ABSTRACT
Pelczynski, Wood and others have argued for the necessity or utility of setting aside Hegel's metaphysics in our readings of his political thought, they have underestimated the pragmatism of Hegel's actual political theory as well as their own metaphysical commitments. Thus, with the descriptive program put behind us I will here make a concluding case against the prescriptive challenge in favor of the utility and value of metaphysical problems and questions for political thought, both for Hegel and for ourselves. Against the modern and contemporary paradigms of political theorizing, our thinking is inherently grounded in foundational metaphysical claims in ways which tether the theorizing subject to a wider and deeper horizon of thought than can be assigned to autonomous subjectivity per se. The dialectic does not merely seek to conjoin whole and part, it also intends to reconnect past and future and against this the liberal-positivist paradigm is inherently and existentially opposed.
