Karl Marx and the Future of the Human
In the German-speaking countries at the end of the eighteenth century, modern forms of economic and political life still largely lay in the future. Thinkers like Schiller, Goethe and Hölderlin look back to ancient Athens for a criterion against which they could criticise the kind of society that they saw developing in England and France. In ancient Greece, they believe, life, politics and art had been united. Now, they were torn apart. They measured the horrors of the industrialism, individualism and fragmented labour of their own time against ‘the glory that was Greece’.
Hegel’s conception of society, in fact, his entire philosophical work, including his unique notion of logic, centred on the attempt to bring these opposites together, without ignoring their conflict or trying to wish it away. Seen through the eyes of science [Wissenschaft = the craft of knowing], he believed, the interests of the community as a collective entity could be harmonised with the rights of private individuals and in this way philosophy could transcend the fragmentation of social life. The democratic polis of ancient Athens was, he thought, the ‘living work of art’, but when the French Revolution had failed to fulfil its promise, he knew that it was impossible for that life to be recalled. It was clear to him that, in modern times, economic and political life were separated from each other, and that, in ‘civil society’ - ‘the battlefield of private interests’ - the wills of individual property owners clashed with the social organism as a whole. But, Hegel argued, the modern state, if it could be philosophically comprehended, would transcend these conflicts. An organic whole revealed itself to science, in which individual freedom was actualised in the life of the state. He took as his motto the Greek notion of ‘hen kai pan’, the One and the All.
But we ought to be clear about what ‘actuality’ means here. For this, first of all, Hegel’s work must be taken as a unity, not piecemeal. ‘The True is the Whole’, he wrote. If you cut any piece - for instance the Logic - out of the entire system, you falsify both whole and part. This is not merely a matter of logical exposition, the order in which he deals with the categories, for each aspect (‘moment’) of his philosophy, each category, represents at the same time a stage in the history of philosophy. His History of Philosophy is the other side of the coin to his Philosophy of History, which traces the unfolding of Spirit, that is, the entire way of life of the species. Each philosopher’s work is ‘its own time expressed in thought’, the most clear reflection of a stage of development of society and of society’s consciousness of itself. Each outlook is a valid part of this entire historical process. (The relation of Hegel’s ‘Spirit’ to Montesquieu’s ‘spirit of the laws’ is worth noting.)
Hegel has summarised the whole of this history to date, not as a random sequence of opinions, nor as a linear development which excludes the conflicts between successive stages, but as it unfolded precisely through their opposition, and the resolution of opposition in a higher stage. The truth was not a simple correspondence between a thought and its particular object, but a process in which both thought and object developed. This is the basis his identification of philosophy with science, and for his claim that his philosophy is absolute. Every one of the thinkers we have briefly discussed finds a place in Hegel’s contradictory summary of the development of history, as expressed in the development of knowledge.
In particular, Hegel wanted to bring together what he recognised as two opposites: the universal conceptions of Aristotle and Kant’s summation of the Enlightenment. But this implied a sharp criticism of the Enlightenment view of society as the combination of clashing private wills, which were somehow transcended by the universal needs of the community. Hegel condemned this conception as a ‘mere ought’. Reason was not the private property of each individual, but the purposive activity of the whole of humanity. Like Aristotle’s Forms, but unlike Plato’s Ideas, Reason worked in the world. It was the task of philosophy to find out about it, after its work was done.
This joint movement of history and self-consciousness is the coming-to-be of Freedom, in Hegel’s special meaning of this word. This is not the ‘negative freedom’ of the Enlightenment, which declared that individuals ought not to be prevented from doing whatever they happened to feel like. Hegel denounces this as ‘arbitrariness’ [Willkur]. Instead, freedom is the self-creation of Spirit [Geist]. Spirit finds itself in its objects, uniting what we are with what we can be through their mutual contradiction.
‘To be unfree simply consists in our being involved with something else and not at home with ourselves.’ The history of philosophy, on the contrary, ‘is the history of untrammelled thinking, or of reason. Thinking of that kind is concerned solely with itself.’ (History of Philosophy: Introduction.) Now we can see Hegel’s answer to the question ‘what is actuality?’ It is what exists, but only when the reasonableness of existence has revealed itself to science. This is the ‘work’ which actuality [Wirklichkeit] must accomplish, transforming existence from the inside into what it actually is. The objects of nature simply exist as separate, discrete things. Ethical life, however, is actual and forms an organic unity. This is not the life of independent individuals, each equipped with Reason, that the Enlightenment had expected, but the movement of the whole of humanity as an organism, only grasped through science and otherwise unknown to the individuals.
Reason is as cunning as it is mighty. Its cunning consists in the mediating activity which, while it lets objects act upon one another according to their own nature, and wear each other out, executes only its purpose without itself mingling in the process. (Encylopaedia Logic, para 209, Addition.)
One way to look at Hegel’s career is as a series of disappointments. Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin, that remarkable trio of theological students in Tübingen, were highly enthusiastic about the storming of the Bastille. The Revolution, they were sure, was bringing about a revival of the virtues of the Ancient Athenian polis. All such dreams were shattered by the Terror. This was the background to Schelling’s later defection to reaction and, perhaps, to Hölderlin’s mental breakdown. Hegel, however, turned to philosophy, (‘unwillingly’, as he writes in a letter to schelling). Here, he believes, in the development of Spirit, Reason finds the way to reconcile the contradictory features of modern Europe. He wants the outcome of the Revolution, but without the revolution, precisely what could be summed up in the name: Napoleon Bonaparte. With such an outlook, Hegel could not but be a highly political man, greatly involved with attempts to reform the German state, that at that time did not exist as a unity. Early in the century, Hegel looked forward to a Germany united by Napoleon. After the defeat of Prussia at Jena in 1807, the hope of reforms from above inspired many thinkers and officials. So the final defeat of Napoleon, the last echo of the Revolution, came as a second great shock to Hegel.
But, with high hopes of success, he joined those seeking reform. In 1815, Kaiser Wilhelm Friedrich III of Prussia promised his loving subjects a written constitution. His reforming Chancellor, Prince von Hardenberg, drew up a draft for such a constitution early in 1819, and its proposals for a constitutional monarchy were close to those Hegel was about to publish in the Philosophy of Right. In 1816, Hegel got his first university job, in Heidelberg, founded less than a decade before. (Look at the powerful optimism of Hegel’s inaugural lecture on the History of Philosophy, delivered in Heidelberg in 1816.) A couple of years later, Hegel was offered an even better post, Fichte’s old chair of philosophy in the University of Berlin, being personally invited by Altenstein, (in full, Karl Sigmund Franz Freiherr vom Stein zum Altenstein), the reforming Prussian Minister for Education.
Precisely at this moment of triumph, in the summer of 1819, the reactionaries struck back. The King withdrew his promise of a constitution, the censorship was intensified, all the reformers were dismissed and all their hopes dashed. From the time Hegel arrived in Berlin, his position was continually under attack from many quarters. But, just before he died, yet one more blow struck the Hegelian system. In 1830, the restored Bourbon monarchy was overthrown. Hegel’s fellow reformers were overjoyed, but Hegel himself was not. One reason was that a completely new force entered the European political arena: the organised proletariat of Paris. In many parts of Germany, the movement in France found an echo among the nascent working class. This was quite outside anything Hegel’s outlook could handle. He was conscious of poverty as a major problem of the modern world, and he also knew that he had no complete answer to it. But he could never have expected the poor themselves, the ‘rabble’ [‘Pöbel’], to take a hand in the game, and to emerge as rivals to his favoured ‘estate’, the educated and enlightened state bureaucracy. The following year, Hegel was dead.
In every part of his vast system, Hegel is keenly aware of the atomised relations between isolated individuals in bourgeois society. His first book, the Phenomenology of Spirit, claims to investigate every form through which self-consciousness examines itself, from mere individual sensation to the Absolute Knowledge available only to scientific cognition.
Studying the way that individual self-consciousness grasps itself as a concept, Hegel entitles a section expounding and criticising Kant: ‘Individuality which takes itself to be real in and for itself’. The first of its three parts has the satirical title: ‘The Spiritual Animal Kingdom and Deceit’. A little later, he discusses the idea of the abolition of private property, and shows how Kant’s analytical method is incapable of deciding on whether such an idea is either true or false.
Suppose the question is: Ought it to be an absolute law that there should be property? Absolute, and not on grounds of utility for other ends: the essence of ethics consists just in law being identical with itself and through this self-identity, ie having its ground in itself, it is unconditioned. Property, simply as such, does not contradict itself; it is an isolated determinateness, or is posited as merely self-identical. Non-property, the non-ownership of things, or a common ownership of goods, is just as little self-contradictory. That something belongs to nobody, or to the first comer who takes possession of it, or to all together, to each according to his need or in equal portions – that is simple determinateness, a formal thought, like its opposite, property. (Phenomenology of Spirit, Miller translation, page 258.)
(The whole of this section should be compared and contrasted with Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, written seventy years later.)
To place Hegel in the context of our brief account of the history of political thought, we shall examine his last book, the Philosophy of Right.1 It will also be useful to refer to the Lectures on this topic, delivered in Heidelberg in 1817-18.2 He had used these as a first draft for the Philosophy of Right, but they have a greater significance in understanding Hegel’s political thought than a mere draft. For, just when this manuscript had been prepared for publication, the Carlsbad Decrees sent all notions of reform scuttling for cover, and Hegel had to rewrite it completely to get it past the censors. Even with these amendments, the publication of the Philosophy of Right was in itself an act of defiance.3 So we might expect Hegel to have revealed more of what he believed in the Lectures than in the book. (In the end, I don’t think the Lectures add a great deal.) As Hegel explains in his Preface to the Philosophy of Right, the book gives the philosophical background to the Section on ‘Objective Mind’ in his Encyclopaedia, paras 483-546.
In the Preface, Hegel explains the political role of philosophical science:
The truth concerning right, ethics, and the state is at any rate as old as its exposition and promulgation in public laws and in public morality and religion. What more does this truth require, inasmuch as the thinking spirit [Geist] is not content to possess it in this proximate manner? What it needs is to be comprehended as well, so that the content which is already rational in itself may also gain a rational form and thereby appear justified to free thinking. (Philosophy of Right, p 11)
Hegel’s famous dictum, ‘What is reasonable is actual; what is actual is reasonable’, must be read carefully in this light. He is not justifying whatever happens to exist. Only what has revealed itself to pass the test of Reason is actual, and when Reason has done its work, reality will either show itself to have been necessary, or it will cease to exist, although patience is necessary. His book, he explains, is ‘an attempt to comprehend and portray the state as inherently rational’. Hegel is consistently hostile to any kind of Utopian dreaming, the kind of thing of which he accuses the Enlightenment. There must be no pretence at ‘issuing instructions on how the world ought to be’. Philosophy, he insists, ‘always comes too late to perform this task.’
Since philosophy is exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the comprehension of the present and the actual, not the setting up of a world beyond, which exists God only knows where - or rather, of which we can very well say that we know where it exists, namely in the errors of a one-sided and empty ratiocination. (Philosophy of Right, p 20)
But this means that it would be quite wrong to think of Hegel’s last book as being about his ‘theory of the state’, or a justification of some political views. Here is the embodiment of the whole of the Hegelian system. Thought reconciles itself to the world, by recognising that social forms are the product of thought itself. So the task of philosophical science, reflecting upon and comprehending this development, can only be accomplished after the event whose essential meaning it reveals is over and done with. The science of right, then, could only be a part of the whole of philosophy and its history, from which the will and freedom could be deduced. We have seen that philosophy has throughout its history sought to perform two different tasks. On the one hand, it tried to give an account of the way things were, and to explain why they were just so. On the other hand, it tried to find out how they ought to be, and to discover how they could be made to conform to this ideal pattern. The task Hegel is attempting to accomplish is both and neither of these. The Idea, to which philosophy has to find its way, also guides the movement of history, through which it actualises itself. Philosophical science has to find the unifying principles which underlie this entire development.
In the Preface, Hegel makes an important reference to Plato’s Republic. On the one hand, he sees this work as ‘a proverbial example of an empty ideal’ (Philosophy of Right, p 20), describing the world as it ‘ought’ to be. However, Hegel’s historical understanding enables him to do more than merely reject Plato’s conceptions. The Republic is ‘essentially the embodiment of nothing other than the nature of Greek ethics’, which Plato can see being undermined by a ‘destructive force’ which was penetrating the life of the polis. Elsewhere, Hegel identifies this force with the coming of Christianity, and in the Preface, he describes it as expressing ‘the free infinite personality’. Hegel’s philosophy of reconciliation seeks to overcome the conflict between ethics and this principle of individuality. He sees philosophy originating in Greece precisely as an expression of the break-up of community.
It may be said that philosophy only commences when a people has left its concrete life in general, when separation into different estates has begun, and the people approach their fall [Untergang], where a gulf has arisen between inner striving and external actuality, when the hitherto existing form of religion etc. is no longer satisfying, when spirit manifests indifference towards its living existence or dwells unsatisfied therein, when ethical life dissolves. Then spirit takes refuge in the space of thought and forms for itself a realm of thought standing against the actual world. Philosophy, then, is reconciliation of ruin, which was begun by thought. (History of Philosophy: Introduction. )
One interesting aspect of the Philosophy of Right is the paucity of references to Aristotle. This tends to obscure the fact that Hegel is really engaged here in a continual debate with the Aristotle of the Ethics and the Politics. In general, in exploring the distinctions between ancient Athens and modern Europe, above all the disappearance of slavery, Hegel stresses the importance of free individuality in the modern world. This element, he points out, was unknown to his Greek forerunners.
Early in the book, Hegel tells us explicitly where his account of socio-political life begins.
The basis [Boden] of right is the realm of spirit in general and its precise location and point of departure is the will; the will is free, so that freedom constitutes its substance and destiny [Bestimmung] and the system of right is the realm of actualised freedom, the world of spirit produced from within itself as a second nature. (Philosophy of Right, para 4, p 35.)
This is his starting-point: the will, which cannot and must not be deduced from anything else. From the will, he must unfold the entire structure of society, economy and politics. (He spells out this unifying principle in the Philosophy of Right, addition to para 279, p 317.) At first, the will is abstract, the single individual. ‘Freedom is here the freedom of the abstract will in general, or ... the freedom of an individual person who relates only to himself.’
In beginning his work in this way, Hegel has separated himself from his Greek predecessors. Will is a concept hardly known to Plato and Aristotle, while for Hegel will and freedom are the characteristics of the modern world. The two great Ancients knew freedom only as the distinguishing mark separating the citizen from the slave, while for Hegel, modernity means that ‘all are free’. Nonetheless, they agree across the millennia that philosophical comprehension is crucial for social life.
But the immediate abstract shape of will is only a starting-point. In the Lectures, he explains that ‘Right expresses in general a relationship constituted by the freedom of the will and its realisation’ (p 56). This individual abstraction uncovers its meaning explicitly only in the forms of social life, in the economic structure, in the State and in the international system of states. ‘Merely formal right’ has to unfold its more concrete stages of development.
Hegel explains how ‘the concept of the absolute free will is the finite free being. We begin with the individual free being, and then consider how it frees itself from this finitude.’ (Lectures, p 61) ‘Freedom from finitude’ is only possible in society where the abstract individual becomes a person, and this in turn is inseparable from the possession of things, for only in possession does personality show its objective character. Will is ‘the abstract basis for abstract and hence formal right. The commandment of right is therefore: be a person and respect others as persons.’
A person, in distinguishing himself from himself, relates himself to another person, and indeed it is only as owners of property that the two have existence [Dasein] for each other. Their identity in themselves acquires existence [Existenz] through the transference of the property of one to the other by common will and with due respect to the rights of both - that is by contract. (Philosophy of Right, para 40, page 70.)
In opposition to Plato, Hegel thinks he can prove the necessity for private ownership.
As a person I am a free being; in the sphere of universality I am wholly an individual; in the thing I own I must be for myself in all my individuality, and so I must own it fully, freely; and it follows that there must be private ownership. (Lectures, p 75)
The abstract individual, Hegel believes, is merely a natural being with a natural will. Persons, on the contrary, live in society. None of Hegel’s categories thereafter is to be found within the ‘natural realm’. At this abstract level, freedom is merely something negative. As the Lectures put it, in a critical allusion to Kant: ‘“Respect human beings as persons” is the imperative of abstract right; thus all imperatives of right (other than the command “Be a person”) are merely prohibitions.’ (p 62.)
Hegel’s analyses what is meant by ‘taking possession’. He distinguishes three aspects: physically seizing something, giving it form [formierung] and designating its ownership. Of these, the second is the most important. Every human activity produces an objective result outside itself, something which exists independently in the world and necessarily stands opposed to the actor. Hegel not only sees the act of forming something as one of the ways of taking possession of it: he is unable to consider forming anything, that is, any act of human creativity, except as a way of possessing it. Hegel’s other works contain some wonderful insights into fine art and it history; but in the Philosophy of Right the only mention of art is in a sentence about the commercial value of an art object (para 68).
Hegel goes on to develop three aspects of abstract right: property, contract and wrong [das Unrecht]. Simple possession becomes property, when society as a whole recognises the right of each individual. Hegel takes the word ‘alienation’ [Entaüsserung], meaning the transfer of property to someone else, and gives it a universal spiritual significance. Particularly interesting is his belief that you can sell the use of your ‘physical and mental powers’, but only for a limited time. This is ‘because they have they have the aspect of an external relationship to my personality.’ (Lectures, p 79.)
When he talks about contract, Hegel reveals a significant disagreement with Aristotle. We saw in the Politics that lending money at interest was classified as the most hateful way to get a living. For Hegel, on the contrary, it is quite acceptable. His classification of contracts, (in para 80), following that of Kant as well as the Roman jurists, includes rent, money-lending and wages, all, of course, under the overall heading: ‘Morality’.
Like Aristotle, Hegel must describe the exchange of commodities and this leads him to attempt to expound the relationship between the exchangeability of a thing and its usefulness in satisfying a need.
A thing [Sache] in use is an individual thing, determined in quantity and quality and related to a specific need. But its specific utility, as quantitatively determined, is at the same time comparable with other things of the same utility, just as the specific need which it serves is at the same time need in general and thus likewise comparable in its particularity with other needs. Consequently, the thing is also comparable with things which serve other needs. (Philosophy of Right, para 63, p 92.)
This ‘consequently’ is astounding in so profound and subtle a thinker. Throughout its entire history, economics has struggled - and totally failed - to carry out the task which Hegel thinks he has polished off in a couple of sentences: to derive quantitative proportions of exchange from the utilities of commodities. (We have seen how Aristotle stubbed his toe on the very same obstacle.) And yet this error reveals the deepest truth, as Marx was to demonstrate. For it contains Hegel’s understanding that human needs and forms of exchange are not something merely ‘natural’, but are themselves produced through social activity.
Paragraph 66, in the Section headed ‘The Alienation of Property’, is interesting for containing, in the accompanying Remark, a reference to Spinoza. Hegel identifies Spirit with self-caused substance, whose concept involves its existence. Hegel ties together the necessary existence of property with Spirit and the inalienability of personality. Hegel seeks to distinguish between the slave, whose personality is alienated, and the modern wage-earner, who is free because he can own property.
The transition from property to contract is the next step in the development towards concreteness in Hegel’s conception of social relations.
Contract presupposes that the contracting parties recognise each other as persons and owners of property.... In a contract, I have property by virtue of a common will; for it is the interest of reason that the subjective will should become more universal. (Philosophy of Right, para 71, p 103.)
By considering the possibility of wrong and its punishment, Hegel shows how the abstract person is not yet a conscious moral subject. From here, Hegel arrives at the idea of morality [Moralität], where will is subjective. The individual, standing opposed to the universal, expresses itself in action.
Action contains the following determinations: (a) it must be known by me in its externality as mine; (b) its essential relation to the concept is one of obligation; and (c) it has an essential relation to the will of others. (Philosophy of Right, para 113, p 140.)
Hegel is not satisfied with Kant’s exposition of the contrast between individual decision and the Good as ‘a mere ought’. The will
first posits itself in the opposition between the universal will which has being for itself; then, by superseding this opposition - the negation of the negation - it determines itself as will in its existence [Dasein]. ... Thus it now has its personality ... as its object [Gegenstand]; the infinite subjectivity of freedom, which now has being for itself, constitutes the principle of the moral point of view. (Philosophy of Right. para 104, pp 131-2.)
The subjective action has purpose and the subject is responsible for it. Hegel discerns two opposed totalities: good in the abstract and conscience. How are these two to be reconciled? Hegel considers the unity, ‘the reconciliation’, of abstract right with morality, in which we reach the level of ethical life [Sittlichkeit], the final destination of Hegel’s journey.
Hegel sees that morality is limited by its individualist character, and he associates this limited point of view with Kant. In contrast, he explains,
the determinations of ethics constitute the concept of freedom. They are the substantiality or universal essence of individuals who are related to them merely as accidents. Whether the individual exists or not is a matter of indifference to objective ethical life, which alone has permanence, and is the power by which the lives of the individuals are governed. (Philosophy of Right, para 145, Addition, p 190.)
We have reached a new level in Hegel’s attempt to reconcile the individual and society. ‘Ethical life is the unity of the will in its concept with the will of the individual’. (PR, para 33, p 64.) ‘Ethical life is the interpenetration of the subjective and the objective.’ (Lectures, p 129) In relation to this ‘ethical substance’, individuals are merely accidental. Unlike Aristotle, Hegel does not see Ethics as a science to be studied by the citizens, helping them to make choices about the best way to live. Instead, he regards Ethical Life as an objective process of development, which philosophy has the task of raising to the level of consciousness.
This, the third part of his book, deals with the socio-historical form within which the ‘ethical substance’ unfolds. It contains three sections: Family, Civil Society and the State. The family, in turn, is divided into marriage, family property and the bringing up of children. At the heart of Hegel’s notion of marriage is the status he gives to women: they are ‘passive and subjective’. On this question, at least, Hegel insists on being more backward than Plato. ‘Woman has her substantial vocation in the family, and her ethical disposition consists in family piety’. ‘Women may well be educated, but they are not made for the higher sciences, for philosophy and certain artistic productions which require a universal element.’ (Philosophy of Right, para 166, pp 206-7.)
And so on.
The position of the family in Hegel’s scheme is determined by its being a foundation for the holding of property. Hegel thinks it obvious that ‘the family as a legal person in relation to others must be represented by the husband as its head.’ Children, while they are not things to be owned, like slaves, have to be subject to parental discipline, ‘the purpose of which is to break their self-will’. All of this is to prepare them to belong to civil society. While the family, Hegel says, is founded upon relationships of love, civil society is governed purely by selfishness.
The selfish end in its actualisation, conditioned ... by universality, establishes a system of all-round interdependence, so that the subsistence and welfare of the individual and his rightful existence are interwoven with, and grounded on, the subsistence, welfare and rights of all, and have actuality and security only in this context. (Philosophy of Right, para 183, p 207.)
Civil society was the term used by the eighteenth-century Scots, Steuart, Ferguson and Adam Smith, to denote the social relations between independent property-owners. From his study of political economy, Hegel sees civil society [bürgerliche Gesellschaft] as a combination of two ‘principles’. One is ‘the concrete person who, as a particular person, as a totality of needs and a mixture of natural necessity and arbitrariness, is his own end.’ The other is the universal mediation between each such individual and the rest. ‘Their relation is such that each asserts itself and gains satisfaction through the others.’
In civil society, each individual is his own end, and all else means nothing to him. But he cannot accomplish the full extent of his ends without reference to others; these others are therefore means to the end of the particular person. But through its reference to others, the particular end takes on the form of universality, and gains satisfaction by simultaneously satisfying the welfare of others. (Philosophy of Right, para 182, p 220.)
Thus the universal needs of society are satisfied through the actions of individuals who are not conscious of these needs, who only see and only act upon their own individual needs. This development of needs and their satisfaction forms a system of needs.
The account of civil society in the Lectures begins like this:
The more precise concrete characteristic of universality in civil society is that the subsistence and welfare of individuals is conditioned by and interwoven with the subsistence of all other individuals. This communal system provides individuals with the framework of their existence and with security, both externally and with regard to right. So civil society is in the first place the external state or the state as the understanding envisages it. ... because the main purpose is to secure the needs of individuals. (Lectures, pp 161-2)
Alluding to Rousseau, Hegel adds,
Here the burghers are bourgeois, not citoyens. ... Here is the sphere of the mediation involved in the fact that the individual’s purpose also has universality as one of its aspects. But here we do not yet have life within the universal for the universal.
Hegel’s interpretation of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ is central to his entire outlook.
Individuals, as citizens of this state, are private persons who have their own interest as their end. Since this end is mediated through the universal, which thus appears to the individuals as a means, they can attain their end only in so far as they themselves determine their knowledge, volition and action in a universal way and make themselves links in the chain of this continuum [Zusammenhang = connection]. (Philosophy of Right, para 187, p 224.)
Hegel has many criticisms of civil society and its fragmentary character, but they are subordinate to his belief that, precisely through the collisions between the particular individual interests, the universal is being furthered. Reason governs the world, but only via unreason.
Particularity, in its primary determination as that which is opposed to the universal of the will in general, is subjective need, which attains its objectivity, ie its satisfaction, by means of (α) external things, which are likewise the property and product of the needs and wills of others and of (β) activity and work, as the mediation between the two aspects. The end of subjective need is the satisfaction of subjective particularity, but in the relation between this and the needs and free arbitrary will of others, universality asserts itself, and the resultant manifestation of rationality in the sphere of finitude is the understanding. This is the chief aspect which must be considered here, and which itself constitutes the conciliatory element within this sphere. (Philosophy of Right, para 189, p 227.)
This is where Hegel pays tribute to the achievements of political economy, mentioning specifically Smith, Say and Ricardo. However, his task is not merely to praise them, but to uncover the inner meaning of their work. The path to freedom passes through the civil society they studied, and only here, in the form of social needs, do the needs of the individual develop and find their satisfaction. Hegel dismisses Rousseau’s notion that freedom existed in a ‘state of nature’, which he has already identified with abstract individuality.
For a condition in which natural needs as such were immediately satisfied would merely be one in which spirituality was immersed in nature, and hence a condition of savagery and unfreedom; whereas freedom consists solely in the reflection of the spiritual into itself, its distinction from the natural and its reflection upon the latter.
The system of production which underlies civil society gives rise to a division of labour, through which
the work of the individual becomes simpler, so that his skill at his abstract work becomes greater, as does the volume of his output. at the same time this abstraction of skill and means makes the dependence and reciprocity of human beings in the satisfaction of their other needs complete and entirely necessary.
Furthermore, the abstraction of production makes work increasingly mechanical, so that the human being is eventually able to step aside and let a machine take his place. (Philosophy of Right, para 198, p 232-3.)
Hegel’s picture of the modern economic system never depicts it as an ideal state of affairs. ‘In these opposites and their complexity, civil society affords a spectacle of extravagance and misery as well as of the physical and ethical corruption common to both.’ As he had learnt from Adam Smith, and as he stated more clearly in his early (1801-2) lectures in Jena, the division of labour has a devastating effect on the individual labourer. ‘Through the work of the machine, the human being becomes more and more machine-like, dull, spiritless.’ Twenty years later, in the Philosophy of Right, he says that the differentiation between individuals brought about by the system ‘does not cancel out the inequality of human beings.’
As we shall see, he is also well aware of the wide disparity of wealth which is engendered by the system. In the Lectures, Hegel was more forthright in his criticism of the way that market society functions, than he was in the book in which he had had to tailor his criticisms to the censors. For instance, his account of the factory is quite startling:
Factory workers become deadened [stumpf] and tied to their factory and dependent on it, since with this single aptitude they cannot earn a living anywhere else. A factory presents a sad picture of the deadening of human beings, which is also why on Sundays factory workers lose no time in spending and squandering their entire weekly wages. (Lectures, p 177)
However, because the machine makes it possible to replace workers, ‘human beings are... first sacrificed, after which they emerge through the more highly mechanised condition as free once more.’ The overall development which is the outcome of all this inequality, misery and oppression makes it all worth while, Hegel believes, as did Adam Smith. (Neither of them asked the factory-workers what they thought!)
Up to this point in Hegel’s argument, he has effectively been uncovering the rational meaning of the type of social life which throughout Europe was either already in existence, or coming into being. Now his account moves into a new gear. He must explain more and more what he thinks ought to be, what a rational socio-political order would be like. This is by no means a kind of utopian scheme, because he has to try to present each element of his account as taking its place as part of a single, rational whole.
In Hegel’s picture, each individual has to belong to one of three estates [Stände]. This word does not mean classes. Like the ‘corporations’, which we shall meet in a moment, they look like an attempt by Hegel to call into play some aspects of medieval society, in order to sort out the problems of modernity. However, they are actually part of his preparation for the transition to the state. The concept ‘estate’ is essential for Hegel’s task of reconciling individual subjectivity with the state: it is only through membership of an estate that each individual’s activity becomes a contribution to the universal development of society.
The substantial or immediate estate includes all those engaged in agriculture, lumping together the wealthy landowner and the agricultural labourer. The reflecting or formal estate covers everybody involved in trade and industry, so that factory-workers are thrown together with the owner of the factory. ‘It relies for its livelihood on its work, on reflection and the understanding, and essentially on its mediation of the needs and work of others.’ Notice, above all, that there is no space left vacant for the modern wage-earner, so the modern form of class struggle cannot appear in the picture. Over the substantial and formal estates stands that section which has ‘the universal interests of society as its business’. These are the bureaucrats who run the state. They are thus to live in conditions which contrast strongly with those of Plato’s Guardians: while the Guardians were to be kept free of all entanglement with family and property, Hegel makes sure that his bureaucrats are part of a comfortable middle class.
It must therefore be exempted from work for the direct satisfaction of its needs, either by private resources or by receiving an indemnity from the state which calls upon its resources. (Philosophy of Right, para 205, p 237.)
Hegel also dislikes Plato’s notion that the rulers should assign each individual his particular place. He believes that each individual must decide what he will do for a living. (A woman’s place is another matter. That’s fixed biologically, he thinks!) In the Philosophy of Right, (para 207, p 239) this leads him to a deprecatory remark about the caste system in India. However, in the corresponding place in the Lectures, Hegel had inserted this comment:
For privileges accorded to one class in regard to communal tasks are very oppressive. For instance the Prussian nobility used to have the sole right to be commissioned officers. This class distinction based on privilege, where one class participates to a greater extent in communal tasks, is one of the most repugnant forms of distinction. (Lectures, pp 185-6)
He thought it prudent to miss this idea out of the work as published, as he did another reference to privilege. (Lectures, pp 224-6.)
Now he describes the administration of justice and the role of law in society, if it is to function as the realisation of freedom. For this, the automatism of civil society, governed unaided by the market, must be tempered by conscious decision, by Reason. ‘The development of law founded on right ... is an affair of the understanding.’ (Lectures, p 190.) What is right has to be recognised by all.
For the system of needs to operate, Hegel requires the intervention of a set of institutions which he calls the police [Polizei]. (Maybe ‘polity’ would be a better translation: Aristotle’s politeia, though not mentioned, is never far away.) This does not just refer to the forces of law and order. Hegel means public authority in general, which also includes the provision of welfare for those who need help. Not only ‘the undisturbed security of persons and property should be guaranteed, but also ... the livelihood and welfare of individuals should be secured’. It is in this context that Hegel considers the existence of widespread poverty in modern society.
When a large mass of people sinks below the level of a certain standard of living ... that feeling of right, integrity and honour which comes from supporting oneself by one’s own activity and work is lost. This leads to the creation of a rabble[Pöbel], which in turn makes it much easier for disproportionate wealth to be concentrated in a few hands.’ (Philosophy of Right, para 244, p 266.)
Hegel makes no pretence of having a solution to this ‘problem’. As possible ways to combat unemployment, he considers attempts to expand markets through what we would nowadays call advertising, and by international expansion and colonisation. But he goes no further than saying: ‘The important question of how poverty can be remedied is one which agitates and torments modern societies especially’. In a lecture delivered towards the end of his life, Hegel declares: ‘These two sides, poverty and wealth, thus constitute the corruption of civil society.’ So Hegel has more than an inkling that civil society is already showing its limits. In the Lectures, Hegel goes into more detail about the problem of poverty. ‘The whole community [das Allgemeine] must therefore make provision for the poor, in regard both to what they lack and to the idle, malevolent disposition that may result from their situation and the wrong they have suffered.’ (Lectures, p 209.)
The final category of Hegel’s account of civil society is what he calls ‘Corporations’. Something like the medieval guilds, each corporation should co-ordinate the activities of people engaged in a particular economic activity, and thus overcome the isolation of individuals. They thus come between the estates and the state. Hegel needs this structure of estates and corporations to mediate between the state and the mass of individual citizens, and to confront the problem with which all the political thinkers had been trying to answer: the relation between individuals and the universal.
Only now is Hegel ready to discuss the political arrangements of the modern social order. For the first time, we encounter the State as a political entity. For Hegel, the individual finds his freedom only within the community as a whole, which he identifies with the political state, and that is why membership in the state as a political form is for him the highest freedom. ‘The state is the actuality of concrete freedom.’ Hegel stresses that the economic structure of modern society, which works through each individual striving to satisfy their own desires, had become distinct from the state, which is needed as the universal political power and the highest expression of reason.
The state is the actuality of the substantial will, an actuality which it possesses in the particular self-consciousness when this has been raised to its universality; as such, it is the rational, in and for itself. This substantial unity is an absolute and unmoved end in itself, and in it, freedom enters into its highest right, just as this ultimate end possesses the highest right in relation to individuals whose highest duty is to be members of the state. (Philosophy of Right, para 258, p 275.)
(There is an echo here of Aristotle’s ‘unmoved mover’.) This is the cornerstone of Hegel’s entire account modern social life. The state exists with absolute necessity. Hegel enters into a discussion of Rousseau’s conceptions of social contract and of ‘the general will’, and this is the occasion for a clear reference to the French Revolution, and the dangers inherent in revolution in general.4
When these abstractions were invested with power, they afforded the tremendous spectacle, for the first time we know of in human history, of the overthrow of all existing and given conditions within an actual major state and the revision of its constitution from first principles and purely in terms of thought; the intention behind this was to give it what was supposed to be a purely rational basis. On the other hand, since these were abstractions divorced from the Idea, they turned the attempt into the most terrible and drastic event. (Philosophy of Right, para 258, p 277.)
In the Lectures, he gives a useful pointer to his concept of the state. The family, he explains, ‘is marked by the tie of love’, while civil society has instead ‘the tie of necessity, where people behave to one another as independent beings’. The state, the third moment of Ethical Life, is ‘the unity of the two, which appears as consciousness of freedom’. (Lectures, p 220.) Individuals can choose whether to ‘enter the state ... of their own free will’. If they choose otherwise, they ‘place themselves in a state of nature, where their right is not recognised’. (Lectures, p 223.)
The state, he argues, shows itself in three aspects. It is a particular, internal, constitution; it is an individual entity in international law; and, in combination with other states, it takes its place in world history, chiefly through war. What is the relation of the constitution to the ‘spheres of family and civil society’? Hegel poses the problem of their unity like this:
The state is one the one hand an external necessity and the higher power to whose nature their laws and interests are subordinate and on which they depend. But on the other hand, it is their immanent end, and its strength consists in the unity of its universal and ultimate ends with the particular interest of individuals, in the fact they have duties towards the state to the same extent as they also have rights. (Philosophy of Right, para 261, p 283.).
What matters most is that the law of reason should merge with the law of particular freedom, and that my particular end should become identical with the universal; otherwise, the state must hang in the air. It is the self-awareness of individuals which constitutes the actuality of the state, and it stability consists in the identity of the two aspects in question. (Philosophy of Right, para 265, p 287.)
Here is that organic unity of individual and universal which runs through every part of Hegel’s work. It is also his answer to the problems which broke up the Athenian polis and which he believes could restore its harmony in the only form he believed to be possible for modernity: a system of philosophical science. His criticism of Plato, who also sees thepolis as an organism, is that he leaves no room for individual subjectivity. His Idea stands outside the world, while Hegel’s Idea lives and develops in the world.
But how is this unity to be realised? Hegel struggles with this question in great detail in order to construct his constitution. He never ‘holds these truths to be self-evident’, as the Enlightened authors of the American Constitution did! If such important knowledge about society were directly available to anyone, there would be no need for philosophy. Only through the action of Spirit can socio-political life have any meaning, and uncovering the springs of that action demands hard philosophical work. ‘Opinion’ is no use here.
The political disposition, ie patriotism in general, is certainty based on truth (whereas merely subjective certainty does not originate in truth, but is only opinion) and a volition which had become habitual. ... This disposition is in general one of trust ... or the consciousness that my substantial and particular interest is preserved and contained in the interest and end of another (in this case the state), and in the latter’s relation to me as an individual. As a result, this other ceases to be an other for me, and in my consciousness of this, I am free. (Philosophy of Right, para 268, p 288.)
Here we see the importance of Hegel’s claim that his philosophy is Absolute Knowledge. But now he has to carry out a still more difficult task: he must produce a rational constitution and show that it is the only one possible. It turns out to be a constitutional monarchy. Far from upholding the existing Prussian state, as some people still insist on repeating, what he aims for is closer to the character of the British monarchy of William IV. Hegel is quite certain that
for a people that has developed to civil society, or in general to consciousness of the free ego in its determinate existence, in its needs, its freedom of choice and its conscience, constitutional monarchy alone is possible. (Lectures, p 249.)
The constitution of the state is rational. It divides itself into legislative, executive and sovereign powers [fürstliche Gewalt]. This is ‘in accordance with the nature of the concept’ and its three ‘moments’, universality, particularity and singularity. On the basis of this logical framework, he ‘proves’ the necessity for an individual monarch.
Sovereignty, which is initially only the universal thought of this ideality, can exist only as subjectivity which is certain of itself. ... But subjectivity attains its truth only as a subject, only as a person, and in a constitution which has progressed to real rationality, each of the three moments of the concept has its distinctive shape which is actual for itself. This absolutely decisive moment of the whole, therefore, is not individuality in general, but one individual, the monarch. (Philosophy of Right, par 279,p317.)
In the Lectures, Hegel is more outspoken about the restrictions which his constitution would place upon the monarch, but the main substance of his argument is the same. The monarch does not have a contract with the people, even though he is their ‘supreme representative’. He has a ‘body of counsellors’, but they only advise him. Ministers of State are responsible for executing decisions, but they must be chosen by the monarch, who deposes them when he thinks it necessary.
Hegel regards democracy as quite unworkable in a modern state. ‘Without its monarch and that articulation of the whole which is necessarily and immediately associated with monarchy, the people is a formless mass.’ That is why Hegel thinks that monarchy, kept within constitutional bounds, is superior to democracy as a political form. ‘The people’ are no more than a collection of individual atoms and therefore a threat to the unity and harmony of the state.
Popular sovereignty is one of those confused thoughts which are based on a garbled notion of the people. Without its monarch and that articulation of the whole which is necessarily and immediately associated with monarchy, the people is a formless mass. (Philosophy of Right, para 279, p 319.)
And later,
To know what one wills, and even more, to know what the will which has being in and for itself - ie reason - wills, is the fruit of profound cognition and insight, and this is the very thing which ‘the people’ lack. (Philosophy of Right, para 301, p 340.)
Hegel’s bureaucracy, as we have already seen, is drawn from the educated middle class. It is prevented from using its position to dominate society by (a) the monarch and (b) the corporations. Hegel’s legislative power is based upon the three estates [Stände], which we have already encountered. These resemble the trois états of pre-revolutionary France.
Viewed as a mediating organ, the Estates stand between the government at large on the one hand and the people in their division in particular spheres and individuals on the other. Their determination requires that they should embody in equal measure both the sense and disposition of the state and government and the interests of particular circles and individuals. ... They ensure that individuals do not present themselves as a crowd or aggregate, unorganised in their opinions and volition, and do not become a massive power in opposition to the organic state. (Philosophy of Right, para 302, p 342.)
Hegel ‘proves’ that the Legislature has to be divided into two Houses, and that the Upper House has to consist of the ‘estate of natural life’ - in practice, the landowning nobility.
The first house contains the universal class, the landowning class. Members of the agricultural class who wish to enter the estates assembly must not only belong to this immediate class, but must also be wealthy landowners. (Lectures.)
The second estate - in practice, the business class - will choose their representatives to the Lower House, but that in no case implies democratic elections.
As for mass elections, it may also be noted that, in large states, the electorate inevitably becomes indifferent in view of the fact that a single vote has little effect when numbers are so large; and however highly they are urged to value the right to vote, those who enjoy this right will simply fail to make use of it. (Philosophy of Right, para 311, p 350.)
All the previous work, the movement from morality to ethical life, the discussion of family and civil society, the structure of a rational state, leads to the discussion of the monarchy. This is the climax of Hegel’s argument. As he puts it at the end of the Lectures,
Rationality is to be found in the middle class, which is the intellectual estate. The people are a material extreme; to say that the people will what is good means that they do not want to be oppressed, and that they want to give as little as possible and get as much enjoyment as possible. It is through the middle class that the wishes of the people are laid before the sovereign. (Lectures, p 315.)
The subsequent sections of the Philosophy of Right seek to place the modern state as an individual entity in the world community of states and in the process of world history. In international relations, there is no place for ethical life. The individual states relate to each other in a way analogous to the individuals in Hobbes ‘state of nature’. Rejecting with contempt Kant’s efforts to find the way to ‘perpetual peace’ between the warring nations, Hegel sees war between states as the concomitant of harmony within states. At the end of the century following Hegel’s, we have a rather different perspective on what this means for the life of humanity! Hegel thinks war ‘should not be regarded as an absolute evil’.
Through its agency (as I have put it on another occasion), ‘the ethical health of nations is preserved in their indifference towards the permanence of finite determinacies, just as the movement of the winds preserves the sea from that stagnation which a lasting calm would produce - a stagnation which a lasting, not to say perpetual, peace would also produce among nations’. (Philosophy of Right, p361.)
Finally, Hegel sets the State in the context of world history, recapitulating some of the ideas to be found in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History. History is ‘the exposition and the actualisation of the universal spirit.’ (Philosophy of Right, para 342, p 372.) The very last sentences of the book declare:
The present has cast off its barbarism and unjust arbitrariness, and truth has cast off its otherworldliness and contingent force, so that true reconciliation, which reveals the state as the image and actuality of reason, has become objective. In the state, self-consciousness finds the actuality of its substantial knowledge and volition in organic development; in religion, it finds its feeling and representation, of this truth as ideal essentiality; but in science, it finds the free and comprehended cognition of this truth as one and the same in all its complementary manifestations, ie, in the state, in nature, and in the ideal world. (Philosophy of Right, para 360, p 380.)
Hegel has given the most complete attempt possible to make sense of the modern world, the world of money, capital, wealth and poverty, bureaucratic power and war. Within a decade of his death, his powerful philosophical influence had faded, and later revivals of interest in his ideas have usually tended to downplay the significance of this particular book. After the succeeding nightmare century, the question whether this world does indeed ‘make sense’ raises itself with ever greater force.
1. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, or Natural Law and Political Science in Outline, edited Allen W Wood, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
2. A student’s notes of these, discovered and published in Germany in the 1970s, have recently been translated into English: Hegel’s Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science. The First Philosophy of Right. Translated by Michael Stewart and Peter J
Hodgson. University of California Press, 1995. The same ground is covered, more schematically, in the third part of the Encyclopaedia, the Philosophy of Mind, paras 483-552.
3. So much for the nonsense about Hegel in his last book being ‘a conservative upholder of the Prussian state’. This rubbish is still repeated in textbooks. Its currency in ‘Marxist’
circles dates back at least to 1870. See Engels’ letter to Marx, 8 May, 1870, protesting against its ignorant repetition by Wilhelm Liebknecht.
4. See also the section of the Phenomenology of Spirit headed ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’.