The dialectic in Hegel's Phenomenology

The dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology  (text of talk given to Kingston Philosophy Cafe Dec 4th 2014)

1.

The idea of this session was to build on an earlier talk I gave on Hegel’s Phenomenology and go into some areas in a bit more detail, and I chose to focus on Master and Slave, partly because it is a well known passage but also because it is useful for sorting out different interpretations of Hegel.   But before I do that I wanted to spend a bit of time talking about the method and how it all links together.    People often talk about “the dialectic” when they talk about Hegel’s method and the first thing most people learn about Hegel is usually something to do with thesis-antithesis-synthesis and dialectical method, and dialectic is often opposed to the analytical method of most contemporary philosophy.   One odd thing about this is that Hegel at least in his earlier work (up to and including the Phenomenology) has almost nothing to say about this, and indeed the word dialectic only appears in the Phenomenology in a couple of  passing remarks,  certainly not part of the Introduction where Hegel does set out the procedure he is going to follow in the Phenomenology.    On the other hand when we study this method, it is clear that it draws heavily on Plato and what has become known as his dialectical method.    So I wanted to begin this evening by talking a bit about dialectic in Plato.

Dialectic essentially means using dialogue, and nearly all Plato’s works are dialogues.    Within them we can easily distinguish the negative and the positive aspects.    The negative aspect is found for example in the so-called Early Socratic dialogues, and it examine notions like beauty, truth, courage and subjects various definitions of these things to a critical scrutiny.   It’s a particular type of scrutiny and perhaps the most important thing about it is that it doesn’t import any external criteria into the discussion but uses only the criteria that the person offering the definition himself uses.    There is no question then of whether we like or dislike what someone is saying, and this is not a debating society type of discussion where we try to win the audience over to our point of view.    We just ask, does this definition make sense?   The only criterion we really need for this is the principle of non-contradiction, i.e. we need to agree only that things must make sense, or if you like, that thing must either be, or not be, but cannot both be and not be at the same time – Aristotle’s principle of the excluded middle.    The result of a negative dialectic is pretty much always apoeretic, i.e no firm conclusion and the suggested definitions are always found to be unsatisfactory in some way.

It can seem like a nit-picking and fussy procedure and it’s worth asking what Plato is trying to achieve in these negative dialogues (or parts of dialogues).    Does he think that if we have really good definitions of key concepts like beauty, truth and so on then we have a solid foundation to build philosophy on?    Is the point to work towards definitions that don’t lead into contradiction by subjecting them all to rigorous criticism?   I’m going to argue that it isn’t, and perhaps that is obvious to you too but if so it is probably worth pointing out that many people do take this view.     Modern philosophy in general seems to like to do this sort of thing and its practitioners often interpret Plato in the same way, as if he were one of them.   A good example is the translator of Theaetetus , a chap called Robin Waterfield.    Theaetetus examines a theory that truth is based in perception, and finds it unsatisfactory.   If you are familiar with Plato you won’t be surprised by that because you will know that Plato’s theory of truth is the theory of Form, which is quite opposed to any theory of perception.    Waterfield doesn’t notice this though and sees Theaetetus as Plato's work on what modern philosophy calls epistemology.    He then does something a bit unusual for a translator, and instead of writing an introduction to the dialogue as translators usually do he writes an essay after it and in it argues that Plato had failed to make a certain distinction, and that if he had made this particular fine distinction he could have overcome the contradictions he found in a theory of truth based on perception.     He seems to think this is consistent with Plato’s procedure and that Plato would be grateful to him for ironing out contradictions in the theory of perception and giving him a nice tidy theory which because it is free of contradiction must be the truth.     Socratic irony – Socrates’ profession that the only thing he knows is is his own ignorance – looses its ironic edge, and becomes the genuine modesty of an early practitioner who is smart enough to realise that he hasn’t got it all worked out yet.

Now, I don’t think that is the point at all of the negative dialectic.    I think they are aimed at the very concept of definition, or perhaps to be a bit more precise, a certain type of definition that seeks to define something by expressing it in terms of something else, which has the effect of reducing it to that something else or turning it in to that something else.    A good modern example would be John Rawles, who defines justice as fairness.    He’s doing something that we often do, which is pointed out especially by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, which is that when we are faced with a difficult question, we respond by substituting an easier one.    The question “what is justice?” is definitely a hard question, but if you substitute the question “what is fairness?” it becomes much easier and Rawles finds that he can go on at great (and tedious) length about fairness, but unfortunately that isn’t the question and nothing he says in fact has any bearing on the question of what is justice, even though his book is titled a Theory of Justice.   He hasn’t simplified justice by reducing it to fairness, he has just changed the subject, and his book is a theory of fairness, not a theory of justice.    Plato’s negative dialogues are all about reductive definitions like this and they all end up with the conclusion that the definitions are unsatisfactory and contradictory, and that’s how they are meant to be because any reductive definition will necessarily be unsatisfactory.

So that leaves the question, is there another type of definition which is not unsatisfactory?    After all, if Plato is saying that in general we don’t know what we are talking about, because when we are asked to define our terms it turns out that we can’t, well,  this seems hopeless.   But that isn’t really the point, because although we may have trouble defining something like justice, it doesn’t mean that we don’t know what it is (in platonic language, we can have right opinion or ortho doxa of it).    In the Republic Plato starts off with a short negative dialectic, a dissection of Thrasymachus’s sophist argument that justice is the interest of the stronger, but then moves in to a more positive expository dialogue where he offers his own definition of justice.   But it’s not so much a definition as a description of justice, and that’s a big difference.    The difference is this:    a definition of justice implies that justice is something that results from my reasoning, so it follows that I should be able to explain my reasoning, whereas a description of justice says or implies that justice isn’t a result of my reasoning but exists in its own right.    When Plato describes justice in the Republic he accords the idea the respect due to an independent entity, and that’s why his thinking can be called Philosophy as opposed to the Sophism of say Thrasymachus.    If you think you are in charge, as Thrasymachus does, then you are a dominator, not a lover, and philosophy is not control of the truth but love of the truth.    The very notion of philosophy implies the idea (admittedly a counterintuitive one, especially for a modern philosopher) that the truth is independent of my reasoning.    That in essence is the theory of form, or idealism, which says that the true reality is the idea and that ideas are logically prior to experience and not derived from it.    It’s not really an “-ism” in the sense of being a position you can choose to adopt if you prefer it to some other notion like materialism – it is a simple logical necessity, and all philosophy, in the sense of love of truth, has to be idealism.

There are a couple of aspects to Plato’s definition of justice in the Republic, both consistent with respecting its independence.   The first is to describe it as something that exists where there is a balance between the cardinal virtues.    If someone is wise, brave, and disciplined, there we feel we are likely to find justice, while someone who is unwise, cowardly and undisciplined we may feel less confident of being able to deliver justice.    This approach is taking the idea of justice as a whole, a real entity, and teasing out aspects of it that can help us to know it better.    It turns out that those aspects are the same as Aristotle’s four causes although there’s no evidence that Plato thought about it in that way.    The second way of describing justice is to say what would an ideal state look like?    An ideal state would surely be the embodiment of justice and to describe it would therefore tell us something pretty concrete about the nature of justice itself.    This is the element of the philosophical point of view that Hegel describes as speculative.    You might not like Plato’s ideal state, but I think you would have to agree that in describing it Plato gives a pretty good idea of what he understands by justice – while Thrasymachus, or John Rawles, or really almost any modern political philosopher, because they are all equivalent to the sophists and believe that they possess the truth – actually tell us nothing at all about that key question, because they are always actually talking about something else.

So you can really see three moments of the dialectic in Plato which perhaps give rise to the thesis – antithesis - synthesis chestnut, or perhaps better and a bit closer to Hegel who I am pretty sure never mentioned thesis – antithesis - synthesis, abstract – negative – concrete.    In terms of the Republic you could say that the thesis or abstract moment is Thrasymachus’ definition of justice, the antithesis or negative is the result of the criticism of that, which is that it is unsatisfactory because it leads to self contradiction, and finally the concrete and speculative description of justice as a real entity by Socrates.

2

Now lets turn to Hegel and see how he develops this in the Phenomenology.   There are two big differences, one of which I’ll talk about now and the other later (part 3 below).     Broadly speaking you can say that the method of the Phenomenology is just the same as Plato’s.    It may not be written in dialogue form exactly, but it is an imagined dialogue between what he call “natural consciousness” which takes a common sense view of things that has a lot in common with Plato’s sophists, and “we” the philosophical readers who play a part more like Socrates’.   The big difference is that in Plato there isn’t much of a connection between the speculative part and the negative dialectic.      Hegel changes this through the notion of determinate negation, which says that the negation of a position like Thrasymachus’ does not just say that that position is false, but can also give a positive result.     It’s a notion that has been criticised as illogical.    Can the negation of A, not-A, give you a new proposition B?    It seems not.    But what is negated for Hegel is not so much a position as a claim, and any claim involves the truth because if I claim something I necessarily claim that what I am claiming is true, even if my claim is just implicit and not necessarily something I am aware of.    Hegel’s argument is that the structure of the Phenomenology is determined by the negation of particular points of view giving specific results that give rise to the next one, so that the whole thing is connected and the negative criticism is always also producing a positive result.    This is something he does only in the Phenomenology, which is an induction of a prephilosophical/sophist/commonsense consciousness that thinks that appearance is reality into a philosophical standpoint , i.e. that the ideal is what is real.    Once this is achieved once there is no need to repeat it and all of Hegel’s later work leaves out this negative aspect of the dialectic and deals only with the positive speculative element, just like Plato in the body of the Republic.   There are aspects of the dialectic in these later works and Hegel begins to use the term more openly, but the negative dialectic that is so familiar from Plato’s dialogues is only present in the Phenomenology.    The later works are essentially speculative, and the Philosophy of Spirit for example in the Encyclopaedia can be characterised as the covering the same ground as the Phenomenology of Spirit, but omitting the negative dialectic. 

So let’s see how this works with a few examples.   These will be bowdlerisations of Hegel’s arguments and miss out all kinds of important middle steps but they seem to be valid for all that and working out what the “determinate negation” is at any particular juncture in the Phenomenology can be a great help in understanding the overall structure;   and you don’t stand a chance of understanding Hegel if you don’t have a view of the overall structure of the argument.

So to begin with you can take each of the twelve major subsections of the Phenomenology and find a claim that is made at the beginning, and a result that comes at the end that is the opposite of what was claimed at the beginning and which becomes the foundation of a new claim.

The very beginning is the claim of sensation, the idea that what I am experiencing here and now is the truth.   It seems self-evident and obvious, that this particular experience I am having just now is true and couldn’t be otherwise.   So if we find that this claim is unsatisfactory, leads to contradiction, what will the result be?    What is the opposite of this particular experience?   It could be the universal, the opposite of the particular, and that is indeed where we get to at the end of Hegel’s discussion, although this isn’t the way we get there exactly, and the universal becomes the object of the next section on perception.

It’s important to note how this takes place and in particular that it is not a deduction, but a discovery.   The common-sense view may be that this particular experience is true and that it has no need for universals, it can just believe in its senses, but just mentioning the particular implies its opposite, the universal.    The universal in other words was always there and all that happens in the dialectic of sense-certainty is that we become explicitly aware of that fact.     All the discoveries in the Phenomenology are like that.   What you discover at every stage was always there from the beginning, and ultimately what you discover is that everything exists only as a moment of the absolute idea, that appearance is not reality, that the true reality is the ideal, just like in Plato.     It can be a hard idea to swallow but perhaps easier if you break it down into bits like the dialectic of sense certainty.

 

Perception, which is sensation mediated by the universal and is the result of the dialectic of sense-certainty,  sees the universal as a property of the object.  It has colour, texture, weight and so on and these universal categories are determined by the object itself.    It’s the conditioned universal.   Now what is the opposite of that?    The unconditioned universal, the universal that is not conditioned by the physical character of the object.    For Hegel this is the Newtonian concept of Force, which in a way underlies all natural science, because science likes to explain things by showing that they are a result of natural forces.    Thus the negation of the claim that perception is the truth is the claim that science is the truth.     I’ll come back to this in a moment but let’s just do one more determinate negation, the ninth one which has to do with enlightenment ethics and in particular Kant.     The enlightenment believes that the good is a result of reason.    This however doesn’t work because it’s abstract and can’t say anything concrete.   Hegel for example points out that according to the principle of the categorical imperative you can defend the system of private property, because in willing it for yourself you can equally will it for everyone else; but you could also do the same for a system of communal property and reason alone can’t decide which is better.   According to the notion of determinate negation, what does this mean?    If the original claim was that the good is a result of my reasoning, the negation of that must be that the good is not a result of my reasoning.    If it isn’t a result of my reasoning, then it must be independent of my reasoning, and if the good is independent, then you can say that, like a Platonic form, it is real, it exists in its own right.   This is perhaps the most important transition in the Phenomenology and once you understand that the rational is real, you transcend (and preserve) reason itself and enter the realm of Spirit, which just is the rational intuited as real, and not just a “faculty” of the human brain.

It’s worth stressing how radical this is.   At every stage of the Phenomenology Hegel starts with a point of view that seems like common sense, and at every stage proves that the exact opposite is the truth.     Everything you take for granted will be challenged and changed into its opposite.   Hegel may be politically conservative, but philosophically he is just the opposite.   More self consciously radical thinkers like Marx, or Sartre, for example, turn out to be philosophically entirely conventional, men of the enlightenment – Sartre bases his whole philosophy on a version of the Cartesian cogito and called his trilogy of novels The Age of Reason – and philosophically they are at the level of sophism and haven’t discovered the truth that only the ideal is truly real, which is to say they are not really philosophers in the classical sense of lovers of the truth at all.   They are also not dialectical in the sense that they do not consider the internal consistency of their theories, in spite of the obvious fact that they lead to contradiction, for example Sartre's assertion that the only moral value is freedom and that anything goes so long as it is freely chosen, and the only moral failing is "bad faith" when you try to see your actions as the result of something other than your own self-determination, yet it would seem that if you freely choose to act in "bad faith" then that is a valid free choice too.

3

Now, let’s go back a bit and look at what was supposed to be the main topic for this evening, master and slave.    I’ve held back a bit from this topic because something strange happens here which seems to change all the rules of dialectic, which until now depends on the principle of non-contradiction.    At the end of the discussion of understanding, where we make the transition from consciousness to self-consciousness, material to efficient cause, Hegel suddenly says that in order to think Life, we need to think contradiction, somehow to accept it into our thinking and learn to live with it.    And, elsewhere, he does in fact reject Aristotle’s principle of the excluded middle.    In fact that principle, which is still taught as a fundamental principal of logic today, does lead to a host of problems which were well known in the ancient world,  Zeno’s paradox for example.    The paradox of motion is that something, the arrow, must pass through every point on its journey, yet because it is moving it cannot be at that point but has instantly left it, in other words it must both be and not be (in a certain place) at the same time.   Not only motion, but any change at all seems to be ruled out by the principle of the excluded middle because for there to be change something must come into being that previously was not, and so Hegel says in the Logics that there must be a third category between being and non being which is becoming.

Now I don’t want to follow that train too far because I’ll get out of my depth, but returning to Master and Slave, what Hegel seems to be saying is that contradiction, or at least opposing ideas are actually driving forces and part of the efficient cause or energy source of Spirit.    What is a contradiction in the realm of the dead (i.e. natural science) is not necessarily one in the realm of life, as Hegel said in the Early Theological writings.

It begins with the notion of Desire.   Of course because we are now in efficient cause (self-consciousness, the second of the four major parts of the Phenomenology) and the fundamental question is what motivates us, desire has to be part of the answer:    we do things because we want to.    But desire itself is odd because it desires not only to consume (negate and destroy in Hegelian parlance) the object it desires, but it also aims in doing that to destroy itself because desire is also a desire for satisfaction, in other words not to desire any longer, and this in a way is equivalent to death.    It seems to be some thinking like this that lies at the heart of Freud’s view that civilisation can be seen as the result of a conflict between two forces, Eros, the libidinal life force and Thanatos, its unconscious counterpart, the death instinct.

Now, thinking of determinate negation, and without going into detail, what is the opposite of desire for an object?    How about desire for a subject?   What happens if the object of my desire is a subject, a non-object?    Well for a start, since it isn’t an object I can’t consume it.   I can destroy it by killing it, or if it submits to me I can choose to enslave it – these were understood to be the possible outcomes of ancient warfare.    If I kill it, then the object has gone and I have no satisfaction, if I enslave it I have the object and the recognition from it I desired, except that I desired a subject, a free being, and what I have is a slave so the recognition I have is not the recognition I sought.    I have stumbled into a hive of contradictions.

There is no evidence that Hegel thought at all about sexual desire in this context, but the parallel to Freud is strong.    Freud sees all desire as libidinal and in the contradiction of desire for an object that is also a subject sees desire sublimated, or made sublime, by being directed towards something it cannot consume, so that that desire becomes permanent and is the basis of all civilisation.

Courage, which is the virtue associated with self-consciousness, seems also to be a contradictory thing.   Nobody wants to go to war, and anyone who does knows the likelihood that they will be killed.     What can possibly make this attractive?    There seems to be no logical reason for it and there doesn’t seem to be any gain that could compensate for death, yet history teaches that we do do this.   In a way Hegel’s account gives some explanation of this in terms of recognition, but I don’t think it’s quite an explanation in the sense of giving you a rational reason for putting your life at risk, I think it is more a case of accepting that we are motivated by spirit and that pure reason alone can’t always explain why we do what we do and sometimes we need to accept apparently contradictory notions like courage into our lives without worrying about it too much.

4.

Now, one of the things I wanted to do tonight was to talk about different ways Hegel is interpreted by contemporary commentators.

Let’s start with the dialectic in the Phenomenology.   This is something that gives commentators a lot of trouble and they come up with widely varying explanations of how the whole thing hangs together.   Findlay for example talks about the Phenomenology being a series of “worthwhile dead ends”, so while each section may end in contradiction, we somehow learn something along the way and when we take all the things we have learned together, then we have perfect or absolute knowledge.   Another commentator, Richard Norman if my memory serves me, says that in each critical part of the dialectic there is a grain of truth that remains, and the final result is the heap of grains put together, and actually most modern commentators who address the question of how it all hangs together and what it’s purpose is offer some explanation a bit like this.    It may be generalising a bit but you can say that what they are interested in is the negative dialectic, and like the translator of the Theaetetus they tend to think that the point is to iron out the contradictions and then you will have absolute knowledge.   This isn’t philosophy, it’s sophism.   It misses out the entire speculative element that is the main part  of the story.   It’s like reading only the first section of the republic, the negative dialectic with Thrasymachus, and ignoring all the rest, the positive and useful stuff.    In general you can say that modern commentators are not idealists and don’t understand speculative thought, and only understand the negative aspect of dialectic.    If you don’t grasp the simple notion that the ideal is what is real, you can never make sense of Hegel.   Unfortunately if you do, it becomes impossible to take modern philosophy seriously and you are unlikely to get a university post and you won’t be asked to write books about Hegel or Plato.    Consequently books about Hegel rarely make any sense.

The passage on Master and Slave is also one that gives rise to very different interpretations of Hegel.    Sartre famously said that Hegel was right to point out the fundamental conflict at the centre of human relations that stems from the simple fact of self consciousness (the thinking goes that in self-consciousness I depend only on myself therefore am independent of others, but others may limit my independence therefore I must see them as threat and try to dominate and preserve my own independence – which Sartre calls freedom although it’s not really the same thing); but that he was wrong in thinking that this fundamental conflict could be overcome.    And the idea that it can be overcome is at the centre of another interpretation of Hegel that puts the master slave conflict at the centre, but interprets it in a liberal way as saying that the contradictions inherent in the master slave relationship themselves give rise to a higher form where the one-sidedness of that relationship is overcome in “mutual recognition”, taking the text “they recognise themselves as mutually recognising one another” from the Master slave passage.   They then view history as fuelled by this conflict and finally reaching an end, a “universal and homogeneous state” to quote Alexander Kojeve, a great exponent of this point of view, in which all citizens are finally recognised as equal, a kind of protocommunism that appeals to many Marxists (although Kojeve himself was not one).

The problem with these interpretations it seems to me is the same as the problem with some of the interpretations of the structure of the argument, which is that they are mechanistic and modern, the latter not in a good sense.    They read into Hegel many things that are not there, for example the idea that the master slave conflict is something that may or may not be overcome.    In fact this simply isn’t an issue for Hegel and the question of whether it can be overcome doesn’t arise.    What he is saying is that it is part of the story of Spirit and it does tell us something about courage which is one of the essential moments (four causes) of Spirit and must be part of the speculative picture he is trying to draw.   The same point can be made against those who wonder what truth remains after the negative moment of dialectic in the phenomenology and it can be summarised in Aristotle’s dictum that the True is the Whole, a real existence, and not the leftovers once all the contradictions of abstract though have been ironed out.

5

Let’s conclude now by returning to the three elements of dialectic, thesis, antithesis, synthesis or better abstract, negative, and concrete or speculative.     These are sometimes seen as a kind of supercharged syllogism, a special type of reasoning that can take place within a few sentences or paragraphs.    In fact when Hegel made that passing remark, it seems that it referred to philosophy as a whole and in particular to Plato’s Republic.    The thesis or abstract moment is the common sense view of the world, the belief that appearance is reality.    It can be summarised in a certain view of conceptual thought, which is that it is a result of my subjective reasoning, or artificial, a human creation;  and it is characterised as a definition or reductive explanation of whatever concept is in question.    This turns out to be false and this is shown by finding internal contradiction.   This means that the concept is not a result of my subjective reasoning, which means that it is independent of it, and something that has an independent existence is what we call real.    Thus we get to the notion that it is the ideal that is real, not appearance or common sense, and that the appropriate way of getting to know the idea is both respectful and speculative.    This ultimately is the foundation of both Platonic and Hegelian thought.    The true reality is not appearance, but the idea, and the idea is logically prior to all appearance and far from being derived from it, it is actually what allows it to happen.   Without ideas there would be no appearance.

It’s a counterintuitive notion, but one that is the basis of all philosophical thought at least in the original meaning of that term as coined by Pythagoras and taken up by Plato.    It is the opposite of Sophism, which thinks it does know the truth or at least in principal can, so long as it is clever enough.     Modern philosophy, which likes to think of itself as more advanced than ancient philosophy, which it sees as primitive, is in fact all Sophism, something more primitive than classical  Philosophy.   In terms of the dialectic, it is all stuck in the first or abstract phase, and it has not risen to an appreciation of the fact that the truth, the object of philosophy, is something that is real.    It even talks of abstraction as if it were a good thing, as if the philosopher’s skill was that of thinking abstractly and in general terms, rather than concretely and specifically, or, better, speculatively.

Modern philosophy of course dismisses Plato’s idealism almost universally, and “neo-platonic” has become a synonym for “wrong-headed”.   It’s worth pointing out though that there has never been a critique of Plato that has shown his view to be false.   It may be worth repeating that with emphasis.    THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A COHERENT CRITICISM OF THE CLASSICAL THEORY OF FORM.    All that has happened is that it has gone out of fashion.    Nowadays we like to think of ourselves as practical, down to earth sorts who base our knowledge on natural science, and this idealist stuff (which by the way is just as much the foundation of Aristotle as well as Plato) doesn’t appeal.    Because everyone wants to believe in common sense, that appearance is indeed reality, it is very easy to perpetuate this idea, after all it is the way things seem to be.    Instead of getting to grips with Plato, engaging with his thought, we make dismissive remarks like “nobody thinks like that any more”, or “it’s totally untenable nowadays” (both views expressed within this group this year) and these opinions are allowed to pass without further thought or reflection.    In terms of dialectic, we can say that what has happened here is that the basic rule of dialectic, that we do not import our own criteria but instead only use the criteria of whatever abstract idea we are investigating, has been broken and we are introducing instead our own critereon which is whether we like the idea or not.    In modern philosophical circles this often means asking whether it suits our own (mainly atheistic, liberal and morally relative) prejudices.   Karl Popper calling Plato’s Republic a “handbook for aspiring dictators” is a good example, and typical of the way modern thinkers approach Plato.    What would be better, and more philosophical, would be to examine Plato’s argument and to see whether it makes sense.    One can certainly apply this method to any modern philosophy and the result is always the same, that it collapses into contradiction and that is because it is abstract, all at stage one of the dialectic.    With Plato however, you will find that you can’t do that, and the reason is that he has gone beyond abstract thought to concrete or speculative thinking, and it is only abstract thought that necessarily leads into contradiction.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t criticise Plato, or Hegel – there are important differences between them but they agree on the basic point that appearance is illusion and only the ideal is real – but that your criticism must also operate on the speculative level, which means respecting the independence of the idea.   We could talk for example about the idea of justice, and few would agree that the ideal state described in The Republic is one we would find ideal ourselves.    It’s incumbent on us then to say what would be our ideal, because ultimately that is our answer to the question of what is justice, and that is what Hegel does in his Philosophy of Right.    I can’t think of another modern work of political theory that does this.   All are in the abstract/reductive mode, with the possible exception of Machiavelli's The Prince, although that work is really premodern.    Abstract thought, which includes virtually all philosophy since Descartes, and particularly the “analytical philosophy” that so dominates our universities, is junk and we need to put it on the junk heap and return to speculative or real philosophy, genuine love of the truth and not a simple desire to dominate it.