Typically, determinist schema leave convenient
implicit escape hatches for their creators and advocates, who are somehow able
to rise above the iron determinism that afflicts the rest of us. Hegel was no
different, except that his escape hatches were all too explicit. While God and
the absolute refer to man as collective organism rather than to its puny and
negligible individual members, every once in a while great individuals arise,
"world-historical" men, who are able to embody attributes of the
absolute more than others, and act as significant agents in the next big
historical Aufhebung — the next great
thrust into the man-God or world-soul's advance
in its "self-knowledge." Thus, during a time when most patriotic
Prussians were reacting violently against Napoleon's imperial conquests, and
mobilizing their forces against him, Hegel reacted very differently. Hegel wrote
to a friend in ecstasy about having personally seen Napoleon riding down the
city street: "The Emperor — this world-soul — riding on horseback through
the city to the review of his troops — it is indeed a wonderful feeling to see
such a man."[1]
Hegel was enthusiastic about Napoleon because of his
world-historical function of bringing the strong state to Germany and the rest
of Europe. Just as Hegel's fundamental eschatology and dialectic prefigured
Marxism, so did his more directly political philosophy of history. Thus,
following the Romantic writer Friedrich Schiller, Hegel, in an essay in 1795,
claimed that the equivalent of early or primitive communism was ancient Greece.
Schiller and Hegel lauded Greece for the alleged homogeneity, unity and
"harmony" of its polis, which
both authors gravely misconceived as being free of all division of labor. The
consequent Aufhebung disrupted this
wonderful unity and fragmented man, but — the good side of the new historical
stage — it did lead to the growth of commerce, living standards, and
individualism. For Hegel, moreover, the coming stage, heralded by Hegel's
philosophy, would bring about a reintegration of man and the state.
Before 1796, Hegel, like many other young
intellectuals throughout Europe, was enchanted by the French Revolution,
individualism, radical democracy, liberty and the rights of man. Soon, however,
again like many European intellectuals, Hegel, disillusioned in the French Revolution,
turned toward reactionary state absolutism. In particular, Hegel was greatly
influenced by the Scottish statist, Sir James Steuart, a Jacobite exile in
Germany for a large part of his life, whose Inquiry into the Principles of
Political Economy (1767) had been greatly influenced by the
ultra-statist German 18th-century mercantilists, the cameralists. Hegel read the German
translation of Steuart's Principles(which had
been published from 1769–72), from 1797 to 1799, and took extensive notes.
Hegel was influenced in particular by two aspects of Steuart's outlook. One
held that history proceeded in stages, deterministically "evolving"
from one stage (nomadic, agricultural, exchange, etc.) to the next. The other
influential theme was that massive state intervention and control were
necessary to maintain an exchange economy.[2] It comes as no surprise that Hegel's main
disillusion in the French Revolution came from its individualism and lack of
unity under the state. Again foreshadowing Marx, it became particularly
important for man (the collective organism) to surmount unconscious blind fate,
and "consciously" to take control of "his" fate via the
state. And so Hegel was a great admirer not only of Napoleon the mighty
world-conqueror, but also Napoleon the detailed regulator of the French
economy.
Hegel made quite evident that what the new, developing
strong state really needed was a comprehensive philosophy, contributed by a
Great Philosopher to give its mighty rule coherence and legitimacy. Otherwise,
as Professor Plant explains, "such a state, devoid of philosophical comprehension,
would appear as a merely arbitrary and oppressive imposition of the freedom of
individuals to pursue their own interest."
We need make only one guess as to what that
philosophy, or who that Great Philosopher, was supposed to be. And then, armed
with Hegelian philosophy and Hegel himself as its fountainhead and great
leader, "this alien aspect of the progressive modern state would disappear
and would be seen not as an imposition but a development of self-consciousness.
By regulating and codifying many aspects of social practice, it gives to the
modern world a rationality and a predictability which it would not otherwise
possess."[3]
Armed with such a philosophy and with such a
philosopher, the modern state would take its divinely appointed stand at the
height of history and civilization, as God on earth. Thus, "The modern
State, proving the reality of political community, when comprehended
philosophically, could therefore be seen as the highest articulation of Spirit,
or God in the contemporary world." The state, then, is "a supreme
manifestation of the activity of God in the world," and, "the State
stands above all; it is Spirit which knows itself as the universal essence and
reality"; and, "The State is the reality of the kingdom of
heaven." And finally, "The State is God's Will."[4]
Of the various forms of state, monarchy is best, since
it permits "all" subjects to be "free" (in the Hegelian
sense) by submerging their being into the divine substance, which is the authoritarian,
monarchical state. The people are only "free" when they are
insignificant particles of this unitary divine substance. As Tucker writes,
"Hegel's conception of freedom is totalitarian in a literal sense of the
word. The world-self must experience itself as the totality of being, or in
Hegel's own words must elevate itself to "a self-comprehending
totality," in order to achieve the consciousness of freedom. Anything
short of this spells alienation and the sorrow of finitude."[5]
According to Hegel, the final development of the
man-God, the final breakthrough into totality and infinity, was at hand. The
most highly developed state in the history of the world was now in place — the
existing Prussian monarchy under King Friedrich Wilhelm III.
It so happened that Hegel's apotheosis of the existing
Prussian monarchy neatly coincided with the needs of that monarch. When King
Friedrich Wilhelm III established the new University of Berlin in 1818 to
assist in supporting, and propagandizing for, his absolute power, what better
person for the chair of philosophy than Friedrich Hegel the divinizer of state
power? The king and his absolutist party needed an official philosopher to
defend the state from the hated revolutionary ideals of the French Revolution,
and to justify his purge of the reformers and classical liberals who had helped
him defeat Napoleon. As Karl Popper puts it,
Hegel was appointed to meet this demand, and he did so
by reviving the ideas of the first great enemies of the open society
[especially Heraclitus and Plato] … Hegel rediscovered the Platonic Ideas which
lie behind the perennial revolt against freedom and reason. Hegelianism is the
renaissance of tribalism … [Hegel] is the "missing link," as it were,
between Plato and the modern forms of totalitarianism. Most of the modern
totalitarians, … know of their indebtedness to Hegel, and all of them have been
brought up in the close atmosphere of Hegelianism. They have been taught to
worship the state, history, and the nation.[6]
On Hegel's worship of the state, Popper cites chilling
and revealing passages:
The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth …
We must therefore worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on earth
… The State is the march of God through the world … The State must be
comprehended as an organism … To the complete State belongs, essentially, consciousness
and thought. The State knows what it wills … The State … exists for its own
sake … The State is the actually existing, realized moral life.[7]
All this rant is well characterized by Popper as
"bombastic and hysterical Platonism."
Much of this was inspired by Hegel's friends and
immediate philosophical predecessors, men like the later Fichte, Schelling,
Schlegel, Schiller, Herder, and Schleiermacher. But it was Hegel's particular
task to turn his murky doctrines to the job of weaving apologetics for the
absolute power of the extant Prussian state. Thus Hegel's admiring disciple,
F.J.C. Schwegler, revealed the following in hisHistory of Philosophy:
The fullness of his [Hegel's] fame and activity,
however, properly dates only from his call to Berlin in 1818. Here there rose
up around him a numerous, widely extended, and … exceedingly active school;
here too, he acquired, from his connections with the Prussian bureaucracy,
political recognition of his system as the official philosophy; not always to
the advantage of the inner freedom of his philosophy, or of its moral worth.[8]
With Prussia as the central focus, Hegelianism was
able to sweep German philosophy during the 19th century, dominating in all but
the Catholic areas of southern Germany and Austria. As Popper put it,
"having thus become a tremendous success on the continent, Hegelianism
could hardly fail to obtain support in Britain from those who [felt] that such
a powerful movement must after all have something to offer … " Indeed, the
man who first introduced Hegel to English readers, Dr J. Hutchinson Stirling,
admiringly remarked, the year after Prussia's lightning victory over Austria,
"Is it not indeed to Hegel, and especially his philosophy of ethics and
politics, that Prussia owes that mighty life and organization she is now
rapidly developing?"[9] Finally Hegel's contemporary and acquaintance,
Arthur Schopenhauer, denounced the state-philosophy alliance that drove
Hegelianism into becoming a powerful force in social thought:
Philosophy is misused, from the side of the state as a
tool, from the other side as a means of gain.… Who can really believe that
truth also will thereby come to light, just as a byproduct?… Governments made of philosophy a means of serving their state
interests, and scholars made of it a trade. (emphasis
Schopenhauer's)[10]
In addition to the political influence, Popper offers
a complementary explanation for the otherwise puzzling widespread influence of
G.W.F. Hegel: the attraction of philosophers to high-sounding jargon and
gibberish almost for its own sake, followed by the gullibility of a credulous
public. Thus Popper cites a statement by the English Hegelian Stirling:
"The philosophy of Hegel, then, was … a scrutiny of thought so profound
that it was for the most part unintelligible." Profound for its very unintelligibility!
Lack of clarity as virtue and proof of profundity! Popper adds,
philosophers have kept around themselves, even in our
day, something of the atmosphere of the magician. Philosophy is considered a
strange and abstruse kind of thing, dealing with those things with which
religion deals, but not in a way which can be "revealed unto babes"
or to common people; it is considered to be too profound for that, and to be
the religion and the theology of the intellectuals, of the learned and wise.
Hegelianism fits these views admirably; it is exactly what this popular
superstition supposes philosophy to be.[11]
This article is excerpted from volume 2, chapter 11 of An Austrian
Perspective on the History of Economic Thought(1995). An MP3 audio file of
this chapter, narrated by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download.
Notes
[2] Hegel was also influenced by Steuart's great
rival, Adam Smith, but unfortunately in the wrong direction. From the Wealth of Nations Hegel concluded that the
division of labor had brought man the misery of specialization, alienation,
etc. More interestingly, from Smith's friend the Rev. Adam Ferguson's famous
line on events that are "the product of human action but not of human
design," Hegel got the idea of each individual agent of the world-soul's
pursuing the world-soul's purposes without conscious intent. This is Hegel's
famous concept of the "cunning of reason" at work through history.
Ferguson, in turn, arrived at his famous phrase, not
by analysis of the free market, as Hayek implies, but from an attempt to show
that the revolt in Scotland in 1745, which almost succeeded in bringing the
dread Catholic Jacobites to power, was unconsciously pursuing God's benevolent
purpose of shaking Scottish Presbyterians — assumed of course to be God's true
Church — out of their religious apathy. In short, the Scottish Catholics,
though consciously pursuing evil ends, were unwittingly carrying out God's
designs. Out of apparent evil, good. Similarly, when Hegel later hailed
Napoleon as the "world-historical" man, he saw Napoleon as intending
to pursue evil but unconsciously furthering God's benevolent design. See
Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish
Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1985), pp. 40–44.
[5] Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1961), p. 39, n. 3, pp. 54–5. E.F. Carritt points
out that, for Hegel, "freedom" is "desiring above all things to
serve the success and glory of their State. In desiring this they are desiring
that the will of God should be done.…" If an individual thinks he should
do something which is not for the
success and glory of the state, then, for Hegel, "he should be
"forced to be free". "How does a person know what action will redound to the glory of the
state? To Hegel, the answer was easy. Whatever the state rulers demand, since
"the very fact of their being rulers is the surest sign of God's will that
they should be." Impeccable logic, indeed! See E.F. Carritt,
"Reply" (1940), reprinted in W. Kaufmann, (ed.),Hegel's Political Philosophy (New York; Atherton
Press, 1970), pp. 38–9.
[6] Karl R. Popper, The Open
Society and its Enemies (5th ed., Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1966), II, pp. 30–31.
[11] Ibid., pp. 27, 30. For an explanation of what
Popper refers to as the "scherzo-style" of his chapter on Hegel, see
ibid., pp. 393–5.
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