Douglas Moggach (BA Toronto, MA and PhD Princeton) is a professor at the University of Ottawa and life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge.
He is Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney,[1][2] and has held visiting appointments at Sidney Sussex College and King's College, Cambridge,[3] the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge, Queen Mary University of London,[4] the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.,[5] and the Fondazione San Carlo di Modena, where he taught a graduate seminar in Italian on German Idealism.
Moggach argues that the political thinking of the German Hegelians represents a specific variant of republicanism, which recognizes modern social diversity and alienation.
[15] Moggach also traces the relations between German idealism and various strands of Romanticism, and contributes to conceptions of universality, freedom and republicanism in European political thought.
[20] Moggach discovered an unpublished manuscript by Bruno Bauer, which had been awarded the Prussian Royal Prize in philosophy by a panel headed by Hegel in 1829.
Moggach thinks that in this early text Bauer also lays the foundations for his later theory of infinite self-consciousness, and for his specific type of ethical and historical idealism.
According to Moggach, many of these New or Young Hegelians found a solution to these conflicts in republican ideas of virtue, rethought so that they are compatible with modern institutions.
For the Hegelians, though, political action has to promote, or at least not hinder, the external freedom of others, but it must also have the right kinds of internal ethical motivation: this means not acting exclusively from private interest, but from an idea of the general good.
With Gareth Stedman Jones,[31] Moggach edited a Cambridge University Press volume, The 1848 Revolutions and European Political Thought, 2018.
The book deals with Johann Gottfried Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Fichte, Schiller, Hegel, and members of the Hegelian school including Karl Marx.
[35] Moggach produced a critical discussion of multiculturalism, in a published conversation with Charles Taylor, Jeremy Waldron, James Tully, and others.