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10 - War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Shlomo Avineri
Affiliation:
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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Summary

Hegel's theory of war led various commentators to find a connection between Hegelian political theory and the fascist, totalitarian ideas about war and the state. There is no doubt that what Hegel has to say on the subject of war is rather unusual and sometimes quite startling, and it is easy to see how his unorthodox views, when taken out of the context of his general political philosophy, could have been so misconstrued.

Nothing could be more unsettling than the way in which Hegel criticizes the conventional wisdom about war, derived from the heritage of Natural Law theories. This heritage, both in its ecclesiastical and its secular version, tended to look upon war as something deviating from the norm of peace and harmony unless war was waged for what could be declared to be a ‘just’ cause. Since the avowed aim of Natural Law theories was to achieve a system of harmonious cooperation among individuals as well as among states, a strong undercurrent of negative value judgement accompanied anything deemed to be injurious to this effort. War, or strife generally, always meant, therefore, that something went wrong.

This left Natural Law theories with somewhat Manichean explanations about the origins and causes of war. A theological Natural Law theory could always refer either to God's inscrutability, or to man's fall, or to both; secular theories had no such convenient refuge, and thus had no choice but to acknowledge the chasm between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’. The legacy of this dichotomy is, of course, strongly felt in Kant as well.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1972

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  • War
  • Shlomo Avineri, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  • Book: Hegel's Theory of the Modern State
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139171441.012
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  • War
  • Shlomo Avineri, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  • Book: Hegel's Theory of the Modern State
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139171441.012
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • War
  • Shlomo Avineri, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  • Book: Hegel's Theory of the Modern State
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139171441.012
Available formats
×