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The ‘Social’ is Prior to the ‘Political’: Bosanquet Revisited (Again)*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 August 2013

Avital Simhony
Avital Simhony*
Affiliation:
School of Politics and Global StudiesArizona State UniversitySimhony@asu.adu
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Abstract

The essay aims to reveal the priority of the ‘social’ over the ‘political’ in Bosanquet's thought by making more prominent what Bosanquet calls ‘social’. It is the domain of human connectedness and cooperation that occupies the space between the ‘political’, state action, and the personal, narrowly conceived individual. The centrality of the ‘social’ emerges against the backdrop of two rival interpretations of Bosanquet's relationship with British Idealism over state action. The one claims that Green's split into ‘right’ (Bosanquet) and ‘left’ (Ritchie). The other interpretation restores unity, denying that the right-left divide introduces fundamental differences into the Idealist camp. Though not a laissez-faire individualist, Bosanquet's restrictive stance on state action with regard to the poor reveals, I argue, ‘social individualism’. Best expressed in his prioritizing of ‘social cooperative action’ over state action, at the heart of social individualism lies a conceptual-normative nexus between self-maintaining, self-managing, self-governing individuals and social cooperation.

Type
Articles
Information
Hegel Bulletin , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , October 2013 , pp. 245 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 2013 

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Footnotes

*

My thanks to Thom Brooks for being there throughout while I was struggling to make the best of Bosanquet. I also thank Katerina Deligiorgi for her helpful comments.

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