HEGEL AND THE STATE

(Although designated as postable, this is mostly a stock entry, a brief retelling of Bertrand Russell’s outstanding narrative. Its purpose, however, will be served in providing the skeleton for the future original entry, which will be based on my special reading of Hegel for this purpose, for which at present I have no time at all… Now, having finished the entry, I find it very important and indispensable for the Hegel series even in its present raw state, and its opening plus the final few paragraphs of my commentary happily lift it out of the pure stock designation.)

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Hegel’s conception of history is terribly interesting, the main feature of which is his vision of the State. As long as I am on this subject, let me fill in one curious detail. Hegel is often represented as a glorifier of the German nation and the promoter of German superiority über all alles. This however clashes with his view of the world’s future, where America, and not Germany, is the land of the future. Hilariously, though, he is saying that at the time of his writing there is no real State in America yet, because a real State requires the division of classes into rich and poor.

Nations, in Hegel, play the part that classes play in Marx. The principle of historical development he says, is national genius. In every age there is one nation charged with the mission of carrying the world through the stage of the dialectic that it has reached. In Hegel’s age, it is undoubtedly Germany. But, in addition to nations, we must take account of world-historical individuals, such as Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon: heroes of their times, whose aims embody the dialectical transitions about to take place.

Hegel’s emphasis on nations, together with his peculiar conception of freedom (defined by him as the right to obey the Law) explains his glorification of the State, defined by him in The Philosophy of History as the actually existing realized moral life. All the spiritual reality possessed by a human being is possesses only through the State. “For his spiritual reality consists in this, that his own essence--- Reason--- is objectively present to him, that it possesses objective immediate existence for him. For truth is unity of the universal and subjective Will, and the universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, in its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth…. The State is the embodiment of rational freedom realizing and recognizing itself in an objective form. The State is the Idea of Geist in the external manifestation of human Will and its Freedom.”

Very insightfully, Russell remarks that Hegel claims for the State much the same position as St. Augustine and his Catholic successors claimed for the Church. There are, however, two respects in which the Catholic claim is more reasonable than Hegel’s. Firstly, the Church is not a chance geographical association, but a body united by a common creed, believed by its members to be of supreme importance; it is thus in its very essence the embodiment of what Hegel calls the Idea. Then there is only one Catholic Church, whereas the States are many. When each State, in relation to its subjects, is made as Absolute as Hegel makes it, there is difficulty in finding any philosophical principle by which to regulate the relations between different States. In fact, at this point Hegel abandons his philosophical talk, falling back on the state of nature and Hobbes’s war of all against all.

The habit of speaking of “the State,” as if there were only one, is misleading, so long as there is no World State. Concerning the latter, Hegel is opposed to any “League of Nations,” by which the independence of separate States might be limited. He is opposed to the idea of World Government, because he thinks that it is a good thing that there should be wars from time to time. (Compare this to Dostoyevsky’s similar idea!) War, he says, is the condition in which we take seriously the vanity of temporal goods and things. War, to him, has a positive moral value. (As in Dostoyevsky.) “War has the higher significance that through it the moral health of peoples is preserved in their indifference towards the stabilizing of finite determinations.” Kant’s League for Peace is mistaken, because a family of States needs an enemy. Conflicts of States can be decided only by war. The rights of States have their reality in their particular wills and the interest of each State is its own highest Law. There is no contrast of morals and politics, because States are not subject to ordinary moral laws.

Such is the essence of Hegel’s geopolitical theory. There are several tremendously valuable elements in it, which I will later necessarily develop much further than I have, in the Collective and other sections. I can only say that in our time Hegel’s history curiously reasserts its relevance and legitimacy. There is however an abundance of senseless bloody wars that serve no moral purpose, and the task of mankind is perhaps to learn from Hegel how to superimpose the moral value of Hegel’s war on the absurd bloodshed of modern wars, and in a peculiar way to promote morality and to reap peace from a continuous drum roll of memento mori.

But isn’t this in effect some hopelessly naïve wishful thinking? After all, such a rosy scenario presupposes our active interest in history, and an ability to learn from it. But even Hegel has observed (which may have actually contributed to his positive conception of the inevitability of war) that our reality leaves much to be desired in that respect:

What experience and history teach is this: that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

With which judgment I cheerlessly concur without any doubt or reservation.