Hegel's Rabble

Reviews / Votes

A remarkably incisive and powerful intervention into to question of the relationship between philosophy and politics. Taking the supposedly marginal notion of the "rabble" from Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Ruda elevates it to the status of a proper, yet paradoxical philosophical category. Paradoxical, because it marks a fundamental irritation of philosophy by politics, and calls for the transformation of the former. Relating this transformation to the passage from Marx to Hegel, Ruda revisits this passage from a highly original and non-standard perspective, allowing for important contemporary philosophical debates of politics to resonate in it. An extremely compelling and original philosophical work, it is on its way to becoming a classical reference in future philosophy-politics debates. Hegel's Rabble offers the first systematic analysis of this most symptomatic and intractable figure in Hegel's philosophy, and through its reformulation of the relation between impoverishment and empowerment - the relation that leads from Luther's pauper to Hegel's rabble to Marx's proletariat - Ruda's book explodes the illusions that still mystify the contemporary valorization of 'civil society', and reframes our whole understanding of poverty, class, and the revolutionary pursuit of equality. Ruda reads the minor theme of the rabble in Hegel's Philosophy of Right with the same care and insight as Derrida on the family or Kojeve on the master-slave dialectic. Particularly interesting is his analysis of the two rabbles so often in the news today: the poverty rabble, so-called "hippies," "rioters," and "scum," and the luxury rabble, the financial capitalists who wreaked havoc on the world economy with their reckless gambling and speculation. No philosophical work is more relevant for understanding the contemporary crisis.