It has long been fashionable to launch impassioned broadsides—of mixed philosophical quality, it must be said—against Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel. The German philosopher is partly to blame for this fact. His taste for newfangled jargon and cryptic syntax was never likely to endear him to anglophone philosophers reared on the crystalline prose styles of Thomas Hobbes and David Hume. It was for this reason that the likes of Bertrand Russell and A.J. Ayer dismissed Hegel as a pompous obscurantist. To make matters worse, Hegel’s ambiguously expressed adulation for the state, though largely misunderstood by critics like Rudolf Haym and Karl Popper, has resulted in his being all too easily typecast as an intellectual forerunner to 20th century totalitarianism.
But in his new book, Hegel’s World Revolutions, the intellectual historian Richard Bourke turns his attention to the more recent post-war ‘insurgency’ against Hegel, led by such figures as Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault. After all, the post-modern assault on every species of grand narrative, whether religious or secular, could hardly have been expected to spare the thinker who, most audaciously in his philosophy of history, spun perhaps the grandest of such narratives in modern thought.
The cultural pessimism of Nietzsche, though somewhat marginal in the 19th century, caught fire in the academic world through the writings of Foucault. Whereas in Hegel reason is hailed as “the Sovereign of the World,” Bourke speaks of a tendency within academia today—and as a Professor at Cambridge, he ought to know—to convict reason of “a domineering arrogance” and dismiss the very idea of enlightenment as “retrogressive.” “[W]hole generations,” he goes on, “have been coaxed into a posture of suspicion. Freedom is equated with domination; equality is exposed as a means of exclusion; and liberal democracy is taken to be complicit with imperialism.” Again, this is to be expected. Foucault’s rejection of any kind of pristine teleology, his relentless search for the grubby, self-serving power interests which really animate all of our institutions and structures of knowledge, is a far cry from the Hegelian effort to find in the world that history has made, indeed the world it is still making, a set of rational principles striving to realise themselves. Bourke is evidently more sympathetic to Hegel’s quest to understand the series of “world revolutions,” from classical antiquity to the Reformation, that have culminated in the modern world than the urge of Foucault and his later disciples—many of them unwitting adherents—to expose the corrupt origins of all things.
Adorno is also criticised for claiming that Hegel, with his talk of the rational as actual and the actual as rational, effectively sold out to the Prussian authorities. Apart from anything else, says Bourke, “few scholars today would accept Adorno’s reading of the equation between actuality and rationality.” It neglects the wider metaphysical picture in which statements like “the rational is actual and the actual is rational,” seemingly a defence of the status quo when considered in isolation, find a meaningful place.
Because Geist’s mission to accomplish absolute self-knowledge is deemed to play out through the mental activity of mankind, Hegelians are committed to the view that all manifestations of consciousness, as embodied in the law, institutions, and ethical life (Sittlichkeit) of human communities, contain at least some measure of rational pedigree. But far from a conservative hymn to the unchallengeable authority of given arrangements, the process is dynamic, not static. The role of philosophers is not to look at society, say perfectum est, and leave it at that. It is to appreciate the actualizing ideals of reason which drive history and, given our own nature as rational creatures, to identify with this process of spiritual development ourselves. After all, writes Hegel, it occurs along lines that harmonise with human ends: “The rational is necessary as what belongs to substance [for Hegel, this fundamental substance was Geist], and we are free in so far as we recognize it as law and follow it as the substance of our own essence; objective and subjective will are then reconciled and form one and the same untroubled whole.”
But more fundamentally, Bourke contends that Adorno’s rebuke of Hegel was the result of a sharp divergence in goals: “Hegel had been keen to spurn what Adorno hoped to revive: the use of philosophy as a form of moral protest against politics.” This had been the thrust of Hegel’s critique of Kant: that he sought to base political life on abstract ethical formulas while overlooking the concrete socio-historical conditions with which even the most apparently sublime moral theories must work.
On Kantian ethics, Hegel argued, the moral agent is reduced to an isolated being, imagined apart from all particular attachments and expected to deliberate on the precise formulation of his moral duties in a non-social void, his only aids being reason and the purity of his own intentions. As a result, any attempt to sustain a community of moral creatures, held together by the kind of collective sentiment which supplies the basis for action as well as a shared rational capacity to collaborate socially in distinguishing right from wrong, becomes exceedingly difficult. The pursuit of goodness cannot begin from nowhere. Nor does it start from no-when. It is both socially and historically grounded.
Summarising Hegel’s problem with Kant’s belief in formulaic injunctions, Bourke writes: “a viable faith had to be a people’s or a ‘folk’ (Volk) religion: it must engage existing human affections.” Moral duties, then, can only receive a concrete content and win our allegiance in a socio-historical setting, for this—not Kant’s imagined “Kingdom of Ends” (Reich der Zwecke)—is where we in fact find ourselves. Hegel’s infamous line about the identity of rationality and actuality was far from a surrender to Prussian power; it stemmed from a genuine conviction that, since reality is both conceptual and dynamic, we should trust in the moving potential of Geist to redeem us at a social level, rather than despise this world out of love for our own mind-forged blueprints for a better one.
The distinct merit of Hegel’s World Revolutions is its use of Hegel to make the case that these same arguments against building a brave new world also present difficulties for revivalists who would wish to restore a lost one. Among Bourke’s chief concerns, he tells us, is “the adoption of historical templates per se as a source of moral judgement in political theory.” In the post-war era, there has been no shortage of such attempts at revival. Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt—whose shared admiration for the virtues of classical antiquity prompted both thinkers, in their own ways, to mine the history of thought for “lost treasure” that we might cash in today—are two outstanding examples. To this day, the likes of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor are engaged in the same kind of business. But according to the so-called Cambridge school of intellectual history, the use of past thought to breathe fresh life into modern political debates is a non-starter. Figures like J.G.A Pocock, along with Quentin Skinner and John Dunn (at least in their early work), lauded the scholarly rigour of treating historical thinkers in their own time-bound context, fundamentally different from our own, rather than reading these dead giants like fellow interlocutors in a 20th century (or for us, of course, a 21st century) senior common room.
Both Dunn and Skinner, reports Bourke, rowed back on the uncompromising historicism of their youth, turning to political theory largely because the idea of studying the history of political thought for its own sake—a calling still defended by Pocock at the grand old age of 99—struggled to distinguish itself from a pedantic antiquarianism. He further contends that this volte-face was problematic, since it threw Skinner—who has lately turned to neo-Roman accounts of republicanism as a potential source of inspiration—into conflict with the sound “historicist principles” he had advanced in his landmark essay, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” (1969). Bourke suggests that Hegel, sharing this apprehension, charted an agreeable middle course between root-and-branch rejection and wholesale imitation of past forms of life, giving Plato—whom Hegel discusses in the introduction to Elements of the Philosophy of Right—as an example:
Hegel recognised that we live with the residues of Platonism whilst also insisting that we no longer inhabit Plato’s universe. Since philosophy was concerned with what we had become, it had to work with what remained of the useable past.
However, there are limits to the uses of history. The quest of figures like Strauss and Arendt to dig up “lost treasure” runs the risk of anachronism, being motivated more by an enthusiasm for revival than a discerning historical diligence. How is faithful recovery of a departed worldview even possible? Surely, responds the Hegelian, there must be unassailable reasons for its having faded into the ether of history. Attempts at restoration will necessarily cast these reasons aside, dismissing them as mere chronological accidents. Whereas, of course, for a Hegelian committed to the notion that history not only exhibits a rational kernel but that rationality is its driving force, the strength of these reasons must be granted. They are not a matter of random contingency, an instance of efficient causation that might easily have turned out otherwise; they are the result of conceptual necessity. Such is Hegel’s objection to complacent forms of revivalism.
As Bourke puts it, “[Historians seeking to use the thought of the past in present contexts have struggled] to explain how an older currency could lose its value and have it restored.” It is not always clear whether Bourke agrees with Hegel that there must be logically sound reasons underlying the fact that previous forms of life, however apparently sublime, have disappeared. Political life, after all, is for the most part concerned with perceived value, not necessarily the real thing. Indeed, all that is either thought or takes place in history is garbled through those most febrile of things: human temperament, personality, character. Hegel sought to explain these seemingly confounding variables by recourse to the cunning of reason (List der Vernunft), the basic idea being that, if need be, Geist is wily enough to use even the most irrational means for the fulfilment of rational ends. However, unless we grant the Hegelian premise that human history is bound up with rational necessity—a view that Bourke at no point defends (indeed, arguments found in his splendid 2017 book Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke indicate that he has little time for teleological accounts of the past)—is it not entirely possible for genuine treasure to have become lost and buried for the most dreadful of contingent reasons? And is it not sheer chronological snobbery, as C.S. Lewis would have put it, for us to contend otherwise?
It is also worth pointing out that Hegel was not just “concerned with what we had become,” but—in his own time at least—with what we were becoming. A conservative appreciation of the value of “the useable past” is certainly present in Hegel, but it sits uneasily alongside his encouragement of political messianism with respect to the future. From the standpoint of Hegel’s speculative philosophy, after all, the seemingly endless conflicts of human life are not only soluble but bound to be solved, owing to the fact that, as we have already noted, he held that “Reason is the Sovereign of the World.” The cosmos is in this way its own redeemer, transcending all ephemeral conflict as Geist strives to actualise reason through time, rather as God is thought by Christians in the hereafter, if not on earth, to wipe away all tears from their eyes. Hegel thus bequeathed to posterity a comprehensive metaphysical framework whereby the manifold divisions thrown up by history, as instantiated in the development of human societies, come to be seen as mere moments along the way to a higher unity in which we have a stake.
Therefore, despite Hegel’s sharp conservative critiques of the unrooted shortcomings of both abstract utopianism and ahistorical revivalism, the moving potential of his philosophy of history contains potentially radical implications of its own. Apart from anything else, his system deifies change by conceiving transformations in society as the historically embodied progeny of a teleological process through which Geist, using human consciousness as a vehicle, actualises its rational potential in the world. More radically still, the dialectical pattern exhibited by Hegel’s philosophy of history emboldened his posthumous left-wing admirers, most notoriously Marx, to seize upon conflicting binaries with all the excitement of soothsayers hearing voices in the wind. This is because every conflict, though producing nothing but chaotic negativity in the short term, leads in the end to a determinate outcome and brings about an enduring positive result: “a truth ripened to its properly matured form,” as Hegel puts it in the Phenomenology, “so as to be capable of being the property of all self-conscious Reason.” For Marx, this properly mature “truth”—admittedly only ‘discovered’ once he had made radical revisions and transformative updates to the Hegelian system—turned out to be communism.
Nevertheless, despite the limited attention paid to Hegel’s peculiarly left-wing afterlife, Bourke’s defence of the German philosopher against a motley crew of post-war cynics and political idealists is historically thorough and philosophically compelling, every sentence of it delivered with a clarity that will make the layman rejoice and the specialist grunt with envy. “For Hegel’s adversaries,” Bourke writes, “justice requires that politics be cleansed of its past. However, for Hegel himself, progress presupposes building on existing resources.” Apart from anything else, this approach is most welcome at a time when the past is routinely condemned, with a smug, half-educated presentism, as an accident to be corrected rather than a treasure-house of potential wisdom and vicarious experience from which we should draw with due humility.
