The Inevitable Collapse of Hegel’s World

Philip Pilkington discusses how Hegel’s dream of a universal and rational state came to terrible fruition in global liberalism —and also why its contemporary collapse was inevitable.

The ghost of Hegel never seems to go away. It still haunts the halls of Western institutions to this day.

If we look at the modern day European Union, for example, we cannot understand it without reference to thinkers like Alexandre Kojève who not only influenced, either directly or indirectly, most of the European thinkers after the Second World War but also played a large role as a French civil servant in the creation of what would become the European Union. Kojève viewed the creation of the European Union as an explicit project to realize Hegel’s universal and rational state. We see something similar if we look at the American empire that developed in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The key ideologist for this empire – this liberal empire – was of course Francis Fukuyama who saw it as a manifestation of Hegel’s End of History.

None of this is a coincidence. Philosophers, especially those in the European tradition, have long seen it as their goal to supersede Hegel. But try as they might they never do. Whenever a liberal thinker requires a philosophy to justify liberal institutions they inevitably end up back with Hegel. Serious philosophers in this tradition tend to find themselves following the same trajectory. Whether they start with Nietzsche or with Heidegger, they inevitably find themselves, in one way or another, dealing with issues they find in the old German master. There is a very concrete reason for this: in the modern European tradition Hegel really is the philosopher par excellence. Alfred North Whitehead once said that all European philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. We might say that all modern European philosophy is a series of footnotes to Hegel.

In a recent review of my book The Collapse of Global Liberalism, Peter Leithart has questioned my use of Hegel to chart the collapse of liberalism – both as an ideology and as embodied in concrete institutions. He is not the only one to do so. Theologians and philosophers with a background in religion have tended to be the most attuned to liberalism’s recent collapse – and they have, for the most part, asked why I insisted on dusting off Hegel to chart the rise and fall of liberalism. In this essay I would like to explain the rationale for this – because in doing so we can better understand just how interdependent liberalism and Hegel really are. In a sense, Hegel is liberalism and liberalism is Hegel, to paraphrase Hillaire Belloc. In tracing out the broad developments of Hegelian thinking and its offshoots we can better understand the trajectory that liberalism has taken as a concrete political philosophy since the Enlightenment period.It will then become clear why the only way out is through: only Hegel can bury liberalism, and he can only do so by simultaneously burying himself.

Hegel, In Himself and For Himself

Let us start with Hegel himself. What makes Hegel the liberal thinker par excellence? Certainly, Hegel is not the most articulate exponent of liberalism as a political ideology. No professor teaching a course on Liberalism 101 would reach for Hegel’s work – not even as a primary source. The key to understanding why Hegel is so important for understanding liberalism is rather because Hegel’s philosophy represents liberalism in its most stable form. In my book I distinguish between what I call ‘hard liberalism’ and ‘soft liberalism’. Hard liberalism is liberalism in a purified form. It is what happens when liberalism is taken literally and the abstract diktats that undergird it are applied directly to society. We have seen a lot of hard liberalism recently – and it has inevitably led to the collapse of the ideology itself. Soft liberalism, on the other hand, is liberalism alloyed with ideas from other traditions. In the West these ideas tend to be broadly Christian in origin. My argument in the book is that soft liberalism is somewhat “stable” because the non-liberal ideas provide ballast for the liberal ideas and prevent them floating off toward self-destructive extremes.

Hegel’s philosophy represents the most comprehensive and stable form of soft liberalism ever proposed. Hegel explicitly recognises that hard liberalism is dangerous and risks tipping into instability due to its extreme individualism or, at a societal level, into a cacophony of irrational desires. For example, in his Philosophy of Right Hegel says the following of the hard liberal ideas of Jean-Jacque Rousseau:

Rousseau considers the will only in the form of the individual will… and regards the universal will not as the rational will as such, but only as the common will which proceeds from the individual will as conscious wills. The result is that he reduces the union of individuals in the state to a contract and hence to something based on their arbitrary will and opinions, and on their express consent given at their own discretion.

The solution to this is not to give up on liberalism as such but rather to temper it and channel it into rational institutions and laws. This is the goal of Hegel’s political philosophy. He does not want a society stripped of its substance, as some of the liberal thinkers seem to espouse, but rather one that integrates purely formal rights with morality. Hegel calls this fusion “Sittlichkeit” which translates to the “ethical life” or the “ethical order”. Hegel’s idea is to explicitly integrate the moral structures of the society that he lives in – broadly, Lutheran Christianity – into the state structures. Other thinkers in the liberal tradition tend to add the moral dimension as an afterthought, but Hegel integrates it directly into his political philosophy. In doing so, he provides the fullest expression of what I call soft liberalism.

Yet Hegel’s thought contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. Hegel is still a liberal after all – and if I am correct, liberalism is an inherently unstable ideology. Hegel’s philosophy fails because it has only a purely formal conception of morality. If the reader searches in Hegel’s writings for concrete pronouncements on what constitutes the Good Life – on what morals the ideal State should follow – he or she will come up empty. Morality in Hegel is merely the allusion to morality. He never grasps the nettle and deal with complex moral questions like, for example, Thomas Aquinas or Aristotle do. Hegel seems to broadly take morality for granted.

Related to this is Hegel’s reading of Christianity. Deeply influenced by his Lutheranism, Hegel expounds what today would be recognised as liberal Protestantism. While he never explicitly states it, he seems to view the New Testament as a largely mythic doctrine – something that would be more perfectly espoused by Hegel’s student, David Strauss. No doubt he views the morality that the New Testament embodies as being evolutionarily superior to the morality found in other religions across time and space. But nevertheless, he seems to view this morality with the same hypersubjectivism that one would find in extremely liberal Protestant churches today. For Hegel Freedom is the highest virtue – and while this Freedom is certainly not libertine freedom of the sort promoted by liberals today, it is nevertheless highly subjectivised. It is far closer to the liberal conception of freedom than it is to the Augustinian. Hegel seems to want an absolute minimum of rules governing personal behaviour and maximum scope for creating one’s own life in line with one’s own “reason”.

Hegel, like the soft liberalism that he perfects, wants a minimum of constrictions on human freedom – and, importantly, that freedom is seen as coming from within. It is written on the heart of every man and in the process of living it is realised through a dynamic process of interaction with the world. Social and political institutions are primarily there to channel these sentiments of the human heart and form themselves in its image. This is sola scriptura transformed into a political project and a blueprint for the ideal State. It is ultimately a bet. Give a man a Bible and the freedom to read it and he will become a model citizen. Set up a State that integrates the whims of this model citizen and you will create a model society. In this framework any imposition on the citizen’s right to form his own conception of the ethical life is seen as an arbitrary impingement on his freedom. Hegel, and soft liberalism more generally, reluctantly defend some hierarchies in society – but only what they see as a minimum necessary for channelling the Spirit of Man. This is the Geist – the Hegelian embodiment of the march of Enlightenment ideals. The Geist is definitively liberal Protestant.