The Problem of Poverty and the Limits of Freedom in Hegel’s Theory of the Ethical State

Inequality and Insecurity in Ethical Life

Hegel believes that poverty is a necessary consequence of the proliferation of need in industrialized civil society. He theorizes civil society as a sphere of particularity and privacy, in which individuals are alienated from the unity of the family. The lives of modern individuals are directed toward the satisfaction of their own personal ends, and their wills are particularized by the various needs toward which they are directed. In other words, individuals become what they are—individuated persons—by their particular relations to modern society’s endless generation of social and artificial needs. ¹⁰

In order to address this endless variety of needs, society develops new systems of reciprocal labor, mutual exchange, and private consumption, through which an individual’s particular activity contributes to the formal universality of economic interdependence. As Hegel puts it, “by a dialectical movement, the particular is mediated by the universal so that each individual, in earning, producing, and enjoying on his own account, thereby earns and produces for the enjoyment of others.” ¹¹ The organic unity of the ethical state is latent in this formal interdependence, insofar as the neediness that particularizes individuals as self-regarding bourgeois will also drive their integration, as citoyens, within the state’s concrete universality. ¹²

However, need also constitutes an internal limit to the very processes of integration that it sets in motion. Because social and artificial need develops apace with the productive potential of labor, modern society’s “indeterminate multiplication and specifications of needs, means, and pleasures” continually overwhelms its system of economic interdependence. ¹³ This excess need is experienced most acutely by the propertyless unemployed, who cannot find satisfaction within civil society’s network of production and exchange. Consequently, they suffer from the very neediness that, for other members of society, enables individuality, social standing, and community. This is the condition of modern poverty, in which the “infinite increase in dependence and want” particularizes some individuals to the degree that they cannot be integrated into the formal interdependence of civil society or the organic unity of the ethical state. ¹⁴

Several features of Hegel’s analysis of poverty deserve clarification. First, poverty is a necessary consequence of developed civil society. Hegel is most explicit about this in his lectures, but the necessary emergence of poverty is also theorized in The Philosophy of Right, where he links natural differences among persons to the artificial inequality that, in developed society, must lead to poverty. ¹⁵ Second, modern poverty does not emerge in societies characterized by generally low standards of living. Rather, it emerges in thriving societies where, for those who are not poor, the proliferation of artificial needs and luxury stimulates economic interdependence and social coherence. In this respect, modern poverty constitutes a form of deep inequality. ¹⁶ Third, poverty perpetuates, and is perpetuated by, social exclusion. Without employment or property, the poor are barred from the vocation-based estates and corporations, which are the institutions responsible for integrating the particular interests and subjectivity of individuals into the universality of the state. ¹⁷ Excluded from these institutions, the poor lack access to the sphere of actualized freedom. Finally, poverty tends toward subjective alienation in addition to objective exclusion. Lacking the resources to “be somebody” in society, “the poor man feels excluded and mocked by everyone, and this necessarily gives rise to an inner indignation” that sets the impoverished individual against the rest of society. ¹⁸ In sum, advanced civil society necessarily generates a situation of deep inequality, wherein the poor remain within civil society, but are objectively and subjectively segregated from the interactions and institutions that enable others to actualize their freedom in the state.

If allowed to proliferate, this inequality can generate a social and political crisis. Hegel notes that unemployment can become so widespread in developed societies that “whole masses are abandoned to poverty which cannot help itself.” ¹⁹ He uses the pejorative term “rabble” (Pöbel) to name the unintegrated and unstructured mass of poor that lives without property or work. ²⁰ Lacking access to the social structures that mediate individuality into the ordered indifference of the state, poor individuals are left to fall into the disordered indifference of the rabble, which swells “with leaps and bounds” as inequality increases. ²¹ Because its members lack capital and employment, the rabble is not an organized estate or class, but a disordered crowd—an unstructured multitude that grows within the ethical community but remains excluded from its unity.

Crucially, the rabble is not engendered by objective conditions alone. Rather, it is “the disposition associated with poverty” that turns poor individuals into a rabble. ²² This “rabble-mentality” is a collective and affective expression of the rabble’s exclusion and alienation, which Hegel variously characterizes as a combination of shamelessness, laziness, viciousness, dishonor, incivility, idleness, lawlessness, malevolence, and hatred. ²³ Above all, the rabble is indignant. Its indignation is a “necessary” consequence of its exclusion, and it takes the form of “inward rebellion against the rich, against society, the government, etc.” ²⁴ Hegel’s “etc” is important. As a form of abstract negativity, the rabble’s indiscriminate indignation has no determinate object. Rather, it is directed toward everything from which it is excluded and alienated, namely ethical life as a whole, and all of its constituent parts. ²⁵ Denied social standing and freedom by every aspect of Sittlichkeit, the rabble rebels against not only particular individuals and institutions but also the rational unity of ethical life itself.

The rabble is a curious feature of Hegel’s political philosophy, but it is not an anomaly. Rather, it is a consequence of unrestrained civil society, which by its own inner dynamic facilitates the free unification of most members of society, even as it simultaneously creates an unfree and disordered underclass. Nevertheless, Hegel’s readers are right to ask what the growth of the rabble means for Hegel’s theory of Sittlichkeit, because at first glance, the existence of the rabble appears to belie the ethical community’s promise of actualized freedom. Although I will ultimately argue that the growth of the rabble is essential to the development of ethical life, and the state in particular, there are two immediately negative implications of the rabble that require elaboration here.

First, the presence of the rabble can be interpreted as evidence that the development of ethical life is not yet finished. So long as a mass of unfree citizens persists within civil society, this line of thought goes, the actualization of universal freedom remains incomplete. ²⁶ On this point, it is revealing that Hegel associates disorganized masses in general, and the rabble in particular, with “barbarous” violence. ²⁷ In the published version of “On the English Reform Bill,” he calls the rabble’s behavior “unchecked savagery,” while the unpublished manuscript reads “bestiality.” ²⁸ Either term is sufficient to show that, for Hegel, the rabble engendered by industrial civil society constitutes an internal limit to the development of rational civilization and objective freedom. ²⁹ As society’s unintegrated remainder, the rabble embodies a moment of unsatisfied need, unmediated negativity, and unactualized freedom. This suggests that the work of universal history is not yet done. For this reason, Hegel cannot simply reconcile himself and his readers to a vision of modernity that includes mass poverty. ³⁰ Unless poverty is eliminated, substantially ameliorated, or made to serve ethical life, it threatens to undermine the actualization of freedom in the ethical state.

Second, the presence of the rabble can be interpreted as a practical, material threat to the community theorized in Hegel’s political philosophy. ³¹ Indeed, Hegel positions the rabble’s indignation as a dangerous counterforce to the rational unity of civil society and the state. ³² This threat is implicit in the links Hegel draws between inadequate social recognition and antisocial criminality. For Hegel, marginalized or ignored individuals lash out against others and their possessions, not to satisfy their needs, but to secure social recognition that is otherwise unavailable to them. ³³ Because its freedom and social standing are unrecognized by all members and institutions of civil society and the state, the rabble lashes out against the ethical community as a whole, rather than against a particular person, contract, or relation. In other words, because the rabble’s exclusion and alienation are structural, its rebellion constitutes social and political, and not merely interpersonal, violence. ³⁴ The indiscriminate indignation of the rabble, motivated by its total lack of social recognition, threatens to tear apart civil society and the state.

Taken together, these two lines of interpretation enable us to understand Hegel’s surprisingly forthright remarks concerning the potential insecurity of the ethical state. He writes:

What matters most is that . . . my particular end should become identical with the universal; otherwise the state must hang in the air. . . . It has often been said that the end of the state is the happiness of its citizens. This is certainly true, for if their welfare is deficient, if their subjective ends are not satisfied, and if they do not find that the state as such is the means to this satisfaction, the state itself stands on an insecure footing. ³⁵

By preventing masses of individuals from satisfying their interests, actualizing their self-consciousness, or uniting their particular ends with the universal, poverty frustrates the rational purpose of Sittlichkeit and its unity in the ethical state. The resulting insecurity is both theoretical and practical. At the level of theory, if Hegel can provide no solution to the problem of poverty, then the actualization of freedom is not finished, and Hegel’s system appears to be incomplete. At the level of practice, mass poverty generates the antisocial rebellion of the rabble, which threatens to disrupt or dissolve the ethical community. In both senses, the problem of poverty would seem to undermine Hegel’s entire political philosophical project.

Yet, the problem of poverty and the threat of the rabble are not accidental components of that project. Rather, they represent an essential and internal countermovement to the actualization of freedom in the community unified by the ethical state. The proliferation of artificial need in modern society drives the actualization of individual freedom in the state, but it also alienates some individuals and leaves them to fall into the impoverished rabble. Thus, poverty, the rabble, and the threat of social dissolution are the underside of the same dialectic that determines the various institutions described in the Philosophy of Right. Through the dialectical realization of freedom, the organic unity of the ethical community develops together with its internal outcast, the disordered and lawless rabble.

Reframing the Problem of Poverty

Hegel presents the growth of mass poverty as a tragic and dangerous countermovement to the actualization of individual right and freedom in the state. This is one way to interpret his remark that the problem of poverty “agitates and torments [bewegende und quälende] modern society.” ³⁶ In this section, I develop this interpretation by indicating the ways that civil society and the state are spurred into action, and literally moved, by the poverty that agitates them. Both civil society and the state attempt to mitigate poverty, integrate the excluded particularity of the poor, and prevent the emergence of the rabble. However, neither sphere includes the resources to do so effectively. By reviewing the failures of civil society and the state to eliminate poverty, this section prepares the ground for my argument that the unsolved problem of poverty—as an unsolved problem—plays an ultimately productive role in Hegel’s theory of ethical life.

Civil society attempts to eliminate poverty by redistributing wealth and work, but the problem is “merely exacerbated” by these proposals. ³⁷ The private redistribution of wealth cannot ameliorate poverty, because charity is based upon limited, contingent, and subjective relations between poor persons and their benefactors, and such relations are insufficient to replace the formal universality of civil society’s network of interdependence. ³⁸ Hegel maintains that charity by itself may even intensify the alienation of the poor, because it provides an income “without the mediation of work,” creating an imbalanced relation of dependence that prevents the achievement of social standing and self-consciousness. ³⁹ This concern about the one-sided redistribution of wealth would seem to suggest a corresponding redistribution of labor, but this too would only intensify the problem. Associating poverty with overproduction, Hegel argues that putting the poor to work in menial jobs would simply increase production without adequately increasing consumption, thereby exacerbating the problem. ⁴⁰ In light of these problems, he concludes, “Despite an excess of wealth, civil society is not wealthy enough—i.e. its own distinct resources are not sufficient—to prevent an excess of poverty and the formation of a rabble.” ⁴¹ The problem of poverty thus falls to the state.

However, the state can do little to eradicate poverty or prevent the rabble from forming, because it cannot effectively intervene in the autonomous operations of civil society. To do so would be to force the universal on the particular—that is, to crush individual interest beneath the common good—without dialectical mediation or ethical development. ⁴² In order to preserve the dialectical actualization of individual freedom in the state, Hegel rejects the public redistribution of both wealth and labor, leaving civil society’s network of economic interdependence to function without direct state administration. ⁴³ Moreover, even apart from his commitment to the autonomy of civil society, Hegel acknowledges that the state is simply unable to provide an objective, universal, or complete solution to the inequality that thrives there. When they operate within civil society, the institutions of the state risk conforming to the contingency, partiality, and subjectivity characteristic of that sphere. ⁴⁴ Thus, even if public regulation were not antithetical to the relative autonomy of civil society, the state could not provide a universal or objective remedy for the structural problem of poverty.

This leaves the institutions that bridge civil society and the state. At first glance, the guildlike corporations appear to offer a solution to the problem of poverty. Much like the estates, the corporations operate within civil society to integrate individuals within the universality of the state. ⁴⁵ Acting as a voluntary “second family,” the corporations protect and support their members, enable them to develop social standing, coordinate their talents, and educate them. ⁴⁶ Recognizing this, some have argued that Hegel’s solution to the problem of poverty is to usher the poor into the corporations, where they may receive support without the disadvantages discussed above. ⁴⁷

However, this solution is unworkable, because indigence excludes the poor from the corporations, just as it excludes them from the estates and the other institutions of civil society. In order for the corporations to remain viable in civil society, they must be selective about their membership and “admit members in accordance with their objective qualification of skill and rectitude.” ⁴⁸ This effectively bars the poor from participation in the corporations, because, according to Hegel, poor individuals lack the capital, skill, honor, and integrity that accompany productive employment in civil society. ⁴⁹ Moreover, although corporations may educate nonmembers to make them eligible for entry, even this cannot help the poor because, on Hegel’s account, the indigent are “more or less deprived of . . . the ability to acquire skills and education.” ⁵⁰ Thus, the poor are effectively locked out of a virtuous circle: if they were members of corporations, they could develop their skill, rectitude, and social standing, but because they lack these altogether, they are not likely to gain membership. Of course, the state could force the corporations to relax their membership criteria, and perhaps match this with increased support. However, this proposal would run afoul of Hegel’s critiques of state intervention in civil society. Thus, far from being Hegel’s solution to the problem of poverty, the corporations merely illustrate the problems that Hegel identifies with both private and public assistance.

As a result of these failures to eliminate poverty, the forces of unsatisfied particularity and unmediated negativity remain active in the ethical community, where they continue to threaten its stability and security. This does not mean, however, that poverty is merely an obstacle to the development of Sittlichkeit. Instead, the cunning of reason twice transforms poverty into a means of ethical life’s development. This happens first and most visibly in Hegel’s discussion of colonization, which turns the poverty that agitates and torments society into an engine of modern sociality.

Just after introducing the problem of the rabble, Hegel notes that civil society’s “inner dialectic” of overproduction and poverty demands the expansion of ethical life to new colonies. ⁵¹ While the Philosophy of Right connects crises of overproduction to colonization, Hegel’s lectures go into more detail, directly attributing the need for colonial expansion to “the emergence of a mass of people who cannot gain satisfaction for their needs by their work when production exceeds the needs of consumers.” ⁵² Moreover, the lectures clarify that it is the new urban poor themselves who become colonists. ⁵³ These colonists function as founding “peoples” that begin new states, beginning with a “return to the family principle” between the metropole and colony. ⁵⁴ Thus, in late modernity, the global spread of ethical life is driven, not only by the heroic acts of generals, but also by the steady expansion of need—and constant expulsion of the needy—from agitated and tormented societies.

There is some reason to think that Hegel is not the champion of European colonialism that he is often taken to be. ⁵⁵ Regardless, it is clear that Hegel does not consider colonial expansion to be a genuine solution to the problem of poverty. Colonies cannot finally absorb civil society’s impoverished masses, or purchase all of its overproduced goods, or mediate its excess negativity, because unrestricted civil society continually generates more of all of these. As Hegel argues in one of his political commentaries, any temporary relief brought by colonization would be quickly dispelled by the continual growth of poverty in the sending country. ⁵⁶ Worse still, colonization actually proliferates the problem of poverty, and the rabble, by reproducing them in new ethical communities. In his lectures, Hegel is explicit that every modern colony, unless it remains a simple extension of its country of origin, eventually achieves independence. ⁵⁷ When a colony becomes its own independent state, it can no longer serve as an outlet for the social and economic pressures of its original sending country. Instead, it undergoes the dialectical development that its country of origin already embodies and, as it develops, it will generate its own unsatisfied needs, its own poverty, and its own rabble. ⁵⁸ Thus, while the dialectic of colonization and independence reproduces the modern state across the globe, it also reproduces the threat of the rabble within each new state.

It is generally acknowledged that colonization does not offer a satisfactory remedy to the problem of indigence. What is not generally acknowledged, and must be stressed here, is that Hegel’s discussion of colonization illustrates that the problem of poverty itself, as an unresolved problem, can serve the development of ethical life. Through colonization, poverty and the rabble—as the personified failure of the ethical community to satisfy, mediate, and integrate all of the negativity that it produces—drive ethical life across the globe. If poverty were eliminated by civil society or the state, then it could not serve, in late modernity, as the engine of ethical life’s global reproduction.

This reveals that the problem of poverty is not simply a “gaping hole” in Hegel’s political philosophy, and it reminds us of one of Hegel’s important methodological commitments—namely that an outstanding problem can function productively with regard to other elements within his philosophical system. ⁵⁹ Granted, the productive function of poverty is limited in the case of colonization. Colonization only drives the external expansion of the ethical community, rather than its internal development. In other words, through the colonial reproduction of ethical life, the problem of poverty contributes to a merely quantitative, rather than qualitative, actualization of freedom. ⁶⁰ However, this limitation does not change the fact that, in his discussion of colonization, Hegel assigns a crucial and productive role to the poverty that plagues modern life.

Once this is recognized, Hegel’s readers incur a new interpretive task. Rather than focusing on how Hegel could have or should have resolved the problem of poverty, or how his failure to do so condemns his political philosophy, we should instead ask whether Hegel assigns poverty any role that warrants its inclusion, as an unresolved problem, in his philosophical system. In other words, given the collective failure of civil society and the state to effectively eliminate the spread of poverty and the growth of the rabble, might this failure itself enable other aspects of Hegel’s political philosophy, such that “solving” the problem of poverty would jeopardize the higher aims of Hegel’s thought? In the next section, I argue that this is indeed the case. By positioning the threat of the rabble as the dialectical condition of the ethical state’s internal sovereignty, Hegel reveals that modern poverty ultimately contributes to the internal development, and not just the external expansion, of ethical life.

How the Rabble Serves Ethical Life

The failure of civil society and the state to eliminate poverty has long presented an interpretive aporia for Hegel’s readers, insofar as the persistence of poverty appears to undermine Hegel’s philosophy of actualized freedom. The aporia dissolves, however, when we consider what ends are served, with regard to the actualization of freedom, by leaving the problem of poverty unsolved. In this section, I argue that the unsolved problem of poverty earns its place in Hegel’s social philosophy by making possible the ethical state’s achievement of internal sovereignty and, more generally, the organic unity of the ethical community.

For Hegel, sovereignty is the highest expression of political organization, but it is not a property or characteristic that the state can possess entirely on its own. Rather, sovereignty is a dialectical achievement that must be constantly realized through the state’s “negative relation [Beziehung]” to its ‘others’. ⁶¹ On Hegel’s view, the modern state achieves the independence and unity necessary for sovereignty by differentiating itself from those entities that, by their very presence, call into question the autonomy and coherence of the state. In other words, in order to affirm what it is—an independent and united political community—the sovereign state must differentiate itself from what it is not. ⁶² Sovereignty thus requires the presence of others that serve as the dialectical conditions for the state’s achievement of “being in and for itself.” ⁶³

Hegel theorizes two moments of sovereignty, which involve two different modes of self-differentiation. External sovereignty refers to the state’s “individuality [as] an exclusive unit” vis-à-vis other political entities. ⁶⁴ This aspect of sovereignty is a matter of outward-looking differentiation, through which the state realizes itself as an independent and determinate individual. In distinction, internal sovereignty refers to “the organization of the state and the process of its organic life with reference to itself” as a unity of its various components. ⁶⁵ This aspect of sovereignty is a matter of inward-looking differentiation, through which the state realizes itself as an organically unified and rational whole. The achievements of external and internal sovereignty require the presence of two very different others, which occasion the state’s acts of external and internal differentiation.

First, the state actualizes its external sovereignty by accomplishing and maintaining its “individuality” in relation to an entity that, by its very presence, calls that individuality into question. ⁶⁶ Here, individuality refers to the state’s independent and “exclusive being-for-itself.” ⁶⁷ The state actualizes its individuality only by confronting and differentiating itself from the kind of entity that could put the state in a relation of external dependence—namely, another sovereign state. By affirming this other as like itself, but negating it as not itself, the state maintains itself as an independent and determinate entity. Without the second state to serve as its external other, the state could not realize its external sovereignty.

Second, the state actualizes its internal sovereignty through accomplishing and maintaining its organic coherence in relation to an entity whose very presence calls that coherence into question. The internally sovereign state is a united whole that supersedes and coordinates its discrete components, such that “the particular functions and powers of the state are not self-sufficient and fixed, . . . but are ultimately rooted in the unity of the state as their simple self.” ⁶⁸ Within the state’s organic unity, the different powers of government and public authority, as well as the institutions of civil society and the family, perform diverse functions but are all “determined by and dependent on the end of the whole.” ⁶⁹ Correspondingly, individual citizens are unified by their civic participation and patriotic disposition. ⁷⁰ In this way, each constituent element of the ethical community exists as an “organically linked and mutually conditioning” member of the internally sovereign state. ⁷¹

Like external sovereignty, internal sovereignty is a task to be achieved in relation to an other. Primarily, this involves uniting the disparate elements of ethical life—individuals and the family, civil society and its institutions, and the state’s legislative, executive, and sovereign powers—within a coherent organization of political authority, civic belonging, and social trust. However, internal sovereignty requires more than this. Paralleling the case of external sovereignty, the state must also maintain and affirm the coherent organization that it has brought to ethical life. To do so, the state must confront the possibility of dissolution by differentiating itself, as an organic whole, from an entity capable of negating this unity. Although Hegel does not explicitly name the other that serves as the dialectical condition of the state’s internal sovereignty, his account of internal sovereignty as “self-referring negativity” requires that there be one, insofar as the state’s self-reference is a matter of negating what is not itself. ⁷²

Given Hegel’s description of internal sovereignty, we can infer the characteristics of the other that the state must negate in order to achieve and maintain itself as internally sovereign. First, Hegel’s remarks on external sovereignty should not mislead us into thinking that the state’s second other must be another state, or any entity that also embodies the organic unity characteristic of internal sovereignty. External sovereignty is matter of independent individuality, and to realize this, the state requires confrontation with an other that is formally identical but numerically distinct from itself. Internal sovereignty is not a matter of individuality, so there is no need for the state’s second other to be formally identical to itself. Instead, because internal sovereignty is a matter of coherent unity, the state must differentiate itself from an entity that is fundamentally unlike the organic constitution it imposes on ethical life—an entity that manifests a total lack of rational unity. ⁷³

Second, because internal sovereignty is a “purely internal matter” in which the state “differentiates its moments within itself,” we can infer that the state’s disorganized other must be internal to the ethical community. ⁷⁴ This does not mean that the state’s internal other must be part of the state apparatus itself (i.e. the judiciary, executive, and sovereign powers). Rather, in order to occasion the act of internal differentiation that confirms the state as coherently organized and thus internally sovereign, the state’s internal other must exist within the scope of those various elements—the family, civil society, and the state apparatus—that the state organizes in achieving internal sovereignty. Put simply, in order to serve as the dialectical condition of internal sovereignty, the state’s internal other must exist within the boundaries of the ethical community.

At the same time, however, the state’s internal other must be in an important sense other than the unity that the state imposes upon ethical life. It must be genuinely alien to the whole of the ethical community, even as it remains within the community’s boundaries, so that the state can perform the acts of internal differentiation that are required for internal sovereignty. Moreover, this internal other must manifest a persistent disunity within the ethical community, so that the state can maintain its internal sovereignty in a way that parallels the maintenance of external sovereignty and does justice to Hegel’s concept of self-referring negativity—namely, through a continual negative relation. This means that the role of the immanent other cannot be played by the individuals or institutions of civil society, or the particular powers of the state, because once the state has achieved internal sovereignty, these constituent elements of its organic unity no longer oppose that unity. By contrast, the state’s internal other must continue to manifest a lack of coherence that puts into question the coherence of ethical life. As Hegel puts it elsewhere, “there must be an actuality and difference which cannot be overcome by ethical life.” ⁷⁵ This other must essentially, and not just momentarily, oppose the unity of Sittlichkeit, even while remaining within the bounds of the ethical community, so that it can occasion the internal differentiation that is required for internal sovereignty.

Finally, internal sovereignty has an important subjective aspect, and this too must be opposed by the state’s immanent other. In the unity of Sittlichkeit achieved by the internally sovereign state, subjectivity becomes a “political disposition” or “public consciousness” that is manifested in the rationality, dutifulness, and patriotism of citizens who “know the state as their substance.” ⁷⁶ Far from being an exceptional form of self-sacrifice, this political subjectivity is characteristic of normal affairs in the internally sovereign state, in which individual citizens recognize the organically united ethical community as the basis and end of their freedom. ⁷⁷ In order for the state to achieve and maintain this subjective aspect of internal sovereignty, it must confront an interior alien that manifests an opposing subjective tendency. Thus, the state’s internal other must be comparatively irrational, unpatriotic, and uncivil.

In short, for the state to realize its internal sovereignty, it must oppose an internal other that persistently manifests every objective and subjective tendency that has been otherwise overcome in the dialectical unification of the ethical community. Even as the constitution of the ethical state brings organic coherence to the irrational disunity of ethical life’s various components, some version of this disunity must persist so that the constituted state can differentiate itself, as the unifier of ethical life, from an other whose very presence calls this unity into question. Within the boundaries of ethical community, but opposed to its rational unity, there must be something like a “crowd or aggregate, unorganized in their opinions and volition . . . a formless mass whose movement and activity can consequently only be elemental, irrational, barbarous and terrifying.” ⁷⁸ Absent this immanent other, the state cannot actualize the internal sovereignty that is the highest expression of its rational principle.

In his discussion of internal sovereignty, Hegel never names the internal other that the state confronts in order to actualize itself as the organic unity of Sittlichkeit. However, looking back through Hegel’s account of the dialectical unification of the ethical community, we do find an immanent alien that haunts the process of unification at every step, falling outside and opposing the rational unity achieved by the state, even as it remains within the boundaries of the community. This internal other is the impoverished rabble.

Three considerations justify reading the rabble as Hegel’s candidate for the state’s internal other. First, Hegel characterizes the rabble as fundamentally unlike the organic unity of the state. The rabble is not simply different from the state; rather, it is the negation of the specific qualities that Hegel associates with internal sovereignty. Second, in addition to manifesting irrational disunity in its composition, the rabble rebelliously opposes the rational unity of ethical life in its affect and actions; it is not merely a difference, but an active counterforce to the achievement of internal sovereignty. Third and most importantly, the rabble persists as the only unintegrated and unmediated moment of opposition within the ethical community. Other potential candidates for the state’s internal other—say, the capricious wills of individuals, or the self-serving members of the modern bureaucracy—have all had their otherness negated by the dialectical unification of the ethical community. Only the rabble remains permanently and actively other to the internally sovereign state, for reasons described earlier: the institutions of ethical life all fail, on Hegel’s own account, to incorporate the rabble into the organic whole of the community. This failure enables the rabble to persist as an uniquely alien presence in relation to the state, continually manifesting the difference required for sovereignty’s negative relation, while still remaining within the boundaries of the ethical community and the scope of state authority. This unique combination of internality and otherness is what the state must continually oppose in order to affirm and maintain itself as internally sovereign.

To put the point more finely, the state finds its internal other in the rabble because of all of those features that make the rabble, and the problem of poverty more generally, so aporetic for Hegel’s readers. Poverty is indeed the one outstanding problem within Hegel’s political philosophy, and the rabble is the only internal threat to the coherence of the ethical community. But it is precisely this unique status that makes the rabble—as the embodied manifestation of the community’s one unresolved problem—serve as the internal other that the state confronts in actualizing the organic coherence of the ethical community as a whole. In much the same way that poverty and the threat of the rabble facilitate the external development of the ethical community by driving colonization, they also facilitate the internal development of the community by occasioning the actualization of internal sovereignty. Here again, but this time more deeply, ethical life’s one unsolved problem—as an unsolved problem—is made to serve the development of ethical life. Far from being a defective moment within Hegel’s political philosophy, then, the rabble is the unwilling guarantor of the ethical community’s rational organization. Hegel’s philosophical system cannot include a remedy for poverty—as some of Hegel’s readers, and perhaps Hegel himself, have hoped—because the persistence of the impoverished rabble is required for the coherence of the system itself.

Crises and Constitution

This interpretation can be supported by the relation that Hegel draws between sovereignty and states of emergency or crisis. He writes, “But in a situation of crisis—whether internal or external—it is around the simple concept of sovereignty that the organism and all the particular spheres of which it formerly consisted rally, and it is to this sovereignty that the salvation of the state is entrusted.” ⁷⁹ For Hegel, political emergencies test the vitality of states and provide occasions for the “idealism which constitutes sovereignty” to be actualized. ⁸⁰ Hegel’s thought privileges two different states of crisis: the external threat of war and the internal threat of the rabble.

Hegel’s remarks on war are well known. States achieve their external sovereignty (individuality) by differentiating themselves from other states, and war provides an ideal occasion for this negation. Indeed, the external crisis of war is so beneficial to external sovereignty that some states will, in times of peace, “generate opposition and create an enemy” in order to have “occasion for action abroad.” ⁸¹ Hegel notes that actual war may be unnecessary for the realization of a state’s individuality; the threat of war is enough to facilitate the salutary confrontation. ⁸² Thus, even if no external agitation is readily available, the state may continually manufacture external threats in order to continually realize its external sovereignty.

The internal threat of the rabble facilitates internal sovereignty in an analogous way. In “The German Constitution,” Hegel argues that a “mass of isolated estates . . . might freely come together in times of danger or emergency and thereby constitute a state and a political power out of their separate powers in order to meet the current need.” ⁸³ Although Hegel acknowledges that both internal and external crises might serve political constitution, he notes that German unity in the face of external opposition has been fleeting. ⁸⁴ However, he immediately indicates that unity might be better accomplished by emulating European states that have achieved internal sovereignty by “pacifying and uniting those elements which fermented within them and threatened to destroy the state.” ⁸⁵ In other words, the various components of German society might achieve political coherence in a state constitution—that is, in an internally sovereign state—by confronting the threat posed by an internal other.

These historical observations are given philosophical form in the Philosophy of Right. Hegel positions the rabble’s growth as a structurally guaranteed internal crisis that the state confronts in order to actualize the organic unity of the ethical community. Through the constant proliferation of need, civil society motivates the realization of individual freedom in the ethical state and, simultaneously, engenders the rebelliously indignant masses of poor. This double-movement ensures that at each moment in its development, “the state itself stands on an insecure footing.” ⁸⁶ However, in a dialectical move that is characteristic of Hegel’s philosophy, this insecurity itself provides the condition for the state’s fullest development. Poverty and the indignation of the rabble not only provoke the ameliorative efforts of society and the state—which fail—but also motivate the unification of those members of the ethical community that are not permanently excluded and alienated from the state’s promise of actualized freedom. In this way, the Hegelian state continually resecures its footing, and ethical life reaches its highest moment, by producing and opposing the crisis of poverty and the threat of the rabble.

This provides a final layer of significance to Hegel’s remark that poverty “agitates and torments” modern society. ⁸⁷ To be sure, mass poverty troubles the ethical community, but it does so like war, by invigorating society “just as the movement of the winds preserves the seas from that stagnation which a permanent calm would produce, and which a permanent (or indeed ‘perpetual’) peace would produce among peoples.” ⁸⁸ Like the external crisis of war, the internal crisis of poverty threatens the stability of the ethical community. However, this threat spurs the unification of the rest of the community in the state’s organic constitution, ultimately conditioning—in the sense of making possible, but also limiting—the actualization of freedom in the whole of ethical life.

Hegel’s Critical Theory of the Ethical State

I have argued that the unsolved problem of poverty plays two productive roles within Hegel’s philosophical description of the modern state. First, poverty drives the external reproduction of the ethical state through colonization. Second, it enables the internal sovereignty of the state by engendering the rebellious rabble that serves as the state’s internal “other,” in relation to which the state can realize itself as the unity of ethical life. It is this second role that earns the unsolved problem of poverty a place in Hegel’s system. Hegel does not offer a solution to the problem of poverty because the persistence of poverty is a condition of possibility of the rational unity of ethical life.

On this reading, poverty both enables and constrains the actualization of freedom in the ethical state. On one hand, insofar as political freedom is actualized in the internally sovereign state, and insofar as internal sovereignty is realized through the state’s ongoing opposition to the impoverished rabble, persistent poverty makes possible the actualization of freedom. On the other hand, because persistent poverty is a condition of unfreedom for the poor, it also limits the actualization of freedom. In other words, the persistence of poverty enables ethical life to fulfill its rational purpose, while also ensuring that this fulfillment is always partial or incomplete. In this way, Hegel’s ethical community is characterized by a form of self-limitation: its promise of freedom is fulfilled only in opposition to a group of internal “outsiders” to whom that freedom cannot extend.

This interpretation does not imply that Hegel justifies the poverty of some by appealing to the freedom of others. Nor does it require us to disregard Hegel’s concern for the welfare of the poor. Instead, we can reconcile Hegel’s concern for the poor with the productive roles that he assigns to poverty by reading his political philosophy as a critique, rather than an affirmation or defense, of the social order that requires poverty as the ever-present occasion for its own unity. ⁸⁹ In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel theorizes a particular network of normative commitments, historical contexts, and institutional apparatuses, within which freedom can be realized for some only by maintaining appalling forms of unfreedom for others. This suggests that there is something pathological about that framework of commitments, contexts, and institutions. ⁹⁰ Read as a form of critique, and with the interpretation advanced here, the Philosophy of Right portrays a social order that not only fails to do justice to Hegel’s own concerns for the welfare of the poor, but also fails to fully satisfy its own rational purpose of actualizing freedom.

By emphasizing this failure and, more generally, by reading the Philosophy of Right as a critique, I do not disregard Hegel’s commitments concerning the rationality of ethical life in general, or the state in particular. Indeed, it is a testament to the rationality of the ethical community that its one open problem—its inability to ameliorate poverty—is also a crucial moment in the fulfillment of its rational purpose, even if this fulfillment can only be partial or incomplete. ⁹¹ Rather than denying this rationality, Hegel’s critical intervention consists in affirming the rational form and purpose of the existing social order and then tracing these to their inherent limit. ⁹² By revealing that freedom cannot be actualized within the ethical community except through ongoing opposition to the rabble’s disordered unfreedom, Hegel’s philosophical critique takes the rationality of the social order as its object and reveals it to be self-limiting, even in the advanced stages described in the final sections of the Philosophy of Right.

One of Hegel’s most famous commitments is that such a project becomes feasible only when a social order has begun to be exhausted by the movement of history—when “a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized” for what it is and was all along. ⁹³ This is why philosophy comes “too late” and why, in Hegel’s view, it can only reflect what is—the real that is rational—rather than what might be otherwise. ⁹⁴ Nevertheless, this reflection can be deeply critical if, in addition to revealing the rational form of what exists, it also reveals the internal limits of that rational form, which only become apparent as existence runs up against them. By tracing the rational form of the ethical community, and showing how the rational purpose of that community collides with its opposite in the figure of the rabble, Hegel demonstrates reason’s exhaustion with the existing social order. For Hegel, that is as much as political philosophy can do, but this is already a deeply critical accomplishment.

Conclusion: Internal Outsiders in Post-Hegelian Critical Theory

Read as a critique, Hegel’s political philosophy denies the universality of freedom in a social order where individual self-interest and the demands of collective life are ostensibly reconciled by mediating individuality, social standing, and political representation through a particular system of economic interdependence. This opens a number of critical avenues that can be productive for contemporary analyses of social and political inequality. To conclude, I will highlight just one in order to clarify Hegel’s relation to political theory today.

Hegel is widely considered a critic of the liberal social contract tradition, and my earlier arguments suggest an additional layer to his familiar critique. For modern social contract theories, the benefits of membership in a legitimate polity become attainable and meaningful through a single axis of differentiation. These benefits—usually freedom and equality—are only realized within the association of contractors. Whatever remains outside of this association—be it a temporal, spatial, civic, or natural exterior—does not enjoy the benefits that the contractors receive. Thus, the association of contractors is founded and legitimated in opposition to whatever it excludes, and the benefits of association are attained, enjoyed, and signified in contradistinction to their absence outside the scope of the association. By privileging this single inside–outside axis of differentiation, modern contract theory can give the false impression that all members enjoy the benefits of association equally, and in equal opposition to nonmembers.

As I read his critical theory of the ethical state, Hegel preserves this inside–outside axis of differentiation, but also acknowledges a second axis within the political association—namely, the division between the impoverished rabble and the rest of society. For Hegel, the political association is founded and legitimated through opposition to, and differentiation from, not only what it excludes but also some of what it includes—the internal remainders of ethical life. By doubling and internalizing the axis of normative differentiation that is essential to the modern social contract, Hegel presents his readers with a disconcerting thought: the freedom enjoyed by some members of the association is conditioned, not only by its denial to those beyond the borders of the association but also by its denial to certain members within the association.

To be clear, the upshot of Hegel’s thought is not simply that political benefits are distributed unequally throughout the interior of the ethical-political community. Rather, Hegel shows that, within a particular form of ethical-political community, political benefits gain their content, substance, and significance partly by virtue of their unequal distribution among persons who, as members of the same community, have an equal claim to those benefits. According to his critical analysis, the ethical state can actualize freedom only if it maintains internal sovereignty, and this in turn requires the persistent presence of an impoverished and unfree underclass. At the level of individual lives, this means that citizens who are not excluded and alienated from the unity of ethical life realize their own freedom only on the condition that other citizens are impoverished, alienated, and unfree. Thus, the state not only fails to universally actualize freedom but, what is more, the freedom that it does actualize gains its significance from its particularistic and unequal distribution throughout the community.

Put bluntly, this is the further lesson of Hegel’s analysis of the productive role of poverty in the ethical state: My own freedom may be made possible and defined, not only in contradistinction to those who are not my cocitizens, and so have not been promised the same freedom, but also in contradistinction to those who are my cocitizens—my neighbors who have been formally promised, but substantively denied, the very freedom that I enjoy. This is a lesson that social contract theory cannot easily entertain. Nevertheless, it is crucial to understanding forms of social inequality across a variety of institutional contexts. For instance, Carole Pateman has demonstrated that ideals of freedom and equality gain their particular content in liberal societies by virtue of a male–female axis of differentiation, according to which males enjoy political freedom and equality in ways that are denied their female co-citizens. ⁹⁵ Or again, Charles Mills has shown that, in purportedly liberal societies, the freedom of whites has been deeply conditioned, in theory and practice, by its direct comparison to the unfree condition of nonwhites. ⁹⁶ Behind these analyses stands Hegel, whose remarks on poverty, sovereignty, and freedom remind us that the unequal distribution of political goods within a community is essential, not only to the particular ways that those goods are enjoyed but also to the actual constitution—and so also the potential transformation—of the community itself.