Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, Hegel’s Anglophone followers dismissed the philosophical germ of Hegel’s dialectical method. John McTaggart is said to have characterized this as a spurious “Hegelianism with the proofs left out.” Facile applications of Hegel’s dialectic to concrete social realities are mistaken in glossing over just how the justification of normative sources propping those realities really work. For McTaggart, the proof’s the thing. So too for Peter Simpson at the turn of the twenty-first century.