Why Recognition Is a Struggle: Love and Strife in Hegel’s Early Jena Writings

I mean to show why the so-called struggle for recognition and ensuing master/bondsman dialectic from Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit were conceived as violent, rather than within a pattern of, say, cooperation, friendship, or love. I do so by examining the extant manuscripts, essays, and drafts in which Hegel experimented with different ways of articulating the themes of recognition, intersubjectivity, and mastery/servitude between 1793 and 1806. I show how those topics were first motivated within these early writings, offering an account of the considerations that finally led Hegel to prefer the Phenomenology’s version to previous ones.