Scholar in Residence 2025

Project: The Politics of Contradiction: War and the Rabble in Hegel’s Philosophy

Wójcik's project places Hegel’s political thought face to face with the realities it most struggles to contain. War and the rabble — two figures simultaneously central and marginal in the Philosophy of Right — reveal the points at which rational order breaks open and the contradictions of modernity erupt into view. War exposes the fragility of universality in the conflict among states; the rabble embodies the disintegration of ethical life within a global capitalist order that fails to secure dignity for all.

This research does not treat these tensions as mere theoretical anomalies. Instead, it takes them to be the very core of Hegel’s insight: that the modern world rests on living contradictions it cannot neutralise. When reconciliation falters, Hegel’s political philosophy begins to breathe — not as a doctrine of closure, but as a thinking attuned to conflict, uncertainty, and transformation.

During Wójcik's residency at INDEX, this project acquires a concrete and urgent focus. The ongoing war in Ukraine — reshaping the state, society, and Europe’s geopolitical landscape — becomes a critical site for testing Hegel’s speculative claims against the violent contingency of history. How can Hegel’s dialectic help us understand the dynamics of a war still unfolding? What does a real, present war reveal about the limits of political institutions, the pressures placed on social solidarity, and the fragile line between the universal and the particular? In this project, war is not simply an object of analysis — it becomes a test for philosophy itself.