ABSTRACT
Philosophers and political theorists have long been baffled about Hegel’s standards, or lack of standards, of political legitimacy. Frederick Neuhouser (2000) articulates the normative standards of Hegel’s social philosophy to explain Hegel’s requirements for any social order to be rational and to show that Hegel’s account of these requirements is philosophically compelling. Hegel’s ‘social theory … is unsurpassed in its richness, its philosophical rigor, and its insights into the nature of good social institutions’. Neuhouser identifies three important subjective aspects of social freedom: Comprehension of the social world in which one lives and (inter-)acts; the ‘practical identity’ each of us develops through our social interactions, and the rationality inherent in well-ordered social institutions, including the family, civil society, government and the nation. These findings illuminate Hegel’s account of the relations between individual and collective goods, the merits of a rationally well-ordered republic, and the roles Hegel identifies for rational social criticism. The chapter closes by crediting Neuhouser’s incisive account of the subjective aspects of social freedom to raise the more fundamental issue of Hegel’s analysis and justification of the objective aspects of social freedom – the central topic of this study.
