Presentation Title:  "Hegel on Poverty"

Abstract: G.W.F. Hegel often stands accused of developing a contradictory or defective account of freedom: by accepting the presence of ineradicable poverty and a rebellious rabble in the midst of ethical life, he tacitly admitted that rational freedom in modern society was not fully free nor rational. This paper offers a different reading. Far from seeing the presence of ineradicable social ills as evidence that stands in contradiction to our freedom, Hegel saw them as an essential manifestation of our freedom. The crucial concept underlying this account is that of totality. As he saw it, the "ethical substance" is an unconscious totality in the midst of development, with a covert causality that governs the whole. To come to consciousness, it must undergo a process of educative formation in which its self-determining power manifests itself in various forms of violence and subordination. Only by internally dividing itself—leading to social inequality—does it form itself as an object that it can come to comprehend as a free and self-knowing subject. Once we recognize how Hegelian triadic totality works in social life, we can also see how he lays the groundwork for a mode of systemic social analysis that is growing increasingly relevant today.

About:  Shterna Friedman is an Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard. She has taught in the Committee on Degrees of Social Studies at Harvard (2023-2024); and in the Department of Political Science at Tufts University (2022-2023). She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2023. She majored in philosophy at Barnard College, and also received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 

She is currently working on a manuscript tentatively entitled The Idea of a Social System: Kant, Hegel, and the Rise of Systemic Social Theory. It examines the emergence of the tendency to treat normative attributes (such as justice or oppression) as systemic rather than individual properties. More generally, her research focuses on the epistemological and metaphysical presuppositions of modern systemic social theory as developed by the German Idealists, and further elaborated and criticized by such later thinkers as Marx, Durkheim, Parsons, and Foucault. Trained in early modern political thought, she is interested in the deep historical sources of the present and the often unarticulated assumptions that underlie ordinary and philosophical social and political discourse. She is also interested in issues of social ontology, political metaphysics, historical causation, political epistemology, and the methodology of the social sciences.

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