Focusing on Hegel's political philosophy, this text demonstrates the unifying role played by the doctrine of the collective historical social consciousness.

The paper situates the new field of men's studies in the context of the evolution of women's studies. It argues that men's studies' distinctive feminist approach to men is a necessary complement to women's studies, citing paradigmatic examples of new perspectives. In tracing women's studies' development, the paper argues that reconceptualizations of "gender" resolve tensions between much of women's studies' non-essentialist empirical social science describing "sex roles" and much of feminist theory's essentialist celebrations of women's core selves.

The central question of the Euthyphro is “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or pious because it is loved?” A baseball analogy explains this to students: “Does the umpire say ‘Out’ because the runner is out, or is the runner out because the umpire says ‘Out’?” The former makes the relevant knowledge public, making Socrates the appropriate secular moral authority, while the latter makes it religious, invoking Euthyphro’s expertise. Foucault’s aphorism that power is knowledge illuminates (...) how the aristocracy stands behind Euthyphro, while Socrates empowers the democracy. An abstract epistemological question has important political consequences. (shrink)

Defends "The New Men's Studies: From Feminist Theory to Gender Scholarship" (Hypatia 2:1, Winter 1987) against what is argued are Mary Libertin's misreadings. The argument for men's studies is logically independent of though related to the debate about essentialism in women's studies. Men's studies studies men in and as particular groups. Intellectual should not be equated with institutional autonomy. The feminist study of men should be supported by feminist scholars.

The English-speaking philosophical world will greatly benefit if this fine translation of Ritter's essays on Hegel produces an effect similar to that of the reception of the German original. The impact of the title essay alone, first published as a separate volume in 1957, can in part be gauged by its being one of a dozen post-war books on Hegel analyzed in Michael Theunissen's special Beiheft of Philosophische Rundschau on Die Verwirklichung der Vernunft [The Realization of Reason], and one must (...) agree with Manfred Reidel's characterization of it as "fundamental" ["grundsätzlich"]. The consideration of Ritter's work with which most readers will probably be familiar is Jurgen Habermas's essay, "Hegel's Critique of the French Revolution", expressly written to "amplify" Ritter's thesis. (shrink)

While Hegel has a reputation for the most empyrean philosophical speculation, economics is known as the most dismal of sciences. The conjunction of the two might be expected to produce an effect like that of plunging a flaming torch into a bucket full of cold water: One will extinguish the flame and churn up the water a bit, without shedding any light on either of them. The fusion of Hegel and economics requires something to smoothe the transition from one to (...) the other, some third term to mediate between them and effect a successful synthesis. In this volume, the concept of freedom functions as the mediating term, and it is successfully used to shed light on both Hegel and economics. All the contributors explicate and exploit the tensions between Hegelian freedom and economic freedom to produce new understandings of both. The concept of freedom is one of a cluster of concepts which could have been used as mediating terms: Justice, reason, politics, or even philosophy might have produced volumes quite similar in spirit to this one; and my guess is that choosing either history or power might have yielded very different books. (shrink)