Volume 73, Issue 2

Abstrakt This contribution places Hegel’s groundbreaking differentiation between civil society and the political state in Elements of the Philosophy of Right into the systematic context of his politico-philosophical thought and into the historical context of his intellectual biography between revolution and restoration. Particular attention is paid to the innovative conception of a specifically modern form of civico-political ethos (“Sittlichkeit”, ethical life) and the intricate interlacing of state and society by means of a differential conception of large civico-political groupings (“Stände”, estates). The modern polity portrayed by Hegel proves to be, by and large, our own.

Schelling’s system of identity, initiated in 1801, soon encounters several ontological challenges following the publication of the dialogue Bruno in 1802. These issues revolve around the distinction between the Absolute and the world, and the very existence of the finite. The central theme of Schelling’s Philosophy and Religion – and of this paper – is the concept of the Fall. Schelling develops this idea by drawing an analogy with Christian dogma; in his philosophy, however, it signifies the emergence of meaning and explains the existence of a finite world. Moreover, freedom, inherently linked to finitude, now depends on the establishment of a “real absolute” where nature, the world, and humanity are recognised as the proper domain of freedom, in contrast to the original, self-contained “ideal absolute”. Comparing this development with Schelling’s earlier identity system, we argue that between 1802 and 1804 he shifts toward a more dualistic stance, thereby departing from mainstream German Idealism years before the Freedom Essay .

I provide an account of class transition with reference to Bourdieu, Spinoza and Marx, building on essayistic work by contemporary French philosopher Chantal Jaquet. After clarifying the notion of class with Marx and Bourdieu, I sketch a Spinozist perspective of movements between classes. While Bourdieu registered such movements as exceptions, Jaquet explains them as rearrangements of affective, economic, political and socio-cultural determinants. She thereby pits Spinoza’s concept of ingenium against Bourdieu’s habitus figure. As I show, this expresses ontological and anthropological differences between both oeuvres. Spinoza’s understanding of affect , disposition and conatus , I argue, allows class reproduction to be grasped in its inherent instability. While Jaquet inherits Bourdieu’s struggle to account for the politics of whether the social refracts into classes (making class transition an issue in the first place), I suggest reconciling the analysis of class transitions with the critique of class relations by triangulating Spinoza and Bourdieu with Marx.

This paper explores the intersection of class, moral injury, and recognition, examining how the class structure degrades human dignity and autonomy, and proposes paths for social transformation beyond recognition. Class represents a moral injury to the status of being human. Unlike identity-based claims that seek recognition, the condition of class necessitates abolition. The paradox is that even though class can be diagnosed as a form of misrecognition, its rectification cannot be accomplished via recognition. To identify class as a moral injury is to recognise that recognition cannot resolve the misrecognition of class. Undoing the epistemic injustices and misrecognitions of class rather demands the collective work of abolishing class itself.

Despite the possibility of clearly defining social classes on the basis of economic criteria, ambivalent relationships occur time and again in concrete social constellations. Classes in such an intermediate relationship can be characterised as “amphibious”. A considerable proportion of the working class also exhibits such “amphibious” characteristics due to the effects of historical and current differentiation processes. The phenomenon is further entrenched by the education system, thereby explaining why people who have ascended through the educational system often develop ambivalent feelings about their milieus of origin. It is argued here that an analysis based on classes has more transformative potential than theories focusing on the trespassing of class boundaries.