Approaching Joachim Ritter's Hegel

Writing in the ‘Editor’s Introduction’ for his Cambridge edition of G. W. F. Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1991), Allen W. Wood set out the case that ‘although Hegel’s theory was put forward as a rational defence of the modern state, his true legacy belongs rather to the critics of modern society’. Wood suggested that Hegel can be identified to be a socially critical theorist in particular because ‘the basic tendency of Hegel’s social thought is to undermine modern society’s liberal self-interpretation’. By this Wood meant that although Hegel ‘leaves the liberal’s state pretty much intact’, his social theory can be ‘mercilessly critical of the ahistorical, individualistic and moralistic rationale which liberalism provides for it’.[i] Part of liberalism’s individualistic self-rationale is identified by Wood when he goes on to maintain that Hegel’s contrastingly ‘communitarian’ rationale for modern political life aiming to actualize freedom, ‘leads us to question the value of the formalisms […] with which liberals wish to identify “freedom”’ – one of which is ‘the protection of individual liberties’. For Wood, Hegel’s suggestion that the freedom afforded by the protection of individual liberties is merely formal enables a critique of liberal orthodoxy’s exclusive focus on subjects’ rights; to see that ‘the formal freedom to make arbitrary choices and express our subjectivity leads in the direction of alienation rather than self-actualization’ is also to critique such formal freedom in the sense of subjects’ rights.[ii]

Unlike liberalism, Hegel’s thought advises – as Wood notes – both that ‘we cannot be free unless our social life is self-transparent’ and the necessity for ‘concrete social situatedness and integration’. Hegel’s communitarian rationale for political life, which insists on a sense of society’s structuration around individuals’ social roles, can thus indicate – Wood argues – how desperately lacking is the merely formal freedom of existing society which remains unaware of our social situatedness:

‘This [communitarian rationale] provides the basis for an indictment of any society which tries to call itself “free” even though it fails to offer its members any rationally credible sense of collective purpose, leaves them cynically discontented with and alienated from its political institutions, deprives them of a socially structured sense of self-identity, and condemns many of them to lives of poverty, frustration and alienation.’[iii]

Hegel’s tendency not to attack the liberal state whilst nonetheless supplying a critique of liberalism’s individualistic rationale for that state accords with what Wood refers to as ‘the “centrist-reformist” image of Hegel’s political philosophy’ which was defended after World War Two by scholars such as T. M. Knox, Eric Weil and Joachim Ritter. This image, Wood adds, became the view of Hegel’s social theory propounded by the ‘responsible’ mainstream of Hegel interpretation through to the 1980s.[iv] I want to focus here on the reception of Hegel offered to postwar West Germany in Ritter’s 1969 Metaphysik und Politik: Studien zu Aristoteles und Hegel, a selection of essays from which appeared in English in Ritter’s Hegel and the French Revolution: Essays on the Philosophy of Right (1982).

In his ‘Translator’s Introduction’ to the latter collection, Richard Dien Winfield pointed to how Hegel – again ‘in contrast to liberal theory’ – did not ‘proceed from any predetermined notion of freedom, which is then employed as a principle to determine and legitimate the various relations of right’. For Hegel it was right – justice – that was the fundamental issue: for him the problem of the legitimacy of modernity, for instance, must be addressed in philosophy ‘from the vantage point of the theory of justice’. It is precisely this, Winfield noted too, that Ritter’s work on Hegel’s philosophy of right underlines: how Hegel supplied not just means for ‘developing further the theory of justice itself’, but also ‘the basic conceptual tools for assessing the justice of the modern age’. Ritter’s readings draw out, moreover, how Hegel – in contrast to liberal theory – was ‘devoted to establishing and determining justice as freedom, not by postulating freedom as the prior principle of justice, but by developing the structures of justice themselves as the constitutive reality of freedom’.[v]     

Hegel asserts, as Winfield writes, that ‘freedom is the sole substance and content of justice’. That is, ‘freedom is not a principle of justice, out of which relations of right are to be derived, but an actual structure of right’. Winfield stresses Ritter’s attention to the fact that ‘Hegel expressly declares that the philosophy of right can have no other task than following out the self-determination of the Idea of freedom’. For Hegel, crucially, to conceive ‘right as the Idea of freedom’ was for him to conceive right in terms of ‘the system of justice consisting in the relations in which the free will determines itself in all its possible modes and thereby achieves its full realization’. Hegel grounded the legitimacy – the ‘normative validity’ – of modernity on the basis of such freedom as the ‘substance and content’ of justice: ‘every normative sphere of action has its valid universality by comprising a specific structure of freedom’ (Winfield). It is also worth noting that what Winfield calls the ‘system of right incorporating all practical relations as determinations of freedom’ comprises ‘just spheres’ such as, notably, ‘person and property’.[vi]

Right, that is, enables the lived realization of freedom through property relations. Social interaction – ‘practical relations’ – entailed for Hegel, in Winfield’s words, ‘no universal ideal of freedom, awaiting embodiment, but rather the real relationship of persons through property’. This ‘real relationship of persons through property’ was – Winfield continues – recognized by Hegel ‘to be the specifically abstract right of interaction’s minimal reality’. Hegel’s assertion that property relations ‘comprise the most basic interaction of freedom’ (Winfield) is underlined by Ritter in his 1961 essay ‘Person and Property: On Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Paragraphs 34-81’. ‘[…] Hegel conceives the freedom which civil right posits in property as the determinate being of freedom in all stages of its realization.’[vii] Ritter also emphasized Hegel’s observation that only the modern achievement ‘that individuals come to be recognized as bearers of a free will, irrespective of any natural determinations unrelated to the will’s recognizable expression’, has enabled the establishment of ‘the most elemental of rights, the right to property, as a universal aspect of the life of willing individuals’ (Winfield). Hegel saw too, however, that abstract right brings with it ‘conflicts and wrongs’ – such as fraud or open violations of property rights – which cannot be ‘resolved and righted’ through the means of abstract right alone. Hegel’s awareness of ‘the deficient abstractness of personhood’ opened into his theorization of how ‘individuals interact not simply as persons, giving their wills a particular embodiment in property, but as moral subjects who make it their own intention to do right in general’. Whilst it is true that for Hegel abstract right enables the lived realization of freedom through property relations, for him abstract right also ‘becomes the most rudimentary component of a more encompassing reality of freedom’, the other components of which are ‘other forms of right’ (Winfield).[viii]    

But we can look in more detail at the emphasis laid by Ritter on Hegel’s argument that right enables the lived realization of freedom through property relations. Ritter stressed that Hegel was ‘the first in Germany at that time to see’ that ‘the overcoming of all dependency stemming from the state of nature’ was enabled by ‘the determination of nature as object of the will presupposed in the property relation’, and also the first to grasp this as ‘the truth of civil law and its abstract freedom, limited to the relations of persons to objects of the will taken as property’.[ix] Whilst, as we have seen already, Ritter recognized Hegel’s ascription to modernity of the freeing of the will from the influence of ‘natural determinations’, it was more important for Ritter to underscore the primacy of individuals’ autonomous exercise of the will within this process: ‘the relationship in which persons give themselves a determinate being in objects of the will is the commencement of freedom’. Moreover, adds Ritter, ‘rule in the form of the state presupposes the freedom of right’. This is because ‘where freedom becomes actual in the right of the person to objects of the will, all forms of “rule” based upon man’s natural condition and the order of nature become an injustice’. Ritter here glosses paragraph 57 of the Philosophy of Right in order to note that the ‘truth of abstract civil right’ is ‘grounded herein’:

‘[…] Man, who, as a natural being, is free only “according to the concept,” only “implicitly” and “potentially,” can first become free in actu when he frees himself from the unfreedom of the state of nature and makes nature an object of the will, breaking its power.’[x]    

Karl Marx, Ritter saw, would go on to separate property from the freedom associated with liberation from nature: ‘revolutionary theory is […] led to posit the liberation from nature as the true social core of the freedom constitutive for civil society, and to play this off against the form of its property’. But for Hegel, as Ritter foregrounds, ‘the truth of civil law and its abstract freedom, limited to the relations of persons to objects of the will taken as property’ relates to modern society’s overcoming of nature’s unfreedom. Hegel, Ritter noted, certainly linked property (and civil society) to poverty, or to what at one point he calls ‘the negativity that it [property] signifies’. But crucially, ‘Hegel insists nevertheless that property must have the “character of private property” (par. 46)’. This is because, as Ritter emphasizes, ‘the externality of civil society, which, on the one hand, offers the spectacle of extravagance and want, is for Hegel, on the other hand, the existence of individual freedom.’ Hegel argued that private property enables individuals’ freedom, maintaining that ‘the relationship of persons limited to objects of the will is not only the condition of liberation from nature, but simultaneously the positive condition of the freedom of individuals’ (Ritter).[xi]  

Hegel, Ritter stresses, brings out ‘the fact that with civil right the freedom of personality comes into existence in person and property’. Ritter outlined how ‘Hegel incorporates into the theory of property the determination of the freedom of the person from out of subjectivity’, thus tracing the shift from the ‘person’ of civil society to the ‘personality’ gaining freedom, by reading how Hegel makes of the individual an object and thus someone who is self-subsistent.

‘[…] In property “my will, as the will of a person, and so as a single will, becomes objective” (par. 46), in that “I am myself an immediate individual” (par. 47) and “I as free will am an object to myself” (par. 45).’[xii] 

By willing an object to be property, the subject exercising civil right makes of itself an object: something alienated, but also, importantly, that which can attain self-subsistence. Ritter writes that ‘for the very first time in history civil right gives “the development of particularity to self-subsistance [sic]” its right’, as well as pointing to the transition from person to personality occurring within civil society. ‘In the context of the Philosophy of Right, it is unmistakably clear that in civil society the “self-subsistent inherently infinite personality of the individual” comes as such to its realization.’ A footnote recommends a ‘beautifully systematic investigation’, Hegel als Denker der Individualität (1957), by H. Schmitz.[xiii]

Ritter goes on to explain that for Hegel modern civil society ‘elevates freedom to the universal principle through the determination of labour and of all labour relations in such a form that skills can only be alienated as objects of the will and property for a limited time’. Within labour it is this only temporary self-alienation of the subject qua skills which ‘releases to the person in himself, as personality, his selfhood and its realization’. In a similar way, as Ritter sees, it is civil society’s self-restriction to property relations that, in Hegel’s scheme, in effect ‘liberates the individual’ as spiritual ‘personality’ within the state. For, as Ritter added in a footnote, ‘the freedom of subjectivity and its realization becomes for Hegel the substance and foundation of the modern state’.[xiv]

‘Here lies the reason why, in Hegel’s view, the freedom of property is the principle with which Christian freedom first of all achieves existence: Since [sic] society restricts itself to the relations of persons to one another mediated through property, it liberates the individual as personality to become subject in everything which constitutes the wealth and depth of the personal, ethical, spiritual being that is now untouched by any determination as object of the will.’[xv]

Ritter’s readings enable us to see how Hegel’s assertion of the importance of property relations within civil society is central to how (in Wood’s words) ‘without denying the right of persons and subjects, Hegel asserts against liberal orthodoxy the vital necessity for modern humanity of concrete social situatedness’. Hegel suggested that ‘we cannot be free unless our social life is self-transparent’ (Wood): only rational insight into the (temporary) self-alienation of the subject within concrete labour processes, for example, can enable us to imagine the release of selfhood when skills are not alienated as property from the individual. In the meanwhile – to continue to echo Wood – the offer of liberal theory of ‘the formal freedom to make arbitrary choices and express our subjectivity’, as if upholding individual rights without admitting that ‘society restricts itself to the relations of persons to one another mediated through property’ (Ritter), simply ‘leads in the direction of alienation rather than self-actualization’.[xvi]     

30.9.22

 

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[i] ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. by Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; first publ. 1991), pp. vii-xxxii (pp. xxviii, xxvii, xxviii).  

[ii] Wood, pp. xxviii, xxix.

[iii] Wood, pp. xxix, xxviii.

[iv] Wood, p. xxxi n. 10.

[v] ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in Joachim Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution: Essays on the Philosophy of Right, trans. by Richard Dien Winfield (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984; first publ. 1982), pp. 1-34 (pp. 3, 2). 

[vi] Winfield, pp. 3, 10, 3, 4, 6.

[vii] Winfield, pp. 10-11, 12; Ritter, p. 131.

[viii] Winfield, pp. 12, 13, 14, 13.

[ix] Ritter, pp. 136-37, 136, 137.

[x] Ritter, pp. 135, 134.

[xi] Ritter, pp. 138, 139, 138-39, 139.

[xii] Ritter, pp. 142, 149 n. 12, 139.

[xiii] Ritter, pp. 139, 149 n. 11.

[xiv] Ritter, pp. 141, 149 n. 11.

[xv] Ritter, pp. 140-41.

[xvi] Wood, p. xxix.