In this essay I challenge John McDowell’s controversial claim that “the real topic” of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic is the relation between “two aspects of the consciousness of a single individual.” I first consider McDowell’s interpretation of Kant, and then, by analysing briefly Hegel’s account of self-consciousness prior to the master/slave dialectic, I defend the more traditional view that that dialectic describes the relation between two separate individuals. I also criticize McDowell’s conception of absolute knowing, which, as I understand it, underlies his contention that the master/slave dialectic examines the relation between apperceptive spontaneit y and empirical consciousness within a single self.

I argue that Stephen Houlgate misstates an element in the Kantian background to my reading of “Lordship and Bondage” (§2). He misreads my remarks about the need to see Hegel’s moves there in the context of the progression towards absolute knowing (§3), and, partly consequently, he fails to engage with the motivation for my reading (§4). And he does not understand the way my reading exploits the concept of allegory (§5).

In this response, I accept some of McDowell’s criticisms of my presentation of his views in my essay, but argue that his understanding of Hegel (and of Kant) remains problematic. In particular, I claim (a) that he fails to see that, for Kant, intuitional unit y is inseparable from judging; (b) that his understanding of Hegelian absolute knowing is wrong as it stands (though more plausible, if suitably qualified); (c) that he fails to see that self-consciousness aims, not to overcome the specific antithesis between self-consciousness and the empirical world, but to achieve explicit consciousness of itself in its relation to what is other, and that this requires it to relate to another self-consciousness; and (d) that the implications of his idea that Hegel’s account of the life and death struggle and the master/slave relation is “allegorical” remain unclear.

I offer an interpretation of the connection between judging and intuiting in Kant (§2). Next I try to clarify how the movement in the self-consciousness chapter, as I read it, fits in the Phenomenology’s progression towards absolute knowing (§3). In some detailed responses to Stephen Houlgate, I reiterate how my reading is motivated by the wish not to discard, or ignore, Hegel’s first formulation of what is to be achieved by the movement in the self-consciousness chapter, and I object to Houlgate’s equation of thinking consciousness with Stoicism (§4). Finally, I try to clarify the point of my invocation of allegory (§5).

Bruno Bauer’s response to Max Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1845) is here examined closely, for the first time. In working out their concepts of freedom and self-determination, the Hegelian Left stressed different elements in the synthesis which Hegel himself had effected. Options appear that can be described as generally Fichtean or Spinozistic; each has distinct political and ethical implications. Bauer’s claim is that Stirner “Unique One” is to be understood as a version of Spinozist substance, which fails to rise to the Fichtean-Hegelian standpoint of rational subjectivit y which his own thought represents. The paper endorses Bauer’s conclusion that essential differences between his republicanism and universalism, as opposed to Stirner’s anarchism and particularism, can be traced to divergent receptions of Fichte and Spinoza, as mediated through Hegel. With references to Hegel’s critiques of Spinoza, the paper reconstructs Bauer’s argumentation on the inadequacies of a merely substantial view of freedom.