Hegel’s Monarch, the Concept and the Limits of Syllogistic Reasoning Sebastian Stein Klaus Vieweg’ s seminal new book Das Denken der Freiheit, on Hegel’ s political philosophy, is an immensely rich and rewarding book that develops complex arguments in a manner adequate to Hegel’ s standards of argumentation. My aim in what follows is to show that there is room for debate about the nature of philosophical method within the community of scholars who aspire to live up to Hegel’ s standards of rational argument but are unhappy with his conclusions. Put as a question: What does it mean to argue with Hegel rather than against him or, as Klaus Vieweg does, to argue with Hegel against Hegel? 1 In so doing, I will focus on Vieweg’ s argument against Hegel’ s notion of hereditary monarchy, as presented in the Philosophy of Right §§275–86. I. The issue of monarchy In his discussion of the inner constitution of Hegel’ s state, Vieweg confidently rejects Hegel’ s claims in favour of hereditary monarchy and argues that by the standards of Hegel’ s own syllogistic logic, monarchy ought not to be part of a just social order. 2 However, on what grounds does Vieweg make these claims? In the first chapters of his book, Vieweg decidedly and humorously rejects what he takes to be methodologically naïve criticisms (Vieweg 23ff) of Hegel and is careful in his own argument not to appeal to his or ‘our’ own contemporary intuitions, customs, traditions, etc. He aspires not to assume any other methodological perspective but Hegel’ s own in order to live up to Hegel’ s own standards of philosophical argument, i.e., to the requirements of his speculative logic and its task of explicating what Hegel calls the ‘actuality of the rational’ (Vieweg 30). For Vieweg, this means engaging in speculative syllogising (Vieweg 234 ff) 3 , which requires the thinker first to identify what Hegel calls the concept’ s (Hegel’ s alias for conceptual truth) three (onto)logical elements, i.e., the universal (U), the particular (P), and the individual (I), and their determined form in the specific context under scrutiny (in this case, political philosophy). Following the example doi:10.1017/hgl.2016.8 Hegel Bulletin, 37/1, 145–155 © The Hegel Society of Great Britain, 2016 145 terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/hgl.2016.8 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. Universitaet Heidelberg, on 22 Mar 2017 at 14:02:26, subject to the Cambridge Core