Abstract

This article reinterprets Hegel’s much discussed “failure” to theorize a remedy for the poverty that disrupts modern society. I argue that Hegel does not offer any solution to the problem of poverty because, in his view, the sovereign state depends upon the persistence of poverty. Whereas a state’s achievement of external sovereignty requires the presence of another state, its achievement of internal sovereignty requires the presence of a different, internal other. This role is played by the impoverished and rebellious “rabble,” which opposes the state’s unity and stability. Ethical life cannot eliminate poverty because poverty, and the insecurity that it engenders, are dialectical conditions of the state’s highest development. This interpretation reveals a critical dimension to Hegel’s political philosophy, insofar as the state’s promise of actualized freedom can only be sustained in relation to a mass of internal “outsiders” to whom that freedom does not extend