Realizing Freedom: Post-Kantian Perfectionism and the Hegelian School

Douglas Moggach

University of Ottawa & University of Sydney

This paper summarizes the major themes of my forthcoming monograph on post-Kantian perfectionism, with specific reference to the Hegelian School. The central thesis is that Kant’s critique of rational heteronomy in the Groundwork effectively ruled out certain types of perfectionist ethics and their corresponding political applications, notably the programs of Christian Wolff and his school, which were dominant in the German territories in the mid- to late eighteenth century. Kant’s critiques did not, however, preclude the emergence of a new type of perfectionism, no longer based on the state-sponsored promotion of eudaimonia or material, intellectual, and spiritual thriving, but on the advancement of freedom and the conditions for its exercise.  Predicated on the idea of right, post-Kantian perfectionism focuses on maintaining  and enhancing the juridical, political, and economic conditions for rightful interaction  among self-defining individuals. Following innovations by Humboldt, Schiller, Fichte, and Hegel, the Hegelian School contributes significantly to this new political-ethical approach, not only as negative critics or deconstructivists, but as innovators in the diagnosis of modern civil society and its contradictory interests. Marx follows up some of these Hegelian innovations while retaining elements of the older perfectionism in his ideas of the unmediated unity of species-being and his derogation of rights as mere ideology. Nonetheless his critique of capitalism as vitiating the freedom and not only the happiness of workers is structured along post-Kantian perfectionist lines.