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July 7, 2008
Hegel’s freedom claim in the Philosophy of Right is that the subject is ‘at home’ only when it lives under laws, customs, practices and institutions the underlying rationale of which it can recognize, i.e. understand and affirm as rational. And it can recognize and affirm these laws because they have in their turn been made by rational human subjects.
For Hegel this is historically the case in modern times. In modernity, claims Hegel, the actual customs, practices and institutions that shape the lives of subjects enjoy authority and deserve respect only in virtue of their underlying rationality. Laws, for instance, have to win acceptance insofar as they manifestly satisfy the interests of those subject to them. He says:
The principle of the modern world requires that whatever is to be recognized by everyone must be seen by everyone as entitled to such recognition.
The underlying rationality of actual institutions does not lie on their surface; it is buried within them. This is why Hegel insists that we modern subjects need not religion but a Science of Right, the task of which is to uncover and make public the implicit rationality of custom and law. For Hegel, the task of philosophy was still to recognize the rationality in the actual.
In response we can say that fundamentally irrational institutions that in Hegel’s eyes are merely ‘lazy’ have their own survival mechanisms, including the ability to cloak themselves in the appearance of rationality.
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