ABSTRACT
Bernard Williams often complains that contemporary philosophical liberalism lacks a theory of error: a convincing account of why everyone prior to the seventeenth century failed to appreciate those facts about human rights that we now regard as basic, foundational truths of morality and politics. In this essay, I explore to what extent Hegel’s philosophy of history, or something like it, might be recruited to remedy this particular defect in current defenses of liberalism. Although my ultimate conclusion is that Hegelian accounts are not quite up to the task Williams sets for them, I hope to show that this failure proves an interesting vantage point from which we can view the problem of correcting for the chronic ahistoricism of philosophical liberalism.
