On the English Reform Bill

Hegel reads Britain's great electoral reform from Berlin, in a newspaper essay whose last instalment was kept out of the paper.

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel79 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Über die englische Reformbill
First published: 1831(aged 61)
Original language: German

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Overview

A single vote carried a bill to redraw Britain's electoral map through its second reading in the House of Commons in March 1831, and Hegel, who followed the parliamentary debates in the press, set out to explain to German readers what was really at stake. His essay ran in the Allgemeine Preußische Staatszeitung, the Prussian government's own newspaper, and the last instalment never appeared there: the Prussian censorship stopped it, and the full text circulated only in a private printing. The essay is an indictment and a warning at once. Hegel lists what English liberty looked like from the inside — seats bought outright, an election at Liverpool said in Parliament to have cost £120,000, clergy who drew their parishes' income and paid a poor curate to do the work, and Irish Catholics compelled to pay tithes to an Anglican church not their own while funding their own priests from what little they had. Continental monarchies, he argued, had cleared away such inherited privilege by rational legislation from above; England had nothing comparable, only a Parliament made of the very interests that needed reforming. What alarmed him about the bill was less its content than its principle. By letting new, abstract claims into Parliament with no strong crown to mediate between them and the old privileges, it might drive a defeated opposition to seek its strength among the people and bring on a revolution in place of a reform. Hegel died that November; the Reform Act became law the following June.

Key concepts

What does Hegel mean by 'positive' right in England?

A positive right is one held because it was once granted or inherited, not because reason can justify it. Hegel finds English law and constitution overwhelmingly positive: a jumble of privileges that simply happen to exist. His example is the map of Parliament itself, where decayed boroughs of two or three tenants kept the right to send members while flourishing cities of a hundred thousand had none.

What is representation of 'the abstract will of individuals'?

It is the modern idea that Parliament should represent individuals simply as individuals, each will counted like any other, rather than the great interests and estates of a country. Hegel contrasts it with older constitutions, such as the Swedish one, where the estates themselves send deputies. He fears that, carried through consistently, the abstract principle opens an endless series of claims.

Why does a strong crown matter for reform, in Hegel's view?

Because someone must stand above the competing interests to carry a reform through. On the Continent, Hegel argues, monarchs abolished church tithes, lords' privileges and hunting rights by rational legislation, without upheaval, violence or plunder. In England the crown lacked that power and was jealously watched, so the only body that could reform Parliament was Parliament, made up of the interests that needed reforming.

What are the 'formal principles of freedom' Hegel warns about?

They are ideas of freedom and equality taken in the abstract, without regard to how a state actually works. Under them, obeying laws is accepted, yet obeying the officials who apply them seems contrary to freedom, and any difference between commanding and obeying seems contrary to equality. A crowd can call itself the people and claim to be the sovereign will against every organised authority.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

English liberty seen from inside

What did the famous English freedom look like to those who lived under it? Hegel's catalogue answers with bought seats, idle clergy and a dispossessed Ireland.

Hegel lists what English liberty meant in practice: seats in Parliament bought outright, an election at Liverpool reported to have cost £120,000, decayed boroughs of two or three tenants keeping seats while flourishing cities had none. Church offices had become private income, their duties handed to poor substitutes for alms, and the Catholic Irish, stripped of their churches, paid for their own priests out of their few pennies. Continental monarchies, he argues, had long since cleared away such privileges by rational legislation from above; England had only a Parliament made of those very interests.

political corruption
corruption
privilege
aristocracy
property rights
property
ireland
taxation
poverty
agrarian relations
political patronage
public finance
class interest
legal reform

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Reform or revolution

Can a country repair its institutions without tearing them down? Hegel feared the bill's principle more than its clauses, because nothing in England stood above the parties to steer the change.

The bill promised fairness in how seats were shared out, and Hegel grants that reform was needed. What alarmed him was the principle it let into Parliament: the abstract will of individuals, counted as such, and formal ideas of freedom and equality under which a crowd can call itself the people and every official seems to stand above it by wrong. With no crown strong enough to mediate between old privileges and new claims, a defeated opposition might seek its strength among the people and bring revolution in place of reform.

electoral reform
political reform
political representation
parliamentary representation
suffrage
monarchy
popular sovereignty
parliamentary sovereignty
political legitimacy
executive power
political participation
political apathy
political judgment
political power

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Within this work

passages held: 79
distinct concepts: 178
by passages held, corpus-wide: #557

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “political representation” and “suffrage”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 11 pairings. 31 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
political representation	suffrage	3
aristocracy	political representation	2
electoral reform	parliamentary representation	2
electoral reform	political representation	2
electoral reform	suffrage	2
parliamentary representation	political reform	2
aristocracy	electoral reform	1
aristocracy	political reform	1
electoral reform	political corruption	1
parliamentary sovereignty	political representation	1
political corruption	political reform	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1801 The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy (Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie)
The book that opened Hegel's Jena years and first put his name before the public — as Schelling's ally, a role his essays for their Critical Journal continued.
DE
1802 Faith and Knowledge (Glauben und Wissen)
Written at the height of the alliance with Schelling: the longest of Hegel's pieces for their journal, and his fullest early reckoning with Kant.
DE
1802 How the Ordinary Human Understanding Takes Philosophy (Wie der gemeine Menschenverstand die Philosophie nehme)
Of Hegel's reviews for the Critical Journal, the most openly mocking: the journal's programme of severity turned on a single named Kantian.
DE
1802 On the Essence of Philosophical Criticism (Über das Wesen der philosophischen Kritik überhaupt)
Unsigned, and claimed for both editors ever since: the programme at the head of the journal Hegel and Schelling ran in 1802–03, which Hegel's reviews in its later issues put into practice.
DE
1802 On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law (Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts)
Spread across the Critical Journal's last two issues: Hegel's longest published early writing on law and the state, composed while he was still an unsalaried lecturer at Jena.
DE
1802 Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy (Verhältnis des Skeptizismus zur Philosophie)
Between the Krug review and Faith and Knowledge in the Critical Journal's run, the essay in which Hegel first says what doubt does for philosophy.
DE
1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (Die Phänomenologie des Geistes)
Written as Napoleon's army entered Jena and published in 1807, the book Hegel meant as the doorway into his system — and the one many readers still enter him through.
DE
1812 Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik)
The larger of Hegel's two versions of the Logic, written away from any university while he ran a Nuremberg school; the metaphysical core the rest of the system rests on.
DE
1817 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline (Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse)
The frame for Hegel's other books: its first part condenses the Science of Logic, and the Philosophy of Right expands one section of its third part. Hegel taught from it and rewrote it twice.
DEEN
1821 Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts)
The last book Hegel published in his lifetime apart from new editions of the Encyclopaedia: the textbook of his Berlin law lectures, and the one of his books most argued over by political readers.
DE
1831 On the English Reform Bill (Über die englische Reformbill) you are here DE
1833 Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie)
Among the posthumous lecture books, the course Hegel carried through nearly his whole teaching life, and the one that closes on his thanks to the students who had followed it.
DE
1835 The Philosophy of Fine Art (Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik)
Not a book Hegel wrote but Berlin lectures assembled by a student after his death — the most influential philosophy of art of the nineteenth century, and a contested reconstruction of it.
EN
1835 Who Thinks Abstractly? (Wer denkt abstrakt?)
Hegel in the manner of a magazine essayist: short, comic and aimed at the general reader, though he never published it himself.
DE
1837 Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte)
For decades the most widely read of Hegel's works, and now the most contested — lectures on world history, published after his death, reading it as the growth of human freedom.
DE

— or open another of their works