ABSTRACT

A timely aspect of the revival of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s work has been the examination of his ideas by feminists identifying the masculinist assumptions underpinning the history of political thought. Hegel’s commitment to such a ‘functionalist’ or reductionist view of the family as a necessary and natural institution, argues Moller Okin, is expressed in his treatment of the male head of the family as its only political representative and the fact that he ‘disposed of the female half of the human race.’ Hegel’s political theory is rooted in teleological assumptions regarding male and female nature, which he distinguishes in terms of ‘the analogue of form and matter whereby the male provides the human form during mating and the female serves as a vessel within which the male-created homunculus incubates’. Hegel’s arguments render him an unpromising candidate for inclusion within feminist theory.