Hegel Beyond Liberalism: The Dialectic of Political and Economic Democracy

In his book, Hegel Beyond Liberalism: The Dialectic of Political and Economic Democracy, Bernardo Ferro seeks to capture Hegel’s core insight that freedom is realized through institutions that reconcile our particular interests with the common good. This idea has a radically transformative potential yet, Ferro thinks, it is one that neither Hegel himself nor his liberal interpreters have fully recognized. In this ambitious and creative book, Ferro takes up the task of spelling out the implications of this idea, arguing that Hegel's vision of freedom requires the full democratization of the economic and political spheres in the form of market socialism and political democracy. Through his original, compelling interpretation of Hegel's political thought, Ferro brings out the significance of Hegelian ideas about the relationship between freedom and political economy for contemporary questions about the nature of socialism, democracy and freedom. A central foil in the book is an image of Hegel as a ‘socially minded’ (p. 34) liberal who combines an appreciation of individual rights with a recognition that freedom requires social conditions. By Ferro's lights, this interpretation fails to do justice to the unique character of Hegel’s vision in two ways. First, it downplays the speculative logic that underpins the practical elements of Hegel’s thought, and so the extent to which he wants to radically revise our political concepts. Second, even though this approach understands the individual to be socially constituted, it still takes personal freedom as a touchstone. For Ferro, Hegel does not just want to show that social conditions are necessary for personal freedom. More deeply, he aims to mediate the opposition between freedom’s personal and collective dimensions such that a fully realized freedom will involve a ‘“thoroughgoing unity” (durchdringende Einheit) of particularity and universality (PR §§258R, 261R) embodied by the rational state’ (p. 36). Freedom is not an individual possession society enables, but something that is realized only when the particular and the universal are mutually constitutive.