The abyss of right: Hegel⇔s philosophy of right and the question of poverty

Abstract

Hegel's interpretation of the question of poverty in modern states has been an important topic in Hegelian scholarship. His early engagement with political economy (e.g., John Locke, Adam Smith and James Steuart) and his attentiveness to social phenomena made him especially concerned with the ethical significance of poverty. Poverty is a puzzling issue for Hegel: it appears both as a necessary and unsolvable outcome of the modern rational ethical life and as an ethical failure that undermines the legitimation of this very form of life. In this paper, I articulate and defend Hegel's understanding of poverty as an ethical failure, by showing that it frustrates fundamental aspects of the actualization of the concept of freedom. Also, I argue that Hegel's failures in the face of this puzzle, namely that he is not able to map the necessity of this problem onto the rationale of modern ethical life, stem from the fact that he could not understand that there is another operative law in modern markets, i.e. the law of value, which does not correspond to the market's rational justification as theorized in his account of “civil society”. Finally, I contend that the philosopher's impasse expresses a rationality deficit in modern civil society itself. By arguing so I shed light on important aspects of Hegel's conception of modernity and show how this interesting philosopher can be insightful even in his blind spots.