Comment on Doull’s ‘Hegel and Contemporary Liberalism, Anarchism, Socialism’

Abstract

First of all, I owe everybody an apology. I did not receive Prof. Doull’s paper until I arrived here; and between sessions, dinners and beer I have tried to go very carefully through his paper. I have been tempted to write a 64 page rebuttal of it, but I’m afraid I can’t do that. So I shall make a few remarks concerning points on which I disagree with Prof. Doull. Not that I would like to do an anti-Hegel to his 20th century Hegel, because I very much agree with a lot of what he says about Hegel’s political philosophy giving us not only insights but far more than that in our modern world. I said earlier in the conference, going perhaps farther than Prof. Doull would agree, that some of the implicit truth of Hegel resides in Marx; and, therefore, I honestly accept the position that so much of the Philosophy of Right is terribly relevant to our own age. So the remarks I’m going to make do not mean that I disagree with Prof. Doull’s basic thesis. I go along with him quite a way on that. But there are a number of difficulties in his presentation, as I see it, which I just cannot pass over without comment.