1st Edition
Hegel on Ethics, the State and Public Policy Comparisons with Immanuel Kant and Utilitarianism
Drawing on a wide range of Hegel’s writings, this book analyses the Hegelian position on ethical action. This position is systematically compared with that of Immanuel Kant, the comparison emphasizing Hegel’s insistence on a morality grounded in an ‘ethical’ context which essentially refers to the State rather than the agent’s private will. The argument proceeds to the relationship between the State and the various components of civil society; and to the interaction between the State and the individual; and feeds into the debate regarding Hegel’s status in relation to Utilitarian Ethics and liberalism. This book carries further the researches published in A History of Utilitarian Ethics and Immanuel Kant and Utilitarian Ethics, and will be of interest to readers in the history of political economy, political science, philosophy and ethics.
Introduction
1. Personal Ethics
2. The State and Civil Society
3. The Political State
4. Political Economy and Public Policy
5. On Ethical Progress
6. An Overview, and Hegel in the Prussian Context
Appendix A: On Professor Brudner’s Interpretation of Hegelian Philosophy
Appendix B: On Karl Marx’s ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law [Right]’
Biography
Samuel Hollander is University Professor Emeritus in Economics at the University of Toronto where he taught from 1963–1998. He is author of studies of the economics of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Robert Malthus, Jean-Baptiste Say, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; and of A History of Utilitarian Ethics (Routledge 2020) and Immanuel Kant and Utilitarian Ethics (Routledge 2022). He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and was a Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique of France (CNRS), 1999–2000.
