Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic

1. The theoretical and political problem of the State and Right seems to be focused today on the theme of the social control of living labor, or rather on the theme of the legal control of social labor. This is to say that if the contemporary State is becoming ever more socialized, if its action has become ever more diffuse, and if this is due to the extreme importance that the movements of the world of labor have progressively assumed, then it follows that the juridical essence of the contemporary State tends at its limit to merge with the form of the social organization of labor. The planned State, both in the case in which the fiction of the private property relation is still admitted and the case in which it is negated (social State and socialist State), thus really establishes its legitimacy in the entire context of the nexuses of coercion and consensus that it lays out and with which it forms the mode of social production. To the extent that organized labor has become the exclusive foundation of social wealth, it has become, to the same extent, the foundation of constitutions, that is, the material condition of legality. The contemporary State is above all command of social labor, the organization of living labor.

To reread today a philosopher of Right with the claim to affirm his contemporaneity—in the sense that the problems he treated can be objectively translated for the contemporary reader—means to place him in front of the problems we have mentioned, to ask him how he thinks of the command of social labor, to consider to what extent this type of problem distinguishes his thought. The history of the philosophy of Right begins to be interesting only at the point where it is manifested as the philosophy of the organization of social labor.

2. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is perhaps the first philosophical text of modernity for which such an approach can be valid—and valid in an exclusive manner. Hegel, the philosopher of Right, is from this point of view an entirely contemporary author.

Right is the organization of and command over social labor, the form in which civilization [civiltà] is constituted via labor. This is a recurring and fundamental concept:

Education [Bildung],¹ in its absolute determination, is therefore liberation and work toward a higher liberation; it is the absolute transition to the infinitely subjective substantiality of ethical life [Sittlichkeit], which is no longer immediate and natural, but spiritual and at the same time raised to the shape of universality [Allgemeinheit]. Within the subject, this liberation is the hard work of opposing mere subjectivity of conduct, of opposing the immediacy of desire as well as the subjective vanity of feeling [Empfindung] and the arbitrariness of caprice.

[Certainly,] the fact that it is such hard work accounts for some of the disfavor that it incurs. But it is through this work of education that the subjective will attains objectivity even within itself, that objectivity in which it alone is for its part worthy and capable of being the actuality [Wirklichkeit] of the Idea.²

Substance, therefore, is the entire labor of civilization as the rational organization of the Idea, as the objectivity of the Idea and its new necessity of an ethical universe. Right is completely contained in this self-objectification—via labor—of the Idea: “The system of Right is the realm of actualized freedom, the world of spirit produced out of itself as a second nature.”³ It is a nature that is not found but radically constructed by the social activity of men, who are all included in the profound necessity of the labor of the Idea. The hard labor of individuals is included and contained in the design of the absolute labor of Spirit. Labor is the substance of the spiritual world [mondo spirituale].⁴

3. Now, this substantiality of labor as the foundation of the civil world [mondo civile] that Hegel assumes in the Philosophy of Right is stated even more explicitly in the early writings in which Hegel’s thought was developed, particularly in the early philosophico-juridical writings.

Between Frankfurt and Jena, through economic analysis and with explicit reference to the classics of English economic thought, labor (as the source of value) and wealth (as the result of labor) are integrated into the narrative of Spirit and considered as terms of positive qualification of objectivity. Society is constituted as a totality by the demanding synthesis of material motivations, by the valorization of the determinateness of total human labor. The previous youthful image of the ethical community in which individuality and rationality harmoniously and classically converged, and on which his first investigations were based, is dissolved by the Hegel of Jena into a process traversed by the stages of human industriousness from need to the interdependence of needs, from labor to the social collectivities that manage total labor. Here he depicts the rationality of the entire picture: “physical needs and pleasures … posited for themselves in the totality, obey in their infinite intertwinings a necessity and constitute the system of general mutual interdependence with a view to the physical needs and the labor and the accumulation of the same [needs and labor] and—considering this as science—the system of so-called political economy.”⁵

From this point, however, the picture is further deepened. The deepening is perfected until it finds in individual labor the substantial origin of ethical value in its universality. In the Phenomenology of Spirit a few years later, Hegel will say:

The labor of the individual for his own needs is just as much a satisfaction of those of others as of himself, and he attains the satisfaction of his own only through the labour of others. As the individual [der Einzelne] in his own particular [in seiner einzelnen] work ipso facto accomplishes unconsciously a universal [allgemeine] work, so again he also performs the universal task as his conscious object. The whole becomes in its entirety [als Ganzes] his work, for which he sacrifices himself, and precisely by that means receives back his own self from it.⁶

4. Substantiality of labor is therefore the foundation of human civilization [civiltà]. Nevertheless, “need and labor, raised to this universality, constitute for themselves … an extensive system of commonality and reciprocal dependence, a life of that which is dead that moves in itself, that is agitated in its movement blindly and in an elementary way in one sense or in another, and that like a wild ferocious animal needs to be constantly tamed and domesticated.”⁷

Here is the point at which Hegel’s thought assumes, even more expressly, a contemporary figure. The recuperation of the positivity of labor to the life of Spirit, labors’s very deep involvement [inerenza] and its very fundamental nature, cannot be given as such. Civilization [civiltà] isn’t simply labor but regulated, organized, and controlled labor. Labor, without Right, without the State, becomes chaos, the life of a dead body, particularity that arrogates universality for itself. Labor, on the other hand, can and must be universal: but only in the mediation of the State. The fundamental nature of labor is dialecticized, subsumed, sublimated. The involvement [inerenza] of the economic in the entire development of ethical life is subordinated already in Jena to the necessity of labor’s regulation. Rather, the regulation is slowly abstracted from the content to which it is applied: the economic and the juridical are born together, among the elementary processes of socialization of need and enjoyment, through the system of needs. However, this proceeding together lasts until the “second State”, that is, until the acquisitive class; then Right is emancipated. It can regulate this process only by negating its commonality with the process of the socialization of labor. Thus, it definitively declares the substantiality of labor to the human world. Right is contract, punitive justice, institution: here it is still mixed up with the direct necessity of the economic. But then it becomes constitution, State, government; that is, regulative and at the same exalting the reality of that regulated world. From now on, labor will appear in the command of the State.

5. The picture that the Philosophy of Right presents is that of the complete hegemony of Right over labor—which is nevertheless the substance of the ethical world. Command over social labor here ends up constituting the schema of the State itself: the assumption of labor in the Absolute occurs in the form of command, in the form of the statal articulation of social labor—as articulation for social classes. The division of labor has here a figure immediately functional to command over labor. The capitalist mode of production in the phase of primitive accumulation is sanctified and assumed as the substance of the general social relation. Within it command the political forces that are the guarantors of this phase of development. Idealism triumphs over economic analysis, exalting into spirituality the forces that in economic reality exercise command.

Here in the Philosophy of Right, the system of needs, though conceived in the wealth of its internal dialectic (“In this dependence and reciprocity of work and the satisfaction of needs, subjective selfishness turns into a contribution toward the satisfaction of the needs of everyone else. By a dialectical movement, the particular is mediated by the universal so that each individual, in earning, producing, and enjoying on his own account [für sich], thereby earns and produces for the enjoyment of others”)⁸ is immediately submitted to the dialectics of capitalist “participation” in wealth:

The possibility of sharing in the universal resources—that is, holding particular resources—is, however, conditional upon one’s own immediate basic assets (i.e., capital) on the one hand, and upon one’s skill on the other; the latter in turn is itself conditioned by the former, but also by contingent circumstances whose variety gives rise to differences in the development of natural physical and mental [geistigen] aptitudes which are already unequal in themselves [für sich]. In this sphere of particularity, these differences manifest themselves in every direction and at every level, and, in conjunction with other contingent and arbitrary circumstances, necessarily result in inequalities in the resources and skills of individuals.⁹

Nor is participation that is different from wealth an individual fact, an exception of singularity: the universality of the process equally has to express the diversity in “universal masses” [allgemeinen Massen],¹⁰ in different collectivities of participation and command over social living labor.

Thus Right is superimposed over the living community of social cooperation in the organization of wealth.

6. The nexus of unity and division, of cooperation and subordination proposed by the capitalist organization of social living labor thus ends up constituting also the interior nexus of the Hegelian conception of Right.

Right is in fact presented in the Philosophy of Right in three figures: It is abstract Right, norm and prohibition, the moment of negative protection of personality, element conditioning the constitution of the society as such; but it is also, in the second place, immediately, subjective Right, claim—the person becomes subject, will conforms positively as action. The auroreal life of Right is constituted in this intertwining in a form completely analogous to the self-constitution of social cooperation in the productive world. Right confers here to particularity the capacity and the possibility “of developing and moving on all levels.”¹¹ It is the liberty of action that particularity develops in the world as the collective intention of determined sociality: “the particular reflected in itself is in general well-being.”¹² That is, it is the collective growth of labor from the system of needs to the production of wealth. Labor, as constructed world and as forming force, as second nature, as produced objectivity, therefore constitutes the base on which both society and Right develop at the same time.

But Right is presented in the Philosophy of Right also in a third, definitive figure: as organic nexus of the ethical world, as ethical institution, as the determined articulation of the entire social world. Now, the emergence of that which for Hegel is the real Spirit, the passing from particularities to universality, from the finite to the infinite, produces the fact that the entire process of the definition of Right is modified and that the nexus that united Right and social cooperation is completed and sublimated in the nexus that sees cooperation in subordination. Liberty, in becoming “substantial liberty,” subordinates completely—almost sends back to the background of an unattainable negativity—the world already seen as a human construction, as the collective undertaking of liberty. Cooperation and its dialectics of the positive production of the collective are dissolved inside a context that sees it completely enclosed in the subordination of their process to the absolute—to an absolute that is before any process of any type: “this idea is the being, eternal in itself and for itself and necessary, of Spirit.”¹³

in relation to the spheres of civil law [Privatrecht] and private welfare, the spheres of the family and civil society, the State is on the one hand an external necessity and the higher power to whose nature their laws and interests are subordinate and on which they depend. But on the other hand, it is their immanent end, and its strength consists in the unity of its universal and ultimate end with the particular interest of individuals, in the fact that they have duties [Pflichten] towards the State to the same extent as they also have Rights.¹⁴

But this duplicity of the relation between civil society and State, according to which the State would be at the same time negation and the becoming truth of civil society, is duplicity only in appearance, because the becoming truth consists in subordination, and the process is real only in negation. Thus the system of social labor assumed inside the system of Right to constitute its reality can exercise definitively its substantial function and can continue to be its (the system of Right’s) condition only by subordinating itself completely to the State. The State is in the last instance the true ethical reality: society and the world of cooperation assume reality only in the act of subordinating themselves to it. Subordination penetrates the very process of cooperation, giving it its own sign. Subordination, the reality of the State, is ontologically immanent to the dialectical process that constitutes it, and it is present in the moment of social cooperation that gives it its determinate being. Labor is the foundation of the State, it is the foundation of the entirety of legality insofar as it is the material of the control of the State. The control of social living labor is the labor of the State.

1. The thought of Right and of the State as the thought of labor and its organization is therefore completely explicit in the Philosophy of Right. It is a thought of labor and its determinate organization: bourgeois and capitalist.

This is immediately evident in the presuppositions of Hegel’s analysis, conditioned to an extreme by the Smithian and Ricardian conception of the foundations of political economy. Value is thus indeed assumed in its laborist origin;¹⁵ however, it is also certainly translated, on that basis, into the universality of exchange value:

A thing [Sache] in use is an individual thing, determined in quantity and quality and related to a specific need. But its specific utility, as quantitatively determined, is at the same time comparable with other things of the same utility, just as the specific need which it serves is at the same time need in general…. This universality, whose simple determinacy arises out of the thing’s particularity [Partikularität] in such a way that it is at the same time abstracted from this specific quality, is the thing’s value, in which its true substantiality is determined and is an object [Gegenstand] of consciousness.¹⁶

In the second place, the bourgeois and capitalist determinateness of the Hegelian discourse on labor and its organization results from the assumption of inequality as a fundamental term in defining the subjects of the labor process. This is not simple naturalistic inequality¹⁷ but exaltation (that is, posed in terms of having to be so) of the diverse functions of the productive process: association necessitates subordination, laboring cooperation necessitates differentiation in the process of valorization, and labor necessitates command, capital.¹⁸

Third, and consequently, the same Hegelian conception of civil man sees the rule of exchange as predominant: the citizen, as “bourgeois,”¹⁹ is the encounter of the necessity of counting as abstract interchangeable need (all men are, in society, before anything else commodities) and of the possibility of playing a determinant role—and collective as class—in the mechanism of the whole social subordination.

Hegel, therefore, the philosopher of Right, is the philosopher of the bourgeois and capitalist organization of labor.

2. In Hegel, however, there is not only the theorization—and the justification—of the given situation of the capitalist process. There is not only the recuperation of the theoretical intuition of classical economy between Smith and Ricardo. Beyond these, there is the utopia of capital, the perfect definition of the transcendental and driving relation of two propositions: the reality of the rational and the rationality of the real. If the reality of the rational is the apotheosis of the state of fact, the absolute immanentism of the pacification of the idea and of the real, determinateness conquered as pacification, and capital thus functions as absolute ordering in the bourgeois determinations that Hegel was able to comprehend, then, besides this, there is also the completely dialectical affirmation of the rationality of the real. The revolutionary passion of the Enlightenment is thus consciously subordinated to the necessity of capital.

The State is the reality of ethical life, the reality of labor: it is above all the driving rationality of this absolute identity. The world, in which what is rational is given and justified is shaken by the tension that emanates from the interior essence of rationality. A sort of unsatisfied will of understanding, of domination through doing and the intelligence of doing, thus traverses the entire picture. Where it seems that everything is complete, everything is incomplete. Where it seems that determinateness triumphs, the margins of the real’s practicability are revealed to be unlimited. But all of this occurs in the measure of a control and of a management of development that cannot but find its own definitive condition in the realized ethical Idea, in the State. It is the essence of the State, it is the essence of capital as the completeness of the subordination of the world of labor: all of that is the absolute, autonomous and self-moving. The immobile of the abstract ethical Idea rediscovers itself as motor of the real. And if the real is labor, if the rational order is “capital,” if the relation between cooperation and subordination and between particular and universal is the State, then, we have here the State as development, as capital in necessary development. The State as capital is the State as development. Power is exercised in development, by development. The State is a dynamic institution that sees Right developing as determinate action within the context of society bringing back every social action to the total determinations of the given rational order.

At this point, the rediscovery of universality in the discontinuous seriality of events, the connection of actions in a coherent universe of interior experiences, the fixation of a necessary nexus between individual meanings and overall meaning becomes a task that will find a response. Science is filled and satisfied by this process that feels in itself the absolute: in operating, it is justified, it is always re-proposed as objective, though being in every moment result. The equilibrium of all triumphs over the tension of the parts and, vice versa, the determinateness of the parts is placed harmoniously in the movement of all. The capitalist urgency of exalting the world, dissolving it into its parts, reconstructing it, dominating it completely—never any rest, always a firm command: this urgency is translated by Hegelianism into science. From Giovanni Gentile to Carl Schmitt, the European intellectual entre deux guerres has learned that this is its apologetic mission.

3. The enduring fortune, bourgeois and capitalist, of Hegelianism consists in this image of a rationality that is both given and continually transcendent, incomplete as development and complete as State. Nothing corresponds more to the image that capital produces of itself than this image, in the perpetual alternation of development and crisis, of reformism and repression, which its existence determines. And in no place is this total and dynamic projection of the State of capital offered better than in the Philosophy of Right. Neither Hegelian aesthetics nor logic, even less the philosophy of religion or of history, manage to produce this completeness of image. In the Philosophy of Right, the conciliation of positivity and the Idea are given without incoherencies: neither the indeterminateness of religious intuition, nor the coarseness of historical typology, nor the instability of the aesthetic vision, nor the formalism of the logical process are able to upset the picture. In fact, in the Philosophy of Right, neither the mere positivity of Right nor the merely statal normative are valorized more than the Idea; rather, here the complete positivity of social production through labor is at play. This compact social reality, unitarily assumed and resolved in the process of the Idea, is the measure of the dynamic positivity that the universal configuration of the Philosophy of Right manages to attain. It is an image that interprets the rigidity of the social structures that it reads as positive, an image that interprets the necessity that emanates from the same social structures as dynamic, in order to comprehend, ever more profoundly and rationally, this determinate world of capital within which contemporary man is completely contained.

4. This interior completeness of the Philosophy of Right has nourished and at the same time imprisoned the philosophical and political thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is a generously positive prison when one thinks of the continuous self-critical initiative that the living nexus of rationality and positivity imposed on bourgeois thought. The nineteenth-century conception of progress in positivity closely linked to this (and with this eighteenth-century rationalism was overcome); historicist optimism; the great wave of scientific thought itself: all that is perhaps incomprehensible if it is not linked to the intuition that the real can be moved from the inside without thus losing its positive composition. For the first time in the history of man, in an Hegelian fashion order has become progressivist and power has become reformist. The bourgeoisie, in the name of Hegelianism, had the possibility of renewing an old, revolutionary demand of the Renaissance—the nostalgia for which it had perhaps never lost until now.

But a prison is always a prison, even when it is gilded—above all, if it comprehends bourgeois thought only in the way that it subordinates and crushes the society of labor, only in the way that the bourgeois apology of development in order is posited on the exploitation of total social living labor. Development, domination, wealth: but these are “confronted with a material which offers infinite resistance, i.e., with external means whose particular character is that they are the property of the free will [of others] and are therefore absolutely unyielding.”²⁰ Here the cage of the absolute wavers, it really finds its antithesis. The “absolutely unyielding” does not accept the composition of the plan of reason, of the State.

5. When bourgeois thought feels all of this, as a crisis in the entrails of the absolute in which it reposes, it nevertheless does not manage to liberate itself. The prison that Hegelian thought imposes here is not gilded anymore; rather, it is dramatic. An “irresolute determinateness and absolutely unyielding” lived, received, suffered; yet the cage of the absolute, cannot, must not, and does not want to be shattered. After the nineteenth-century apotheosis of Hegelianism, here is the twentieth-century nemesis of the scheme of reference, of the absolute as the project of reason, which the most lucid bourgeois theory has inherited from Hegel. This new hard-won determinateness cannot be subordinated. A new dialectic, within and against the Hegelian absolute, is opened: no longer triumphal, but from time to time mystical or ascetic, always tragic, always more negative.

Here, in fact, the totality of the Hegelian process of reason cannot manage to constitute itself anymore, the process is given as interrupted: and yet it wants to constitute itself. Philosophical science moves from the determined, it wants to reconstitute the determined in the perspective of the absolute: but by now the absolutely unyielding, the reality of an irreducible conflictuality, has been shown. The demand of totality is uncoupled and takes distance from the recompositive mechanism; process and result are not able to attain identity. Here it is that totality is pursued with the rhythm of an unresolved dualism: it will be the ascesis of a functioning intentionality that repeats the models of the transcendental schematism but with a charge of phenomenological heaviness that does not permit the apprehension of the absolute. It will be, inversely, the acceptance of a world of meanings, historically given, which will be held on to in the absence of an overall and ontologically convincing meaning: here the absolute becomes convention, the given is mystically confirmed with stupor and submission to its power that cannot be broken. It will be, finally, the awareness that the nexus between meanings and sense of the ontological event cannot be resolved, that the relation between determinateness and totality is not concluded: “the whole is the untruth.” But what a terrible destiny lies behind this discovery! The negation is painfully qualified by the nostalgia of the absolute content on which it is exercised. Hegelian phenomenology is completely relived in inversion: not in the process that carries it to the height of the capitalist composition of the Philosophy of Right, but inversely, beginning from the critique of it, within the series of contradictions that constitute the process—a series of contradictions that are today irresolvable, but evermore deepened. The Hegelian totality is dissolved in the contradictions that constituted it without the possibility of triumphing over them. The “tragedy in the ethical” is not the condition of the totality anymore but rather the result of the process.

1. The trajectory of Hegel’s thought on the State and on Right is not merely bourgeois and capitalist: the Hegelian impact is so complex that it reverberates and is also valid in very, or at least potentially, contradictory locations.

If it is in fact true that the insubordinate determinateness of labor is felt on the development of bourgeois philosophy such as to induce in it desperate results, then it is so much more true that this particularity, really, historically, rises against the general capitalist interest that is supposed to be represented in the figure of the Hegelian State. When, beginning in 1848, and then in the great revolutionary undertakings of the working class in 1870 and in 1917, the particular worker is qualified as subject, proposing and undertaking the rupture of the machines of statal domination over subordinate labor, it seems that the Hegelian ideology of the State has closed its account with history:

Capital stands on one side and labour on the other, both as independent forms relative to each other; both hence also alien to one another. The labour which stands opposite capital is alien [fremde] labour, and the capital which stands opposite labour is alien capital. The extremes which stand opposite one another are specifically different.²¹

Still, that is not verified; or it is only verified in the form of utopia, of revolutionary hope. In effect, the real experience of realized socialism verifies the continuity—paradoxal continuity, we will see—of a Hegelianizing practice of the State. The revolution is reorganized as capitalist institution; socialism takes the figure of the State. The militant cooperation of the revolutionary workers sees and poses in the first place the necessity of a phasal displacement between an egalitarian participation in the structure of the State and a subordinate participation, according to the urgencies and the positivity of the productive functions, in the structure of the economic process. Slowly—within this historical context—the same free participation in education and in the management of political will is destroyed and subordinated to the necessities of the economic mechanism. Socialism is given in the form of the Hegelian State: the particular worker’s interest, its “obstinacy,” is therefore not able to free itself from the general interest, from the plan of general subordination. Still, Marx had already noted in the Grundrisse that “the demand that wage labour be continued but capital suspended is self-contradictory, self-dissolving.”²²

2. Certainly, something has changed. Right and the State do not have here, as in the development of Hegel’s thought, as in that crucial phase of the construction of the contemporary capitalist State, the necessity of transcending the world of labor—even if at the end of the dialectical process, in those pages of the Philosophy of Right that see the transition from civil society to the State or that of the second acquisitive class to the general class. Here labor is extended to the circle of the general class, but only to discover in itself that dialectic of cooperation and subordination, the continuity of which Hegel interrupted at this point, exalting—exterior to the labor process—its political autonomy and sublimation. In this new experience—which wants to be of negation—Hegelianism paradoxically subsists; it finds a more intimate coherence. The absolute does not need to cut its roots in labor, the order does not need to disengage from the dialectic that proposes and constitutes it: realized socialism gives us the continuity of the formative scheme of the State entirely within labor. Labor and Right, cooperation and subordination, society and State, occur together in an integrated and close community and at all levels of dialectical development.

The prison of the Philosophy of Right is thus extended here also to one of its potential negations. It triumphs over it. It triumphs over it at the point that negation, rather than proposing doubt, deepens the coherence of the context. What seems to be an overturning appears as a radical confirmation. The State, menaced, is reproposed as the substance of the ethical idea, the solution of the particularity of the general nexus of Spirit. Certainly, it is a Spirit “that works.” But wasn’t the Philosophy of Right supposed to be from the beginning the “hard labor of the highest freedom”?

3. Does this extreme solution of insurgent and unsubordinated particularity, within the scheme of the Hegelian statal conciliation, really have the capacity to resolve its problem? Or doesn’t it rather happen that the unresolved opposition finds here—after this extreme attempt of conclusion—the appropriate terrain on which to deepen itself? No longer, therefore, against Right, no longer merely against the State, but against labor, which the last solution has shown as universally comprehensive substance and the keystone of the relation between cooperation and subordination?

The impetuous advancing of the movement of insubordinate particularity, well beyond the limits imposed by the Hegelian prison of socialism, shows that the road to liberation is precisely that of the struggle against labor—and it shows that it cannot be contained in the Hegelian project of the absolute. As praxis and science, the revolution liberates itself from Hegelianism: the productivity of Spirit is shown to be a prison in the same way as the productivity of labor—this final contemporary divinity of the composition of exploitation with development, of labor with the enlightenment utopia of capitalist progress. The mass refusal of labor as general condition, of the insubordinate attitude fundamentally attacks the Hegelian composition (both in its capitalist and in its socialist figure) of cooperation and of subordination. For the first time, cooperation is dissociated, is turned against subordination, discovering itself in subordination “as object, as absolute misery,” reflecting on itself instead—as cooperation—“as general possibility of wealth as subject and as activity.” “Labour not as an object, but as activity; not as itself value, but as the living source of value. [Namely, it is] general wealth (in contrast to capital in which it exists objectively, as reality) as the general possibility of the same, which proves itself as such in action.”²³ For the first time, labor breaks the substantialist definition that tied it to the State: in the refusal of itself it steps forward at the same time as refusal of the State, it asserts itself as the collective undertaking of liberty. The organization of social living labor is thus entrusted to the general human proposal of happiness and wealth, developing itself as such, against any moment of subordination.

4. The rupture of the nexus cooperation and subordination in the social practice of the refusal of labor recovers the obstinacy of particularity; it makes it true as acting particularity, as subject. An alternative world, a really constructed “second nature,” opens as a very rich possibility beginning from the activity of the particular. But, critically, what should be emphasized above all is as follows: that the refusal of labor, the exaltation of the obstinacy of particularity inheres as negation at the deepest point, in the most radical dimension of the Hegelian process of the absolute. The shattering of the universe of the Philosophy of Right takes place at its sources: going beyond the necessity of Right and of the State, which are not however originary, attaining to the true nucleus of the necessity of the process of objectification, which is the necessity of the capitalist organization of labor. Here there is not some particular content of the dialectic that is placed in discussion; here the formalist business of the neo-Hegelian reform of the dialectic is not repeated: it is the dialectical process itself that is refuted as an adequate form of a specific content, the capitalist organization of labor. The refusal of labor deepens until appearing as the refusal of the dialectic, as the radical dissolution of the composition of the subject of labor with the necessity of subordination, as the radical affirmation of the irreducibility of the collective reality of particular obstinacy.

From here on, the process is given only as the capacity of rupture, as a series of struggles: particularity shows itself to be in itself, as activity, as permanent struggle, more general that any possible absolute. There is no necessity of recomposition because the obstinacy of the particular does not recognize others than itself to exploit, to recomprehend in a unity of opposites: there is only the deepening of the particular in itself, the discovery of a new universe by a turning back, and an excavation of the collective particular into itself. Reality is not dialectical but partial, autonomous, singular. Reality is not universal but radically unilateral: it is praxis that anticipates and risks itself by constructing itself as a particular power.

Finally outside the dialectic, outside any compositive process that is only a process of mystification, outside of labor as the synthesis of oppositions, outside of philosophy as the terrain of the ideal usurpation of the real, of the particular, the refusal of labor thus draws the consequences of the discovery of the Philosophy of Right as the supreme index of bourgeois ideology and the capitalist practice of the organization of exploitation. Here the thought of the particular, liberating itself of the dialectic of labor, liberates itself from philosophy as the nocturnal apparition of an apologetic comprehension of the real: the owl of Minerva disappears from our evening.

5. On the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth, our homage to Hegel, to the great thinker of the Philosophy of Right, is bitter—as it should be when we recognize in his reflection the massive base, continually renewed, of an ideology that desires the exploitation of man over man, that imprisons, though recognizing it, the hope of liberation. The historical awareness of the necessity of that thought, necessary to the beginning of the nineteenth century and of the development of mature capitalism, is attenuated and changes, when faced with the warning of the mystifying importance, of the significance of the suffocating impact of the Hegelian philosophy on a century and a half of the history of thought. The mystification, the political deformation of revolutionary demands: all of that has referred to Hegel. Let’s move this formidable obstacle out of our way! Let’s liberate our praxis and our thought from its fascination! Maybe only hate, as the expression of the insubordinate particularity in which our thought grows, can still define the quality of a relation with Hegel.

And yet, nevertheless, precisely this sentiment, with its intensity, still contradictorily binds us to him.

1. [Translator’s note: The Italian translation of Die Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts cited by Negri (La filosofia del diritto, ed. F. Messineo and A. Plebe [Laterza: Bari, 1965]) translates the German Bildung with the Italian civiltà. For Hegel, Bildung refers to a process of intellectual or “spiritual” [geistig] formation whose meaning is only approximated by the English “education” or the Italian civiltà (or formazione, the term used to translate Bildung in reference to, for example, academic, humanistic education). In the interest of fidelity to both Negri’s and Hegel’s texts, the original terms are provided to enable the reader to note the constellation of meanings operative in these passages.]

2. PR §187n. [Translator’s note: References to the Philosophy of Right are given according to paragraph number of what has now become the “standard” edition, indicated by the symbol “§” while “n” refers to a note. The German edition consulted is G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, in Werke, vol. 7, Auf der Grundlage der Werke von 1832–1845 neu edierte Ausgabe, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979).]

4. [Translator’s note: The adjective spirituale derives from the established Italian translation of Hegel’s Geist with Spirito. “Spiritual world” in this context could thus equally well be translated as “intellectual world” in its specific Hegelian meaning.]

5. G. W. F. Hegel, Ueber die wissenschaftlichen Behandungsarten des Naturrechts: Seine Stelle in der praktischen Philosophie und sein Verhältnis zu den positiven Rechtswissenschaften, in Werke, vol. 2, Auf der Grundlage der Werke von 1832–1845 neu edierte Ausgabe, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979), p. 482.

6. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, vol. 3, Auf der Grundlage der Werke von 1832–1845 neu edierte Ausgabe, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979), p. 265.

7. G. W. F. Hegel, Jenenser Realphilosophie, ed. J. Hoffmeister (Leipzig, 1932), vol. 1, p. 239.

21. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 266.