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HEGEL’S POLITICAL BIAS CONTRADICTS HIS DIALECTICAL APPROACH
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HEGEL’S POLITICAL BIAS CONTRADICTS HIS DIALECTICAL APPROACHAnalyzing Hegel’s background, one of his critics has written: “Born in 1770 (a few months before Beethoven), Hegel grew up in Stuttgart, the principal city of the duchy of Wurttemberg. His ancestors and relatives included state officials, clergymen, and lawyers. According to his sister, Hegel expressed an early interest in a legal career and was still interested in obtaining a legal rather than a theological education in his late teens. But Hegel was trained as a theologian (and self-trained as a philosopher), not a lawyer, at the Protestant seminary at Tubingen (1788- 93). Even in later years when he regularly lectured on the philosophy of law, he never studied law with the same care that he devoted to other subjects” (Hoffheimer, cited below, p. 834). A career in “theology” certainly makes one qualified to discuss the relation between religion and society. And it may include the philosophical background necessaly to analyze moral issues. But Hegel’s privileged upbringing itself blocked a more clear understanding about the roots of civil strife, and in his eagerness to find a philosophical “root” under the growth of the civil and international strife around him, Hegel applied a creative and somewhat mystical philosophical method to real political issues, and this resulted in a Panglossian or Pollyanish view of the world as the best it could possibly be at any given point in history. In fact, this flaw makes Hegelian conservatism a failure even on its own criteria. This is true for two reasons: 1. Hegelian conservatism makes a normative claim about states of affairs, that the state is good now, even in moments of political crisis which are precisely the time that it seems the state is becoming historically obsolete. The presence of protest against the existing social order may not be, as Hegel believes, a mere anticipation of changes which, incrementally, will eventually happen. It may instead be a sign of something that is already happening, the sign of the obsolescence of Hegel’s state itself. 2. It favors the old and established over the new, which seems a pre-dialectical judgment. Hegel’s final judgment, politically, is that “the real is rational,” that whatever is happenmng now must be meant to happen. But “being meant to happen” might mean that any number of threats to the state, even in their early and primordial stages, could be “real,” and that it is not conservatism, but its opposite, radicalism, that is appropriate. Hegelian conservatism is the natural outgrowth of a philosophy written by a brilliant man in the employment of a bad government. Democracy was not unheard of during his life; there is little excuse for Hegel to have justified the German monarchy. Thus far, we have seen that the dialectic, even if it is a useful analytical tool (and according to strict logical rigors it can be little more), is inappropriate to judge history; it gives a sense of inevitability to something which may be neither inevitable nor desirable. Politicizing the dialectic of ideas is bound to result in a kind of absolutism, of which Engels has much to say. Using it demand one’s surrender to the state is not only a hasty generalization, but is also dangerous to freedom. USING MARX TO REFUTE HEGELEngels argues many things in this section, most notably that Hegel is a politicized constructivist, a philosopher who, with whatever good ideas and good intentions, manufactured a system in order to meet a political need. What, however, makes Hegelianism more susceptible to such manipulation? The obvious answer to a Marxist is that if we are only discussing ‘ideas,” then because ideas are themselves constructs of particular dominant or dominated groups, they are naturally made to be manipulated. Ideology, the clash of ideas that is the finishing point for Hegel, is nothing more than one component in a larger system for Marx and Engels, a system based on the material world, not the world of ideas. Marx “stood Hegel on his head,” as the saying goes. Hegel saw the clash of ideas, Marx saw the clash of flesh and blood, and the ideas only later. Hegel believed the state to be the most rational of social agents; Marx avoided the conservatism of Hegel by invoking the cynicism of class conflict. We already know how idealism causes conservatism. For Marx and Engels, however, there is an added conservatizing element. In class societies, those who have most of the economic goods are less willing to see social problems as being the result of material inequality. They are likely to invent and support “ideological’ arguments, and then their philosophers will, like Hegel, spend their time discussing the clash of the ideas, while outside of their parlors and classrooms, real people are starving. In this sense, Hegel makes us forget. Hegel robs us of our memory of true carnage, the blood and fire Marx speaks of in Section Eight of Capital, the robbery and murder that has constituted acquisition and enterprise in Western history. If Hegel can so easily make us think that ideas fight wars with each other and rise from their own ashes like ideological firebirds, then it is no wonder that Hitler found so much to inspire him in Hegels confident statism. And so one wonders what Hegeliamsm might mean to a terrorist somewhere with a weapon of mass destruction, having just read in Hegels philosophy of history that certain people, the people who change history, are exempt from moral accountability. A materialist dialectic is necessary to understand real history and change. Hegel can only give us a system which examines ideas in the abstract, which removes them from their material context in order to examine them. History deserves better; Marxists believe that every real war is a war over resources. Hegel might show us as much as the ideas generated by the powerful in order to justify those wars, but nothing more. He may have been correct about how to find the truth, but incorrect about where to look, and who was to find it. 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