already seen, good and evil are
intimately bound up with one another in Hegel's conception of rational
necessity so that it is not possible to regard them as categorically
distinct. We must see all previous philosophic systems and forms of life
as part of an ongoing dialectic, the purpose of which is the disclosure of
the rationality contained there in.
Third, the conception of Absolute Knowledge is tied to Hegel's
conviction that all knowledge must take the form of a system. By a
system is meant that every form of knowledge must exhibit some degree
of rational harmony and coherence. Only what is expressed in th

of a system is true. "The truth," he says in the Preface to the
Phenomenology, "is only realized in the form of a system." "Knowledge
is only real and can only be set forth fully in the form of science, in the
form of a system."67 All knowledge, then, from the lowliest forms of
sense experience to the most abstract branches of science takes the form
of an interconnected set of categories and propositions any one of which
is only fully intelligible when considered in the light of all the others. For
Hegel, to describe a statement or propostion as true does not mean that
it adequately pictures or represents a reality independent of itself.
Rather, truth lies in the relation between one statement and some
internally related set of statements that it presupposes. Thus the circular
or systematic character of knowledge does not imply, as it has
sometimes been alleged, an abdication of the search for critical
standards of truth and rationality. It merely shows that the criteria for
determining truth are not where we once thought they were. Truth lies i
the whole or in the form of a circle.68
Fourth, Hegel's conception of Absolute Knowledge points toward a
new form of justification and truth. Henceforth our knowledge will not
be regarded as true because it satisfies some criteria of rationality or
objectivity laid down in advance. Truth is not, to use Schelling's phrase,
that "point of indifference" where the mind and the external world come
into contact. Indeed, Hegel emphatically rejects the conception of truth
as correspondence with or representation of reality. He instead wants to
interject a social component in the justification of belief; epistemology
has become social theory. He refers to the knowledge that he has
produced as "absolute" not because it is in touch with ultimate reality
but because it is at least potentially a source of intersubjective agreement
among social agents. It is less a matter of objectivity than agreement; less
a matter of correspondence than consesus. Like Wittgenstein, Hegel
believes that not only are judgments of true and false matters of human
agreement but also of forms of life.69
The consensus theory of truth that I am attributing to Hegel should
not be misunderstood. What Hegel is seeking to do is to replace the older
conception of truth as agreement with reality with one based on
agreement injudgment, language, forms of life. As we have seen with the
brief analysis of sense certainty, there is no reality outside of the
linguistic categories and concepts we use to describe, explain, and
evaluate it. Truth is thus always realized in some form of community.
Now what is crucial to a community is some notion of mutuality,
respect, and esteem. Judgments cannot be legitimately produced by

either force or fraud but must be the outcome of discussion, persuasion,
and dialogue. Contemporary social theorists like Jurgen Habermas and
Hans-Georg Gadamer have spoken of the principles of unconstrained
dialogue and communication as the only means of arriving at the
truth.70 Only when all conditions of domination, coercion, and asymmet-
rical power relations have been suspended can the participants in such a
dialogue be said to be members of a community of speakers. As for the
concrete features of such a community, there would, no doubt, be great
disagreement between Hegel, Gadamer, and Habermas, but all are
certain that the inquiry into the conditions of truth may prepare the way
for a deliberation on the justice of particular social arrangements.
The great virtue of Hegel's consensus theory of truth is that it shifts
the burden of proof away from the individual language user to the
community. The community becomes, then, the standard of all values,
including truth. Without some telos of agreement, we would encounter
the kind of skepticism or "bad infinity" that prohibits from the outset
the possibility of intersubjective agreement. But herein lies the difficulty.
For if this reading of Hegel is correct, then the appeal to some form of
community or consensus as the locus of truth merely serves to establish
one more foundation or guarantee for the legitimation of knowledge.
Hegel's need for a telos of agreement merely smuggles in epistemology
through the back door.71 Furthermore, it could be argued, the appeal to
consensus as a condition of truth is not a means of enhancing freedom
but stifling it. Such a consensus must necessarily establish itself as an
orthodoxy, the arbiter of true and false, acceptable and unacceptable,
which in turn serves to inhibit the flow of "unconstrained discourse." In
the end, Hegel's solution to the problem of knowledge looks like a
halfway house between traditional epistemology and the later more
dangerous versions of skepticism: genealogy and deconstruction.
The chief problem was that Hegel was never able to make clear just
how such a rationally achieved consensus could be secured. For there
are no a priori reasons to suppose that all rational agents will agree
about what conditions are most propitious for arriving at the truth.
However, Hegel almost certainly believed that the participants to any
such consensus would have to consent to (a) the legitimacy of the social
and political institutions of postrevolutionary Europe and (b) his theory
of Absolute Knowledge. But surely his critics are correct to point out
that in the more than 150 years since Hegel's death, the institutions of
the modern constitutional state have never ceased to be in question; and
furthermore, even if Hegel is right to assert that freedom requires

form of knowledge, it does not follow that it requires us to ac
Hegel's theory of Absolute Knowledge.
Fifth, a final implication of Hegel's claim to Absolute Knowledge is
that it stands at the end of history. Whatever Hegel's critics (and
apologists) have maintained, he believed himself to have lived at that
absolute moment when the meaning of history would at last be made
clear. History, for Hegel, represented the struggle of human beings to
achieve complete satisfaction. This satisfaction will be attained only
when we have acquired both intellectual and moral mastery over
ourselves and the world. The Phenomenology, combined with the
Science of Logic, represents Hegel's path to epistemic sovereignty; the
Philosophy of Right, along with the Philosophy of History, represents
the road to moral mastery. For Hegel, his own system of science
represents the closing of the circle of knowledge because it could claim
successfully to bring out the rationality of what is. In words that have
become firmly etched into the philosophical consciousness of our age,
he writes that
when philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By
philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of
Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk.72
Once this insight is achieved, Hegel hoped, philosophy could at last

refrain from teaching the world what it ought to be and restrict itself to
showing "how the state, the ethical universe is to be understood."73 Only
when we recognize the rationality of the real can we be said to have
attained to the end of history.
Hegel's claim to be standing at the end of history will no doubt strike
skeptical readers as an unparalleled piece of arrogance or even
chauvinism. In the first place, his claim to have put knowledge in its final
form seems to be empirically unsupportable. Historical change is, on
Hegel's own account, brought about to a large degree by radical
conceptual innovation. But there is no way to predict with certainty
when such innovation may cease. As Karl Popper has shown, since
history is controlled in part by the direction of knowledge and since the
direction of knowledge cannot be predicted, we cannot predict the
future direction of history.74 Hegel seems to have drastically underesti-
mated the essential openness and unpredictability of experience.
Second, even if Hegel was right that his was the last word in the
community of free men, the result might be not elevating bu

For Nietzsche whose essay on The Use and Abuse of History is the locus
classicus of the critique of Hegelian historicism, "there has been no
dangerous turning point in the progress of German culture in this
century that has not been made more dangerous by the enormous and
still living influence of this Hegelian philosophy."175 The danger in
question is that contemporary man "by a neat turn of the wheel" is
suddenly elevated by Hegel to "the perfection of the world's history."
Such an insight, for Nietzsche, would have the effect of turning modern
men into mere epigones with nothing great or noble left to do. What
Hegel ought to have said, then, is "that everything after him was merely
to be regarded as the musical coda of the great historical rondo-or
rather, as simply superfluous. "76 The end of history, if such a thing wer
possible, would not mean the complete satisfaction of human desire but
would result in a kind of generalized aimlessness and loss of meaning.
The land of Minerva's Owl would be for Nietzsche nothing so much as
the world of the "last man," the one great herd without a shepherd.77
Hegel's critics need not be accorded the last word. Recent political
events may not so much disprove as confirm Hegel's judgment on
history. World War II, it has been suggested, was nothing so much as an
internecine struggle between the "left" and "right" wings of the Hegelian
school.78 Indeed, as recently as 1946, a profound and sympathetic
interpreter of Hegel could write the following:
Observing what was taking place around me and reflecting on what had taken place
in the world since the Battle of Jena, I understood that Hegel was right to see in this
battle the end of History properly so-called.... From the authentically historical
point of view, the two world wars with their retinue of large and small revolutions
had only the effect of bringing the backward civilizations of the peripheral
provinces into line with the most advanced ... European [i.e., Hegelian] historical
positions.79
More important, when properly understood, Hegel's claim to have

arrived at the end of history need not be taken as an uncritical
endorsement of the status quo. The claim to have put knowledge in its
final form does not commit him to the view that no future change is
possible, but only that such changes as does occur will have to submit to
the same kind of immanent or internal critique that Hegel himself
practiced. Hegelian critical theory as the retrospective reconstruction of
events purports to bring out the rationality of the real. This is not, of
course, to advance the false belief that whatever is is rational. Reality or
actuality (Wirlichkeit) is a technical term in Hegel's vocabulary that

must be distinguished from mere existence (Existenz). In a lengthy
footnote to the 1830 edition of the Encyclopedia, he explains that
actuality consists only of those aspects of what is that are in full
agreement with reason.80
The implications of this conception of rationality for critical theory
are considerable. Hegel's point, suggested throughout this article, is that
over the long haul, nothing can persist that continually frustrates our
interests in the realization of reason. Social critique, therefore, properly
applies to those laws, institutions, or practices that inhibit the emergence
of an intersubjective agreement or consensus among agents. Far from a
plea for social quietism or complacency, there is an unstated premise in
Hegel that what is not yet fully rational should be made so: What is
actual should become rational.81 The temporalization of reason need
not result in the abandonment of a critical standpoint. Rather, reason
here holds open the door for revolution. It is in this sense, then, that
Hegel can be regarded as the true founder of later critical theory.
NOTES
1. For works acknowledging Hegel's importance for this literature, see Theodor
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. by E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 19730;
Drei Studien zu Hegel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974); Ernst Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt:
Erlauterungen zu Hegel(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972); Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and
Human Interests, trans. by Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971); Herbert
Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1955); Hegels Ontologie und die Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1968); Michael Rosen, Hegel's Dialectic and its Criticism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982).
2. For excellent discussions of the concept of critique, see Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik
und Krise: Ein Beitrag zur Pathogenese der Burgerlichen Welt (Freiburg: Karl Abler,
1959); Kurt Rottgers, Kritik und Praxis: Zur Geschichte des Kritikbegriffs von Kant bis
Marx (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975); see also the discussion in Paul Connerton, The
Tragedy of Enlightenment: An Essay on the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980), 16-26.
3. See Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Relativism and Objectivism (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); Fred J. Dallmayr, 7he Twilight of Subjectivity:
Contributions to a Post-Individualist Theory of Politics (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1981); Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1982); I have also dealt with some of these issues in my
Reading Althusser: An Essay on Structural Marxism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1984).
4. G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. by J. B. Baille (London:

George Allen & Unwin, 1971), 137.
5. Hegel, Phenomenology.
6. G.W.F. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel (Lesser Logic), trans. by William Wallace
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 100, para. 64.
7. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. by E. S. Haldane and
F. H. Simson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), 3: 295, 298.
8. G.W.F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. by A. V. Miller(London: George Allen
& Unwin, 1969), 588.
9. Hegel, Lesser Logic, 66, para. 41.
10. Hegel, Phenomenology, 132-133.
11. Hegel, Phenomenology, 140.
12. Jean Hyppolite, Genese et structure de la phenomenologie de l'esprit de Hegel
(Paris: Aubier, 1946), 16; George Lukacs, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations
between Dialectics and Economics, trans. by Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press,
1975), 54, 296.
16. Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. by James H.
Nichols, Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 176; see also Kenley Dove, "Hegel's
Phenomenological Method," Review of Metaphysics 23 (1970), 615-641.
17. The best works are Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York:
Seabury Press, 1975); R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1956); Charles Taylor, "Interpretation and the Science of Man," Review of Metaphysics
25 (1971), 3-51.
21. G.W.F. Hegel, Verhaltnis des Skepticismus zur Philosophie, Werke in zwanzig
Banden, ed. by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl M. Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 2:
227.
22. Hegel, Verhaltnis des Skepticismus, 240.
23. The best treatment of this subject is Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Hegel and the
Ancient Dialectic," Hegel's Dialectic, trans. by P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1976).
24. Hegel, Lesser Logic, 64, para. 39.
25. For those surprised to see Hegel in this company see Raymond Plant, Hegel
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973), 132, 187, 202-203; Charles Taylor, Hegel and
Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 163-164.
26. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 308.
30. Hegel, History of Philosophy, 2: 341.

34. Hegel, History of Philosophy, 2: 310-311.
36. Hegel, Science of Logic, 113.
39. Hegel, Science of Logic, 106-108.
40. For discussion, see J. N. Findlay, The Philosophy of Hegel (New York:
Macmillan, 1966), 78-79, 357-358; Plant, Hegel, 129-131; Taylor, Hegel and Modern
Society, 32-37, 53-54; Burleigh T. Wilkins, Hegel's Philosophy of History (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1974), 143-190.
42. Leo Strauss, 7he City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 53.
43. See R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Chicago: Regnery, 1972),
290-295.
44. See Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1933), 155, for a fuller discussion of Hegel's views, see William H. Walsh,
Philosophy of History: An Introduction (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 134-150;
"Principle and Prejudice in Hegel's Philosophy of History," Hegel's Political Philosophy:
Problems and Perspectives, ed. by Z. A. Pelczynski (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1971).
45. J. J. Drydyk, "Who is Fooled by the 'Cunning of Reason"7 History and Theory 24
(1985), 163-164.
46. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. by J. Sibree (New York: Dover,
1956), 9-10, 17-19.
47. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 20.
49. Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society, 100.
50. Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt, 234-235.
51. Jon Elster, "Marxism, Functionalism, and Game Theory: The Case for Methodologi-
cal Individualism," Theory and Society 11 (1982), 454-455.
52. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 33-34; see also Science of Logic, 746-747.
58. Kojeve, Introduction to Hegel, 176.
59. Kojeve, Introduction to Hegel.
60. G.W.F. Hegel, Natural Law, trans. by T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1975), 64.
62. This problem is treated in my "Hegel's Critique of Liberalism,"American Political
Science Review 80, no. 1 (March, 1986), 121-139.
63. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, IV, 1124a 1-2.

69. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G.E.M. Anscombe
(New York: Macmillan, 1968), 88, para. 241. "So you are saying that human agreement
decides what is true and what is false?-It is what human beings say that is true and false;
and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in forms of
life."
70. Jurgen Habermas, "Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence," Inquiry
13 (1970), and "Wahrheitstheorien," Wirklichkeit und Reflexion: Festschriftfur Walter
Schulz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1973); Gadamer, Truth and Method, 330-333, 345-351.
71. See Richard Rorty, "Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism," Consequences
of Pragmatism, 173-174, and more fully "Habermas and Lyotard on Post-Modernity,"
Praxis International 4 (1984), 32-44; see also William E. Connolly, "Mirror of America,"
Raritan 3 (1983), 124-135.
72. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. by T. M. Knox (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1967), 13.
73. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 11.
74. Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (New York: Harper& Row, 1964), vi-vii.
75. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. by Adrian Collins
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1979), 51.
76. Nietzsche, History, 52.
77. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. by Walter Kaufmann
(London: Penguin Books, 1966), 18.
78. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975),
249.
79. Kojeve, Introduction to Hegel, 160.
80. Hegel, Lesser Logic, 8-10, para. 6.
81. It was in this sense that Hegel was understood by Marx and the Young Hegelians
of the 1 840s under the slogan the "realization of philosophy." For an excellent critique of
this position, see Lucio Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in Ideology and
Society, trans. by John Merrington and Judith White (London: New Left Books, 1972),
115-120.
Steven B. Smith is Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He is

the author ofReading Althusser: An Essay on Structural Marxism (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1984), and has also published articles on Hegel, Marx, and
Althusser in the Review of Politics, American Political Science Review, and Social
Science Quarterly.

Hegels Idea of A Criticsl Theory

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Hegel's Idea of a Critical Theory

Author(s): Steven B. Smith

H EGEL IS OFTEN regarded as a central figure in the develop-

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 15 No. 1, February 1987 99-126

THE THEOR Y OF IMMANENT CRITIQUE

Hegel's approach to critical theory begins by rejecting what is

announced already in the "Introduction" to the Phenomenology, the

Hegel's starting point in the Phenomenology seems, then, entirely

Hegel's argument, it should be said, is not limited to Kant alon

into the presuppositions of knowledge prior to any actual cogniti

Kant demanded a criticism of the faculty of cognition as preliminary to its exer

The argument here is, I believe, conclusive. It is directed agains

Hegel's answer to the problems inherent in traditional philosophy is

experience in question measures up to our criteria of adequacy, but

Hegel's response to the traditional problem of knowledge might at

THE LOGIC OF DETERMINATE NEGATION

The first objection, then, to Hegel's rejection of traditional e

rethinking or reproducing the thoughts of another in terms that would

Ideologiekritik practiced later by Marx, Nietzsche, and members of

certainty, begins with the destruction of the horizon of everyday

skepticism as it tries not only to negate but to establish and aff

teleological is meant that history as a whole expresses a sort of

functionalist explanations in the social sciences. Elster goes on to

What Hegel means by rational necessity, then, is the ability to

enterprise sought to expel any sense of human interest or "

There are evident difficulties with Hegel's ascription of an objective

On the basis of this passage, some interpreters have suggested that

ABSOLUTE KNOWLEDGE AND

Hegel describes his philosophy in the Phenomenology as the

In describing his philosophy as knowledge of the "Absolute," Hegel is

previous knowledge, a synoptic survey of the whole. One could almost

of rational harmony and coherence. Only what is expressed in th

respect, and esteem. Judgments cannot be legitimately produced by

furthermore, even if Hegel is right to assert that freedom requires

Once this insight is achieved, Hegel hoped, philosophy could at last

community of free men, the result might be not elevating bu

More important, when properly understood, Hegel's claim to have

actuality (Wirlichkeit) is a technical term in Hegel's vocabulary that

4. G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. by J. B. Baille (London:

33. Hegel, History of Philosophy, 2: 341.

66. Hegel, Phenomenology, 98.

Steven B. Smith is Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He is

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