Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and the Idea of the World: Dialectic’s “Political Cosmology”

ABSTRACT Foregrounding Hegel’s political cosmology allows us to set his dialectic-speculative theory of the political world in contrast both to ideal theories and to historicist-positivist theories. Against these positions, Hegel upholds his “realism of the idea”: the claim that a rational world is neither a pre-given whole nor an unattainable ideal, but the dynamic, immanent orientation of reason that continually constructs and animates the world. Hegel’s view of the world thus provides him with a way of reconceiving the relationship between philosophy and actuality. In this view, philosophy is not immune from, or external to, the world it theorizes, but is produced and checked by that world, which it, in turn, produces.