Practical Necessity, Ethical Freedom, and History

Abstract It is explained how the conceptual order of Hegel’s system of right concerns the actualization of ‘ethical’ freedom, which consists in self-determination and self-constraint. Practical necessity plays a key role in explaining not only how agents come to exercise and thereby develop their capacity for ethical freedom, but also how they act in accordance with a normative necessity whose sources are the social and institutional conditions of this form of freedom. This is shown to explain how freedom and necessity are reconciled in Hegel’s theory of ethical life. I argue that ethical freedom is, however, prematurely displaced by a negative idea of freedom that has expansionary implications, despite how this ‘global’ freedom becomes explicit only later in Hegel’s account of world history. I explore the tension between ethical freedom and global freedom in connection with Hegel’s claims concerning the essentially progressive character of world history.