Bradley appears to contrast the ‘individualism’ that he rejects with a more
holistic model of a community like England, on the grounds that there is an
underlying common nature that unifies its citizens into a whole:
If we suppose then [as Bradley has argued] that the results of the social life of
the race are present in a latent and potential form in the child, can we deny
that they are common property? Can we assert that they are not an element of
sameness in all? Can we say that the individual is this individual, because he is
exclusive, when, if we deduct from him what he includes, he loses
characteristics which make him himself, and when again he does include
what the others include, and therefore does (how can we escape the
consequences?) include in some sense the others also, just as they include
him? By himself, then, what are we to call him? I confess I do not know, unless
we name him a theoretical attempt to isolate what can not be isolated; and
that, I suppose, has, out of our heads, no existence. But what he is really, and
not in mere theory, can be described only as the specification or
particularization of that which is common, which is the same amid diversity,
and without which the ‘individual’ would be so other than he is that we could
not call him the same.
49
Here Bradley seems to be using the idea that each individual exempl ifies
something common as part of their essential nature (‘the social life of the
race’) to underpin his social holism (his view that ‘the ‘individual’ apart
from the community is an abstraction’
50
), in a way that co uld well be taken
to be Hegelian; thus, in so far as Bradley’s view expresses the character-
istically holistic view of the concrete universal, so it could be argued that
Hegel’s position has a similar basis.
Likewise, in The Philosophical Theory of the State, Bosanquet argues that
‘the social whole’ has ‘the nature of a continuous self-identical being,
49
Bradley, Ethical Studies, 170–1.
50
Ibid., 173. Cf. also ibid., 168–9:
The ‘individual’ man, the man into whose essence his community with others does not
enter, who does not include relations to others in his very being, is, we say, a fiction,
and in the lights of facts we have to examine him . . . It is, I believe, a matter of fact that
at birth the child of one race is not the same as a child of another; that in the children
of the one race there is a certain identity, a developed or undeveloped national type,
which may be hard to recognize, or which at present may even be unrecognizable, but
which nevertheless in some form will appear. If that be the fact, then again we must
say that one English child is in some points, though perhaps it does not as yet show
itself, the same as another. His being is so far common to him with others; he is not a
mere ‘individual’.
It should perhaps be remarked that when he came to revisit Ethical Studies in 1924, Bradley
came to see that what is held in common is perhaps not best thought of along racial lines,
commenting in his notes on the paragraph we have just quoted: ‘Perhaps, but ‘‘race’’ and
‘‘nationality’’ are not conterminous. This paragraph can hardly stand without large
qualification. How far is identity of race an effective bond of union?’
HEGEL AND THE CONCRETE UNIVERSAL 135
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