The Actual And The Rational : Hegel And Objective Spirit

The Actual and the Rational : Hegel and Objective Spirit

By JEAN-FRANCOIS KERVEGAN (Author) , DANIELA GINSBURG (Translator), MARTIN SHUSTER (Translator)

ISBN 9780226023809

Pages 416

Year 2018

Edition 0

Publisher UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Subject PHILOSOPHY

~~Rs 4840.00~~ Rs 3872.00

Description

One of Hegel’s most controversial and confounding claims is that “the real is rational and the rational is real.” In this book, one of the world’s leading scholars of Hegel, Jean-François Kervégan, offers a thorough analysis and explanation of that claim, along the way delivering a compelling account of modern social, political, and ethical life.

Kervégan begins with Hegel’s term “objective spirit,” the public manifestation of our deepest commitments, the binding norms that shape our existence as subjects and agents. He examines objective spirit in three realms: the notion of right, the theory of society, and the state. In conversation with Tocqueville and other theorists of democracy, whether in the Anglophone world or in Europe, Kervégan shows how Hegel—often associated with grand metaphysical ideas—actually had a specific conception of civil society and the state. In Hegel’s view, public institutions represent the fulfillment of deep subjective needs—and in that sense, demonstrate that the real is the rational, because what surrounds us is the product of our collective mindedness. This groundbreaking analysis will guide the study of Hegel and nineteenth-century political thought for years to come.

About Author(s)

Jean-François Kervégan is full professor at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.Daniela Ginsburg is a freelance translator. She cotranslated Knowledge of Life by Georges Canguilhem.Martin Shuster is professor of philosophy and the Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Content

Preface: Hegel without Metaphysics?

Prologue: The Actual and the Rational

PART I The Law: The Positivity of Abstraction

Preliminary: The Objectivity of Willing

1 Law: Its Concept and Actualizations

2 Between Nature and History: The Law

3 Contract: The Legal Conditions of the Social

PART II The Vitality and Flaws of the Social

Preliminary: The Archeology of Society

4 “Citoyen” versus “Bourgeois”? The Quest for the “Spirit of the Whole

5 The State of Law: Civil Society