The Lord and the Bondsman
The Lord and the Bondsman
This chapter supplies a crucial reinterpretation of Hegel’s master/slave--or better, “lord/bondsman”--dialectic. Scholars from Kojève on have misrecognized the ways in which Hegel writes this episode as a fundamentally feudal narrative depicting the struggle for possession (specifically, for land) between the Herr and the Knecht. For Hegel, this episode has contemporary significance not because of any supposed reference to ancient slavery or the Transatlantic slave trade, but because he himself lived in a time when feudalism (Grundherrschaft or Herrschaft) was still practiced in Germany, as historians have long acknowledged. Hegel, in short, is critiquing contemporary social and economic conditions as powerfully as would Marx. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Marx’s insights into the Herrschaftsverhältnis (master-servant relation) and suggests that Marx learned to demystify capital by contrasting it with feudalism, as conceived in Hegelian terms. In particular, Marx and later theorists follow Hegel in understanding that the uneasy coexistence of feudalism and capitalism necessitates the use of dialectics.
Keywords: Hegel, Marx, master-slave dialectic, lord-bondsman dialectic, feudalism, historiography, German history, slavery, modes of production, historical materialism
Chicago Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
