Hegelian Social Pathology

Abstract

Chapter 13 examines Hegel's understanding of animal and mental illness and extrapolates from them an account of social pathology. Social pathologies should be understood not only in terms of impaired functioning or as imbalances among functional spheres but also as ways in which society fails to enable its members to relate to life in the mode of freedom, including: social practices becoming indistinguishable from processes of mere life; social impediments to realizing practical selfhood, such as inadequate sources of recognition or the generation of infinite, unsatisfiable desires; and ideology that involves a mismatch between what social members do and what they take themselves to be doing in their practices. The form of immanent critique found in Hegel's account of bondsman and lord is presented as a promising solution to the problem of providing an ethical justification of social norms that avoids reducing the morality to mere functionality for social reproduction.