In this response to John Roberts’s essay in JCR 12 2013, I argue that Roberts presents Hegel in a one-sided way that stresses the negative, critical side of his thinking and misses its rationally resolutive side. At the same time, he mislocates Roy Bhaskar’s dialectical work and therefore misunderstands it. In terms of ethics, the key to understanding Bhaskar is the constellational relation he devises between ethics and geo-history, leading to a view of modern ethics as constituting a ‘broken dialectic’.