Systematic Significance for Our Account
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Rawls–communitarianism debate shows: Hegel is not merely of historical interest in the twentieth century but systematically relevant. The questions he posed — How does the individual relate to community? How is freedom possible within institutions? What does recognition mean? — are not settled. They structure the present-day debate.
But the debate also shows: one cannot simply go “back” to Hegel. The communitarian critique of Rawls is justified — but so is Rawls’ insistence on universal rights, on the freedom of the individual from community, on the difference between justice and the good life.
The task is integration: to combine the strengths of both sides without adopting their weaknesses. That is, in the Hegelian sense, sublation. And it is the task that will be pursued further in Volume III.
Transition to Chapter 21b: One of the four directions of the critique of the subject has its own history, one that deserves to be told separately — the theories of positionality from which the left of the following century will speak about inequality. The next chapter is devoted to them.
Transition to Chapter 22: The critique of the subject — feminist, postcolonial, ecological, communitarian — has shown that the classical subject was particular, embedded, dependent. But one question remains open: if there is no sovereign subject that orders the world, how does order arise at all? Who or what organizes society, if not the planning intellect? The cybernetic turn answers: order arises through self-organization, not through external planning. The paradox of an order without an orderer becomes the central theme.