Sometimes blogging is a really tiresome pastime. I recently wrote in a recent post that Hegel was a “moderately liberal constitutional monarchist,” which has the virtue of being more or less accurate. For instance, consider the following:
Hegel stresses the need to recognize that the realities of the modern state necessitate a strong public authority along with a populace that is free and unregimented [bold mine-DL]. The principle of government in the modern world is constitutional monarchy [bold mine-DL], the potentialities of which can be seen in Austria and Prussia.
There are all sorts of responses to Hegel’s position, and it might be interesting to pick up our copies of Philosophy of Right and sort through his arguments. Denying that he held such a position, when it is the beginning of most discussions of Hegel’s political philosophy, seems to me to be an unsatisfactory response. Repeating some caricature of Hegel’s position that you could have picked up in The Open Society And Its Enemies and pretending that this is the appropriate understanding of Hegel’s politics are not the methods likely to persuade anyone of Hegel’s terrible totalitarianism.
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July 7th, 2007 at 9:38 am
moldbug
“If the state is confused with civil society, and if its specific end is laid down as the security and protection of property and personal freedom, then the interest of the individuals as such becomes the ultimate end of their association, and it follows that membership of the state is something optional. But the state’s relation to the individual is quite different from this. Since the state is mind objectified, it is only as one of its members that the individual himself has objectivity, genuine individuality, and an ethical life.”
A typical thought from your average “moderately liberal constitutional monarchist.”
July 7th, 2007 at 11:27 am
Daniel Larison
There’s the way to pull quotes out of context and not admit your error. Never mind that this quote would seem to affirm that he does *not* confuse state and civil society. Confusing them is a vital part of what it means to be a totalitarian.
If you read polis for state (or if you mistranslated polis as state), Hegel would be saying nothing here that Aristotle had not said already. The reality is that, for all of this abstract talk about what the state is, he *was* a constitutional monarchist who believed in a relatively limited regime. You can ignore that all day, if you like, but you won’t persuade anyone.
If you want to say that there is a potential for giving the state too much power because of this sort of language, I would agree with you. That isn’t what you said. The point is that *Hegel* didn’t want to give the state that kind of power. Other people, later, pursued a nationalist understanding of the state that became what we might properly call totalitarian.
July 7th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
moldbug
I really don’t see how the translation of Staat as “State” can be described as tendentious. And where did I endorse Aristotle?
What Hegel is saying is that civil society is not enough - that an individual cannot live without a divine and mystical state. Are you really saying this is out of context?
Our disagreement is in my opinion that state-worship is nine-tenths of totalitarianism. Once the state is divine, it is trivial for it to argue that any specific policy which we would describe as “totalitarian” is necessary to its organic existence, and in fact this is exactly what happened. You may not share this opinion, but surely many do.
July 7th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Daniel Larison
You didn’t endorse Aristotle. The point is that it is that Hegel is not saying anything in the quote you offered that necessarily makes his ideas of membership in the political community significantly different from Aristotle’s. That rather sharply qualifies the charge of proto-totalitarianism, as far as I’m concerned.
I am saying that you refuse to cede the obvious point that Hegel was exactly what I described him as being. You have also called me intellectually dishonest for having said something that a sizeable number of Hegel scholars say all the time. I grow extremely weary of this.
State-worship would be a very bad thing, but even then it matters what kind of state we’re talking about. At bottom, since Christianity acknowledges that all power is given from God, any Christian political thinker might, by your lights, be reasonably considered a forerunner of totalitarianism. Yet divine-right absolutism and totalitarianism are two entirely different phenomena that have very little in common. In your view, it should be the case that totalitarianism sprang from ideas that divinised the state, because imputing some divinity or divine chrism to the state or ruler paves the way for totalitarianism, yet it seems clear that totalitarian ideologies primarily derived from the denial of any sacred order and a repudiation of the role of divine providence in history. Totalitarians put the state and/or nation in the place of God–they did not attribute divinity to the state, but rather denied divinity’s significance all together. Totalitarianism is above all anthropocentric and involves mass revolution–it is the antithesis of all political theories that invest some measure of divinity in political authority.
In the end, your complaint against Hegel is about what his ideas may imply if they are read in a very particular way. That would involve reading them in such a way that ignores almost everything that Hegel claims he is actually in favour of in his own time. It means ignoring the man’s actual political leanings and attributing to him the politics of another century. It is anachronism of the worst sort.
July 7th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
moldbug
Strangely enough, almost all historical Hegelians - certainly including Marx, and also including Woodrow Wilson - read him in exactly the way I, Popper, and Goldberg describe. Your argument boils down to the position that Hegel didn’t mean (a) what he said, and (b) what most of his disciples thought he said.
I am not a Christian, so this one is easy for me, but I do think there’s a connection between Christian political thought and totalitarianism. Does the name “Calvin” mean anything to you? Divine-right absolutism a la Filmer was on the Catholic track and much less successful at surviving into the 20th century, but one could mention Falangism.
Aristotle certainly believed in the polis. So did all the Greeks. Is statism new? Why should it be? We can admire Aristotle because he was less statist than Plato, not because he was utterly free from sin.
Also, Aristotle had some other thoughts besides, which I’m not sure is really clear of Hegel. There’s a difference between someone who isn’t 100% sure about the Warren Commission and someone whose entire intellectual energy is focused on the grassy knoll.
I accused you of intellectual dishonesty, or at least carelessness, because the obvious reading of the word “liberal” within the context that you used it is not accurate, and it is not the meaning you are defending now. I have certainly been guilty of similar carelessnesses and I try to admit it when someone calls me on it. None of us is rigorously editing our posts, and conceding a point every now and then doesn’t impair your credibility - quite the contrary.
July 7th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
tedschan
Wow, so Aristotle is a “statist” now simply because there is some sort of reality to the community as such? Unbelievable.
July 7th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
Daniel Larison
No, you accused me of intellectual dishonesty (i.e., lying) because I called Hegel a “moderately liberal constitutional monarchist.” You claimed that this was self-evidently wrong, and only a dishonest person would say this. In what has followed, you have not managed to show that my claim was even wrong, much less willfully dishonest. At best, we follow two different, conflicting interpretations of Hegel. I find the revisionist accounts of Hegel persuasive, and you obviously don’t. You declared mine to be self-evidently wrong, while I have attempted to at least provide some argument for why the tradition you’re following has misunderstood things.
You want to call all kinds of people, including Robespierre, totalitarian, and you blithely refer to Aristotle as “statist,” but you claim to be terribly concerned about precision and context. Just give it up. In blogging people do make mistakes, and I have a pretty good record of owning up to mine when I have made them. If I had any sense that you had proven my claim wrong, I would say so. On the contrary, I have become even more convinced that my offhand description of Hegel was right.
As I have demonstrated on several occasions, my description was and remains accurate. I don’t need to concede a point when I have not been shown to be in error. When talking about a 19th century figure, the meaning of liberal should be clear to anyone who knows something about political philosophy. It means liberal in the sense of 19th century liberalism. I have since made it very clear.
This applied to Hegel. 19th century liberalism does not obviously or necessarily lead to totalitarianism, and early 19th century German liberals are not, barring some much more convincing argument being made, obviously proto-totalitarian. If Hegel was a German liberal, and he was, it seems very difficult to read his ideas of a limited constitutional monarchy as the foundations for an unlimited mass state a century later.
July 7th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
moldbug
I accused you of recklessly overstating your case, which is an accusation I stand by.
In Edgar Lee Masters’ Lincoln the Man, he describes Lincoln’s special fondness for an old law textbook called Chitty on Pleading. Masters’ point is that Lincoln was generally without deeply-felt opinions and would, like a good lawyer, take any line of attack he found effective. Like you, I am not a Lincoln fan, I certainly cannot accuse you of not having opinions, and I think that generally you are a considerable asset to the conservative intellectual scene and one whose influence will be felt for many years. However, I detect a note of Chitty and I don’t think it does you - or your cause - a service.
Your description of Hegel is perfectly accurate. Under definition 15(b)(2) of the word “liberal,” that is, “liberal by the standards of post-Napoleonic Prussia,” a definition which is in no way antonymic to “totalitarian” (Turnvater Jahn was a “liberal” by exactly the same standard), and which no reasonable person could possibly have assumed you meant in context. And including the tricky qualifier “moderately,” whose meaning a casual reader is likely to take in reverse - as I did, thinking you’d said “moderate liberal.”
Your description of Hegel also makes Goldberg look like an ass. Under meaning 1(a) of the word “liberal” in its 19th-century context, meaning “Whig,” a description which in the context of Hegel bears no resemblance to reality, but which is a definitive refutation of any association with totalitarianism. Exactly as one would expect from the context of your argument.
You are young enough and smart enough to do anything you want. If you want to go to law school, I am sure you’d excel there.
But you are a historian. You are smarter, more perceptive, and more sensible than Jonah Goldberg. You can score points off of him with ease - though it is not even clear to me why you would want to do so - while maintaining a much higher standard of argument.
Instead, you offered a description that was at best tendentious and debatable, presenting it as a well-known historical fact that would seem to refute the title contention of Goldberg’s forthcoming book. Goldberg may be an ass, but he is not that much of an ass. 95% of readers might swallow this kind of argument, like good jurors. But it is the other 5% that count.
Frankly, this is a waste of your talents. Your ability as a writer is obvious, and you are basically a sane man in a political world of almost universal delusion. You should be able to make this obvious to anyone who stops by your blog. Instead you are using high-school debate tactics to skewer political hacks who are nowhere near worthy of your intelligence or energy.
As you know, we live in a world of mediocrity. One of the many ways in which this system perpetuates itself is that young, brilliant writers, such as yourself, are insufficiently challenged. They see how easy it is to be only slightly better than the mediocre hacks, and still be flooded with oceans of praise. So they reach this point and relax, and after a few years they learn to rest on their laurels and are simply assimilated.
I believe you are capable of writing a blog which, if a random liberal - in the modern sense of the word - accidentally landed on it, would stand a very decent chance of helping him realize that his worldview is completely delusional. You are certainly capable of doing the same for certain kinds of neoconservative, and I suspect you have done it for quite a few. But how much does this really profit the world? Why hunt rabbit when you could hunt bear?
But Chitty on Pleading will not get you bear. At your best your tone has the kind of quality, both magisterial and down-to-earth, that convinces people who don’t intend to be convinced. But you are constantly falling out of it. You don’t tend to give your political opponents the benefit of the doubt, you don’t assume they are intelligent and sincere unless the converse is obvious, and your arguments are clearly motivated by the desire to rack up a rhetorical high-score. This is not the way to present yourself as a voice of reason and intelligence in a deluded and mediocre world. Which is more the pity, because it’s basically what you are.