Description
Hegel’s influence on scholarship within international relations and international political theory has often come in a roundabout way through the ongoing influence of his thought upon critical and social theory and the theory of recognition. This paper turns to Hegel as a thinker of the problematic, contradictory and complex nature of modern ‘freedom’ and does so by looking at his comments on the French Revolutionary ‘Terror’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and his often overlooked account of ‘civil society’ (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) encompassing early 19th century European commercial relations in the Philosophy of Right (1821). Through this I consider to what extent Hegel’s account of freedom might help us to think through contemporary, abstract conceptions of ‘freedom’ mobilised by globalised forms of neoliberal ideology. I consider also how such an account might help us to better understand neoliberalism’s contemporary nationalist, authoritarian and even neo-fascist legacies which, in Hegel’s terms might be thought of as presenting an idea of freedom as the “fury of destruction.”
