Hegel and China: Beyond Liberalism and Communitarianism

Abstract

In the aftermath of the publication of Alasdair MacIntyre's “After Virtue and Michael Sandel's Liberalism” and the “Limits of Justice in the early 1980s”, the debate between communitarians and liberals began to influence political philosophy in Anglo-American academia. The debate centers on the socio-political nature of the self, traditions, community values, and the role of context in shaping our moral and political reasoning. Communitarians emphasize the priority of community, while liberals prefer the significance of individual rights and freedoms. This paper argues that although both sides of the debate are partially correct, taken alone, their positions are incomplete. What is needed is a higher-order theory that can unite them and preserve their partial truths without repeating their errors. With proper readings, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's political and social philosophy accomplishes that by providing a coherent systematic political theory that harmonises the claims of the individual and the community, freedom and context, part and whole, universal and particular, and subjectivity and objectivity. More importantly, this paper also demonstrates the capacity of Hegel’s political philosophy to provide insights for modern China.