Klint Shim

Research Project

Hegel, Spinoza, and the Logic of History and Social Structure

My project examines how the disagreement between Spinoza and Hegel on key metaphysical issues informs their respective social ontologies, especially those concerning history and social structure. The contemporary capitalist modernity, understood as a kind of social order, is both a historical and conceptual formation informed by specific metaphysical notions about freedom, agency, and causality. I argue that the metaphysical difference between Hegel and Spinoza – between Hegel’s dialectical conception of historical rationality and Spinoza’s immanent structuralism – offers essential resources for understanding, critiquing, and refining the current social order. Accordingly, this project involves clarifying the prospects and limits of each framework.

First, I aim to assess the viability of Hegel’s teleological account of historical rationality in light of post-colonial critiques. I examine whether Hegel’s claim that history unfolds according to an immanent logic of freedom can withstand the charge that such a narrative marginalizes non-European forms of life by measuring them against a single developmental standard. Rahel Jaeggi, in her recent book Progress and Regression (2025), offers the most compelling account of Hegelian philosophy of history and social structure that can withstand the charge of Eurocentrism. But her argument crucially hinges on the key Hegelian assumption that society is responsive to self-inconsistency, which then presupposes a unifying principle, however attenuated and formal it might be. Theoretically rigorous post-colonial critiques target this very point of conceiving society as a kind of self-unifying subject; their point is not that the Hegelian conception presupposes a substantive goal, but that it presupposes a unifying movement, regardless of whether the unity is already achieved or to be achieved, substantive or formal. Therefore, it is still to be seen whether the Hegelian theory of history can withstand post-colonial critiques of a more metaphysical and fundamental kind.

Second, I explore whether Spinoza’s account of immanent, non-teleological structure offers a more inclusive way of conceptualizing modernity, one that does not presuppose a Eurocentric trajectory. It is no coincidence that anti-Hegelian philosophers like Althusser and Deleuze actively draw on Spinoza to conceptualize social structure and historical transformation. The key metaphysical basis of their anti-Hegelianism lies in, I argue, one of the central elements of Spinoza’s thought that Hegel could not accept: namely, the co-extensivity and co-fundamentality of thinking and being, which entails that being does not need to be sublated by thinking to be intelligible or effective. At the same time, I argue that Spinozism faces its own challenge: in dispensing with teleology, it risks losing an adequate standpoint of historicity, and with it the very notions of progress and regression that remain indispensable for any serious social theory. History and society are not an amalgam of contingencies but have an objective logic behind them. Making this logic intelligible means giving some kind of narrative about the trends or directionality in history, which can be progressive or regressive. Seen in this light, Adorno’s ambivalence – the fact that he could not entirely dispense with the notions of progress despite his deep distrust of Hegelian universal history – strongly represents the precarity of any anti-Hegelian position.