THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

argument, and on the basis of this construal, they present Hegel’s political philosophy as
an attempt to complete, augment, or ground political liberalism. These philosophers
argue that Hegel’s conception of Sittlichkeit and the state provide the necessary
conditions for the universal rights described in “Abstract Right” and for the subjective
self-determination and critical moral evaluation described by “Morality.”
In this chapter I have argued against this conception of the dialectic and the
interpretation of Hegel’s political philosophy it entails. This conception precludes the
negative meaning of sublation, which I equate with the hermeneutic demand for
reinterpretation, and it fails to account for the role of contradiction in dialectical
progression. A careful examination of Hegel’s methodological remarks, as presented in
the Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia Logic, reveals the central role of
contradictions and the negative moment of sublation in the dialect. The importance of
these aspects of the dialectic can also be seen in the progression of the Philosophy of
Right itself. As we have seen, morality and civil society contain significant
contradictions. In the case of morality, these contradictions arise form the rigid or
absolute nature of the opposition between subjectivity and objectivity, while in the case
of civil society, they stem from the division between the needs and desires of private
individuals, on the one hand, and the institutions and social arrangements intended to
fulfill these needs and desires, on the other hand.
In order to overcome these contradictions, Hegel argues that we must seek the
ground that unites these apparently rigid oppositions. We must discover a conception of
social reality as the original unity of subjectivity and objectivity. Hegel designates this
conception of social reality with the term “Sittlichkeit.” Similarly, we must come to
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