History on Hegel George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born on August 27, 1770 in Stuttgart Germany.

He was the son of a revenue officer who worked with the Duchy of Wurttemburg . The eldest of three children (his

younger brother, Georg Ludwig, died young as an officer with Napoleon during the Russian campaign). He also had a sister by the name of Christaine who he was very attached to. He was brought up in an atmosphere of Protestant pietism. His mother was teaching him Latin before he began school, but died when he was 11.
In 1788 Hegel went as a student to the University of Tibingen with a view to taking orders, as his parents wished. Here he studied philosophy and classics for two years and graduated in 1790. As a schoolboy he made a collection of extracts, alphabetically arranged, comprising annotations on classical authors, passages from newspapers, treaties on moral and mathematics from the standard work of the period. Though he then took the theological course, he was impatient with the orthodoxy of his teachers; and the certificate given to him when he left in 1793 states that, whereas he had devoted himself vigorously to philosophy, his industry in theology was intermittent. He was also said to be poor in oral exposition, a deficiency that was to follow him throughout his life. Though his fellow students call him the old man, he liked cheerful company and a sacrifice to Bacchus and enjoyed the ladies as well. His chief friends were a pantheistic poet, J.C.F. Holderlin, his contemporary, and the nature philosopher F.W.J. Schelling, five years his junior, Together they read the Greek tragedians and celebrated the glories of the French revolution. On leaving college, Hegel did not enter the ministry; instead, wishing to have leisure for study of philosophy and Greek literature, he became a private tutor. For the next three years he lived in Berne, with time on his hands and the run of a good library, where he read Edward Gibbon on the fall of Rome and De lesprit des loix, by Charles Louis, baron de Montesquieu, as well as the Greek and Roman classics. He also studied the critical philosopher Immanuel Kant and was stimulated by his essay on religion to write certain papers that became noteworthy only when, more than a century later, they were published as a part of Hegels theologische Judgendschriften (1907). Kant had maintained that, whereas orthodoxy requires a faith in historical facts and in doctrines that reason alone cannot justify and imposes on the faithful a moral system of arbitrary commands alleged to be revealed, Jesus on the contrary, had originally taught a rational morality, reconcilable with the teachings of Kants ethical works, and a religion that, unlike Judaism, was adapted to the reason of all men. Hegel accepted this teaching; but, being more of a historian than Kant, he put it to the test of history by writing two essays: first, a life of Jesus in which he attempted to reinterpret the gospel on Kantian lines and, second, and an answer to the question of how Christianity had ever become the authoritarian religion that it was, if in fact the teaching of Jesus was not authoritarian but rationalistic. Hegel was lonely in Berne and was glad to move, at the end of 1796 to Frankfurt am Main, where Holderlin had gotten him a tutorship. His hopes of more companionship, however, were unfulfilled: Holderlin was engrossed in an illicit love affair and shortly lost his reason. Hegel began to suffer from melancholia and, to cure himself, worked harder than ever, especially at Greek philosophy and modern history and politics. He read and made clippings from English newspapers, wrote about the internal

affairs in his new native Wurttemberg, and studied economics. Hegel was now able to free himself from the domination of Kants influence and to look with a fresh eye on the problems of Christian origins. Emancipation from Kantianism It is impossible to exaggerate the importance that this problem had for Hegel. It is true that his early theological writings contain hard sayings about Christianity and the churches; but the object of his attack was orthodoxy, not theology itself. All that he wrote at this period throbs with a religious conviction of a kind that is totally absent from Kant and Hegels other 18th century teachers. Above all, he was inspired by a doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The spirit of man, is reason, is the candle of the lord, he held, and therefore cannot be subjected to the limitation that Kant had imposed upon it. This faith in reason, with its religious basis, henceforth animated the whole of Hegels work. His outlook had also become that of a historian- which again distinguishes him from Kant, who was much more influenced by the concepts of physical science. Every one of Hegels major works was a history; and, indeed, It was among historians and classical scholars rather than among philosophers that his work mainly fructified in the 19th century. Personage and influence In his classroom Hegel was more impressive than fascinating. His students saw a plain, old fashioned face, without life or lustre- a figure that had never looked young and was now prematurely aged. Sitting with his snuff box before him and his head bent down, he looked ill at ease and kept turning the folios of his notes. His utterance was interrupted by frequent coughing; every sentence came out with a struggle. The style was no less irregular: sometimes in plain narrative the lecturer would be especially awkward, while in abstruse passages he seemed especially at home, rose into a natural eloquence, and carried away the hearer by the grandeur of his diction. s. In his later works, produced as text books for his lectures, the encyclopedia of the philosophical sciences and the philosophy of rights, he compresses his material into relatively short, numbered paragraphs. The common idea that Hegel is a philosophy of exceptional difficulty is quite mistaken. Once his terminology is understood and his main principles grasped, he presents far less difficulty than Kant. One reason for this is a certain air of dogmatism: Kants statements are often hedged around with qualifications; but Hegel had, as it were, seen a vision of absolute truth, and he expounds with confidence. Hegels system is avowedly and attempt to unify opposites- spirit and nature, universal and particular, ideal and real-and to be a synthesis in which all the partial and contradictory philosophies of his predecessors are alike and transcends. It is thus both idealism and realism at once. Conservatives and revolutionaries, believers and atheist alike have professed to draw inspiration from him. Later years Hegels interest in politics was concrete and practical at first, find expression in a study (1802) of the ancient German constitution as well as in writings on natural law. These legal and political studies, when

seen in their entirety, show Hegel in another perspective as a hard headed realist interested in the concrete details of practical politics. This perhaps explains why he agreed to edit a news paper at Bamberg in 1807. After a years work as editor, during which the most important of his earlier philosophical work, the phenomenology of the spirit (1807), was published, Hegel became the headmaster of the Latin school at Nuremberg. There he set forth his logic and ethics as he had formulated them while teaching a Jena and published the signs of logic (1812-1816). The appearance of his works led to several offers of university professorships, notably at Heidelberg and Berlin. He accepted the Heidelberg chair in 1816 and taught there until he went to Berlin in 1818. In 1811, Hegel married Marie Tauscher, a charming beauty of an ancient patrician family. Her family background embodied the finest traditions of the western German city culture. Her excellent education and her vivacity made her an independent and at times vividly critical companion. They got married and had children. The last work published during his lifetime was his philosophy of right and law (1820). Hegel died in Berlin on November 14, 1831, a victim of the cholera epidemic. Page 49 encyclopedia Americana international edition vol. 14. Copyright by Grolier incorporated. Page 728and 732 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc Volume 8 William Benton, publisher, 1943-1973 Helen Hemingway Benton, publisher, 1973-1974

Ends here.

True spirit Subjective spirit Absolute spirit

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, born 27 August 1770, died 1831.

Hegel was born in Stuttgart on August 27, 1770, the son of Georg Ludwig Hegel, a revenue officer with the Duchy of Wurttemburg. Eldest of three children (his younger brother, Georg Ludwig, died young as an officer with Napoleon during the Russian campaign), he was brought up in an atmosphere of Protestant pietism. His mother was teaching him Latin before he began school, but died when he was 11. He was very attached to his sister, Christiane, who later developed a manic jealousy of Hegels wife when he married at age 40 and committed suicide three months after his death. Hegel was deeply concerned by his sisters psychosis and developed ideas of psychiatry based on concepts of dialectics. Hegel soon became thoroughly acquainted with the Greek and Roman classics while studying at the Stuttgart Gymnasium (preparatory school) and was familiar with German literature and science. Encouraged by his father to become a clergyman, Hegel entered the seminary at the University of Tbingen in 1788. There he developed friendships with the poet Friedrich Hlderlin and the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. From Hlderlin in particular, Hegel developed a profound interest in Greek literature and philosophy. Early on and throughout his life, Hegel recorded and committed to memory everything he read and he read profusely! Hegel worshipped Goethe and long regarded himself as inferior to his brilliant contemporaries Schelling and Holderlin. The Germany of Hegels time was extremely backward from an economic point of view. Germany was a myriad of tiny, backward states, relatively insulated from the turmoils of Europe. He was an avid reader of Schiller and Rousseau. Hegel was 18 when the Bastille was stormed and the Republic declared in France and Hegel was an enthusiastic supporter of the Revolution,

and participated in a support group formed in Tubingen. Hegel finished his first great work, The Phenomenology of Mind on the very eve of the decisive Battle of Jena, in which Napoleon broke the Prussian armies and dismembered the kingdom. French soldiers entered Hegels house and set it afire just after he stuffed the last pages of the Phenomenology into his pocket and took refuge in the house of a high official of the town. In the Phenomenology he attempts to understand the revolutionary terror of the Jacobins in terms of their interpretation of Freedom. Hegel celebrated Bastille Day throughout his life. Having completed a course of study in philosophy and theology and having decided not to enter the ministry, Hegel became (1793) a private tutor in Berne, Switzerland. In about 1794, at the suggestion of his friend Holderlin, Hegel began a study of Immanuel Kant and Johann Fichte but his first writings at this time were Life of Jesus and The Positivity of Christian Religion. In 1796, Hegel wrote The First Programmed for a System of German Idealism jointly with Schelling. This work included the line: ... the state is something purely mechanical and there is no [spiritual] idea of a machine. Only what is an object of freedom may be called Idea. Therefore we must transcend the state! For every state must treat free men as cogs in a machine. And this is precisely what should not happen; hence the state must perish. In 1797, Holderlin found Hegel a position in Frankfurt, but two years later his father died, leaving him enough to free him from tutoring. In 1801, Hegel went to the University of Jena. Fichte had left Jena in 1799, and Schiller had left in 1793, but Schelling remained at Jena until 1803 and Schelling and Hegel collaborated during that time. Hegel studied, wrote and lectured, although he did not receive a salary until the end of 1806, just before completing the first draft of The Phenomenology of Mind the first work to present his own unique philosophical contribution part of which was taken through the French lines by a courier to his friend Niethammer

in Bamberg, Bavaria, before Jena was taken by Napoleons army and Hegel was forced to flee the remaining pages in his pocket. See Letter from Hegel to Niethammer, 13th October 1806. Having exhausted the legacy left him by his father, Hegel became editor of the Catholic daily Bamberger Zeitung. He disliked journalism, however, and moved to Nuremberg, where he served for eight years as headmaster of a Gymnasium. He continued to work on the Phenomenology. Almost everything that Hegel was to develop systematically over the rest of his life is prefigured in the Phenomenology, but this book is far from systematic and extremely difficult to read. The Phenomenology attempts to present human history, with all its revolutions, wars and scientific discoveries, as an idealistic self-development of an objective Spirit or Mind. During the Nuremberg years, Hegel met and married Marie von Tucher (17911855). They had three children a daughter who died soon after birth, and two sons, Karl (1813-1901) and Immanuel (1814-91). Hegel had also fathered an illegitimate son, Ludwig, to the wife of his former landlord in Jena. Ludwig was born soon after Hegel had left Jena but eventually came to live with the Hegels, too. While at Nuremberg, Hegel published over a period of several years The Science of Logic (1812, 1813, and 1816). In 1816, Hegel accepted a professorship in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. Soon after, he published in summary form a systematic statement of his entire philosophy entitled Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences which was first translated into English in 1959 and includes The Shorter Logic, as Part I. The Encyclopaedia was continually revised up till 1827, and the final version was published in 1830. In 1818, Hegel was invited to teach at the University of Berlin, where he was to remain. He died in Berlin on November 14, 1831, during a cholera epidemic.

The last full-length work published by Hegel was The Philosophy of Right (1821), although several sets of his lecture notes, supplemented by students notes, were published after his death. Published lectures include The Philosophy of Fine Art (1835-38), Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1833-36), Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1832), and Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837).

Philosophy
as per MS Encarta Hegels aim was to set forth a philosophical system so comprehensive that it would encompass the ideas of his predecessors and create a conceptual framework in terms of which both the past and future could be philosophically understood. Such an aim would require nothing short of a full account of reality itself. Thus, Hegel conceived the subject matter of philosophy to be reality as a whole. This reality, or the total developmental process of everything that is, he referred to as the Absolute, or Absolute Spirit. According to Hegel, the task of philosophy is to chart the development of Absolute Spirit. This involves (1) making clear the internal rational structure of the Absolute; (2) demonstrating the manner in which the Absolute manifests itself in nature and human history; and (3) explicating the teleological nature of the Absolute, that is, showing the end or purpose toward which the Absolute is directed.

Dialectic
Concerning the rational structure of the Absolute, Hegel, following the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides, argued that what is rational is real and what is real is rational. This must be understood in terms of Hegels further claim that the Absolute must ultimately be regarded as pure Thought, or Spirit, or Mind, in the process of self-development. The logic that governs this developmental process is dialectic. The dialectical method involves the notion that movement, or process, or progress, is the result of the conflict of opposites. Traditionally, this

dimension of Hegels thought has been analyzed in terms of the categories of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Although Hegel tended to avoid these terms, they are helpful in understanding his concept of the dialectic. The thesis, then, might be an idea or a historical movement. Such an idea or movement contains within itself incompleteness that gives rise to opposition, or an antithesis, a conflicting idea or movement. As a result of the conflict a third point of view arises, a synthesis, which overcomes the conflict by reconciling at a higher level the truth contained in both the thesis and antithesis. This synthesis becomes a new thesis that generates another antithesis, giving rise to a new synthesis, and in such a fashion the process of intellectual or historical development is continually generated. Hegel thought that Absolute Spirit itself (which is to say, the sum total of reality) develops in this dialectical fashion toward an ultimate end or goal. For Hegel, therefore, reality is understood as the Absolute unfolding dialectically in a process of self-development. As the Absolute undergoes this development, it manifests itself both in nature and in human history. Nature is Absolute Thought or Being objectifying itself in material form. Finite minds and human history are the process of the Absolute manifesting itself in that which is most kin to itself, namely, spirit or consciousness. In The Phenomenology of Mind Hegel traced the stages of this manifestation from the simplest level of consciousness, through self-consciousness, to the advent of reason.

Self-Knowledge of the Absolute

The goal of the dialectical cosmic process can be most clearly understood at the level of reason. As finite reason progresses in understanding, the Absolute progresses toward full self-knowledge. Indeed, the Absolute comes to know itself through the human minds increased understanding of reality, or the Absolute. Hegel analysed this human progression in understanding in terms of three levels: art, religion, and philosophy. Art grasps the Absolute in material forms, interpreting the rational through the sensible forms of beauty. Art is conceptually superseded by religion, which grasps the Absolute by means of images and symbols. The highest religion for Hegel is Christianity, for in Christianity the

truth that the Absolute manifests itself in the finite is symbolically reflected in the incarnation. Philosophy, however, is conceptually supreme, because it grasps the Absolute rationally. Once this has been achieved, the Absolute has arrived at full self-consciousness, and the cosmic drama reaches its end and goal. Only at this point did Hegel identify the Absolute with God. God is God, Hegel argued, only in so far as he knows himself.

Philosophy of History
In the process of analyzing the nature of Absolute Spirit, Hegel made significant contributions in a variety of philosophical fields, including the philosophy of history and social ethics. With respect to history, his two key explanatory categories are reason and freedom. The only Thought, maintained Hegel, which Philosophy brings ... to the contemplation of History, is the simple conception of Reason; that Reason is the Sovereign of the world, that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process. As a rational process, history is a record of the development of human freedom, for human history is a progression from less freedom to greater freedom.

Ethics and Politics

Hegels social and political views emerge most clearly in his discussion of morality and social ethics. At the level of morality, right and wrong is a matter of individual conscience. One must, however, move beyond this to the level of social ethics, for duty, according to Hegel, is not essentially the product of individual judgment. Individuals are complete only in the midst of social relationships; thus, the only context in which duty can truly exist is a social one. Hegel considered membership in the state one of the individuals highest duties. Ideally, the state is the manifestation of the general will, which is the highest expression of the ethical spirit. Obedience to this general will is the act of a free and rational individual.

Influence
At the time of Hegels death, he was the most prominent philosopher in Germany. His views were widely taught, and his students were highly regarded. His followers soon divided into right-wing and left-wing Hegelians. Theologically and politically the right-wing Hegelians offered a conservative interpretation of his work. They emphasized the compatibility between Hegels philosophy and Christianity. Politically, they were orthodox. The left-wing Hegelians eventually moved to an atheistic position. In politics, many of them became revolutionaries. This historically important left-wing group included Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Friedrich Engels, and Karl Marx. Hegel-by-HyperText Home Page @ marxists.org

Philosophy of Right
Like the Science of Logic, the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences is itself divided into three parts: a Logic; a Philosophy of Nature; and a Philosophy of Spirit. The same triadic pattern in the Philosophy of Spirit results in the philosophies of subjective spirit, objective spirit, and absolute spirit. The first of these constitutes Hegel's philosophy of mind, the last, his philosophy of art, religion, and philosophy itself. The philosophy of objective spirit concerns the objective patterns of social interaction and the cultural institutions within which spirit is objectified. The book entitled Elements of the Philosophy of Right, published in 1821 as a textbook to accompany Hegel's lectures at the University of Berlin, essentially corresponds to a more developed version of the section on Objective Spirit in the Philosophy of Spirit. The Philosophy of Right (as it is more commonly called) can be, and has been (e.g., Wood 1990), read as a political philosophy which stands independently of the system, but it is clear that Hegel intended it to be read against the background of the developing conceptual determinations of the Logic. The text proper starts from the conception of a singular willing subject (grasped from its own first-person point of view) as the bearer of abstract right. While this conception of the individual willing subject with some kind of fundamental right is in fact the starting point of many modern political philosophies (such as that of Locke, for example) the fact that Hegel commences here does not testify to any ontological assumption that the consciously willing and right-bearing individual is the basic atom from which all society can be understood as constructedan idea at the heart of standard social contract theories. Rather, this is merely the most immediate starting point of Hegel's presentation and corresponds to analogous starting places of the Logic. Just as the categories of the Logic develop in a way meant to demonstrate that what had at the start been conceived as simple is in fact only made determinate in virtue of

its being part of some larger structure or process, here too it is meant to be shown that any simple willing and right-bearing subject only gains its determinacy in virtue of a place it finds for itself in a larger social, and ultimately historical, structure or process. Thus, even a contractual exchange (the minimal social interaction for contract theorists) is not to be thought simply as an occurrence consequent upon the existence of two beings with natural wants and some natural calculative rationality; rather, the system of interaction within which individual exchanges take place (the economy) will be treated holistically as a culturally-shaped form of social life within which the actual wants of individuals as well as their reasoning powers are given determinate forms. Here too it becomes apparent that Hegel follows Fichte in treating property in terms of a recognitive analysis of the nature of such a right. A contractual exchange of commodities between two individuals itself involves an implicit act of recognition in as much as each, in giving something to the other in exchange for what they want, is thereby recognizing that other as a proprietor of that thing, or, more properly, of the inalienable value attaching to it. By contrast, such proprietorship would be denied rather than recognised in fraud or theftforms of wrong (Unrecht) in which right is negated rather than acknowledged or posited. Thus what differentiates property from mere possession is that it is grounded in a relation of reciprocal recognition between two willing subjects. Moreover, it is in the exchange relation that we can see what it means for Hegel for individual subjects to share a common willan idea which will have important implications with respect to the difference of Hegel's conception of the state from that of Rousseau. Such an interactive constitution of the common will means that for Hegel such an identity of will is achieved because of not in spite of a co-existing difference between the particular wills of the subjects involved: while contracting individuals both will the same exchange, at a more concrete level, they do so with different ends in mind. Each wants something different from the exchange. Hegel passes from the abstract individualism of Abstract Right to the social determinacies of Sittlichkeit or Ethical Life via considerations first of wrong (the negation of right) and its punishment (the negation of wrong, and hence the negation of the negation of the original right), and then of morality, conceived more or less as an internalisation of the external legal relations. Consideration of Hegel's version of the retributivist approach to punishment affords a good example of his use of the logic of negation. In punishing the criminal the state makes it clear to its members that it is the acknowledgment of right per se that is essential to developed social life: the significance of acknowledging another's right in the contractual exchange cannot be, as it at first might have appeared to the participants, simply that of being a way of each getting what he or she wants from the other. Hegel's treatment of punishment also brings out the continuity of his way of conceiving of the structure and dynamics of the social world with that of Kant, as Kant too, in his Metaphysics of Morals had employed the idea of the state's punitive action as a negating of the original criminal act. Kant's idea, conceived on the model of the physical principle of action and reaction, was structured by the category of community or reciprocal interaction, and was conceived as involving what he called real opposition. Such an idea of opposed dynamic forces seems to form something of a model for Hegel's idea of contradiction and the starting point for his conception of reciprocal recognition. Nevertheless, clearly Hegel articulates the structures of recognition in more complex ways than those derivable from Kant's category of community.

First of all, in Hegel's analysis of Sittlichkeit the type of sociality found in the market-based civil society is to be understood as dependent upon and in contrastive opposition with the more immediate form found in the institution of the family: a form of sociality mediated by a quasinatural inter-subjective recognition rooted in sentiment and feeling, love. Here Hegel seems to have extended Fichte's legally characterized notion of recognition into the types of human intersubjectivity earlier broached by Hlderlin. In the family the particularity of each individual tends to be absorbed into the social unit, giving this manifestation of Sittlichkeit a one-sidedness that is the inverse of that found in market relations in which participants grasp themselves in the first instance as separate individuals who then enter into relationships that are external to them. These two opposite but interlocking principles of social existence provide the basic structures in terms of which the component parts of the modern state are articulated and understood. As both contribute particular characteristics to the subjects involved in them, part of the problem for the rational state will be to ensure that each of these two principles mediates the other, each thereby mitigating the one-sidedness of the other. Thus, individuals who encounter each other in the external relations of the market place and who have their subjectivity shaped by such relations also belong to families where they are subject to opposed influences. Moreover, even within the ensemble of production and exchange mechanisms of civil society individuals will belong to particular estates (the agricultural estate, that of trade and industry, and the universal estate of civil servants), whose internal forms of sociality will show family-like features. Although the actual details of Hegel's mapping of the categorical structures of the Logic onto the Philosophy of Right are far from clear, the general motivation is apparent. Hegel's logical categories can be read as an attempt to provide a schematic account of the material (rather than formal) conditions required for developed self-consciousness. Thus we might regard the various syllogisms of Hegel's Subjective Logic as attempts to chart the skeletal structures of those different types of recognitive inter-subjectivity necessary to sustain various aspects of rational cognitive and conative functioning (self-consciousness). From this perspective, we might see his logical schematisation of the modern rational state as a way of displaying just those sorts of institutions that a state must provide if it is to answer Rousseau's question of the form of association needed for the formation and expression of the general will. Concretely, for Hegel it is representation of the estates within the legislative bodies that is to achieve this. As the estates of civil society group their members according to their common interests, and as the deputies elected from the estates to the legislative bodies give voice to those interests within the deliberative processes of legislation, the outcome of this process might give expression to the general interest. But Hegel's republicanism is here cut short by his invocation of the familial principle: such representative bodies can only provide the content of the legislation to a constitutional monarch who must add to it the form of the royal decreean individual I will . To declare that for Hegel the monarch plays only a symbolic role here is to miss the fundamentally idealist complexion of his political philosophy. The expression of the general will in legislation cannot be thought of as an outcome of some quasi-mechanical process: it must be willed. If legislation is to express the general will, citizens must recognize it as expressing their wills; and this means, recognising it as willed. The monarch's explicit I will is thus needed to close this recognitive circle, lest legislation look like a mechanical compromise resulting from a clash of interests, and so as actively willed by nobody. Thus while Hegel is

critical of standard social contract theories, his own conception of the state is still clearly a complicated transformation of those of Rousseau and Kant. Perhaps one of the most influential parts of Hegel's Philosophy of Right concerns his analysis of the contradictions of the unfettered capitalist economy. On the one hand, Hegel agreed with Adam Smith that the interlinking of productive activities allowed by the modern market meant that subjective selfishness turned into a contribution towards the satisfaction of the needs of everyone else. But this did not mean that he accepted Smith's idea that this general plenty produced thereby diffused (or trickled down ) though the rest of society. From within the type of consciousness generated within civil society, in which individuals are grasped as bearers of rights abstracted from the particular concrete relationships to which they belong, Smithean optimism may seem justified. But this simply attests to the one-sidedness of this type of abstract thought, and the need for it to be mediated by the type of consciousness based in the family in which individuals are grasped in terms of the way they belong to the social body. In fact, the unfettered operation of the market produces a class caught in a spiral of poverty. Starting from this analysis, Marx later used it as evidence of the need to abolish the individual proprietorial rights at the heart of Hegel's civil society and socialise the means of production. Hegel, however, did not draw this conclusion. His conception of the exchange contract as a form of recognition that played an essential role within the state's capacity to provide the conditions for the existence of rational and free-willing subjects would certainly prevent such a move. Rather, the economy was to be contained within an over-arching institutional framework of the state, and its social effects offset by welfarist state intervention. Some of Hegel's most telling criticisms of the unmediated effects of modern civil society concern those on the psychological lives of individuals. Recently, an approach to social reality with Hegelian provenance that uses the notion of recognition to articulate such pathologies has been developed by Axel Honneth (1995, 2010), testifying to the continuing relevance of Hegel's analyses.