Hegel was attracted to the Greek ideal, but he ultimately rejected it as a model for the modern world. This article discusses four deficiencies he identified in ancient Greek ethical life: the immediate relationship between the subjective will of the individual and the ethical norms of the polis, the absence of institutions that mediated citizens’ private goals with the polis, the deficient conception of the human being which underlay slavery, and the granting of recognition on the basis of natural categories rather than politically integrative norms. These deficiencies explain not only why Hegel thought the Greek polis had to disintegrate under the onslaught of subjective particularity, but also why he rejected the Greek ideal as a model of social membership for modern ethical life. In addition, they illuminate his rejection of Fries and provide grounds for criticizing Rousseau. His account of the highly articulated modern state represents a response to the question of how the deficiencies of Greek ethical life can be overcome.

In this paper, I clarify the structure of dialectical contradiction in Marx in order to show how it is influenced by Hegel. To this aim, I focus on the only place where Marx systematically develops the concept of dialectical contradiction, namely, in his analysis of commodity in the first chapter of Capital. Here Marx claims that the commodity is the contradictory unity of use-value and exchange-value. To make this claim intelligible, I first discuss Hegel's conception of ‘the thing’ [Das Ding] in the Science of Logic and demonstrate how for Hegel ‘the thing’ is the contradictory unity of matter and form. With this Hegelian machinery, then, I turn to Marx to show how use-value and exchange-value constitute the matter and the form of commodity, and argue how they contradict each other.

I examine the relation between logic and nature in terms of ‘reflection’, the word that Hegel uses at the end of the Encyclopaedia Logic to describe the self-sundering or externalization of the idea into nature. Although nominally the term ‘reflection’ seems to denote a uniquely mental process and is often used so by Hegel in his early critique of Reflexionsphilosophie, in his later writings it also has an irreducibly ontological significance. Hegel describes logic's opening-out to nature as a movement of ‘reflection’ [Widerschein] and he follows Kant in describing the shift from the finite to the infinite in the relation between nature and thought as one of reflective judgement. Although Hegel generally considers reflection to be uniquely concerned with finite cognition and the constitution of finite things, I argue that in his embrace of reflective judgement he sees a key role for reflection in the relation of logic, nature and spirit.

In this article I argue that Hegel and Saussure both discovered a new mode of theorization that I propose to call ‘structural explication’. This is distinct from the generally dominant ‘linear’ mode of theorization—i.e., causal and quasi-causal explanations. I also argue that the standard criticisms usually directed against Hegel and Saussure stem from a failure to appreciate the nature of structural explication. For example, both Hegel and Saussure argue that—in some deep sense—form can generate content. But this must be comprehended in a strictly non-linear way. A linear interpretation of such arguments will lead to absurdities. I propose to call such deep generative structures (with a nod to Kant) the ‘necessary structures of possibility’. By comparing Hegel's thoughts on the science of a philosophical logic and Saussure's thoughts on the science of a general linguistics it is possible to discern a deep ‘scientific’ affinity. Furthermore, I argue that the structural level cannot be accounted for in any linear way. On the contrary, the linear explanation is fundamentally dependent on a structural explication of the genesis of the basic terms it assumes as ‘given’. A possible reason for the pervasiveness of the linear explanation (besides, perhaps, the success of causality-oriented natural sciences) is that discursive language is linear and our lived experience in time is linear. Thus, a structural explication will inherently appear less intuitive, and maybe also less ‘satisfying’, than a linear explanation. Finally, I also bring the distinction between the linear and the structural to bear on Robert Brandom's normative pragmatist reading of Hegel's ‘semantic holism’.

In the decades around 1800, genealogical imaginaries, or the social, political, economic and cultural meanings of descent and kinship, underwent far-reaching change. Hegel was deeply concerned with these transformations in various respects and in different parts of his philosophy. By engaging with the issues of kinship and family, with the disputes over racial diversity as well as with the scientific debates about life, reproduction and the meaning of sexual difference, Hegel contributed to a philosophical re-articulation of genealogical relations, or to the shaping of a new vocabulary through which the political, social, cultural and epistemic transformations of the period were rendered intelligible in distinctive ways. Although Hegel did not draw explicit connections between his reflections on kinship, race and reproduction, my aim is to explore the semantic interrelations among his reflections on these issues.

While it has long been commonplace to advert to the Phenomenology of Spirit's peculiar prosaic form, there has been no sustained, thematic attempt to understand the relationship between that form—as a continuous, quasi-fictional narrative—and the work's philosophical content. I argue that some of what has been felt to be outlandish about the form may be better accounted for by reading it as connected to purposeful literary decisions, decisions in turn exhibiting philosophical claims about the new mode of modern self-understanding that the argument is concerned with advancing. Extending Allen Speight's suggestions that Hegel sees literature as closely connected to his theory of agency, I argue that the Phenomenology's narrative should be understood as itself specifically and deliberately novelesque. I focus on three points that help clarify the book's form as not simply in keeping with, but as expressing aspects of its content: (1) the narrative structure of consciousness (as a unified, unfolding activity through which Hegel explores the notion of actuality), (2) the theatricalizing counterpoint between the ‘in itself’ and ‘for itself’ (as a dramatic device that Hegel connects to the social underpinnings of consciousness), and (3) the role of confession and forgiveness in the argument (as a theme that Schlegel had singled out as essential to the novel, and that Hegel repurposes both to criticize and to overcome Romanticism). I do not say that the Phenomenology is itself a novel, but that construing some of its formal features and gestures as evoking the genre of the novel can help us to see more of what is philosophically at stake in them, and therefore in the work as a whole.