Hegel Bulletin, 42/2, 157–179
doi:10.1017/hgl.2018.27
© The Hegel Society of Great Britain, 2018
Hegel’s Critique of Greek Ethical Life
David W. Loy
Abstract
Hegel was attracted to the Greek ideal, but he ultimately rejected it as a model for
the modern world. This article discusses four deficiencies he identified in ancient
Greek ethical life: the immediate relationship between the subjective will of the individual and the ethical norms of the polis, the absence of institutions that mediated
citizens’ private goals with the polis, the deficient conception of the human being
which underlay slavery, and the granting of recognition on the basis of natural categories rather than politically integrative norms. These deficiencies explain not only
why Hegel thought the Greek polis had to disintegrate under the onslaught of subjective particularity, but also why he rejected the Greek ideal as a model of social membership for modern ethical life. In addition, they illuminate his rejection of Fries and
provide grounds for criticizing Rousseau. His account of the highly articulated
modern state represents a response to the question of how the deficiencies of Greek
ethical life can be overcome.
For the mature Hegel, ancient Greek ethical life suffered from deficiencies that
render it an unsuitable ideal for the modern world. For example, the ethical
substantiality of Greek life formed the content of citizens’ wills without their
reflection. Citizens’ deepest commitments simply reflected those of the
community. Hegel argues that this relationship between citizen and ethical
substance would prove unstable because it lacked space for subjective freedom.
To capture the complexity of Hegel’s account of Greece, then, it is necessary to
identify the various deficiencies he believed characterized ancient Greek life.
Doing so provides the resources to understand more precisely why he undertook
his famous ‘retreat from Eleusis’ between 1797 and 1805 (Kelly 1978) and to
understand his commitment to a distinctively modern form of ethical life in the
shape of the highly articulated modern state.
In this article I discuss four deficiencies that Hegel identifies in ancient Greek
life: 1) the immediate relationship between the subjective will of the individual and
the ethical norms of the polis, which Hegel calls ‘beautiful ethical individuality’ (PR:
§353, 377);1 2) the absence of institutions that mediated between a citizen’s loyalty
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to the polis and the citizen’s private ends; 3) a conception of the human being based
on natural categories rather than as a ‘self-consciousness comprehending itself as
free’ (PR: §57, 86), which underlay slavery; and 4) the granting of recognition in
connection with natural categories, with the result that political institutions
presupposed political integration rather than generating it. Hegel himself does not
always clearly distinguish among these deficiencies, but each plays an important role
in his rejection of Greece as an ideal for modern life. While he was attracted to the
Greek ideal, he came to believe that it was an inadequate form of life that could not
situate subjective freedom. His theory of the modern state represents a response to
the question of how these deficiencies can be overcome.
Hegel’s commentators have long noted his criticisms of ancient Greek
ethical life. However, the account offered here is unique in two ways. First, it
differentiates the four deficiencies that Hegel identifies in ancient Greek life
rather than treating them all as instances of a single phenomenon, such as
beautiful ethical individuality. Beautiful ethical individuality is not the only feature
of Greek life that Hegel believes is problematic. Slavery and inadequate forms of
recognition represent conceptually distinct, if related, deficiencies. Second, this
account offers a systematic explanation of how these features relate to one
another. While each is deficient, in their interaction with one another they
generate an attractive yet internally unstable set of institutions in which freedom
cannot be fully realized.
I. Beautiful ethical individuality
‘Beautiful ethical individuality’ (PR: §353, 377) refers to the immediate
relationship between Greek citizens’ subjective will and the ethical norms of
the polis. As Charles Taylor writes, ‘The Greek state could work because men
were immediately identified with it’ (1975: 396). Hegel links it to ‘beautiful freedom’
and ‘beautiful ethical life’ (VPG: 137; VPG: 138). He explains it most fully in the
Philosophy of History:
Thus here there is the union of the ethical and the subjective
will or the realm of beautiful freedom, for the idea is united with a
plastic shape: it is not yet abstract for itself on the one hand,
but rather immediately connected with the real [Wirklichen] […]
This realm […] is unselfconscious [unbefangene] ethical life, not
yet morality, but the individual will of the subject stands in the
immediate custom and habit [Sitte und Gewohnheit] of right and
law. […] What is divided into two extremes in the Orient, into
the substantial as such and individuality [Einzelheit] pulverizing
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itself against it, comes together here. But the separated
principles are only immediately in unity and therefore at the same
time the greatest contradiction with itself [der höchste Widerspruch
an sich selbst]. (VPG: 137–38)
This passage describes the unmediated unity of ethical substantiality (des Sittlichen;
des Rechten und der Gesetze; das Substantielle) with the subjective will of the individual
(der subjektive Wille; der individuelle Wille des Subjekts; die Einzelheit). The relationship
between subjective will and ethical substantiality is one of unity because the latter
forms the content of the former, but the unity is as yet unmediated by what Hegel
later in the same paragraph calls ‘the free subjectivity of ethical life’.
In the introduction to Philosophy of History, Hegel defines ‘subjective will’ as
‘an entirely formal determination that does not contain what it wants’ (VPG: 67).
That is, the phrase refers to the willing activity of the individual without reference
to the will’s content. Hegel’s use of the term ‘subjective will’ to describe beautiful
ethical individuality thus emphasizes an important point, namely, that Greek
individuals felt at home in, invested themselves in, and willingly conducted
themselves on the basis of the ethical substance that underlay Greek ethical life.
‘The political order did not exist on the basis of externally compelling people to
participate. Each citizen freely joined the deliberative body’ (Pinkard 2017: 72). The
citizens willed the very norms that constituted the ethical substance in which they
lived, desired to fulfil the obligations associated with the roles they filled, saw the
good of the polis as their own good. ‘The ethical is the principle as in Asia’, says
Hegel, ‘but it is ethical life which is imprinted with individuality and thus means the
free willing of the individuals’ (VPG: 137). The ethical norms of the community
constituted the content of a citizen’s ethical commitments and subjective will.
Yet for Hegel, the identity between subjective will and ethical life in
Greece was immediate in the sense that it was neither a product of nor an
object of citizens’ reflection. On the one hand, the citizen did not decide to
align his commitments with those of the community; he was simply educated
into them such that they formed his second nature. Obligatory, public activities
and the business of governing shaped the beliefs and character of each citizen
such that he unreflectively embodied the ethical norms of the polis. More
generally, for the Greeks ‘the freedom of the spirit is conditioned and has an
essential connection to a stimulus of nature. Greek freedom is stimulated by an
other and is free in that it changes and produces the stimulus out of itself ’
(VPG: 293). This is clear, Hegel thinks, from the importance of the oracle for
Greek democracy. ‘When a colony was to be started, when foreign gods were to
be introduced, when a general wanted to go into battle, an oracle was consulted’
(VPG: 310; see also VPG: 404 and PR: §279). The same was true of personal
decisions. Neither individuals nor poleis would reach an important decision
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simply on the strength of their own deliberations; they sought guidance from
outside of themselves.2
On the other hand, Hegel believed the Greek citizen also did not subject his
ethical commitments to reflection. They constituted his identity in such a way
that they remained invisible to his reflective activity: ‘Among them [the Greeks]
the habit prevailed of living for the fatherland without any further reflection’
(VPG: 309). Consequently, citizens had a direct, unmediated relationship with the
public life of the polis. Their actions were all directed toward the realization of the
common purposes of the polis. As Terry Pinkard writes,
For the Greek democratic political ideal to be real, citizens had
to assume that debate in the public arena was conducted in a
way such that each citizen firmly had the good of the polis as
his basic, unyielding commitment. That commitment itself was
beyond deliberation, and commitment to the agreed-upon
policies had to be equally stringent. (2017: 77–78)
The relationship as Hegel envisions it is unmediated by reflection: it is not that
citizens undertook their daily activities with a background awareness that those
activities contributed to the common purposes of the polis; rather, citizens
undertook to achieve the common purposes of the polis in their actions without
evaluating those purposes.
The upshot of beautiful ethical individuality is that Greek freedom was limited.3
‘In Greece substantial, ethical freedom was the basis; Greece was not able to
withstand the blossoming of subjective freedom’ (GdP II: 123). Subjective freedom
consists in ‘the right of the subject to find its satisfaction’ in its actions (PR: §121, 149).
This satisfaction is not that which the ancient Greek experienced through
membership in the polis. Rather, it is realized when ‘the will can recognize something or
be something only in so far as that thing is its own’ (PR: §107, 136). The right of
subjective freedom extends, Hegel argues, all the way to the choice of occupation.
In Plato’s republic, subjective freedom is not yet recognized,
because individuals still have their tasks assigned to them by
the authorities [Obrigkeit]. In many oriental states, this assignment is governed by birth. But subjective freedom, which must
be respected, requires freedom of choice on the part of
individuals. (PR: §262A, 286)
Greek ethical life demanded a form of individuality in which subjective will is
conditioned by its immediate relationship to ethical substance. Because subjective
freedom presupposes that the individual can justify actions and decisions on the
authority of his or her own reason, it undermines the immediacy of beautiful
ethical life.
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Hegel thus claims that beautiful forms of ethical life are unable to situate
subjective freedom. The ethical norms demand allegiance not on the basis of
their rationality, but on the basis of authorities that stand above individuals: the
gods, oracles, religious traditions, nature, the community, etc. When individuals
begin to question the ethical norms, they are asking that the norms be justified on
the basis of non-arbitrary authorities, or authorities which the questioning
individuals can accept. When the response is simply to reiterate the authority of
the authorities underlying the norms, there are two consequences. First,
individuals become alienated from the norms, and with that, freedom dies.
Ethical substance no longer appears to individuals as something they can invest
themselves in, as norms in which they feel at home, but instead confronts them
as an external, arbitrary authority. Since ‘the actor is free only when she acts on
reasons that are intelligible and not just “given”’, the individuals who question the
authorities are no longer free (Pinkard 2017: 36). Second, precisely because the
norms rest on authorities that will not answer in terms of reason, the individuals’
reason becomes detached from the norms. The norms lose their authority, since
the public sphere which they structure fails to provide a context in which the
individuals’ form of reason-demanding is responded to or reciprocated.4 Because
the ethical substance no longer commands the individuals’ loyalty, the form of
life premised on immediate unity collapses.5
II. Absence of mediating institutions
Hegel’s critique of the absence of mediating institutions in Greek life is closely
tied to his critique of beautiful ethical individuality. The polis was the first and
foremost object of loyalty for the Greek citizen; ‘the goal was the living
fatherland’ (VPG: 309). The relationship between the citizen and political life
could therefore be direct, without secondary associations or other institutions to
mediate between a citizen’s loyalty to the polis and whatever private ends the
citizen might pursue. Public life was the controlling aspect of a citizen’s life. In
both Athens and Sparta ‘political virtue’ was dominant, ‘which nevertheless
developed in the one state into an artwork of free individuality, but kept the
character of something substantial in the other’ (VPG: 315). Even in Athens,
where the arts and sciences blossomed, citizens developed their talents in a
manner that contributed to the public life of the polis. No aspect of a citizen’s life
was isolated from the public life in which the citizen was a participant; he simply
lived ‘for religion, for state, without thinking about it further’ (VPG: 327). The
polis did not need and did not have institutions that provided a context for the
exercise of subjective particularity.6
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Consequently, when the Sophists ‘declared choice to be the principle of
what is right and declared whatever is useful for the subject to be the final ground
of determination’, the political life of the polis disintegrated (VPG: 328). The
breakdown occurred because the polis had no mechanism to mediate the citizen’s
loyalty to his own projects and desires with the universal life of the polis. A citizen
who began to pursue his own projects had no means for understanding those
projects as contributing to the life of the polis; a citizen’s projects would simply
run parallel to public life with no connection to it. Thus ‘the self-sufficient
development of particularity is the moment which appears in the states of the
ancient world as an influx of ethical corruption and as the ultimate reason
[Grund] for their downfall’ (PR: §185, 222). Not able to reconcile the exercise of
their subjective particularity with the public life of the polis, ‘many citizens now
separated themselves from practical life, from the affairs of the state’ (VPG: 329).
Because the public life was the only means the ancient Greek polis had for forging
the close connection between a citizen’s subjective will and the ethical substance
of the polis, a citizen who began exercising subjective particularity effectively
dropped between the cracks of the formative processes. Particularity ruined the
Greeks’ socially and politically cohesive form of life because of the absence of
mediating institutions.
Effectively, institutions in Greece were two-layered: citizens operated at one
level, and the primary object of their loyalty was the higher level of the polis. ‘The
Greeks lived publicly; they had not yet invented private life’ (Vieillard-Baron
1994: 59).7 There were no intervening levels of institutions that could, on the one
hand, serve as the object of loyalty for a certain group of citizens and, on the
other hand, direct the corporate loyalty of that group to the higher level of the
polis. Such a two-layered structure has no means for situating the subjective
particularity of citizens, since subjective particularity by definition involves a
change in the object of a citizen’s loyalties; a citizen’s own projects and desires
rather than the polis become the first and foremost object of his loyalty. Once the
shift in loyalty occurs, no mechanisms remain to reconnect the citizen’s loyalty to
the ethical life of the polis.
This deficiency will plague any form of political life that makes the common
life of the state the foremost object of citizens’ loyalty. This is one reason for
Hegel’s scathing remarks about Fries in the preface to Philosophy of Right.
According to Hegel, Fries calls for ‘a people among whom a genuine communal
spirit prevails’; among such a people, ‘all business relating to public affairs would
gain its life from below; living societies, steadfastly united by the sacred bond of
friendship’, would undertake all manner of public service (PR: Preface A, 15).
Hegel counters that such claims ‘reduce the complex inner articulation of the
ethical, i.e. the state, the architectonics of its rationality […] to a mush of “heart,
friendship, and enthusiasm”’ (PR: Preface A, 15).
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Hegel’s fear is that any contemporary form of life without mediating
institutions would ultimately alienate people from the common life of the state,
because it would remove the mechanisms that bridge the gap between citizens’
diverse, self-interested economic activity and their loyalty to the state.
Individuals as a mass … embody a dual moment, namely the
extreme of individuality [Einzelheit] which knows and wills for
itself, and the extreme of universality which knows and wills the
substantial. They can therefore attain their right in both of
these respects only in so far as they have actuality both as
private and as substantial persons. (PR: §264, 287)
Without mediating institutions, individuals can attain their right in one respect or
the other, but not in both at once. Where individuals devote most of their energy
to public affairs, they have little opportunity to develop their own private
interests. Where they are absorbed in their own private affairs with no
institutional link to the political life of the state, the political cohesion of the state
suffers.
Although Hegel does not identify Rousseau explicitly, his critique of this
feature of Greek life also represents a clear rejection of one aspect of
Rousseau’s political thought.8 Rousseau believes that citizens’ freedom is
partially a function of the amount of influence each has in drafting laws (see
SC: III.1). Since the citizens collectively constitute the sovereign authority,
each has a voice in drafting laws for the body politic. However, the less
influence each citizen has relative to the overall number of voices, the more
likely he is to experience the decision of the entire body as domination. As a
result, ‘the larger the state becomes, the less liberty there is’ (SC: III.1, 174).
In fact, when a state reaches a certain size, it may turn to ‘using deputies or
representatives of the people in the nation’s assemblies’, which effectively
enslaves the people (SC: III.15, 198). Content to let the assemblies legislate,
the people lose their interest in the affairs of state and concentrate on their
own private business. As a result, they lose their freedom by giving up their
participation in making laws.
For that reason, Rousseau argues that the ‘truly free state’ is one where ‘the
citizens do everything with their own hands and nothing with money’ (SC: III.15,
198). All the citizens direct their energy to the common purpose, understanding
that their freedom is bound up with their continued exercise of sovereignty in the
making of laws.
The better a state is constituted, the more public business takes
precedence over private business in the minds of the citizens.
There is even far less private business, since, with the sum of
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common happiness providing a more considerable portion of
each individual’s happiness, less remains for him to look for
through private efforts. (SC: III.15, 198)
Each citizen finds satisfaction in the affairs of the state, and each therefore
focuses on those affairs rather than on private business that might conflict with
the common interest. Rousseau identifies the same conflict that Hegel does
between loyalty to the polity and private interests, but his conception of liberty
commits him to rejecting mediating institutions at the expense of private
interests. For Hegel, on the other hand, limiting the pursuit of private interests
represents a limitation on freedom.
The modern state must therefore possess institutional arrangements for
linking the private affairs of individuals to the political life of the state. This occurs,
according to Hegel, by means of the corporations. In family and civil society citizens
attain their right in the first respect directly; and in the second
respect, they attain it by discovering their essential selfconsciousness in [social] institutions as that universal aspect of
their particular interests which has being in itself, and by
obtaining through these institutions an occupation and activity
directed towards a universal end within a corporation. (PR:
§264, 287)
The corporations, in turn, by means of their role in the legislative activity of the
estates, attain ‘a political significance and function. […] Only in this respect is there a
genuine link between the particular which has actuality in the state and the
universal’ (PR: §303, 343). As Frederick Neuhouser writes,
Because the moment of difference is not to be suppressed by
the state but rather incorporated into it, the principal concern
of Hegelian politics is to find a way of integrating the particular
wills of individual citizens with the general will not only
through the framing of laws that further the good of the whole
but also by subjectively transforming citizens so as to enable
them to embrace the general will as their own. (2000: 137; see
also Church 2012: 79, 97, 102–3)
Such integration cannot occur without mediating institutions. Consequently,
when Greek citizens began to pursue their own private interests, the result was
the dissolution of the public life they had known. The vital, unified political life of
the fifth-century polis could not but degenerate into factional strife and selfseeking behaviour. The modern state, on the other hand, can allow the full
development of subjective particularity without detriment to political cohesion.
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III. Slavery
As we have seen, Hegel thought that beautiful ethical individuality in Greece had
its corollary in the absence of mediating institutions; the immediate unity between
subjective will and ethical substance was sustained by institutional arrangements
that integrated citizens’ loyalties directly with the public life of the polis. For this
very reason, Greek democracy entailed high participatory demands. Describing
the democratic life of the polis, Hegel writes, ‘Every citizen [Bürger] had the right
and the duty to hold and to hear lectures concerning the administration of the
state in public, to train in the gymnasium, to join in festivals’ (VPG: 311).
Citizens had to participate in the governing process and communal activities that
served as focal points for the public life of the polis. These public activities
effected the social and political integration of citizens with one another and with
the polis, which gave Greek democracy its lively character. The same activities
oriented citizens into the ethical norms that structured their life together, thus
effecting the beautiful ethical individuality that made Greek democracy possible.
Anyone who did not have the time and resources to participate in these activities
was simply cut off from the public life of the polis.
For this reason, Greek citizens had to be free from ‘the work of everyday
life’ (VPG: 311). The kind of leisure necessary was available only because slaves
took care of time-consuming, everyday tasks which would otherwise prevent
citizens from participating in the life of the polis. As Hegel writes, in Greece ‘the
particularity associated with needs has not yet become part of [the realm of]
freedom, but is confined to a class of slaves [Sklavenstand]’ (PR: §356, 379). Slavery
set the Greek citizen free to participate actively in the public life of the polis. The
consignment of labour to slaves thus goes hand in hand with the other central
features of Greek ethical life. As Hegel contends in Philosophy of History, slavery ‘was
a necessary condition of a beautiful democracy’ (VPG: 311).
Hegel criticizes slavery on the grounds that it depends ‘on regarding the
human being simply as a natural being [Naturwesen] whose existence [Existenz] (of
which the arbitrary will is also a part) is not in conformity with his concept’ (PR:
§57, 87). On this understanding, the human being is in principle no different
from objects in nature, which can be possessed and used by human beings. The
enslaved human being becomes, as Aristotle says, ‘an instrument’ in the hands of
the master (P: I.4.1253b32, 1989). The slave certainly has a will which he can and
does exercise. However, that he has a will does not in principle distinguish the
slave from any other tool. ‘The master considers the slave not as a person, but as
a thing devoid of self; and the slave himself does not count as an “I”, for his
master is his “I” instead’ (EL: §163 A1, 241). As Aristotle says, the slave is simply
a tool more useful than others (P: I.5.1254a17, 1989).
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Hegel ultimately rejects this ‘false [unwahren] point of view whereby the
human being exists as a natural being and as a concept which has being only in
itself, and is therefore capable of enslavement’ (PR: §57, 87). His criticism of this
understanding is directed at two sides of slavery, the subjective and the objective,
both of which rest on the ‘as yet only immediate consciousness of freedom’ (PR:
§57R, 87).9 Briefly stated, the subjective side of slavery consists in the slave’s own
conception of himself in relation to the master, while the objective side consists
of the conception of human beings that is presupposed by slavery as an
institution. I begin with a treatment of the subjective side of slavery, because it is
here that Hegel brings his criticism to a point.
The beginning of §57 of Philosophy of Right provides Hegel’s reason for
rejecting slavery.
The human being, in his immediate existence [Existenz] in
himself, is a natural entity, external to his concept; it is only
through the development [Ausbildung] of his own body and spirit,
essentially by means of his self-consciousness comprehending itself as free,
that he takes possession of himself and becomes his own
property as distinct from that of others. (86)10
Hegel’s argument revolves around the contrast between the human being ‘in his
immediate existence’ and the human being with a ‘self-consciousness comprehending itself
as free’. The contrast between immediacy and self-consciousness indicates that the
root issue has to do with an individual’s self-definition: the individual who takes
possession of himself by virtue of a particular self-conception cannot be a slave,
while the individual who exists immediately can be a slave. On this interpretation,
slavery is in part a function of the slave’s self-conception.
Hegel’s discussion of taking possession of oneself helps illuminate his
position. §57 is in the abstract right section of Philosophy of Right, in a short section
entitled ‘Taking Possession’. In this section Hegel lists the three modes in which
an individual may take possession of an object (physical seizure, giving form, and
designating ownership by a sign); each mode involves making ‘my will …
discernible in it’ (PR: §55, 84). The discussion of slavery occurs within the
subsection on giving form to an object, where Hegel makes the point that
possession is established by working on or tending to an object. ‘When the
person embodies his freedom in a thing, he places his will in it and appropriates it,
and in this way the thing becomes the person’s property’ (Houlgate 2017: 45). In
the following paragraph, Hegel turns to his discussion of taking possession of
oneself.
According to Hegel, one takes possession of oneself by means of a ‘selfconsciousness comprehending itself as free’ (PR: §57, 86). This self-consciousness, as Hardimon shows, involves a particular conception of oneself. Individuals
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characterized by this form of self-consciousness are individuals in the strong
sense: they conceive of themselves as ‘bearers of separate and particular interests,
possessors of individual rights, and subjects of conscience’ (1994: 148). They see
themselves as individuals whose goals and projects are their own in the sense that
no external party has imposed them in a coercive manner. Hegel’s point here is
simply that an individual with this self-conception locates the legitimacy of his or
her goals and projects within his or her own will. In this way, the individual ‘takes
possession of himself and becomes his own property as distinct from that of
others’ (PR: §57, 86). Such a self-definition makes one ineligible for slavery.
The opposite side of the contrast is the human being ‘in his immediate
existence’ (PR: §57, 86). If the individual’s reflective activity is at the root of the
contrast, as I am arguing, then Hegel has in mind here a reflectively unmediated
relationship to one’s own existence. Whereas the individual who takes possession
of himself exercises the kinds of reflection that result in the self-conception
described above, individuals who do not exercise those forms of reflection have
not taken possession of themselves. Any self-consciousness they might have is so
closely tied to the ethical norms structuring their social world that they locate the
legitimacy of their goals and projects outside their own wills. In the case of the
slave, ‘the self will of the slave surrenders itself to that of his master, receives for
its content the purposes of his master’, as Hegel writes in his account of the
master-slave dialectic in the Encyclopaedia (PM: §433A, 174). This stands in stark
contrast to modern individuals, among whom, according to Hegel, ‘Everyone
knows that he cannot be a slave’ (GdP I: 121).
Individuals without a ‘self-consciousness comprehending itself as free’ thus
lack the kind of self-conception that would prevent them from falling into
slavery. ‘Abstract right belongs only to those who are explicitly conscious of their
freedom and who give that freedom “existence” both in their own eyes and in
those of others’ (Houlgate 2017: 43). Under the appropriate objective conditions,
however, the individual is capable of such a self-conception; as Hegel contends,
the individual can develop ‘his own body and spirit’ and thus take possession of
himself (PR: §57, 86). Hegel contends that the development of the individual
human being tends toward this form of self-consciousness. It represents what
Hegel calls the concept of humanity—the ‘possibility, capacity [Vermögen], or
predisposition’ (PR: §57, 86). The self-conception of the human being in his
unreflective immediacy does not exhaust what it means to be a human being.
Rather, the concept (Begriff) of the human being sets the limits to how human
beings may be rightfully treated.
Hegel thus rejects slavery because it ‘does not contain the point of view of
rationality and right at all’ (PR: §57, 87). The fact that the human being has a will
indicates, according to the broad sweep of Hegel’s argument, that the human
being lives most in consonance with his own humanity when the will actualizes
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itself in the world.11 This requires that the human being enjoy subjective
freedom, the right of locating in one’s own will the legitimacy of all norms by
which one’s life is governed. As Hegel puts it in the Encyclopaedia, the human
being ‘is implicitly destined to supreme freedom’ (PM: §482, 239). Slavery, like
other forms of domination such as ‘serfdom, disqualification from owning
property, restrictions on the freedom of ownership, etc.’, is normatively
objectionable because it represents the ‘alienation of personality’ (PR: §66, 96).
Hegel’s argument against slavery is thus not simply that human beings are
inherently free. In fact, Hegel criticizes this argument as ‘one-sided inasmuch as it
regards the human being as by nature free, or (and this amounts to the same thing)
takes the concept as such in its immediacy’ (PR: §57, 87). Freedom, Hegel
contends, is not a natural characteristic of human beings in the way that, say,
patrimony is. In the words of Lucio Cortella,
Modernity’s realization of equality—that is, its assertion of the
freedom of the legal person—entails a “break” with traditional
man. It separates abstract man from the concrete man linked
to status, culture, religion. In this way it produces a concept of
the human being, the person, that completely prescinds from his
sociohistorical concreteness. (2015: 36; see also De Laurentiis
2005: 93–94)
Freedom, as I have argued in the previous paragraphs, is bound up with the selfconception which individuals hold. Such a self-conception, however, is an
achievement rather than a naturally occurring characteristic of the human being.
Slavery is wrong not in view of the human being’s natural freedom but rather in
view of the human being’s concept and ‘destiny’ (Bestimmung), as Hegel calls it in
§4 of the Philosophy of Right (35).
This helps explain the otherwise offensive claim in the addition to §57 that,
‘if someone is a slave, his own will is responsible, just as the responsibility lies
with the will of a people if that people is subjugated’ (88). This is a point about
those who are slaves not merely because they are in bondage, but because they
believe themselves to be slaves. The former would be held against their will and
coerced into doing what they do not want to do; they would be prisoners rather
than slaves (cf. Houlgate 2017: 44). The latter, on the other hand, have essentially
relinquished their wills to another. This can occur only if their self-conception
allows them to do so. What Hegel has in mind, then, is not merely slavery as a
relationship of force, but as a relationship based on a conception of oneself as an
object of nature which can belong to another human being. Slavery, on this
reading, represents a failure to grasp one’s personality.
This self-conception of the slave has its complement in the conception of
the human being which underlies the institution of slavery. The Greeks practised
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slavery because their conception of human beings located the source of human
freedom outside the human will.12 ‘[W]ith them a man was held to be free only if
he was born free’ (PM: §433A, 174). Freedom was simply a natural category in
their minds, as was slavery, which is why Aristotle could claim, ‘Some men are by
nature free, and others slaves’ (P: I.5.1255a1, 1991). The fact that slavery was
practised in the ancient Greek polis thus indicates for Hegel a serious defect in the
conception of human beings that underlay Greek ethical life. Greek freedom
presupposed this objectionable understanding of human beings that made slavery
possible. Because Greek ethical life required a relationship of dominance to be
woven into the social order, Hegel could not see Greece as a model for
contemporary life.
Just as the individual has to achieve a ‘self-consciousness comprehending
itself as free’, so must an appropriate conception of the human being be achieved
historically before the institution of slavery comes to an end. Hegel avers that this
conception arises with Christianity because of its emphasis on the infinite worth
of the individual before God.13
The genuine reason why there are no longer any slaves in
Christian Europe is to be sought in nothing but the principle of
Christianity itself. The Christian religion is the religion of
absolute freedom, and only for Christians does man count as
such, man in his infinity and universality. (EL: §163 A1, 240–41)
The Christian religion laid the foundation for a conception of the human being in
which the personality of each is recognized—that is to say, in which human
freedom is no longer conceived on the basis of natural categories but rather on the
basis of ‘the will’s self-conscious (but otherwise contentless) and simple reference to
itself in its individuality [Einzelheit]’ (PR: §35, 67). This conception of the human
being precludes slavery, because it entails the commandment, ‘be a person and respect
others as persons’ (PR: §36, 69). According to Hegel, the modern state, based as it is
on this more adequate conception of the human being, thus overcomes the
deficiency of Greek ethical life with respect to slavery.
IV. Recognition on the basis of natural categories
Slavery and the absence of mediating institutions in Greek ethical life go hand in
hand with a fourth deficiency: the granting of recognition in connection with
natural categories. On the one hand, where human freedom is conceived on the
basis of natural categories, citizens’ recognition of one another will likewise be
based on natural categories. The conception of the human being that permitted
the Greeks to view some people as slaves by nature (i.e., to fail to recognize some
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people as persons who ought not be deprived of legal self-determination) also
permitted them to assign citizenship on the basis of categories such as patrimony
and sex (i.e., to fail to recognize some people as persons who ought not be
excluded from the political sphere).14 On the other hand, we have already seen
that the institutions of the modern state link citizens’ particularity with political
life. However, they also link the recognition citizens grant one another with the
norms that validate and link the individuals’ particularity to the state. Where such
institutions are not present, citizens’ recognition of one another has an entirely
different basis, such as patrimony, sex, and even abilities. Granting recognition on
the basis of natural categories is thus the flip side of absence of mediating
institutions: if there are no institutions to link subjective particularity with the
state’s universality, then there are likewise no institutions to give citizens’ mutual
recognition a politically integrative character. This indicates the fundamental
problem with the ancient Greek form of recognition: rather than effecting the
political integration of citizens, it presupposes that citizens are already politically
integrated.
Of the four deficiencies identified here, this is the one about which Hegel
says the least. Nevertheless, two sets of texts allow a reconstruction of the role
this form of recognition plays in his critique of Greek life. The first is
comments about what Gray calls the ‘diminutive size of the city-state and the
corresponding homogeneity of interest’ (Gray 1968: 58); the face-to-face
relations that characterized Greek democracy were an instance of this form of
recognition. Secondly, Hegel argues in his treatment of the estates in Philosophy
of Right that they provide a citizen with ‘recognition in his own eyes [Vorstellung]
and in the eyes of others’ (§207, 238). I will argue that this latter form of
recognition is politically integrative in a way that ancient Greek recognition
was not.
Hegel contends that Greek democracy is possible only because of the small
size of the polis:
democratic constitutions are possible only in small states, in
states that do not exceed the extent of a city by very much. […]
Living together in a city, the circumstance of seeing one
another daily, make possible a common education [Bildung] and
a vital democracy (VPG: 311–12).
Democratic constitutions require citizens to do the work of legislating directly
rather than through representatives. This is possible only where the citizens share
a commitment to their common political life, operate with fundamental
agreements regarding the norms that structure their life together, and meet
together to conduct the business of the polis. This is possible, in turn, only in a
small state, because it is the participation in public festivals and the business of
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governing that educates citizens into the basic norms structuring political life.
The only way for Athenian citizens to internalize what their democracy was about
was to participate in it directly.
For that reason, as we have seen, ‘hard work was not the concern [Sache] of
the citizen, whose activity was directed rather towards public affairs [öffentlichen
Dingen]’ (PR: §248A, 269). Each citizen
must be present at the main proceedings; he must participate in
the decision as such, not only through his single voice, but in
the pressure of moving and being moved, because the passion
and interest of the entire man lay in [his participation], and the
warmth of the entire decision is present in the proceedings.
The insight to which everyone should be converted had to be
evoked through the warming of individuals to it by means of
speech. If this were to occur in an abstract, dead manner by
means of writing, the individuals would not be incited to the
warmth of universality, and the larger the crowd was, the less
weight the individual voice would have. (VPG: 312)
The function of public deliberation in the polis was to produce consensus, but
the consensus was not a matter of rational agreement that could be effected
by means of written communication. The agreement was rather a matter of
what Hegel calls ‘the warming’ of the individual. Oral communication
engaged the citizens ‘in the pressure of moving and being moved’ such that
they reached a kind of affective agreement to the proposal at hand. Such
communication is no longer effective, however, if the population increases
beyond a certain size.
Thus, Hegel believed Greek democracy worked well because its small size
allowed citizens to be caught up in affective forms of persuasion that function
only in face-to-face settings. The persuasion is tied not merely to the arguments
made. If it were, written communication would be just as capable of producing
the kind of agreement that characterized the Greek polis. Writing, however, is
‘abstract,’ as Hegel says. Simply to achieve a consensus by means of written
communication and tallying votes represents ‘a dead being.’15 The affective forms
of persuasion exercised in Greece functioned only because citizens knew one
another; as Aristotle said, ‘If the citizens of a state are to judge and to distribute
offices according to merit, then they must know each other’s characters’ (P:
VII.4.1326a14-15, 2105). Such persuasion is based on citizens’ acquaintance with
one another’s character and talents.
Recognition in the polis was therefore based on natural categories or
individual traits.
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[P]olitical unity—what Hegel calls the formation into a state—
required a mutual recognition among citizens about who was
and who was not a citizen, and in the Greek context, that
carried over into some relatively natural ways of identifying
people (in Greece, such as being born in Athens to an
Athenian man and woman, and so forth). Some social
requirements were thus taken to be rooted in natural but
nonetheless normative or principled facts about life. (Pinkard
2017: 81)16
Hegel thinks recognition in Greece was partially a matter of patrimony; citizens
recognized one another as fellow participants in the political life of the polis
merely because each ‘was born free’ (PM: §433A, 174). Hegel also contends that
recognition in the polis was a function an individual’s talents; he observes that the
Greek citizen loved to show himself off ‘in order to prove himself and acquire
recognition’ (VPG: 296). Greek citizens counted for something in one another’s
eyes simply on the basis of natural characteristics—talents, physical attributes,
and the like. Thus, their recognition as legitimate participants in the political
process was logically prior to and disconnected from the norms of freedom that
structured the political life of the polis. It presupposed political integration.
For this reason, citizens’ recognition of one another could not generate
bonds of political cohesion once the forces of subjective particularity interrupted
the close unity between each citizen and the public life of the polis. In fact,
because the proper functioning of recognition in Greece presupposed precisely
that unity, the forms of recognition Greek citizens had afforded one another
slowly broke down and disappeared once the political cohesion of the polis
diminished.
In the cities there were unceasing battles, and the citizens
divided themselves into factions, as in the Italian cities of the
middle ages. The victory of the one brought the exile of the
others with it, and these then turned to the enemies of their
native city to make war against it. (VPG: 326)
The common political life of the polis gave way to civil strife, and the citizens’
competing interests prevented them from recognizing one another as participants
in a single, common project.
The unspoken target of Hegel’s critique seems to be Rousseau. Believing as
he does that citizens are free only when they have a significant voice in legislation,
Rousseau reaches the conclusion that the city must be very small (SC: III.15,
199). Only in a city ‘where each member can be known to all’ is a vital public life
possible, according to Rousseau (II.10, 170). Rousseau thus prefers a small state
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because its citizens are more likely as a whole to embody the ‘social spirit’ which
makes good legislation possible (II.7, 164). Each recognizes that the freedom he
or she enjoys is grounded in the cooperative venture in which all the citizens
together are involved. They share a ‘social bond’ which, the more it ‘extends the
looser it becomes’ (II.9, 167). It is this social bond which prevents the citizens
from seeing one another as bearers of competing interests; instead, each
recognizes the others as bearers of the general will. The small size permits the
citizenry to have ‘affection for its leaders, … for the homeland, … and for its
fellow citizens’ (II.9, 167). If the state becomes too large, the affection wanes and
the social bond dissolves. Because the state has no institutions to link political life
with the recognition citizens grant one another, the disintegration of recognition
spells the end of the state. Recognition does not play a politically integrative role;
it presupposes political integration.
From the normative deficiency of the forms of recognition characteristic of
beautiful ethical life Hegel drew a broader lesson. Forms of recognition based on
natural characteristics will not be able to counteract the forces of subjective
particularity in any context. That is why Hegel writes in §253 of Philosophy of Right,
If the individual [der Einzelne] is not a member of a legally
recognised [berechtigten] corporation […], he is without the
honour of belonging to an estate, his isolation reduces him to the
selfish aspect of his trade, and his livelihood and satisfaction
lack stability. He will accordingly try to gain recognition through
the external manifestations of success in his trade. (272)
Disconnected from the politically integrative functions of the estates, an
individual can gain recognition only on the basis of his or her own individuality.
Such recognition, however, lacks connection to political institutions which
integrate the exercise of subjective particularity with a meaningful public life.
The political cohesion of the state would either have to exist by some other
means, such as the community mindedness of the citizens, or it would simply
dissolve.
What is needed, according to Hegel, is a set of institutions that allows each
citizen to acquire recognition in a manner that ‘regards and “saves” the
particularity of the subject by discerning in it something of universal importance
and worth and by acknowledging the contributions of the individual to the
community as a whole’, as Williams writes (1998: 254). That is precisely what
Hegel thinks the estates provide in the modern state. They give each member
‘recognition in his own eyes [Vorstellung] and in the eyes of others’ by linking the
individual’s particularity to a larger social grouping (PR: §207, 238). Recognition
is linked to the individual’s contribution to a less selfish end than his or her own;
in Neuhouser’s words, ‘It is through their socially recognized, productive labor
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that they [members of estates] constitute themselves as beings of standing’ (2000:
92). That is to say, their recognition is mediated by the institutions that validate
the particularity of their labour and link it to the political life of the state.
V. Conclusion
Hegel’s critique of Greek ethical life finds its answer in the structural
complexity he builds into his theory of the modern state. Where beautiful
ethical life unites the citizen directly with the polis, the modern state is replete
with institutions that bring various forms of separation and division back into a
fully developed, highly articulated, ethical form of life. Where the polis
represents an undifferentiated form of ethical life which cannot provide a
legitimate institutional sphere for subjective particularity and subjective
freedom, the modern state situates individuals’ subjectivity within a context
of meaningful social membership. It is for this reason that Hegel can claim,
‘The Greeks remain at the mid-point of beauty and do not achieve the higher
point of truth’ (VPG: 308). Not ancient Greece but the modern state is the full
actuality of ethical life.
Those, then, who claim that Hegel’s philosophy represents ‘a modern
content poured into Greek molds’ (Gray 1968: 37) have not captured the full
import of Hegel’s critique of Greek ethical life. It is certainly true that the life of
the ancient polis attracts Hegel. What he finds most attractive is the satisfaction
that each citizen found through his membership in it. The ancient Greek polis
allowed each citizen to experience the satisfaction of participating in a common
political life that reflected his most deeply held beliefs and values and that was
also the product of his own energies. To suggest, however, that Hegel simply
transposes this form of social membership into the modern world misses the
point of his critique of Greek ethical life.17 The form of social membership that
characterized it cannot be regained for the modern world, nor would it be
desirable to do so, because it was premised upon domination and a conditioned
form of freedom.
Hegel argues that modern ethical life, on the other hand, allows the full
development of subjectivity. It is thus structurally different than Greek ethical
life. Four points in particular distinguish modern ethical life from Greek ethical
life for Hegel, each point corresponding to one of the deficiencies he identifies.
Modern ethical life is 1) universal, 2) institutionally complex, 3) politically
integrative, and 4) compatible with reflection on the part of citizens.
He claims that modern ethical life is universal. There are no slaves in the
modern state; every individual enjoys full social membership in it. The roots of
this universality lie for Hegel in the understanding of the human being as a
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person. This understanding, unlike that which underlay Greek ethical life,
stipulates that every individual be treated in accordance with the concept of
the human being as a being which externalizes its inner life into the world by
means of will. When Hegel writes, ‘The Orient knew and knows only that one is
free; the Greek and Roman world, that some are free; the Germanic world knows
that all are free’, it is precisely this phenomenon to which he is referring (VPG:
134). He believes modern ethical life provides each individual with the opportunity
to satisfy his or her own particularity. Whereas the enslavement of some was
required for others in Greece to enjoy freedom, in the modern world all enjoy
freedom.
As a consequence of excluding slavery, however, the work associated with
particularity falls to the citizens themselves. The state must provide avenues by
which citizens can pursue the private ends associated with particularity while still
directing their loyalty to the state. Modern ethical life is therefore institutionally
complex. The state provides ‘legal recognition’ of estates and corporations within
which citizens can pursue their particularity (PR: §253, 272). At the same time,
the estates and corporations raise the consciousness of the individual beyond
him- or herself, because they provide the needs and work of each individual with
a socially recognized character, what Hegel calls ‘the honour in his estate’ (PR: §253,
271). Finally, the estates direct the loyalty of the individual to the state as the legal
basis for the pursuit of particularity. Social membership in the modern state is
thus spread across multiple institutions.
The political linkage between the state and the corporations provides
social membership in the state with a politically integrative character (cf.
Franco 1999: 276–77). Citizens recognize one another not simply on the
basis of natural categories but on the basis of the contribution each makes
to public life by means of his or her membership in a corporation. A
contribution that occurs by ‘unconscious necessity’ is not enough; ‘only in the
corporation does it become a knowing and thinking [part of] ethical life’ (PR:
§255A, 273). Participation in a corporation thus gives an individual’s pursuit
of private ends significance in the reproduction of the institutions of the
modern state. Individuals no longer see one another simply as competitors in
the pursuit of private ends; ‘the spirit of the corporation … is now at the
same time inwardly transformed into the spirit of the state’ (PR: §289, 239).
Modern ethical life generates bonds among citizens by which political
integration is strengthened.
Finally, Hegel believes modern ethical life is compatible with citizens’
reflection. A citizen can reflect on the norms that underlie modern ethical
life without undermining those norms. A citizen can abstract from the social
roles he or she holds without experiencing alienation from those roles.
Individuals can exercise the full range of reflection associated with modern
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subjectivity, and their reflection will (so Hegel argues) only reinforce for
them the extent to which modern ethical life provides each with a legitimate
sphere for the exercise of subjectivity and with social membership. In Hegel’s
words, ‘That relationship—or rather, that relationless identity—in which the
ethical is the actual living principle [Lebendigkeit] of self-consciousness, may
indeed turn into a relationship of faith and conviction or a relationship
mediated by further reflection, into insight grounded on reasons’ (PR: §147,
191). Reflection ruined ancient Greek ethical life, but modern ethical life can
accommodate it.
Hegel’s assessment of modern ethical life is perhaps more optimistic than
is warranted. It is true, as he claims, that the objective conditions that underlay
slavery in the ancient world are a thing of the past in Europe—and, by and
large, around the globe. The legal systems of most nations recognize the
personality of each human being; it is for that reason that slavery has been
outlawed. However, Hegel’s claim that everyone in the modern world ‘knows
that he cannot be a slave’ (GdP I: 121) is contestable. Even under legal systems
that recognize the personality of each human being, some individuals do not
come to view themselves as individuals in the strong sense—that is, they fail to
locate the legitimacy of their interests in their own wills. As a result, they
alienate their wills to other people, much as Hegel believed slaves in the
ancient world did. Such cases, in which individuals never develop a
consciousness of their own freedom, represent a failure of the institutions
of modern ethical life to generate the subjective conditions for the full
development of freedom.
An even greater challenge to Hegel’s optimism about modern ethical life
arises from a related case: individuals who abandon the consciousness of their
own freedom because of more or less subtle coercion and subsequently alienate
their wills to others. What is in view here are not instances in which one
individual complies with another because of an ongoing implicit or explicit threat
of force, but in which an individual ceases to consider him- or herself free and
conforms to the will of another even without the continuing threat of force.
Cases like this suggest that the achievement of the subjective conditions of
freedom by an individual can be lost, even if the objective conditions that support
such an achievement remain in place. If so, then the achievement of the
consciousness of one’s freedom may be fragile, and modern ethical life may
prove less resilient than Hegel believed.
In any case, modern ethical life represents for Hegel an advance over
ancient Greek ethical life. Greek ethical life has serious deficiencies, and a theory
of the state cannot overcome these deficiencies by simply juxtaposing ancient
forms of social membership with the separation and difference that characterize
modernity. Instead, modern institutions must provide for forms of social
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membership that permit the full exercise of particularity while integrating citizens
into the larger life of the state.18
David W. Loy
Concordia University Irvine, USA
david.loy@cui.edu
Notes
1
Emphases in Hegel’s text are his; brackets are the respective translator’s. Abbreviations used:
EL = Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets et al. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991)/
Enzyklopädie der Philosophischen Wissenschaften I, vol. 8, Werke.
GdP I = Hegel, Geschichte der Philosophie I, vol. 18, Werke. Translations my own.
GdP II = Hegel, Geschichte der Philosophie II, vol. 19, Werke. Translations my own.
P = Aristotle, Politics, trans. B. Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford
Translation, ed. J. Barnes, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
PM = Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, Part Three of The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. W.
Wallace. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971)/Enzyklopädie der Philosophischen Wissenschaften III, vol. 10, Werke.
PR = Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. A. W. Wood (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991)/Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, vol. 7, Werke.
SC = Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, On the Social Contract, in The Basic Political Writings, trans. D. A. Cress
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978).
VPG = Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, vol. 12, Werke. Translations my own.
Werke = Hegel, Werke in Zwanzig Bänden, ed. E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel, 20 volumes
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970).
2
On this point, see Pippin (2008: 143–44): ‘In the most general terms, this issue is evident
historically in the issue of what is assigned to nature, fate, or to some other sort of inevitability
and unavoidability, and what can be properly assigned to agency in general, and an individual in
particular. In some contexts at some times, nature might be understood to be itself an agent,
acting, or communicating, as in oracles or portents’. (See also Pippin 2008: 111–12.)
3
Cf. Pippin’s observation that Hegel conceives of freedom as realized to varying degrees
(2008: 193).
4
On the language of demanding and giving reasons, see Pippin (2008) and Pinkard (2017).
5
See Pippin (2008: 245n6): ‘I think that what he means to say is not that individuals function in
some completely unreflective way in their roles, but that when the objective deficiencies in the
social order do force a crisis-like confrontation with other equally required social functions,
reflection and doubt are indeed inspired (cf. Orestes in The Libation-Bearers), but they lead
nowhere, suggest no resolution, and must merely be suffered’.
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So De Laurentiis (2005: 134): ‘Hegel is insistent that lack of recognition of the concrete
universality of individuals is a structural feature of ancient thought and practice’.
7
One might contest Vieillard-Baron’s claim by pointing to the fact that women, for example,
were excluded from the public sphere, but the list of offices in book 6 of Aristotle’s Politics,
which includes guardian of the women, suggests that even the household was subject to public
scrutiny and regulation in Athens.
8
Hegel’s critique of Rousseau in Philosophy of Right §258 attacks the contractual understanding
of the state, which destroys ‘the divine [element] which has being in and for itself and its
absolute authority and majesty’ (277).
9
In referring to the subjective and objective sides of slavery, I follow terminology Hardimon
introduced with reference to Hegel’s treatment of freedom (1994: 95–96).
10
Cf. Aristotle, who writes that a slave ‘is by nature not his own but another’s man’
(P 1.4.1254a15, 1989).
11
See, for example PR: §4, 35: ‘The basis of right is the realm of spirit in general and its precise
location and point of departure is the will; the will is free, so that freedom constitutes its
substance and destiny and the system of right is the realm of actualized freedom’.
12
Thus De Laurentiis writes that the Greeks ‘know themselves in their personifications as
masters or slaves, Thebans or Athenians, wives or heads of household, warriors, merchants, or
philosophers. They do not know themselves as “what is free,” that is, as “the in and for itself
determinate”’ (2005: 85).
13
Smith (1992: 106–7) makes this point in his argument against Kojève’s reading of Hegel.
14
The irony, of course, is that Hegel himself failed to recognize women in just this way; see PR:
§166.
15
For a critique of Hegel’s claims about ‘the privilege of speech over writing’, see Derrida
(1982: 88–108); for a rejoinder see Magnus (2001: 19–21, 83–94).
16
Williams makes the same point about honour: ‘Ancient honor was immediate: one was
immediately honored for the sake of his wealth, deeds, and general manner’ (1998: 254).
17
So also Horstmann: ‘It has often and rightly been observed before that this new standpoint
effectively implies the abandonment of a political conception substantially oriented toward the
ethical life of the classical polis’ (2004: 222).
18
I wish to thank James Bohman, Richard Dees and this journal’s reviewers for helpful
comments on earlier versions of this paper.
6
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