ABSTRACT
Both the traditions of the juridical and moral ordering of war continue to exercise a great deal of influence over how a concept of war is understood in late modernity. To a great extent, contemporary thinking about war and the manner through which a notion of right is attached to war are still ordered by these traditions of thinking. Generally, the right to war is understood as state sovereign war, a de-theologized form of violence which excludes from its sphere of legitimacy non-sovereign violence. The right to war is also morally ordered. A Western moral discourse attempts to limit state war and places state actors under a moral obligation to adhere to and realize a form of suprastate cosmopolitan law. In many cases, war is framed as a secular, moral form of just war under which justification is claimed through grand concepts such as peace, freedom, human rights and democracy. This chapter introduces another form of war’s ordering called the ethical
ordering of war. An account of the ethical ordering of war is developed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel inherits both the Westphalian juridical notion of war as state sovereign war and Kant’s critical and moral philosophy. In part, Hegel re-frames the moral account of war to comprehend the operation of war within a wider theory of ethical life (Sittlichkeit). Hegel orders war around an ethical theory which focuses upon the role and status of war in the realization of human freedom within the ethical life of the modern state. At first glance, Hegel’s account of war might appear as somewhat dangerous. For some, it conjures up images of authoritarian or Fascist states of the past and the present which justify wars fought for the glory of the nation, race or civilization. The connection of Hegel to absolutism and Fascism has always been tenuous and highly unfair to Hegel.1 Significantly, such assertions have mischaracterized Hegel’s efforts to demonstrate how any account of ethics and ethical life is bound up with the work of violence. From a Hegelian perspective, an account of ethics fails if it does not attempt to understand the position of violence within ethics itself. Many Western accounts of ethics within modernity have ignored the significance of this Hegelian lesson and have run into
crippling conceptual difficulties when they are forced to rely upon violence to realize their own particular moral positions. There are certainly some unsettling moments within Hegel’s approach to
war and his account of an ethics of exclusion. However, it is intellectually dishonest to simply reduce Hegel’s account of war to these elements. When Hegel’s account of war is placed within his wider philosophical system and method, then his account can be seen to draw attention to some central insights into war which many moderns simply overlook. This chapter shows how Hegel places war within the context of a wider theoretical relation between thinking and violence and within a cognitive and ethical theory of recognition (Anerkennung). This theory attempts to explain some of the causes of social and institutional violence and how, as a praxis of recognition, social violence might be overcome or at least minimized. By reading Hegel’s account of war through an interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy in which a theory of recognition is given central emphasis, this chapter draws out aspects of the ethical ordering of war and its relevance to thinking about the rightness of war in the present.
