82-127-PHIL30-S-PS-0916.20201.001

Einführung in die Philosophiegeschichte: Einführung in die moderne politische Philosophie: E. Burkes Über die Französische Revolution und G. W. F. Hegels Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts

Seminar

Englisch

21.04.2020 - 24.07.2020

Philosophisch-Pädagogische Fakultät

Schweidler, Walter / O'Donnell, Neil

25 unbegrenzt

While appearing to the public mind as locked in a mutually antagonistic and seemingly irreconcilable relationship, the political ideologies of modern progressivism and modern conservatism both historically issue from a common tradition in political thinking, namely that of seventeenth century liberalism. Central to this historic theory belongs the positing of the principle of man’s fundamental rational and moral autonomy and the concomitant desire that the same be recognised by and realised in political reality. To this desideratum naturally belongs the laudation of a certain political form in which the concretization of man’s own individual interests finds the possibility of its greatest maximization, a form in which such interests are not subordinated to those of an arbitrarily imposed temporal power, but rather one which is in-itself an expression of these very interests; namely, one which is freely chosen and legitimated by the exercise of man’s own will. The notion, which Kant referred as the principle of republicanism, that government is legitimated by the will of those governed, constitutes a radical departure from all previous historic theories of state legitimation; one from which today the possibility of any nostalgic return is hardly conceivable.
Fundamentally united to and issuing from the fundamental principle animating political liberalism as indicated above, the thought of E. Burke and G. W. F. Hegel ought not to be regarded, and therefore also possibly disregarded, as ‘conservative’ in the sense of any reactionary assault marshalled by the remnants of the old political order against the new, but rather as an immanent critique of the excesses to which the political realisation of this principle might lead and, in their own time, was believed in fact to have led; namely, to the French Revolution and to gruesome spectacle of the Terror that succeeded it. While their respective critiques of this, what has subsequently become world-historical event, diverge from each other in certain respects to be indicated in the course of this seminar, to both belongs not only a fundamental defense of the central proposition of political liberalism, namely that the state-order is not to be determined by the particular will of any arbitrarily imposed temporal power, whether they be the Stuart monarchs of seventeenth century England or the political ideologues of eighteenth century France, but orient and structure itself according to the autonomous and free willing of individual subjects, but also an important rearticulation of what that great proto-liberal Thomas Hobbes once recognised, namely that above the realisation of absolute freedom hovers the specter of absolute tyranny.

https://elearn.ku.de/goto.php?target=crs_575421_rcodexH4WbMvg2J&client_id=elearnKU

Course books:

Burke, E., Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. by F. M. Turner (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003).
Hegel, G. W. F., Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. by A. W. Wood, trans. by H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Introductory reading:

Hampsher-Monk, I., ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’, in The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke, ed. by D. Dwan and C. J. Insole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 195-208.
Kirk, R., The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, 7th rev. ed. (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2001), chp. 1 (‘The Idea of Conservatism’).
Westphal, K., ‘The Basic Context and Structure of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. by F. C. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 234-269.

Further reading:

Barruel, A., Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (London: Hudson & Goodwin, 1798-1799).
Beiser, F. C., Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790-1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Berlin, I., ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in id., Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty, ed. by H. Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 166-217.
Bosanquet, B., The Philosophical Theory of the State (London: Macmillan and Co., 1920), chp. 9, §§ 4 (‘Freedom in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’) and 5 (‘The Philosophy of Right as a chapter in the Philosophy of mind’).
Deneen, P. J., Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2018).
Habermas, J., ‘Hegel’s Critique of the French Revolution’, in id., Theory and Practice, trans. by J. Viertel (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1974), pp. 121-141.
Hazard, P., The Crisis of the European Mind (1680-1715), trans. by J. L. May (New York, NY: New York Review of Books, 2013).
Hegel, G. W. F., The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), BB. B. II (‘The Enlightenment’) and BB. B. III (‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’).
—, The Philosophy of History, trans. by J. Sibree (Ontario: Batoche Books, 2001), Part 4, § 3 (‘The Modern Time’).
Kaufmann, W., ‘Hegel: Legende und Wirklichkeit’, Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung, 10. 2 (1956), 191-226.
Locke, J., Two Treatises of Government, ed. by P. Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Second Treatise.
Marcuse, H., Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, 2nd ed., repr. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955).
Michelet, J., The History of the French Revolution, trans. by C. Cocks (Perth: Antipodes Press, 2018).
O’Regan, C., ‘The Religious and Theological Relevance of the French Revolution’, in Hegel on the Modern World, ed. by A. B. Collins (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), chp. 2.
Pocock, J. G. A., The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
—, ‘Burke and the Ancient Constitution: A Problem in the History of Ideas’, Historical Journal, 3 (1960), 125-143
—, ‘The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution’, Historical Journal, 25 (1982), 331-349.
Ritter, J., ‘Hegel and the French Revolution’, in id., Hegel and the French Revolution: Essays on the Philosophy of Right, trans. by R. Winfield (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1984), pp. 35-123.
—, ‘Person and Property: On Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, paragraphs 34-81’, in id., Hegel and the French Revolution, pp. 124-150
Stanlis, P., Edmund Burke, The Enlightenment and the Modern World (Detroit, MI: University of Detroit Press, 1967).
Strauss, L., Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1965).
Suter, J. -F., ‘Burke, Hegel, and the French Revolution’, in Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives: A Collection of New Essays, ed. by Z. A. Pelczynski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 52-72.
Tocqueville, A. de, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, ed. by Jon Elster, trans. by A. Goldhammer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Voegelin, E., Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Chicago, IL: Regnery, 1968).

11.03.2020 -

Bereits beendet

Alternative Prüfungsform: schriftliche Hausarbeit