As Hegel uses the term, “civil society” is a form of social life driven by self-interest. Agents in civil society only cooperate voluntarily and for private reasons. Hegel includes it as a necessary part of the social world in which the will is free, or of “ethical life.” But it can be hard to see why he includes it. One reason is that the self-interested behavior of agents in civil society doesn’t seem particularly “ethical.” Another is that, according to Hegel, civil society produces an unfree “rabble,” and more generally a “spectacle” of “ethical corruption.” It can be tempting to conclude that Hegel did not really see civil society as part of ethical life, or just that he should not have. This dissertation is an attempt to resist that temptation: I want to make sense of Hegel’s inclusion of civil society as a part of ethical life, while doing justice to the ethical concerns that tempt us to exclude it.
In Chapter One, I explain a unique contribution civil society makes to freedom: participating in it transforms our needs in such a way that satisfying them can be a rational, free activity. In Chapter Two, I explain under what conditions, for Hegel, civil society gives rise to a “rabble,” and why, for Hegel, this would be “ethical corruption.” I then explain how Hegel connects the ethical corruption of civil society to its characteristic self-understanding. In Chapter Three, to make sense of the ethical ambivalence of civil society, I consider Hegel’s striking remark that civil society is “the world of appearance of the ethical.” In civil society, I argue, the individual’s self-interest both manifests the ethical and tends to put itself forward as independent of the ethical. I argue that when we pursue our self-interest in accordance with law and transform our needs in the way described in Chapter One our collective activity constitutes a “world of appearance of the ethical,” and I try to say why it matters, for Hegel, that the ethical “appears.”
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/49214 |
| Date | 09 September 2024 |
| Creators | Mendez, Daniel Maceo |
| Contributors | Sedgwick, Sally |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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