Dissertation abstract
Subjective Right and Freedom of Conscience in Hegel’s Political Philosophy
It has become a commonplace in recent years that the scheme of institutions which Hegel sketches
in his Philosophy of Right should count as more “liberal” than had been previously thought. However,
significant questions remain as to whether the justification that Hegel offers for the legitimacy of those
institutions is itself liberal in character. In particular, Hegel’s political philosophy has been claimed by
prominent communitarians like Charles Taylor (and criticized by prominent liberals like Charles Larmore)
for the primacy which they claim that Hegel assigns to a specific conception of the human good over and
above the demands of right or justice in his argument for the legitimacy of the political institutions of the
modern world.
In my dissertation, I argue that Hegel’s argument in favor of the political liberty of conscience
should rather count as liberal. I demonstrate that Hegel’s argument for the liberty of conscience does not
ultimately rest on a specific conception of the good which the protection of conscientious liberty is to
promote. Rather, Hegel’s argument for the liberty of conscience makes explicit appeal to a scheme of
individual rights, which Hegel identifies as “subjective right,” a notion which is itself grounded in the
central organizing idea of his political thought, the idea of “right” or justice (Recht).
I begin in Chapter 1 by assessing anti-liberal interpretations of Hegel’s political thought, focusing
in particular on Larmore’s communitarian interpretation, and on Ernst Tugendhat’s argument that Hegel
leaves no room for the demands of individual conscience in the face of the totalizing demands of the
Hegelian state. Having established the central challenges which a liberal interpretation of Hegel’s political
thought must answer, I draw from Rawls’s argument for the liberty of conscience in A Theory of Justice
and Political Liberalism two criteria which a liberal defense of the freedom of conscience must satisfy. The
first is an individual-rights criterion according to which the liberty of conscience is grounded in a scheme
of rights belonging to individual agents protecting them in the pursuit of their reflectively determined moral
aims. The second is a toleration criterion according to which the toleration of others with different or
conflicting conscientious aims is guaranteed on the basis of a recognition of those others as the bearers of
political rights.
I begin to articulate and explain Hegel’s conception of the constitution and ground of subjective
right in Chapters 2 and 3. Drawing most significantly on the “Morality” chapter of the Philosophy of
Right, I demonstrate that subjective rights belong to us as reflective agents, and protect the capacity for
moral self-determination which Hegel identifies as central to a free life. I focus in particular on Hegel’s
claim that individual conscience (Gewissen) counts as the paradigmatic shape of subjective right. I
demonstrate that Hegel’s well-known criticisms of the limitations of individual conscience are best
understood as moral arguments against some of his post-Kantian idealist forebears (notably Fichte and F.
W. Schlegel), and not as political arguments in favor of state control in moral matters. Rather, in Chapter
4, I show that, when Hegel articulates the specific political rights belonging to individuals in modern
“ethical life” (Sittlichkeit), he continues to give pride of place to subjective right and individual moral self-
determination. Likewise, I demonstrate, by way of contrast with the accounts of toleration offered by John
Locke, Rawls, and Michael Walzer, that Hegel’s defense of toleration in the Philosophy of Right should
count as liberal because of the fact that he grounds the demand for toleration in a recognition of others as
the bearers of subjective rights.
However, in spite of his arguments for subjective right and toleration, in the late 1820s Hegel also
argued that a free state is possible only if its citizens share a common religious “disposition,” that of
“Protestantism.” While some liberals have argued that the rise of Protestantism in the 16th century played
an important role in the development of liberal polities, Hegel’s assertion that a Protestant disposition is
necessary for the continued existence of free states appears to be a clear violation of the liberal notions of
state neutrality and toleration in matters of conscience. To address this possible inconsistency between
Hegel’s conception of the liberty of conscience and liberal conceptions, in Chapters 5 and 6 I turn to his
argument in the Jena Phenomenology of Spirit that, for a form of social union to count as a configuration of
“spirit” (Geist), it must be possible for individuals reciprocally to recognize one another conscientious
agents. Since Hegel clearly asserts that the institutions of modern ethical life are supposed to count as
“spiritual,” I argue that the agency-based conception of conscience that we find in Hegel’s early writings
should take priority over the religious account of the mature writings. I conclude by assessing the
significance of Hegel’s arguments for the liberty of conscience for our understanding of the general
standing of Hegel’s political thought in relation to prominent strands in contemporary political philosophy,
most notably the views of Rawls, Walzer, and Habermas.