Hegel on Ethics, the State and Public Policy: Comparisons with Immanuel Kant and Utilitarianism

Drawing on a wide range of Hegel’s writings, this book analyses the Hegelian position on ethical action. This position is systematically compared with that of Immanuel Kant, the comparison emphasizing Hegel’s insistence on a morality grounded in an ’ethical’ context which essentially refers to the State rather than the agent’s private will.

Samuel Hollander is University Professor Emeritus in Economics at the University of Toronto where he taught from 1963-1998. He is author of studies of the economics of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Robert Malthus, Jean-Baptiste Say, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; and of A History of Utilitarian Ethics (Routledge 2020) and Immanuel Kant and Utilitarian Ethics (Routledge 2022). He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and was a Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique of France (CNRS), 1999-2000.