Hegel and Capitalism

Description

Bringing together scholars from varying perspectives, this book examines the value of Hegel's thought for understanding and assessing capitalism, both as encountered by Hegel himself and in forms it takes today. The contributors consider Hegel's complex and multifaceted appraisal of modern market societies, which he understands variously as a condition for a proper account of individual freedom, the framework for a productive account of social interdependency, and the breeding ground for a host of social pathologies concerning individual consumption, labor conditions, and disparities in wealth between the rich and poor. Hegel's ideas about the topic are situated in the context of work by other important thinkers, including Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, J. G. Fichte, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Theodor Adorno, along with contemporary social and economic theorists. Demonstrating the value of Hegel's philosophy for addressing issues pertaining to capitalism today, the essays bring insight to contemporary concerns such as resurgent neoliberalism, economic globalization, the subordination of ever more spheres of human life to the logic of economic imperatives, and the adequacy of models of utility maximization for comprehending contemporary market societies.
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Hegel and Capitalism
Andrew Buchwalter

1. Hegel Discovers Capitalism: Critique of Individualism, Social Labor, and Reification during the Jena Period (1801–1807)
Michalis Skomvoulis

2. Beyond Recognition in Capitalism: From Violence and Caprice to Recognition and Solidarity
Kohei Saito

3. Anonymity, Responsibility, and the Many Faces of Capitalism: Hegel and the Crisis of the Modern Self
Ardis B. Collins

4. The Purest Inequality: Hegel’s Critique of the Labor Contract and Capitalism
Nicholas Mowad

5. Hegel’s Notion of Abstract Labor in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right
Giorgio Cesarale

6. Hegel’s Torment: Poverty and the Rationality of the Modern State
C. J. Pereira Di Salvo

7. Capitalism as Deficient Modernity: Hegel against the Modern Economy
Michael J. Thompson

8. Economy and Ethical Community
Richard Dien Winfield

9. Two Ways of “Taming” the Market: Why Hegel Needs the Police and the Corporations
Lisa Herzog

10. Hegel’s Logical Critique of Capitalism: The Paradox of Dependence and the Model of Reciprocal Mediation
Nathan Ross

11. Hegel and Capitalism: Marxian Perspectives
Tony Smith

12. Hegel’s Ethic of Beruf and the Spirit of Capitalism
Louis Carré

Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 31 août 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9781438458779
• Langue: English

Extrait

Hegel and Capitalism
Hegel and Capitalism
Edited by
Andrew Buchwalter
Cover: Berliner Hinterhäuser im Schnee , by Adolf Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel, 1847
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2015 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Dana Foote
Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hegel and capitalism / edited by Andrew Buchwalter.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5875-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5877-9 (e-book)
1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770–1831. 2. Capitalism. I. Buchwalter, Andrew, editor. B2948.H31738 2015 330.12′2—dc23 2015001350
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Hegel and Capitalism
Andrew Buchwalter
Chapter 1
Hegel Discovers Capitalism: Critique of Individualism, Social Labor, and Reification during the Jena Period (1801–1807)
Michalis Skomvoulis
Chapter 2
Beyond Recognition in Capitalism: From Violence and Caprice to Recognition and Solidarity
Kohei Saito
Chapter 3
Anonymity, Responsibility, and the Many Faces of Capitalism: Hegel and the Crisis of the Modern Self
Ardis B. Collins
Chapter 4
The Purest Inequality: Hegel’s Critique of the Labor Contract and Capitalism
Nicholas Mowad
Chapter 5
Hegel’s Notion of Abstract Labor in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right
Giorgio Cesarale
Chapter 6
Hegel’s Torment: Poverty and the Rationality of the Modern State
C. J. Pereira Di Salvo
Chapter 7
Capitalism as Deficient Modernity: Hegel against the Modern Economy
Michael J. Thompson
Chapter 8
Economy and Ethical Community
Richard Dien Winfield
Chapter 9
Two Ways of “Taming” the Market: Why Hegel Needs the Police and the Corporations
Lisa Herzog
Chapter 10
Hegel’s Logical Critique of Capitalism: The Paradox of Dependence and the Model of Reciprocal Mediation
Nathan Ross
Chapter 11
Hegel and Capitalism: Marxian Perspectives
Tony Smith
Chapter 12
Hegel’s Ethic of Beruf and the Spirit of Capitalism
Louis Carré
Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
The original versions of the chapters contained in this book were presented at the twenty-second biennial meeting of the Hegel Society of America (HSA), held at DePaul University in October 2012. I thank DePaul’s Department of Philosophy for its support of the event and Professor Kevin Thompson for coordinating local arrangements. Thanks are also owed the HSA members who evaluated conference paper submissions.
In addition, I thank the contributors to this volume for their commitment and cooperation; State University of New York Press acquisitions editor Andrew Kenyon for his interest in the project; production editor Dana Foote for her conscientious oversight of the production process; Lauren Hambidge, Donatella SchianoMoriello, and other members of the Center for Instructional Research and Technology at the University of North Florida (UNF) for assistance in preparing the manuscript; Gayle Stillson of the UNF Department of Philosophy for help in preparing permission and release forms; and Katharine Rowe for her counsel throughout. Finally, I wish to express my appreciation to UNF for the funding provided through the John A. Delaney Presidential Professorship, which helped support my work on this project.
Richard Dien Winfield’s chapter, “ Economy and Ethical Community ,” was first published in his book Hegel and the Future of Systematic Philosophy (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Introduction
Hegel and Capitalism
A NDREW B UCHWALTER
Hegel and the Contemporary Discourse on Capitalism
Capitalism, whose historical triumph was for many confirmed with the collapse of the Soviet Union, has in recent years become a topic of significant public consideration. The 2008 financial crisis, declining growth rates, economic stagnation, prolonged unemployment, mounting income inequality, decreasing social mobility, growing personal and public indebtedness, an ongoing housing crisis, the commercialization of more spheres of life, the increasing monetarization of social relations, environmental degradation stemming from industrial production, and a globalization process fueled by multinational corporations operating relatively free from public accountability, have all contributed to growing concerns about the nature, stability, and even legitimacy of Western market economies. In addition, economic globalization has triggered in advanced industrial societies a predilection for austerity measures that, coupled with persistent neoliberal challenges to welfare state policies, have called into question common assumptions about the shape and trajectory of capitalism in postwar societies.
Accompanying these developments has been the proliferation of academic studies devoted to capitalist economies. In recent years such writers as Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, James Galbraith, David Harvey, Thomas Piketty, Debra Satz, Wolfgang Streeck, and Joseph Stiglitz, to name just a few, have authored works that in differing ways address the state of contemporary market economies. In addition, historians in growing numbers have made capitalism a central category of disciplinary inquiry. And there has been a renewed interest in theorists historically associated with the analysis of market economies, including writers so diverse as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Hayek.
So far, however, only a small effort has been made to mine the work of G.W.F. Hegel for understanding the current state of capitalism. This is perhaps not surprising, given that for many Hegel remains first and foremost a champion of the Prussian state and state power generally. Whatever one might say of this assessment, it is nonetheless a mistake to disregard his possible contribution to reflections of the nature and status of capitalist market societies. Even if Hegel rarely used the term capitalism itself, his thought—not only his social theory but his political philosophy and his practical philosophy generally—does represent a sustained and distinctive engagement with the prospects and problems of modern market societies. Indeed, given his contention that philosophy itself represents a response to the tensions and “bifurcations” ( Entzweiungen ) he associated with modern economic life, his general conceptual framework, expressed above all in its notion of dialectics, can itself be construed as a response to the phenomenon of modern capitalism.
The locus classicus for Hegel’s understanding of capitalism is the sphere of civil society ( bürgerliche Gesellschaft ), the middle zone in the theory of ethical life or ethicality ( Sittlichkeit ) he elaborates in his 1821 Philosophy of Right . Here Hegel advances a nuanced and multifaceted analysis of modern market economies. On the one hand, he clearly highlights what he perceives as the strengths and achievements of market societies. He attributes to such societies realization of a defining feature of the modern age: the right of subjective freedom. He locates in modern economies conditions for realizing a principle whose first articulation he attributes to Protestantism: the right to subjective satisfaction. He discerns in the increasing mechanization of labor possibilities for greater human emancipation. He claims that modern market economies, committed in principle to the meritocratic evaluation of individual performance, condition realization of the idea of universal human rights. He calls attention to the cosmopolitan dimension of modern commerce, noting how trade fostered through civil society surpasses national borders in ways that contribute to worldwide adoption of uniform norms of person, property, and contract, while cultivating more developed forms of international cooperation. He also assigns normative status to the capitalist division of labor, which, in forging wide-ranging relations of interdependence between individual and community, underwrites modern accounts of constitutional law, republican politics, and forms of sociality based on mutuality and social cooperation.
On the other hand, Hegel was also an acute and highly prescient observer of the problems and pathologies of modern market economies. The account of “the system of needs” ( das System der Bedürfnisse ) he presents in the section on civil society describes the deadening effect mechanized labor has on the mental and physical well-being of human beings. There Hegel also details how this new social order promotes forms of gratuitous and conspicuous consumption that foster and perpetuate vast wealth disparities between rich and poor. He demonstrates how modern market economies, systemically gripped by boom-bust cycles, generate an impoverished underclass characterized not only by material but above all by psychological deprivations. He describes how such deprivations cultivate in the underclass, termed by him a “rabble” ( Pöbel ), a sense of indignation directed not only at the performance and achievement expectations of modern society but at the modern social order itself. He explains how civil society also promotes the emergence of a “wealthy rabble” typified not only by its material avarice but by an insouciant and disdainful attitude toward less fortunate members of society. He details as well how problems in the functioning of individual market economies trigger a colonizing search for new markets that not only replicates original pathologies