Work and need, particular and universal

Abstract

Work and need animate Hegel’s thought. They appear in his early study of liberal political philosophy in Tübingen and his encounter with eighteenth-century Scottish political economy in Bern. These resulted in the lost manuscript on James Steuart’s Principles of Political Economy and in the Jena Realphilosophie lectures on the philosophy of spirit. Work and need are pivotal in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and the Philosophy of Right (1821) and are key supports for the development of his logic and his speculative philosophy more generally. The early reception of Hegel tended to treat his analysis of work and need superficially, to dismiss it, or to take it on often silently without acknowledging or analysing its significance. In the twentieth century, the intervention of Georg Lukács (1975, also 1978, 1980) and the meticulous scholarly work of Paul Chamley (1963, 1965a), Norbert Waszek (1988) along with many others, have made clear the importance of work, need and political economy in Hegel’s thought (see Plant 1977, 1980; Dickey 1987; Waszek 1988; Schmidt am Busch 2002; Renault 2016)