What Hegel's master/slave dialectic really means

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Volumn 34, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 577-610

  Cole, Andrew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 70450058366     PISSN: 10829636     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10829636-34-3-577     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. Theodor W. Adorno, "Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel," in Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 89
2. Karl Marx, The German Ideology, in The Marx-Engeb Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 149
3. J. J. Sheehan, German History, 1770-1866 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 97; 101- 2 (Sheehan's ellipses)
4. Other studies that confirm the feudal nature of Germany (or the German states) include David Warren Sabean, Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
5. Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)
6. Sabean, Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
7. Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1648-1871 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971)
8. and Hans Kohn, Prelude to Nation States: The French and German Experience, 1789-1815 (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1967)
9. and Robert Brenner, "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe," in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 45
10. Brunner, Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria, 4th ed., trans. Howard Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992)
11. and Walter Schlesinger, "Lord and Follower in Germanic Institutional History," in Lordship and Community, ed. Cheyette, 64-99
12. Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right, "trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O'Malley, ed. Joseph O'Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 72
13. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 345
14. For a recent attempt to read Hegel's master/slave dialectic in the context of discourses of freedom in the age of colonial slavery, see Susan Buck-Morss, "Hegel and Haiti," Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 821-65
15. Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit," trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 172
16. Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975)
17. See Jean Hyppolite, Préface de la "Phénomé nologie de l'esprit" (Paris; Aubier-Montaigne, 1966)
18. For more on the French background, see Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975)
19. Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988)
20. Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York; Columbia University Press, 1987)
21. Shadia B. Drury, Alexandre Kojève: The Roots of Postmodern Politics (Basingstoke, Hampshire; Macmillan, 1994)
22. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York; W. W. Norton, 1991), 73
23. Kojève's References to "Being-for-itself" do not begin to appreciate the issues of possession as self-possession
24. Chris Arthur, "Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic and a Myth of Marxology," New Left Review 142 (1983): 67-75, at 69
25. and Osborne, Politics of Time, 71-72
26. Werke, 10: 224-25; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text
27. see also Phil. Hist., 328 and 333
28. See J. A. F. Thompson, The Transformation of Medieval England, 1370-1529 (New York: Longman, 1983), 144
29. See Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge, 1975), 261
30. Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: NLB, 1974)
31. Rodney Hilton, Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Essays in Medieval Social History (London: Verso, 1990)
32. System, 117. Indeed, it seems that here Hegel is exploring the process of "sublation."
33. System der Sittlichkeit, 305, my emphasis
34. Brunner, "Feudalism: The History of a Concept," in Cheyette, ed., Lordship and Community, 46
35. see also Brunner, Land and Lordship
36. Schlesinger, "Lord and Follower," in Cheyette, ed., Lordship and Community, 92
37. See also Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, 272, 274, 276, 278
38. Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure, 172
39. It is no wonder, then, that at the center of many readings of Hegel's lord/bondsman dialectic is a sense of revolution; indeed, this dialectic provides, and explains, those opportunities for the raising of consciousness. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Pocket Books, 1956)
40. Kojève, "Desire and Work in the Master and Slave," in O'Neill, ed., Hegel's Dialectic of Desire, 49-65, at 60
41. and Buck-Morss, "Hegel and Haiti."
42. Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel: A Study of G. W. F. Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit" (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 451
43. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 115-16
44. See also Pinkard, Hegel's "Phenomenology" 54-55
45. and Osbourne, Politics of Time, 72
46. See George Armstrong Kelly, "Notes on Hegel's 'Lordship and Bondage,'" Review of Metaphysics 19 (1966): 780-802, who writes, "The problem of lordship and bondage is essentially Platonic in foundation, because the primal cleavage in both the history of society and the history of the ego is at stake" (788)
47. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 165
48. Phil. Hist., 370
49. Hegel held the view of "[t]his relation of bondage or of person to person" from early on; see System, 126
50. See, respectively, Hintze, "Nature of Feudalism," in Cheyette, ed., Lordship and Community, 29, 30
51. Hilton, Brenner Debate, 6
52. Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, 147, 184
53. and Hilton, Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism
54. E. Le Roy Ladurie, "L'histoire immobile," Annales E. S. C. 29 (1974): 675
55. quoted by Rodney Hilton, in Brenner Debate, 4
56. Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland, History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 1: 66
57. I have in mind the interesting studies by Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985)
58. and Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991)