: James Doull and the Philosophic Task of Our Time 2 2

In an essay published in 1973 James Doull defined the organization of contemporary society in terms of two principles, “an unlimited technical and economic expansion” and “the utopian confidence that men can live together in unity of purpose.” His purpose was to demonstrate the continuing validity of the tripartite Hegelian analysis of the modern state against subsequent criticism. He located the first tendency in the conflict of selfinterested particular wills characteristic of civil society and the second in the construction of concrete universality in the state. Thus, “the philosophical interest of the present time does not lie any longer in the philosophies of subjective will. Their common problem was solved long since in the Hegelian phenomenology.” The continuing validity of the Hegelian analysis of the modern state was understood to be the institutional separation and relation between family, civil society and the state in which the conceptual relationship between immediate undifferentiated universality, the reflective selfinterested particularity of subjective will, and reflective mediated concrete universality was rooted in historical actuality. His argument against critics of Hegel was that any attempt to undermine this tripartite structure would be a regression. Specifically, liberalism and “anarchic individualism” simply propagate subjective will and do not see its necessary supercession in which “society is common work of promoting what is useful to its members singly and collectively.” In this respect Marxism contains a valid legacy of Hegel insofar as it understands civil society as “the total conflict of particular personality and economic life” and “socialism is in truth this conflict overcome inwardly as well as in the structure of society.” The philosophic task of our time is thus to promote the universal will inherent in the state as against the partial realization of modernity in the particular will and to diagnose the failure of cultural currents that do not attain this understanding.