Hegel's Philosophy of the State

The German philosophy professor Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel died in 1831, but his philosophical system dominated the German universities during Marx's student days in Bonn and Berlin. As we can tell from the Letter to his Father, written by an extremely precocious nineteen year old undergraduate, Marx became immersed in Hegel's complicated theories quite young, and he spent his mid-twenties, from 1843 to 1845 in particular, wrestling with the problems of Hegel's philosophical inheritance as they were articulated in the philosophy of the so-called Young, or Left Hegelians. Although scholars have argued fiercely, and still do, about the extent to which Marx did or did not repudiate or make a clean break with Hegelian philosophy, Hegel's thought certainly acted as a major spur to the young Marx, driving him to develop a substantial critique that would form the basis for his own intellectual system. And Hegel's philosophical language affected Marx's writing immensely in all his inquiries: Marx drew on his jargon and on the methods of dialectics, perpetually trying to make the effort to move from the "abstract" to the "concrete", and from the "formal" to the "real", and seeking to penetrate beneath the outer "appearance" of phenomena to the "essence" inside.

Hegel is far too complicated a writer to come to grips with in a satisfying manner in just one week of a course devoted to the ideas of somebody else. Nevertheless, it is still worth making the effort to read some of Hegel's own argument directly, rather than relying on the over-simplified exegesis found in many books on Marx's own thought. Hegel's work is famous for being difficult, and you shouldn't worry at all if bits seem incomprehensible to you at first, second or third attempt. My remarks in this handout will orient you a bit; and we will share the results of our encounter with this forbidding (but richly rewarding) text in class next week.

Hegel's Philosophy of Right, the book we're going to look at, is one element of a much larger philosophical project which also includes the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Science of Logic and the Encyclopaedia. Much of his work, including the Philosophy of Right, is based on the lecture courses Hegel would give to students as part of his university teaching. The so-called "Additions" to the Philosophy of Right, for example, which are found at the back of the Knox volume, are explanatory remarks that Hegel made in the classroom to his students when he was using his own work as a textbook. They are therefore quite useful for trying to understand what Hegel was trying to get at, on those occasions when he is being especially confusing.

Also of interest, and generally more accessible, are his Lectures on the History of Philosophy and Lectures on the Philosophy of History. A couple of remarks about Hegel's views on history are in order here, because his historical vision lurks in the background of the Philosophy of Right, and because it is structurally quite similar to the interpretation of history that Marx will go on to develop, even though the content and animating forces in their rival depictions are quite different. Hegel presents history as a rational process characterised by the development, or unfolding, of freedom. Sometimes Hegel talks of the progression of Geist, the German word meaning "spirit" or "mind", and from which we get our word "Zeitgeist" -- literally, "the spirit of the age". And there's also a theological dimension to this understanding: history is in one sense at least the process of God's coming to understand his own creation.

But history is not a story of simple, steady, unilinear progress. Rather, new forms of freedom emerge out of the conflicts of history, and it is only in retrospect that we can see which parties in history were the bearers of progress, and which stood in its path. When we act in the world, we act blindly; only those who come afterwards can see how our actions fit into, contribute to and partially constitute the wider narrative. "Modernity" is a key concept in Hegel's thinking about history, and two events stand out as being especially important in inaugurating the modern age: the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution. For the first introduced a crucial principle of freedom of individual conscience into religious life in Europe; the second extended this principle into political life with its declarations of universal, individual human rights. Religion and politics could never be the same again; history had measurably advanced; and the character of human freedom was significantly deepened. Yet untold thousands were slaughtered in the European wars surrounding these cataclysmic events. This, in a sense, is the price of progress.

The Philosophy of Right, then, is about a lot of things. It is a textbook on moral philosophy, in which Hegel explores the presuppositions and conditions for personhood and moral subjectivity, the subjects of the first two chapters of the book (which we won't be reading in this course). What kind of rights does an agent require in order to be able to act in the world? What demands does the moral point of view place on us? What problems does it help to solve? To what dangers is it susceptible? In the third part of the book, Hegel presents a systematic set of social and political principles to govern what he calls ethical life, discussing in turn the three key institutions of the family, civil society and state, and it is from these pages that the reading assignment for this week is substantially drawn.

One more word before we plunge into the text: you may already have noticed that everything in Hegel goes in threes. "Abstract right", "Morality", "Ethical life". "Family", "Civil Society", "State". There are many of these clusters of three. There's also the language of "Thesis", "Antithesis" and "Synthesis", of which you might have heard to describe Hegel's philosophy -- but be very careful with this language, because these are terms that Hegel himself never uses, and they are often quite misleading. Often in these sets of threes, the first element represents a "moment" of "undifferentiated" or "immediate" unity; the second element is the "moment" of "differentiated disunity"; and the third is the final higher or complex unity that encompasses, goes beyond, and completes what has gone before. And the movement from the first moment through the second to the third is often called a dialectical progression.

One good illustration of a progression of this kind is suggested by the social scientist Jon Elster: a person might start with dogmatic or unreflective belief (i), pass through a phase of doubt and uncertainty (ii) and end up with a much more reflective belief (iii). What's interesting about this progression is that one can't get from (i) to (iii) directly, but must pass through (ii), nor can one pass from (iii) back to (i) again. Nor is this a simple pendulum movement swinging from belief to doubt andback again, because the two kinds of belief are quite different. Patterns like this often repeat themselves in many varieties of Marxism: on the crude Marxist view of history, for example, it crops up as the movement from prehistorical primitive communism, to the historical divided and conflicted class societies, which pave the way for the future higher kind of communist society after the abolition of capitalism.

In the Preface to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel explains a bit about what this book is, and what he is trying to do. It gets quite dense at times, and you should feel free to skim. Slow down to read more carefully the last few pages of this Preface, though, which are easily the most important paragraphs for our purposes (pp.10-13 in the Knox edition). Here Hegel raises the question that will preoccupy Marx about how "philosophy" and "the actual world" relate to one another, and lays out the slogan that "what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational", one that seems to mark Hegel as a strict conservative until we come to see the strange ways in which he uses both of these words. For both terms refer in his philosophical vocabulary to processes rather than to states of affairs, and Hegel thinks that there is something inexorable about the historical process that culminates in the highest kinds of freedom. Like many other philosophical theologians, Hegel thinks that present misery can be explained with reference to future good, but unlike them he also thinks that it is through understanding how history develops that we come to see why this is so, rather than appealing to either divine mystery or divine judgement in constructing our explanation. And if this is enough to make history rational, then when we examine the present -- a snapshot of history -- the astute observer armed with the Hegelian philosophy of history will detect the ways in which what is actual contributes to, and constitutes part of, this rational process.

One result of thinking in this way is suggested in the next paragraph (p.11), where he suggests that his attempt "to portray the state as inherently rational" is diametrically opposed to "an attempt to construct the state as it ought to be". Rather than insisting on a sharp separation between what is and what ought to be, as so many other moralists and religious thinkers do, Hegel tries to show how universal values are embodied -- often imperfectly -- in existing institutions, and suggests the ways in which the social and political institutions of modernity develop such that their rationality and their elements of universality will become fully apparent. And because philosophers must examine their own present rather than sketch utopias, on this view, philosophy itself can aspire to be no more than "its own time apprehended in thoughts". At the end of the Preface Hegel returns to these thoughts about philosophy and time. Pay particular attention to the penultimate paragraph -- perhaps the most famous thing Hegel ever wrote -- and try to see what he is getting at when he insists that the "Owl of Minerva" (a symbol of philosophical wisdom) "spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk". Does it? Why might it not?

In the opening numbered paragraphs, §§1-2, Hegel introduces the subject matter in the most general way. This reflects one of the main features of the book, which is its progression from what is abstract to what is concrete -- key pieces of jargon for both the Hegelians and the Marxists. Hegel will often begin with an abstract, conceptual, dogmatic or definitional claim, then announce what follows from this, and as he lays out consequences and complications the philosophical narrative gets thicker, richer and more fully developed. The paragraphs may be numbered, but they are not to be taken in isolation: there is often a very palpable sense in which one paragraph follows on from the next. In the opening two chapters of the book, Hegel describes the spheres of "abstract right" and "morality", and in each case the analysis examines very general features of human agency, personality and subjectivity. By the third chapter, on "ethical life", from which almost the entire reading assignment is drawn, Hegel is discussing specific social institutions and how they interact with one another, often in considerable detail.

In this section of the assignment, look particularly at the Remark (the slightly smaller print that follows the numbered paragraph) to §2, which contains some interesting reflections on the method Hegel is adopting in this work. In §4 Hegel makes his famous assertion that "the basis of right is mind", and the Remark emphasises the importance of the freedom of the will in this philosophy. The final paragraph that I have assigned in this first part of the book is the isolated §31 (p.34), in which Hegel makes some of his more explicit remarks about his "dialectical method".

In §§181-208, Hegel introduces and describes the system of civil society. Usually when the phrase is used today it refers to the institutions that are not obviously either a part of the state or the market, including churches, newspapers, unions, sports clubs and the like. We might call this the "Tocquevillian" use of the term, after the French aristocrat who complimented the Americans on their "art of association". But as we shall see, Hegel's civil society is quite different: don't allow yourself to be misled by this currently fashionable use of the term, and try to understand what Hegel is trying to say.

In the paragraphs previous to this extract, Hegel has been describing the way the family is constituted, with famous discussions of marriage, divorce and the respective natures of men and women. §181 is a transitional paragraph, as Hegel pushes his discussion forward from the family to civil society: one way (but only one) to see how this transition works is simply to notice how the nuclear family dissolves itself, as the children grow up and leave home to become adults capable of functioning in the wider civil society. And since one of the functions of the family is precisely to enable the children to make this transition, we can say that the family dissolves itself as it fulfills itself, which is something that the Hegelian jargon term Aufhebung captures very well in German. This movement of abolition-through-fulfillment is one of the key elements of dialectical philosophy, and when we read Marx together look out for the number of pregnancy metaphors he deploys that share this structure, whether it is the new order maturing in the womb of the old, or the revolutionary proletariat serving as the midwife of history, together with many other examples.

In §182-186 Hegel emphasises some key aspects of civil society: it is the sphere of our lives that relates to want-satisfaction; and to the instrumental use we make of others in order to satisfy our wants; and to the multiplication of needs and desires that society creates; and to the system of personal interdependence that is created as a result of the various relationships we enter into in civil society. At §187 Hegel introduces the idea of the individual as "burgher" -- which will be transmuted by Marx into the "bourgeois" with which we are all more familiar -- suggesting a distinction familiar since Rousseau between bourgeois and citoyen, between men in their more economic and more political aspects. Notice also Hegel's thoughts on education-as-liberation in the Remark to this paragraph. In §188 civil society is itself anatomized, and it turns out to have three components of its own: the system of needs, the administration of justice and the police and the corporation. We will read about the first and the third of these.

As in his other inquiries, Hegel's philosophy begins with simple elements, and he progressively paints a fuller picture of the subject of his investigation. In §189 Hegel introduces the system of needs and links his philosophical investigation explicitly to the Classical Political Economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, but he also marks some of the differences that hold between them. In §§189-91 Hegel begins to theorize the nature of needs and means and the ways in which these are conditioned by society; in §§193-5 Hegel argues that a principle of equality and liberation is operating in all transactions in commercial society, but that these principles are abstract, formal principles, rather than being substantial satisfying ethical realities. §§196 introduces the idea of work, with thoughts on education in §197 and on mechanization in §198. Hegel next explains how class divisions make their appearance (§201), and introduces us to three classes: the agricultural class of land-owning farmers (§203), the business class of artisans, manufacturers and traders (§204), and the universal class of civil servants (§206). Notice why the civil servants are considered the "universal" class -- Hegel will consider this class at greater length below at §§289-297. (Marx will hold onto the idea of a universal class, but deny that it is the bureaucracy). Finally, Hegel makes remarks about how the class system contains a happy mix of "subjective" and "objective" factors (§208) and the proper kind of ethical harmony that a well-tempered class society possesses and sustains (§§207-8). (In what ways does Marx's version of class society differ from this?).

Hegel begins his discussion of the police (again -- what does Hegel mean when he uses this term?) with notions of crime and injury (§§231-234). In the next few paragraphs, Hegel uses ideas which we usually associate with Marx: in §236 he explains where class struggle comes from; in §238 he talks of the "estrangement" (alienation?) that civil society cannot but create. §§241-242 start an important discussion of the ineliminable problem that poverty poses for modern society; and Hegel's thoughts on welfare and on the rabble (which Marx will call the Lumpenproletariat and right-wing sociologists today call the underclass) appear at §§242-245 -- thoughts that powerfully echo throughout the contemporary American public policy debate, and far more so than in Europe. And this in turns provokes reflections on the search for overseas markets (§246), overseas trade and communications (§247), and colonial adventures (§248). Here Hegel's argument is extremely close in some of its detail to the argument Marx presents in The Communist Manifesto.

After he has surveyed some of these sources of instability and conflict in civil society, Hegel now turns to the idea of the corporation as a partial solution to some of these troubles -- associational bodies that act as "second families" for their members (§§249-255). It is only a partial and limited solution, however, and so at §256 Hegel makes another transition, from civil society to the sphere of the state, the final section of the Philosophy of Right. In the opening paragraphs of this section, §§257-9 Hegel introduces the state as being "absolutely rational", presents a long Remark on the importance of not confusing the state with the civil society and presents three perspectives on the state: its internal composition, or its Constitution; its being one actor among others in the realm of International Law, and finally its place in the narrative of World-History, the ultimate arena in which the state will exist and to which it will contribute.

We are skipping the discussion of constitutional law, except to look at §270, a long paragraph on the relationship between the state and religion, and one that has a fascinating footnote on pp.168-9 which not only contains one of Hegel's interesting scattered remarks about America, but which also contains his argument about the Jews and their political emancipation -- very much a pressing contemporary issue when Hegel wrote -- which will set the stage somewhat for the later contributions by Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx, whose essay On the Jewish Question we will read next week.

Then we jump ahead to the discussion of the political executive, passages that are a bit easier to follow because of the way in which Hegel is discussing fairly concrete political institutions in some detail. In §§287-297, Hegel renews his discussion of the civil service, the bureaucracy, or the "universal class". He tries to specify what are the proper affairs of the corporations and what of the bureaucracy, and there are some remarks on the executive division of labour, on recruitment, and on tenure of appointment. §§298-314 is the passage on the legislature: we learn what it does at §§299-300, and then Hegel moves into a discussion of the estates: roughly speaking he advocates a bicameral parliament, where the agricultural class fills one chamber and the business class the other. He also thinks that the deputies are to be elected not by voters but by the corporations, which we encountered earlier: they therefore represent societal interests rather than agglomerations of individuals. The estates as a whole serve to mediate between the state and the civil society (§302). This section also contains some interesting attacks on the practices of modern democracies, such as the Remark to §308, which flatly denies that everybody should have a share in political deliberation and decision-making. Here the discussion shifts to questions of elections, and more and more ideas of deliberation and opinion seep into the text. §§316-319 presents Hegel's thoughts on public opinion: he understands that the concept has an important place in modern politics, and tries to spell out what it is while remaining attentive to its "self-contradictions", its limitations and its dangers. Finally, the long Remark to §319 is a discussion of the question of the freedom of the press.

And last of all, to end both the reading assignment and the Philosophy of Right, the final eight pages of the main text, §§341-360, are an all-too-brief presentation of the importance and the progress of World History. As with so much of Hegel, Marx will later substantially rewrite these pages, but keeping a remarkably similar philosophical structure in place while he does so. In §341 Hegel presents World History as the ultimate "court of judgement", but he insists in §342 that this does not make its verdicts those "of mere might". Notice the important paragraphs §§344-5, the reflection on the role of individuals in history at §348, and the rather distasteful and blunt remarks about "civilised" and "barbarian" nations at §351. Finally, to close the entire book, Hegel offers a sketch of the main periods of World History, as it progresses from the "Oriental" to the "Greek" to the "Roman" and ultimately to the "Germanic" realm of history, in §354-358: Marx will later replace these categories with his notion of "modes of production" governing the different historical epochs.