J.M. Bernstein applies Hegel's “Phenomenology of Spirit” (1807) to the economic collapse on Wall Street:
[W]hat Hegel’s probing account means to show is that the defender of holier-than-thou virtue and the self-interested Wall Street banker are making the same error from opposing points of view.bsp; Each supposes he has a true understanding of what naturally moves individuals to action.
The knight of virtue thinks we are intrinsically good and that acting in the nasty, individualist, market world requires the sacrifice of natural goodness; the banker believes that only raw self-interest, the profit motive, ever leads to successful actions.Both are wrong because, finally, it is not motives but actions that matter, and how those actions hang together to make a practical world. ... What market regulations should prohibit are practices in which profit-taking can routinely occur without wealth creation; wealth creation is the world-interest that makes bankers’ self-interest possible. Arguments that market discipline, the discipline of self-interest, should allow Wall Street to remain self-regulating only reveal that Wall Street, as Hegel would say, “simply does not know what it is doing.”