In his 1983 introduction to the philosophy of Hegel, Peter Singer made the then-unorthodox claim that the best place to begin with expounding Hegel’s philosophical system ought to be his philosophy of history. Amid the complexities of Hegel’s Logic (1812) and the dialectical leaps of The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Singer reassured his readers that there was at least some concreteness to be found in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1837). Just as Hegel later came to regard the Phenomenology, and that work’s famous preface in particular, as providing the introduction or ‘ladder’ to his complete philosophical system, Singer thought that by focusing initially on Hegel’s philosophy of history he could provide his readers with a source of preliminary orientation.
Such orientation is essential, given the notoriously dense nature of Hegel’s prose, which has provided fertile ground for any number of mis-readings. Indeed, Hegel’s philosophy was deeply and consistently misconstrued during the twentieth century, often being linked to a totalitarian politics in the period after 1945. That this interpretation was based on a tendentious, de-contextualised reading of only part of the philosopher’s œuvre should have been more widely recognised, for it had the deleterious effect of dampening Hegel’s reputation and ostracizing his thought from the mainstream currents of philosophical discussion. Fortunately, a succession of scholars has been trying to rectify this picture in recent decades, and their work has proven vital in encouraging what has been called a renaissance in Hegel studies.
Richard Bourke’s Hegel’s World Revolutions represents arguably the most original contribution to Hegel scholarship in some time. The originality of Bourke’s approach may reside in the fact that he is an intellectual historian rather than a philosopher. His concern, as so exhaustively demonstrated in his previous monograph on the political life of Edmund Burke, lies not simply in elucidating the content of a philosopher’s writings. That is a comparatively straightforward (if fraught) task, as demonstrated in the ‘sort of insurgency’ perpetrated against Hegel by an assortment of post-war intellectuals including Michel Foucault, Theodor Adorno, and Karl Popper. In their work, Bourke writes, ‘By a strange exercise in verbal association, Hegelian “totality” was identified with totalitarianism.’ Hegel was assailed on the one side for making possible in the nineteenth century the rise of extreme collectivist ideologies in the twentieth; from the other in providing the grandest articulation of what Foucault termed a ‘despotic Enlightenment.’ Both readings obscure more than clarify; they reflect the attitudes of their authors rather than attempt to capture Hegel’s original intentions. It is precisely these intentions that Bourke seeks to excavate in his contextualist reinterpretation of Hegel’s philosophy.
Bourke’s purpose in doing so rests partly with clarifying Hegel’s thought and reducing the grounds of much unnecessary confusion, but ultimately with countering the anti-Hegelian insurgency and its long-term legacies manifest in our political and cultural discourses today. According to Bourke, ‘A key feature of modernity is the advance it made on previous epochs of world history. Despite this forward movement, the achievement represented by the rise of the West is widely censored within our culture.’ Although one might be led from this opening passage to anticipate an effusive—or tone-deaf—celebration of Western progress, one will in fact find neither. What Bourke offers, instead, is a constructive critique of what Hegel would have termed the negative political tendencies of our age. Rooted in nineteenth-century forms of pessimism and exemplified in the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger, this negative tendency in our own day finds expression in Foucault’s substitution of domination for reciprocity as the key to explaining modern social relations. Modernity, on this reading, amounts to little more than a cage; its ethical values translate to blanket forms of oppression. Given political articulation, this tendency often leads to the intemperate disavowal of hard-won political arrangements, such as the modern constitutional state, and indispensable moral norms that together form the substructure of modern liberal politics. Yet, for Hegel, as Bourke demonstrates, ‘progress presupposes building on existing resources.’ Without an appreciation of historical reality as providing the measure of any progressive political action, we can only find ourselves adrift in a sea of abstraction. ‘It is just as foolish to imagine that any philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as that an individual can overleap his own time,’ Hegel cautioned in the preface to his Philosophy of Right (1820). Accordingly, progress in history did not involve a series of Foucauldian ruptures. Instead, Bourke argues, it was dialectical: ‘True reform … had to preserve as well as abolish and transcend.’
One achievement of Bourke’s Hegel’s World Revolutions is to provide a comprehensive yet succinct and elegant exposition of Hegel’s thought that attests to his great importance as a leading philosopher of modernity; another is to provide a new way of viewing Hegel that builds on Peter Singer’s original recommendation. It is from the vantage point of his philosophy of history that Hegel’s system attains an elusive clarity and real-world applicability.
Contrary to what remains the standard conception of his philosophy of mind, Hegel did not leave the real world behind as he followed the course of consciousness or ‘spirit’ [Geist] on the journey towards the achievement of absolute knowing. Rather than standing for a disembodied ghostly essence, Geist ought to be regarded as signifying an interconnected cultural nexus of moral norms and commitments. ‘The beginning of a new spirit is the outcome of a widespread revolution in the diversity of forms of cultural formation,’ Hegel wrote in the Phenomenology. ‘It is both the prize at the end of a winding path just as it is the prize won through much struggle and effort.’ It was Hegel’s task to chart the incremental progression of that cultural nexus through the stages of world history, while paying special attention to those pivotal moments of transition or ‘world revolutions’ where Geist breaks ‘with the previous world of its existence and its ways of thinking.’ But these breaks were never total; they were the outward manifestations of protracted developmental processes. The calamity of the French Revolution, for instance, lay in the enthusiasm of its proponents to inaugurate a new world of justice and equality unbeholden to the decrepit legacies of history. But the political and cultural world in which the revolutionaries were operating had nevertheless been shaped by those legacies. Even if those historical norms had been superseded, they were still indispensable; they could not be thrown away because they formed the ground on which one stood, knowingly or not. As Bourke puts it, ‘Contemporary conditions were not intelligible without a grasp of the historical processes that brought them about.’
This positioning did not arise from a conservative tendency on Hegel’s part – at least not wholly. His project, from one of many angles, can be seen as an attempt to reconcile the seemingly antithetical aspirations of liberalism and conservatism, as expressed in the infamous maxim from his Philosophy of Right: ‘What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational.’ ‘Rationality,’ in this case, signified the application of reasoned principle to political actuality, as exemplified in the modern constitutional state rather than an unregulated monarchy. In Hegel’s view, subjectivity defined the modern world. The course of history was towards greater individual freedom, but this was not a straightforward course. It was fraught with peril, violence, and aberration. History was a ‘slaughter bench’ for Hegel, and the contemporary world at the beginning of the nineteenth century offered a faintly more encouraging picture. Hegel’s philosophy, after all, was motivated by a profound uneasiness with the modern world as he found it. The method he cultivated was one of immanent critique guided by a spirit of sceptical inquiry. Although inescapably a ‘child of his time,’ he was not complacent by its standards. Despite the injustices of history and of modern life, Hegel could celebrate the great achievement of modernity as consisting in the new realisation that ‘the human being as such is free.’ In providing a richer concept of human subjectivity, alongside the dissolution of rank-ordered society and the rise of civil society with its attendant securities of property and individual rights, this gain compensated for the costs of modernity. The idea of universal freedom itself, though not yet fully realised, was essential, and could not be sacrificed at the behest of an insurgent moralism. Modern consciousness was free, Bourke writes, and ‘would never trade its emancipation for superannuated forms of enthrallment.’
The lesson here for contemporary politics is clear and significant. Rather than disavowing our circumstances and dismissing our cultural and intellectual traditions as morally compromised or tainted by history, we ought to be examining the long-term historical processes that have led us to this conjuncture and employing the existing resources at our disposal to surmount its challenges. Moral universalism will prove essential here, as we strain to project a future-orientated politics that nevertheless takes account of its historical genealogies; but any argument on its behalf cannot be advanced from a perspective that is not cognisant of its manifold contradictions. To preach universalism, in other words, one must also preach scepticism. In this respect Hegel provides a model, but a model that is ultimately restricted to its historical context.
Hegel does not provide a ‘buried intellectual treasure’ that we can use as a solution to our own practical problems in the present. As Bourke argues in the book’s final section, devoted to Hegel’s twentieth-century reception and to scrutinising methodological assumptions about how far one can feasibly go in reviving past ideas, philosophy is obliged to work with past thinkers because they contributed to the formation of our current vocabularies. ‘But it should not in the process forget the pastness of the historical past by employing discarded worldviews out of season.’ The point of studying Hegel, and by extension the purpose of contextualising historical thinkers, should concern itself less with relating his circumstances to our own and more with identifying the discrepancies and continuities between different historical eras. The past was past, but it still weighs, in the words of Marx, ‘like a nightmare on the brain of the living.’ One task of philosophy is to dispel that nightmare. Hegel was not our contemporary, but he still offers a powerful source of inspiration in our efforts to understand our world as well as to change it.
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 11: Time.
Adam Coleman is a doctoral student in history at Trinity College, University of Cambridge.