Canada’s Hegel

I. Five years ago, a New York law journal sponsored a symposium on Hegel and law. Charles Taylor, the Montreal philosopher, gave the keynote address. Taylor argued that liberal theory needs to be supplemented with a communitarian view, inspired by Hegel’s political philosophy. Reviewing an edited version of the symposium, Hegel and Legal Theory, a British academic complained that nearly every contributor doffed a cap toward Taylor’s position. “One begins to get the impression,” the reviewer wrote bitterly, “that the German was somehow the author of a book on the Canadian philosopher, rather than the other way around.”

G.W.F. Hegel, who died in 1831, was last in the great line of German idealists which included Fichte, Kant, and Schelling. For reasons I want to explore in this essay, Hegel also looms large in Canada. Certain broad Hegelian principles are...