Abstract: Love is sometimes taken as central both to Hegel’s whole system and the experience of freedom. However, to put love in its proper place within Hegel’s thought is not to dissociate love and freedom but to appreciate love as a irreducible moment of freedom whose boundaries are given by marriage. Here, though, Hegel’s account of love as marriage raises a difficulty no less severe than love as ethical system: just as the latter cannot account for the unique institutional arrangements and shapes of self-consciousness, so too does the former seem unable to account for the unique relationship between spouses. While Hegel’s account of rightly ethical love seems to exclude romantic love as a relationship attentive to the specialness of each spouse, Hegel’s account of divorce due to mutual estrangement points to his awareness of a romantic love that connects (and may disconnect) two souls. Since this element of a love that is bound up with our uniqueness and is attentive to the uniqueness of another is absent from Hegel’s account freedom in marriage, we need to turn elsewhere for resources to theorize it. One place to look is Rousseau’s Emile, and the relationship between Emile and Sophie, where love works to unify the two personalities and simultaneously preserve their freedom. The difficulty that Rousseau in theorizing romantic love as both uniquely unifying and freedom-producing gives us a better sense as to why Rousseau turns from love to marriage, and Hegel abandons romantic love as an ethical solution.

Paper / Communication