‘Shameful is the Only Word for It’: Hegel on Kant’s Sexual and the Social Contract

This paper engages with Hegel’s criticism of the Kantian marriage contract from an unconventional angle. After showing that the Hegelian argument uncovers a parallel between the sexual and the social contract in modern contractarian theories, I illustrate how Kant’s theory of marriage is consistent with his Republican theory and engenders the same conceptual difficulty, that is, a gap between the contracting individuals and the production of the common will. My goal is to suggest that, by illustrating how the logic of the sexual contract works, Hegel enables us to outline a very peculiar notion of ‘patriarchy’ that his ethical Aufhebung of the modern bourgeois family resolutely calls into question. As I will elucidate in the conclusion, this does not imply ignoring the patriarchal structure of the Hegelian family, but gives us the possibility to discriminate between two very different forms of patriarchy: whereas Hegel’s family relies on cultural and therefore conditional masculinist prejudices, the contractarian model is paradoxically indifferent to any such bias but establishes a deeper and more elusive form of patriarchal entitlement.