Radical Hegel: Thinking from the End

Hegel shows that radical change doesn’t require looking forward to a new future but finding hope in the unseen structures of what already exists.



Hegel’s philosophy allows us to rethink emancipation in a way that challenges the picture most commonly evoked by the champions of social change. He takes up a view on things that almost no one else does, and it derives from his insistence on working through to the end and always thinking backward. In the priority of the end point, the priority of articulating the proper punctuation on a position, we can see Hegel’s political radicality and his relevance for today. Hegel’s investment in the perspective of the end orients him as a political thinker. Hegel locates emancipation not in the creation of a new order but in the proper theorization of what already exists. His wager is that if we theorize our situation and its determinations correctly, we will uncover emancipatory possibilities that would otherwise lie dormant. Changing the theorization of our existence—interpreting it correctly—transforms this existence because the way that we live out how we understand our political existence shapes the structure of the society. For Hegel, the philosopher’s task is one of allowing us to see what we’re doing unbeknownst to ourselves. The philosopher doesn’t invent but discovers.