Andy Blunden’s Hegel for Social Movements is a sustained attempt to re-situate Hegel’s system where it can do the most living work: in the intelligibility of collective action, the normative structure of practices, and the metamorphoses of concepts as they are enacted, contested, and institutionalized across the arc of social struggles. Its guiding wager is that Hegel’s Logic and practical philosophy are not a museum of abstractions but a grammar of social becoming; the book’s argument proceeds by showing that what Hegel calls thought is not a ghostly interior substance but the historically mediated norms that regulate, animate, and transform human activity. In this rendering, to study Hegel is to study the ways in which practices are organized by concepts—where concepts name not idle generalities but the rule-governed forms through which activity hangs together and advances. Ideas live as activity, and the critique and development of ideas is inseparable from the critique and development of the practices that instantiate them. This reorientation carries both a methodological and a political charge: methodological, because it relocates logic in the immanent development of social forms; political, because it makes dialectics into a guide for the activist’s labor of clarification, coalition, and strategic self-transformation.
From the outset Blunden frames Hegel’s “ideas” as forms of activity that exist in and through the practices of a community. The point is not that one first observes social life and then abstracts a set of patterns for application; rather, the forms of thinking originate in practical participation and only subsequently appear as “things in themselves” to reflection. What passes for logic in scholastic or bureaucratic settings—checklists, binaries, and the policing of categories—turns an evolving field of activity into a static tableau. Dialectical logic, by contrast, is fitted to the world of porous boundaries and unintended consequences in which activists actually move, and in which the same action can call forth different responses as it is differently embedded in a shifting totality. The book’s central claim is that “Hegel’s logic is the logic of social action,” and that a serious grasp of this logic clarifies not how individuals might be predicted as if by a behavioral algorithm, but how the norms of an activity—practical, theoretical, and semantic—develop, contradict themselves, and give way to renewed forms through immanent critique.
Blunden’s interpretive hinge is a decisive one: thought means norms. To understand an activity scientifically is to understand the norms implicit in it, how those norms are contested, and how they change. The Logic’s subject matter is, then, an ideal object—normativity as such—rather than empirical motions; its method is not the collation of facts but the demonstration that a purportedly absolute concept undermines itself, revealing the next concept as the truth of what has gone before. The result is an account of social change as the rational (intelligible) sequence of transformations in a form of life’s self-conception and self-organization, where concept and practice are two sides of the same coin. The activist learns to read contradictions not as external collisions but as inner tensions within the concept that structures a field of action, and thereby learns to navigate and intensify those tensions toward determinate transformation.
Anchoring this thesis is Blunden’s reconstruction of Hegel’s notion of a “formation of consciousness,” not as a mere set of psychological states nor as a demographic aggregate, but as an organized nexus of actions unified by shared norms and rules of inference. A formation may be a nation, a religious community, a scientific discipline, a firm, or—of particular importance here—a social movement. In each case, the unity is not the sum of individuals but the projective coherence conferred by a concept that functions as a court of last appeal—the Urconcept—which progressively concretizes as it encounters resistance, incorporates critique, and elaborates qualifications and corollaries. The trajectory from abstract beginning to concrete articulation is the trajectory of the movement itself. In this way, the Logic’s architecture—Being, Essence, and Notion—ceases to be an esoteric taxonomy and becomes a map of how practices are born, tested, negated, preserved, and raised in the furnace of struggle.
A recurring intervention in the book is the insistence that the celebrated master-slave dialectic, for all its suggestiveness in colonial and post-colonial contexts—where juridical frameworks are absent or suspended—is a poor paradigm for modern social movements that work within and upon a determinate legal and institutional order. The paradigmatic movements of the last century and a half have sought to remake law, capture and transform institutions, and embed new concepts in the dominant culture; this is not what the master-slave narrative thematizes. For these movements, Hegel’s Logic and the Philosophy of Right—rather than the master-slave drama—offer the conceptual foundations for understanding how a state can be transformed by a radical subject that challenges its norms from within. Dialectics here speaks to a movement’s struggle with the law’s inner contradictions, its work of creating new universals capable of reorganizing the ethical life they inherit.
On Blunden’s reading, to say that a concept is a form of practice is not a metaphor. The concept cricket is not exhausted by a dictionary definition; it is the rule-governed complex of actions that constitutes “playing cricket,” without which the word is empty. Likewise with social and political concepts: the emergence of sexism as a concept in the late 1960s does not name a novel pattern of male behavior so much as the new collective activity of women confronting and organizing against that pattern. The concept congeals and becomes “true” in the activity that orients itself by it; concepts without enactment are phantoms. This way of speaking allows the book to connect the semantic innovation of movements with their practical invention of new forms of life, and to describe the dialectical passage from initially indeterminate slogans to increasingly determinate programs under pressure of critique—from within as well as from without.
From here the account turns to the Logic’s own beginning. On Blunden’s reconstruction, the Logic does not begin from nowhere; its starting point is mediated by the Phenomenology of Spirit, that is, by the historical path through which consciousness attains to philosophical self-knowledge. The claims that the Logic is “presuppositionless” must be heard with Hegel’s clarifications in view: the presupposition is the achieved standpoint of “pure knowing,” itself the result of a determinate history. The opening concept must be empty of determinate content—otherwise one would need to justify that content from outside—but the method is rigorously immanent: at each step, contradictions exposed within a concept propel the transition to its successor, which preserves and cancels what had gone before. Dialectic in this sense is both negative and positive, a critique that dissolves and a logic that reconstructs. For social movements, the lesson is not scholastic. It is the lesson that the universal to which one appeals must be won by showing the truth of one’s concept as the truth of the existing order’s own best claims.
Blunden’s emphasis on formations of consciousness is tied to a concrete sociology of projects. Movements must be seen whole: embryonic murmurs before articulation, the first initiatives that select a “germ cell” action or concept, the contests in which that cell struggles to reproduce and expand, and the phases in which a practice either institutionalizes itself as a new ethical form or fragments under unresolved contradiction. The Urconcept of a movement begins abstractly—“abolish,” “recognize,” “liberate”—and only through the spiral of conflict becomes differentiated into determinate rights, procedures, and forms of association. Dialectics shows why a movement that remains at the level of simple positivity or negation will succumb to the counter-movement of reality; endurance and victory demand the ascent from the abstract to the concrete.
A distinctive contribution of the book is the way it yokes Hegel’s argument to Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, drawing especially on Vygotsky and Leontyev. Concepts, Blunden argues following this tradition, are forms of artefact-mediated action. The mediations—words, diagrams, flags, songs, protocols, software, weapons, laws—are not incidental ornaments of communication; they are the universal means through which activity is organized, the material carriers of social memory, and the vectors through which new norms are stabilized. To act with others is to mobilize a history sedimented in artefacts that have their own trajectories of refinement, diffusion, and obsolescence. This is why an analysis that collapses mediations into the subject’s intention or relegates them to a neutral background cannot grasp cultural change: the artefact is not a transparent conduit; it is an active constraint and affordance, a bearer of universality, and often—when privately owned—an index of domination that shapes agency at its root.
This insistence on artefact mediation is not an external graft upon Hegel. It is the development of a thread Hegel himself marks in his theory of action—summarized in the suggestive aphorism that the tool functions as a norm of labor—combined with Vygotsky’s experimental insight that every action is mediated and that the unit of analysis must be chosen so as to preserve the whole in the part. In practical terms, it means that movement-building is inseparable from the inventive design and circulation of mediating artefacts: banners and slogans, cooperative infrastructures, legal templates, pedagogical routines, and organizational platforms that render a new universal legible and repeatable across contexts. The charkha in Gandhi’s swadeshi campaign; rock music under the Serbian Otpor!; white scarves in Iran’s White Wednesday—these are not mere emblems but condensations of a concept into reproducible acts that bind dispersed agents into a self-conscious project. The dialectical heritage here clarifies how symbol and practice co-implicate one another in the construction of a people around a cause.
Through this lens, Blunden revisits the relation of Hegel’s Logic to the Philosophy of Right. The triad of Right, Morality, and Ethical Life no longer reads as an antiquarian defense of the Prussian state but as a schema for understanding how the subject of action becomes real: first as the bearer of abstract rights (and their collisions), then as a moral agent with inwardness and conscience (and their pathologies), and finally as a participant in the institutions of ethical life—family, civil society, and state—where freedom becomes objective. For activists, the hardest questions often concern this last passage: by what mediations can a new universal pass from the standpoint of critique into institutions without betraying itself? Hegel’s analysis of civil society’s system of needs, the classes it engenders, the public authorities that emerge within it, the estates and legislature, and the conceptual place of corporations offers a grammar for asking when an innovation belongs to ethical life and when it remains at the level of mere morality or abstract right. Even his notorious formulations—“the state as the march of God on earth”—become decipherable as a claim about the necessity that the universal take form, however imperfectly, in institutions that mediate between private interests and a common freedom.
Blunden neither ignores Hegel’s historical blind spots nor allows them to disqualify the logic. Hegel knew emancipationist movements and national struggles; he did not know the modern labor movement or the internal dynamics of mass democratic organization, and his views on gender and family remained deeply patriarchal. But the focus of the book is not to mine Hegel for a ready-made policy platform; it is to extract from his method the instruments for thinking transformation under the conditions that Hegel could not see. The social and political core of the contemporary activist experience—the contest over who counts as a subject, how universals are composed, and how institutions reproduce or undo domination—can still be illuminated by a logic that links the intelligibility of action to the dialectical development of the concepts that organize it.
The book’s style mirrors its thesis. It neither reduces Hegel’s Logic to slogans nor shies away from the density that universal validity requires. The promise is not that reading Hegel will hand activists a checklist of tactics but that it will school judgment in the kinds of transitions that real movements undergo: how simple universals fracture under the weight of difference; how oppositions become contradictions; how mediation is discovered as both constraint and condition; how the universal is recovered—not by suppressing the particular but by reorganizing it under a richer concept; how the Notion’s self-movement equips a project to become a subject capable of objectifying itself in institutions without dissolving into lifeless mechanism. The method is one of immanent critique, and the pedagogy is that of practice: one learns to think dialectically because collective action compels it, and the reading of Hegel makes explicit what practical intelligence already intimates.
At crucial junctures Blunden integrates Marx’s critical appropriation of Hegel. The parallel he draws—between Hegel’s movement from an abstract beginning to a concrete system and Marx’s reconstruction of capital from the commodity germ cell—exposes a shared schema of scientific formation: a long prehistory culminating in the isolation of a simplest concept adequate to the whole, followed by the labor of showing how that concept develops into a differentiated totality through determinate negations. For activists, the utility of this schema is twofold. First, it suggests a method for diagnosing the “germ cell” of a movement’s possible universality, the action or relation that contains the movement’s genome; second, it warns against the attempt to deduce strategy from abstractions that have not been validated by practice. The transformation of the Paris Commune forced Marx to revise the Manifesto; it is a lesson in fidelity to immanence rather than to dogma.
Vygotsky’s own contributions return here as a methodological reinforcement. His “method of double stimulation” and his account of how children form concepts through sequences of artefact-mediated actions show, at the level of cognitive development, how universals come to live in practice before they become explicit. The movement from diffuse complexes to true concepts is not the child’s private ascent but an initiation into historically produced mediations. This matters for social movements because it shows that the making of a people around a cause is a pedagogical process: concepts must be learned, and they are learned by doing within a web of artefacts that make the universal graspable and habitual. The design of those mediations—chants, assembly procedures, mutual-aid infrastructures, curricula—belongs to strategy as surely as does the choice of a demonstration route.
A notable payoff of Blunden’s framework is a clarified account of “truth” in social practice. Truth here is not correspondence between proposition and fact; it is the adequation of a form of life to its concept. When a project’s self-representation no longer fits what it actually does—when a maxim like “prosperity is absolute” confronts the incoherence of the culture it organizes—untruth becomes a practical contradiction inviting critique, and the question becomes which new universal can preserve what is living and bury what has died. This is precisely the kind of critique movements must learn to perform upon themselves if they are to avoid either ossification or endless oscillation between abstract negation and naïve positivity.
The practical implications extend to the activist’s everyday hermeneutics. If the unit of analysis is not the isolated individual but the smallest whole that still contains the movement’s principle, then the activist’s analysis by units must be disciplined by the choice of a unit that already contains the universal. Sometimes that unit is a strike; sometimes it is a legal test case; sometimes a neighborhood assembly; sometimes a platform cooperative. The point is not arbitrariness but fidelity to the germ through which the Notion can reproduce itself. Abstraction is not the enemy; poor abstraction is. Good abstraction discovers the beginning that can carry the end within itself, and organizes praxis so that the end can gradually become present within means.
Blunden’s re-reading of Hegel’s political philosophy demonstrates how a movement becomes a subject by passing through mediations rather than leaping over them. Abstract right affirms personhood and property; moral will introduces intention, conscience, and the drama of hypocrisy; ethical life integrates these into institutional forms where freedom is objective and shared. For social movements, this means a relentless attention to the dialectic of recognition and institution: not every recognition claim can be stabilized as law without contradiction; not every legal victory produces the ethical forms needed to sustain it. The question “what belongs to ethical life?” is not conservative; it is strategic. Movements do not win merely by “expressing themselves” but by composing universals that can live as family forms, as associations within civil society, as public authorities that stabilize new rights, and, ultimately, as revisions in the form of the state itself. This is the hard labor by which a subject ceases to be merely oppositional and becomes world-making.
None of this presupposes a naïve sacralization of the actually existing state. Blunden is clear that Hegel’s own historical horizons constrained him: he did not witness a modern labor movement, and he often reserved the work of reform to elites. Yet the book does not smuggle Hegel’s contingent politics into the present; it mobilizes his logical resources against the grain of those limitations. Notably, the insistence that movements operate within law and against it, using courts and parliaments even as they exceed them, is not an accommodation but a recognition of where contradictions sharpen and universals must be won. Civil disobedience, universal suffrage, participatory innovations that reorganize the estates and legislature—these are the places where a movement discovers whether its universal is capable of institutional form.
What emerges is a picture of Hegel as a philosopher of projects. A social movement is not reducible to moments of mobilization any more than a scientific discipline is reducible to journal articles. It is an entire process in which new concepts pass from invisibility to contestation to partial objectification to crises of coherence to renewal or dissolution. The Logic is the physiology of this process; the Philosophy of Right is its political morphology; the lessons of Vygotsky and Leontyev supply a psychology of mediation that keeps the analysis from vaporizing into ethereal generalities. And the payoff for activists is not theoretical gratification alone but a sharpened capacity to determine beginnings, to endure contradictions without paralysis, to design mediations that make universals portable, to institutionalize gains without capitulating to mechanism, and to recognize when a concept has become untrue to its practice and must be aufgehoben—preserved, canceled, raised—into a richer form.
Blunden’s concluding reflections are deliberately modest and demanding. Studying Hegel is like practicing scales: it does not write the score of political life, but it makes one a better player—more attuned to modulation, more agile across registers, more capable of recognizing when a theme demands variation rather than repetition. In that spirit, Hegel for Social Movements does not offer recipes. It offers something rarer: a disciplined way of seeing how projects compose themselves as subjects, how universals are made and unmade in practice, and how the artefacts we design and inherit become the very muscles and nerves of collective freedom. The book’s achievement is to deliver Hegel from both quietism and slogan, and to hand back to activists a method equal to the reality they inhabit—complex, contradictory, and open.
Blunden’s intervention deserves the attention of anyone who treats activism as more than mobilization and politics as more than policy. It will frustrate those seeking a ready blueprint, but it will reward those who suspect that the hardest tasks of collective transformation are conceptual ones: to name the germ that already carries the end; to sustain the patience of concretion; to build the mediations that carry a universal across contexts; to let contradiction do its work without allowing it to become an alibi for resignation. In the long education of movements that aspire to make history rather than merely suffer it, this book is a formidable instrument: exacting, generous, and, in the deepest Hegelian sense, practical.
Simon Gros 
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