ABSTRACT
In times of social and economic crisis, the imperative to be practical grows ever stronger. No one experiences this imperative more vehemently than the theorist the figure whose vocation inherently finds itself at odds with practical interventions and yet whose work often touches directly on the crisis. Hegel provides a different solution to Voltaire's critique of Leibniz and to the relation between praxis and theory. For Hegel, the effort to arrive at practice in the act of thought fails because it necessarily involves an act of representing practice theoretically, not attaining it. A return to Hegel's thought—and especially his critique of Fichte—shows us why theorists should theorize without feeling guilty for their failure to act practically. Hegel, of course, never wrote his own Ethics, and his one treatise that did explicitly concern politics. The Philosophy of Right included a confession of philosophy's political uselessness.
