Nathan Jun. Anarchist Studies. Volume 22, Issue 2, Autumn-Winter 2014.
In this essay, I argue that there are two more or less distinct theories of the State in Hegel. The first, and better known, is developed in the Philosophy of Right, wherein Hegel endorses the notion of a coercive, centralised, and hierarchical ‘Ideal State’. This is precisely the theory which certain radical Hegelians of the nineteenth century (e.g., Marx and Bakunin) viewed with such deep suspicion. The second, which has not received as much attention by commentators, appears in the Phenomenology and other early writings. Although this theory introduces many of the key components of Hegel’s later political philosophy, it is nonetheless far more radical in its political implications—most important, in its gesturing toward a society which makes room for the realisation of the stateless, classless vision of anarchist communism. The point is not to demonstrate that Hegel is inconsistent or self-contradictory, but show that there are elements of creative tension within his political theory which are not only sufficient to vindicate him from the criticisms of Marx and Bakunin, but also to re-contextualise him as a radical precursor. As I shall argue, the kind of society that emerges in the final chapters of the Phenomenology need not contain the elements of coercion and class struggle which appear in the Philosophy of Right and repulse Marx and Bakunin. On the contrary, such a society may be understood as prefiguring the classless, stateless society which both Marx and Bakunin ultimately endorse.
I
The most fundamental questions of political philosophy are those which concern the nature and scope of state authority; for example: What is the State and how does it come into being? Does the State possess a ‘right’ to rule which implies a correlative ‘obligation’ to obey? If so, how, and to what extent? The aim of this paper is to explore Hegel’s views on these and other questions pertaining to the State and its authority—questions of obvious importance to Hegel given the sheer volume of exacting and comprehensive analysis he devotes to them. The difficulty, of course, comes in interpreting Hegel’s answers to these questions, which is a famously daunting task.
Among modern philosophers, Hegel is arguably one of the most resistant to synopsis and circumscription. This explains the proliferation of rival and mutually exclusive interpretations of Hegel’s political philosophy following his death in 1831. As Shlomo Avineri points out, ‘[A]lmost every shade of political philosophy has had protagonists claiming to state its case in what they considered to be a legitimate interpretation or derivative of Hegelianism.’ An early example of this phenomenon is the conflict between the so-called ‘Left’ (or ‘Young’) Hegelians and the ‘Right’ (or ‘Old’) Hegelians in the 1840s. Whereas the latter group generally regarded Hegel as an orthodox Christian and a loyal Prussian patriot, the former tended to view him as a bourgeois reactionary.
Modern and contemporary discussions of Hegel’s theory are in many respects mere continuations of the earlier conflict mentioned above. In the middle of the twentieth century, for example, some commentators, following the Right Hegelians, viewed Hegel as a monarchist, authoritarian, and/or crypto-fascist who believed, among other things, that Prussia in the 1830s was the actualisation of the Ideal State. More recent commentators, following Left Hegelians such as Bruno Bauer, have tended to see Hegel as a ‘philosopher of freedom’ whose system, if not altogether radical in its own right, nonetheless laid the groundwork for the radical philosophical tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Perhaps such disagreements are simply a consequence of the ‘difficulty’ of interpreting Hegel. But there are other possibilities as well. It is possible, for example, to interpret Hegel as having developed a series of distinct and (more or less) incongruous theories of the State rather than a single, uniform theory. Hegel’s mature political philosophy is developed almost entirely in his later writings, most notably —and in some cases exclusively—in the Philosophy of Right, and it is possible that these later writings diverge significantly from some or all of the ideas outlined in earlier works, such as the Phenomenology of Spirit. Another possibility is that Hegel intended to develop a single, uniform theory of the State—such that all the ideas contained in his earlier works are, by his own lights at least, consistent with those of later works—but failed because the theory is somehow internally inconsistent or self-contradictory.
In my view there is little doubt that Hegel himself viewed the later writings as an extension of or elaboration upon the earlier writings. Nevertheless, as I shall argue, it is possible to distinguish between two more or less distinct theories of the State in Hegel. The first, and better known, is developed in the Philosophy of Right, wherein Hegel endorses the notion of a coercive, centralised, and hierarchical ‘Ideal State’. This is precisely the theory which certain radical Hegelians of the nineteenth century, like Marx and Bakunin, viewed with such deep suspicion. (I will examine some of Marx’s and Bakunin’s criticisms below.) The second, which has generally received less attention, appears in the Phenomenology and other early writings. In this paper, I argue that (a) the problematic developed in the final chapters of the Phenomenology is not solved by Hegel’s later theory of the State; and (b) the Phenomenology provides a philosophical context for the anarchist communist vision of post-Revolutionary society articulated by Bakunin (i.e., a stateless, classless society in which property is owned and managed collectively). My goal is not to claim that Hegel himself was an anarchist communist—a deeply problematic assertion that is belied by the philosophical and historical evidence. Rather, and more modestly, I want to show that there are elements of creative tension within his political theory which allow us to rethink the Phenomenology in important ways—specifically, as a mode of understanding Bakunin’s anarchist model of full communism.
II
The relationship of Hegel’s thought to that of Marx and other radical Hegelians is famously complicated. As Burns and Fraser note, ‘There is an ambivalence about Marx’s attitude to Hegel which is present throughout Marx’s life and which can be clearly discerned in even his early writings.’ Because any attempt to disentangle this relationship, however cursory, would far exceed the aim and scope of this paper, I will present a few of Marx’s and Bakunin’s critiques in an abbreviated and general form.
Hegel construes the history of Spirit (the whole or totality of human consciousness) as a series of dialectic stages or moments, each of which is marked by a distinctive conflict between the positive content (thesis) of Spirit’s previous moments and its coming to see itself as alienated from, or in contradiction with, that content (antithesis). Spirit’s reflective recognition of the collision of thesis and antithesis results in a synthetic reconciliation (aufheben) which comes to be contradicted in turn. The process continues until we reach a point of maximal consistency. In political life, this point is achieved through the institution of the rational state, which resolves the contradictions inherent in the ethical life of civil (or bourgeois) society—especially those stemming from familial and class relations—and in this sense is necessary for the expression and sustenance of freedom. The state, as ‘the actuality of concrete freedom’, negotiates the ‘battlefield of private interest’.
In his Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State (1843) and Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), Marx formulates a critique of those sections of the Philosophy of Right and the Phenomenology which pertain to the State. In his view, Hegel needlessly mystifies the dialectic by inverting the relationship between ‘actual existents’ or ‘real subjects’ and ‘predicates of universal determination’. In other words, he treats individual subjects and institutions, including the state, as ‘vehicles’ or ‘manifestations of the “mystical Idea”‘, and not the other way around. Moreover, although Hegel recognises the process of human ‘self-creation’ whereby human beings construct themselves through labour within ‘forms of estrangement’, the labour in question is only ‘abstract, mental labour’ that produces mere ‘entities of thought’. Thus, although Hegel agrees with Marx that civil society is contradictory, ‘estranged from man’ and ‘alien to a truly human life’, the recognition of this estrangement and alienation only comes about for him in ‘abstract, philosophical thought’. For Marx, of course, it is material labour rather than the movement of Spirit that is fundamental in explaining history. And this critique, which is arguably the most central, is not unique to Marx. Bakunin, too, was a thoroughgoing materialist who vociferously insists that ‘facts come before ideas … [that] the ideal, as Proudhon said, is but a flower, the roots of which lie in the material conditions of existence … [and that] the whole history of humanity. is but the reflection of its economic history.’
It should be noted that these critiques are specifically directed against the whole of Hegel’s idealism and not just his political philosophy. But my purpose here is not to defend idealism, since, on the contrary, I accept Marx’s materialism and endorse his critiques as general objections to Hegel’s ontology. Rather, my aim is to argue that the Phenomenology offers a way of philosophically understanding and justifying the stateless and classless society which Bakunin and other anarchist communists envisage. The fact that this groundwork is laid along idealist rather than materialist lines is, I contend, largely irrelevant to my thesis. We ought to focus, therefore, on critiques of Hegel’s theory which proceed from premises internal to it. One such critique is that the state itself, and not just bourgeois civil society, is a form of estrangement, rather than a vehicle through which to overcome estrangement. This can be understood in two ways: first, that the state fails to fulfill, or even counteracts, the role Hegel imparts to it; and second, that the state is unnecessary to fulfilling this role. Putting aside the fact that, for Marx and Bakunin, political structures originate in civil society and civil society originates in the economic relations of production, both agree with Hegel that civil society is contradictory. Yet the state is not without its own contradictions. As Bakunin notes:
The metaphysicians and the learned jurists tell us that the State is a public affair: it represents the collective well-being and the rights of all as opposed to the disintegrating action of the egoistic interests and passions of the individual … But if the metaphysicians affirm that men, especially those who believe in the immortality of the soul, stand outside of the society of free beings, we inevitably arrive at the conclusion that men can unite in a society only at the cost of their own liberty, their natural independence, and by sacrificing first their personal and then their local interests … Thus the State appears as an inevitable negation and annihilation of all liberty, and of all individual and collective interests.
Here, Bakunin balks at the idea that the State is a vehicle, necessary or otherwise, for the realisation of freedom, depending as it does on a sacrifice of liberty which neither matches nor exceeds the ‘natural’ liberty of individuals. In a similar vein, Marx argues that the state is in fact an organ of class rule, or the oppression of one class by another; its sole purpose, he claims, is to legalise and perpetuate oppression by arbitrating class conflict. On his view, relations of exchange and private property, which are taken to be the foundation of freedom, equality, and all other bourgeois liberal values, actually undermine such values; and the State, rather than existing to reconcile the contradictions inherent in bourgeois political economy, is instead a tool both for the concealment and perpetuation of these contradictions. This is the substance of the first version of the critique mentioned above.
As for the second version, Marx and Bakunin both believe that the State is unnecessary for the overcoming of alienation and the realisation of freedom, albeit in very different ways. Both contend that true freedom could only be realised in ‘full communist society’—that is, a society with no hierarchical, centralised state apparatus, no privately owned means of production, and no socio-economic classes, wherein all property is communally-owned and all individuals have equal social and economic status. As Bakunin notes, however, ‘only the communists imagine that they can attain [full communist society] through development and organisation of the political power of the working classes, and chiefly of the city proletariat, aided by bourgeois radicalism.’ Whereas the Marxists advocated vanguardism and the manipulation of party politics in bringing about the transition to full communist society, the anarchists advocated spontaneous and violent revolution against the State. We need not survey the other historical disagreements between Marx and Bakunin (and the respective schools of thought they initiated) on the role of the State, which are many and varied. The foregoing provides a sufficient articulation of the critique: the State is unnecessary for human beings to live together freely and peacefully; the contradictions inherent in bourgeois civil society can only be overcome by abolishing bourgeois society itself.
Taken together, these two versions of the Marx/Bakunin critique pose a formidable threat to Hegel’s theory of the State in the Philosophy of Right. Anarchists will naturally find these objections compelling, but whether they are truly decisive or not is beside the point. Again, my goal is merely to argue that (a) the problematic developed in the final chapters of the Phenomenology is not solved by Hegel’s later theory of the State; and (b) the Phenomenology provides a philosophical context for understanding Bakunin’s anarchist communism. To the extent that either or both of these theses are true, the Marxist/Bakunin critique will only apply to Hegel’s later theory. In what follows I will make my best effort to defend them.
III
The modern nation-state, whether democratic or dictatorial, is often viewed as a complex matrix of centralised authoritative institutions. These institutions, in turn, coordinate social, political, and economic relations through the coercive enforcement of a ‘rule of law’. Much of the confusion surrounding Hegel’s theory of the State, especially among the Young Hegelians, stems from the last section of the Philosophy of Right, where Hegel seems to identify states with institutional apparatuses (i.e., governments). Elsewhere, Hegel defines the State as the whole community of persons unified by a particular system of laws and governing institutions. The community as such is to be distinguished from the laws and institutions which govern it. Our goal in this section, therefore, is to resolve these ambiguities and specify to the best of our ability what the State is for Hegel. To do so, it behoves us to examine his earlier and most important work, the Phenomenology of Spirit.
The Phenomenology is an incredibly complicated and dense work which, unlike the Philosophy of Right, fails to present a fully-developed political theory. My task in this section, therefore, is not only to provide a judicious summary of relevant ideas, but also to fill in the gaps that Hegel leaves open. The purpose in so doing is to support the claim made at the outset of this paper—viz., that the Phenomenology provides a philosophical context for Bakunin’s anarchist communism. We should note provisionally that in the later Hegel the foundation of the State is not coercion and oppression (ex hypothesi) but freedom (‘the State is the actualization of freedom’) insofar as government (‘the system of right’) is the vehicle through which individuals realise their freedom in society. A very similar idea appears in the Phenomenology, where Spirit is actualised in the laws and customs of a community, which we will return to below. Hegel does not yet refer to laws and customs as a ‘system of right’, nor does he elaborate on the particular forms that laws and customs may take at the level of institutions. But in both cases we find that the State is the actualisation or realisation of a particular dialectical moment.
In its first articulation in the chapters on Reason, the actualisation of Spirit in a community involves two components: (a) the dialectic of reciprocal recognition, whereby self-conscious beings recognise each other as self-conscious; and (b) an ‘ethical substance’ which is shared in common by self-conscious beings. These components are symbiotic: ethical substance is constituted by the reciprocal recognition of self-conscious beings, and reciprocal recognition by self-conscious beings is made possible by their sharing ethical substance:
Reason appears here as the fluent universal substance, as unchangeable simple thinghood which yet breaks up into many entirely independent beings, just as light bursts asunder into stars as innumerable luminous points, each giving light on its own account, and whose absolute self-existence is dissolved, not merely implicitly, but explicitly for themselves, within the simple independent substance. They are conscious within themselves of being these individual independent beings through the fact that they surrender and sacrifice their particular individuality, and that this universal substance is their soul and essence—as this universal again is the action of themselves as individuals, and is the work and product of their own activity.
The shared ethical substance of self-conscious beings is none other than Spirit itself, which Hegel defines as the ‘I that is We and We that is I.’ Reciprocal recognition, in turn, is the process ‘of directly apprehending complete unity with another in his independence: of having for my object another in the fashion of a “thing” found detached and apart from me, and the negative of myself, and of taking this as my own self-existence.’
Reciprocal recognition originates in the primordial encounter of Self and Other in the master-slave dialectic, wherein the slave recognises the master as the master (i.e., as someone who has authority over him), but neither the slave nor the master recognises himself in the other. This is because one is dependent and the other is independent. But for Hegel, self-consciousness desires something identical to itself, and it is this desire that prompts the coming together of self-conscious beings. The ‘coming together’ that results from the realisation of self-conscious reason is what Hegel calls Volk, a people or nation. The people express their reciprocal recognition and shared ethical substance through laws and customs, which in turn are the ‘language’ through which Absolute Spirit ‘speaks’. In this way law and custom are actualisations of the ethical Spirit of a people.
As Paul Franco notes, ‘at the present stage of the Phenomenology … Hegel insists that the ethical life of a people constitutes only the immediate form of Spirit. The ethical disposition is one that is governed by unmediated custom and habit; for it the laws simply are, eternal and unquestionable.’ In this immediate stage, Spirit appears as pure facticity or being in-itself; it has not yet achieved self-consciousness as a free and self-determining subjectivity or being for-itself. Thus Spirit must progress through shapes of consciousness to know itself for what it is immediately. The section entitled ‘Spirit’ provides a map of Spirit’s movement from customary ethical life to self-consciousness.
To survey the entire terrain of this section would take us well beyond the scope of this paper. For our purposes, we need only note a few of its more important topographic features. In general, Hegel is now interested in historico-political ‘shapes of the world’ rather than mere ‘shapes of consciousness’, beginning with the immediacy of facticity (the in-itself of consciousness) in the Greek polis and ending with the mediation of facticity by subjectivity (the for-itself) in the modern world. Hegel analyses Greek ethical life through a consideration of tragedy, and this along two axes: (a) human law, which corresponds to the nation or body politic, and (b) divine law, which corresponds to the family and its ancestral cult. Within this ethical order, as Hegel notes, there is initially an ‘antagonism’ between the family (understood here as wife/husband/child) and the nation. Ultimately, however, the family ‘has its enduring basis in the nation’ because the reciprocal recognition shared among members of a family can only be maintained and vouchsafed through the recognition of the ethical community at large (i.e., by having legal status).
As the dialectical progression continues, however, subjective reflection, language, and Culture eclipse primitive legal status as the principal vehicles of self-consciousness. Through speech and expression, and by extension Socratic philosophy, an individual self-consciousness comes into being for others and in this way becomes universal: ‘It is its own knowing of itself, and its knowing of itself as a self that has passed over into another self that has been perceived and is universal.’ When primitive legal status gives way to the ‘more profound and inward notion of the human “subject”‘—that is, the self’s recognition of its subjectivity and independence in culture as for-itself—the result is self-alienation. It is no longer natural but universal and abstract. This process of self-alienation and self cultivation continues in the period leading up to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Moving from the fall of the ancient world to the rise of modernity, we find in the latter ‘the culmination of this process of self-alienation and self-cultivation … under the supremely alienating sway of wealth.’ As subjectivity shifts from expression through political loyalty to economic dependence, ‘all stability and substance vanish’ giving way to ‘a common thing, a plaything of whims, an accident of caprice.’ Pure culture, as expressed in the world of wealth, is the apex of alienation. It is a ‘disrupted condition’ of the most egregious sort, insofar as subjectivity is now at its furthest distance from substance.
In the world of the Self-Estranged Spirit and alienated Culture (the background, as Merold Westphal notes, of the old modernity), consciousness becomes aware of its alienation and, by extension, of the futility of political and economic reality. Two strategies develop in an attempt to transcend this alienation: faith and Enlightenment. Modern faith is, in the first instance, directed toward the ethereal realm of pure consciousness that lies beyond the pale of alienated culture. It seeks to transcend the pure insight of alienated culture—the critical, negative, content-less, universalised, teleological, and utilitarian rationality of Enlightenment. The anguish of medieval Unhappy Consciousness is absent in this conception because Faith has become a mere projection of anthropomorphised picture-content onto the spiritual world; the Absolute becomes ‘real’ in an instantaneous and unproblematic fashion by taking on the appearance of unessential Being. Yet this projection, since it arises from alienated culture, carries with it the content-less negativity of culture (i.e., pure insight) into the spiritual world, which in turn destroys the iconographic content of that world. Transcendence, in this way, is once again thwarted.
Faith is the god-haunted darkness which Enlightenment seeks to illumine. But since pure insight is the totalisation of negativity, Enlightenment is shown to have no ‘light’ (i.e., content) of its own; rather, it appropriates the content of Faith solely for the purpose of destroying it. The problem of estrangement is overcome by rendering the Absolute an unknowable and featureless ‘void’, which in turn negates any possibility of movement toward It. Since ‘the nothingness that transcends pure sense’ is just that—nothing—all that remains is the individual and his principal mode of awareness, viz., sense perception, the objects of which are known absolutely.
Between the predicate-less absolute Being of Enlightenment deism and the meaningless physical reality of Enlightenment materialism is utility—the relegation of meaning to purely human aims and interests. Reality is reduced to the for-itself as self-consciousness enjoys ‘certainty of its individual self in thorough and penetrating insight fixed upon the useful object’. But utility is a relative concept; there is no necessary connection between my being-for-self and the being-for-other of useful objects. The only way to overcome this last vestige of objectivity is for the self to view everything as product or creation of its own will—and this is what Hegel means by ‘absolute freedom’.
The doctrine of absolute freedom is concretely manifested in the French Revolution, wherein every act of government is a product of the general will (or self-conscious decision of each individual). As a result, the compartmentalisation of ethical life into different socio-economic classes dissolves: ‘In this absolute freedom, therefore, all social groups or classes which are the spiritual spheres into which the whole is articulated are abolished; the individual consciousness that belonged to any such sphere, and willed and fulfilled itself in it, has put aside its limitation; its purpose is the general purpose, its language universal law.’ The work of government, however, requires functional differentiation (e.g., a division of powers) even within a single state entity. Consequently, the absolutely free individual consciousness is merely represented; it is alienated from its own expression of will in the state and is thus unable to ‘achieve anything positive … either of laws and general institutions of conscious freedom, or of a freedom that wills them.’ As Franco notes, ‘unable to produce a positive work or deed, the only thing left for the individual consciousness characterised by absolute freedom is “negative action” and the “fury of destruction.”‘ This is the origin of the Reign of Terror, wherein the will of absolute freedom turns against itself, or rather the part of itself which is outside absolute freedom: its ‘abstract existence as such’ within the revolutionary government.
This is Hegel’s last mention of politics in the Phenomenology. Instead of providing an analysis of the rational state in the aftermath of the Revolution, he discusses morality, religion, and finally absolute knowledge. In the section on morality, or ‘self-certain spirit’, Hegel focuses on the final shape consciousness takes before attaining absolute knowledge; in this shape, consciousness is now absolutely free and has no other object beyond its own subjective self-certainty. It is manifested concretely in the ‘moral view of the world’ articulated by Kant and Fichte, as well as in the concept of ‘conscience’ which appears in German idealism. Hegel’s criticism of the Kantian notion of duty, which turns on what he sees as a ‘dualism’ between ‘morality and nature, duty and inclination’ is reiterated later in the Philosophy of Right (see below). In the romantic notion of conscience, this dualism is overcome; the empty indeterminacy of abstract duty is no longer opposed to the reality of self, having been filled with the immediate content of contingent, individual selfhood. But this merely trades one form of indeterminacy for another. For in conscience, the content of will is now determined ‘by the caprice of the individual and the contingency of his unconscious natural being’. Any action can be justified relative to the subjective interests, desires, or convictions of the individual. As Franco helpfully explains, ‘What some might regard as violence and wrongdoing in the acquisition of property, others might justify in terms of the duty to provide for the support of oneself and one’s family.’ Conscience collapses into a pernicious relativism.
At the same time, the conscientious will is universal in its desire to be recognised by others. That is, in acting, we want others to acknowledge and understand the reasons and intentions underlying our actions. Language is the mechanism by which this explanation or confession is brought about:
It is only by supplementing an action with language, commenting on it, explaining it, that the disparity between the objective deed and the conscientious intention that lies behind it can be overcome. In this way, conscience leads to a ‘community of consciences’, the ‘spirit of substance’ of which is the ‘mutual assurance of their conscientiousness, good intentions, the rejoicing over this mutual purity, and the refreshing of themselves in the glory of knowing and uttering, of cherishing and fostering, such an excellent state of affairs.’
Conscience thereby leads to an emphasis on talk over action, as the ‘beautiful soul’ shuns the finitude, particularity, and impurity of the latter in favour of the universality and purity of the former. It condemns as evil or selfish the concrete action of active conscience, but only by focusing narrowly on what is finite, particular, and self-interested in it. By confessing its guilt, active conscience causes the beautiful soul to recognise the necessity of concrete action and the error of ascetic flight from the world, and the beautiful soul forgives active conscience in turn. It is in this way that the universal and the particular are reconciled within self-certain consciousness.
The dialectic of evil and forgiveness concludes the section on morality and marks the transition to the last two sections of the Phenomenology, on religion and absolute knowledge, respectively. We need not discuss these sections here, since self-consciousness, the concept most relevant to an understanding of Hegel’s political theory, has already reached its most extreme shape in subjectivity in the previous section on morality and conscience. Rather than the Other of political life, religion is political life’s awareness or intuition of itself. But what are we to make of Hegel’s decision to forego any further explicit discussion of political life after the section on the French Revolution?
One possibility, as I suggested earlier, is that Hegel intended the Philosophy of Right and other later works to complete the Phenomenology by envisioning a rational state which follows from and replaces the French Revolution, Kantian deontology, and Romantic idealism. I am more inclined to believe, however, that Spirit in the conclusion of the Phenomenology is disillusioned with, and intentionally distances itself from, the political, or more specifically, from the Revolution’s deification and totalisation of the authoritarian State, which culminates in the disastrous failure of the Reign of Terror. In its place, Spirit looks beyond the coercive state apparatus to morality, religion, and philosophy for a model of social organisation and political community. Although Hegel fails to specifically outline what such a model might be like in the Phenomenology, he nonetheless articulates a set of problems which the post-Revolutionary society must confront and he gestures towards a solution.
It is not until later, in writing the Philosophy of Right, that Hegel attempts to formally lay out such a solution. What I hope to suggest, however, is not only that this solution is faulty but also that it constitutes a betrayal of the Phenomenologys radical promise. To this extent, it is worthy of the criticism it eventually receives from Marx and others.
Lest we get ahead of ourselves, however, we ought first to briefly examine Hegel’s analysis of the State in the Philosophy of Right. We will then return to the Phenomenology in order to clarify the status of Spirit at its conclusion and to investigate the sort of society this status might envision. What I hope to show, again, is that the logic of the Phenomenology may be seen as portending a stateless, classless society of the sort Bakunin and others recommend. According to this view, it is only through the establishment of anarchy that the reconciliation of active conscience and beautiful soul, which heretofore has only been discussed at the level of individual consciousness, can be actualised at the social level.
IV
Hegel’s analysis of the State in Philosophy of Right begins with what he calls ‘abstract right’. This concept, so beloved of Locke and other contract theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, presupposes the will as autonomous, individuated decision-making process. The voluntary and autonomous volition of the will provides the right according to which one makes claims in the world. In other words, one has the abstract right to will precisely because autonomy of will is the realisation of individual will in the world. To exercise this right—that is, to be autonomous—individual will must impose itself on what it confronts (e.g., itself qua will and the world qua object of will).
To confer will upon a thing in the world is to claim property. As in the Phenomenology, the world is an outlet through which the rational is made real, and any particular thing’s purpose in the world is to embody freedom. The right to property is therefore derived from this necessary expression of freedom, in contrast to social contract theorists like Locke for whom the right to property is derived from the right to life. Every individual has a right to decide how she will claim property in the world and, in virtue of imposing her will on the world, how she expresses her will as a free and independent being. Of course, rational wills can and do come into conflict with each other despite sharing the same rights. Therefore, contract is required to arbitrate property-related disputes. But how does contract function?
To begin with, we must note that the conferral of will upon a thing in the world merely manifests will in the world; it does not reveal that a person has a right to property. The right of one rational will to claim property is only revealed when another rational will acknowledges it. In a contract, therefore, one acknowledges or recognises another person as having a legitimate claim to property. That is, the one actualises the will of the other as a right. Now although an independent will can freely and independently decide to acknowledge contracts, it can also refuse another’s claim to property. As such, a person who takes property without contract does wrong. But the ability to do wrong comes from the very definition of right. Thus, if one abides by this static definition of right, then one will necessarily end up with wrong. Individuals, considered as Lockean atoms, will invariably act in such a way as to violate the freedom of other individuals, and rights will necessarily tangle with each other.
According to Hegel, punishment of wrong is exacted upon one independent will by another independent will, and thus constitutes a form of revenge. In this sense, the very asserting of right provokes the negation of right. To put it another way, since the realisation of a free and rational will in the world hinges upon the acknowledgment of other free and rational wills, and since other free and rational wills can refuse to acknowledge contracts, then wrongdoing is a condition of the possibility of right. And although the wronged has a right to punish the wrongdoer, his punishment violates the rights of the perpetrator as a free and independent will. Thus, the asserting of abstract right in a static property relationship leads to a ceaseless negation of abstract right.
In the state of negation, will which at first existed for itself alone is, as Hegel writes, ‘superseded’. Individual rights necessarily become entangled, thus a new definition of right must be formulated which takes this interconnectedness into account. The fluid relationship of individual rights, coupled with the expression of will as subjective, gives rise to the complex factor known as action. Action, in Hegel’s view, includes the following determinations: purpose, responsibility, welfare, intention, and the good. An analysis of these factors marks the transition into the moral aspect of will.
In action, the immediate existence of the moral will is exclusively one’s own, insofar as what one does is what one wills (this is what Hegel means by the purpose of action). Furthermore, one takes responsibility for one’s actions by acknowledging that what he wills instantiates states of affairs beyond his control—i.e., states of affairs born out of the will’s interaction with other wills and with the contingencies of the real world. One has an intention in acting insofar as his action conduces (or is believed by him to conduce) certain desires and aspirations he may have. As a free and rational will, he has a right to decide for himself what brings him satisfaction (i.e., his welfare) and one has a right to pursue whatever leads to satisfaction.
From abstract right Hegel proceeds to the Kantian notion of duty. In his view, duty is a ‘moral’ will which serves as a higher order mediating force among conflicting wills. As in Kant’s philosophy, duty is grounded in the ‘good’, which is defined as the concept of will coupled with the realisation of will. In the concept of will, one directs his will according to an abstract and universal principle which also governs the will of others. In so doing, one moves beyond the isolated, individualised self-realisation of abstract right to the recognition of the other. The realisation of will, in turn, involves particular actions which impose will on the world. But actions can only be claimed to be ‘by right’ if they are asserted by and through the principle that other wills also possess the same right.
The good operates in this sense within the dynamic of active decision-making or practical reasoning. In forming a decision, the will may or may not act according to principle and is thus contingent. Principle demands what one ought to do, but principle is not realised unless one acts on it. Hence it is the realisation of principle, not principle itself, which imparts rights. One has a right to realise his will in the world only insofar as he wills the universal principle—that is, that he wills the freedom of other people. The free decision-making of Lockean abstract right is preserved in this account of morality, but it is refashioned in such a way as to acknowledge its relationship to other wills as well as its obligation to the moral concept.
In Hegel’s view, this duty-based approach is clearly an improvement on abstract right. However, it inevitably raises the question: what is the principle according to which one ought to acknowledge the will of others? Again, the individual will is subjective because it is only realised in particular actions. These particulars are determined by independent decision-making, and, as such, belong to the subjective will (which, as we have seen, may or may not be good). To understand what gives one a right to will in the world, one must move beyond particulars. Through independent decision-making, one must repudiate the difference, particularity, and exclusivity of abstract right.
The problem is that morality itself affords no particular guidelines for action. Duty is characterised by abstract universality alone, and as such, it is ‘identity without content’. This is what Hegel refers to as indeterminacy. To put it another way, the good is not involved with particulars because particulars belong to independent decision-making which may or may not be good. Although one has a right to affirm freedom in conjunction with the freedom of others, one does not know how to affirm freedom specifically. This is because the good does not specify what in particular one is obliged to do.
How does Hegel resolve this problem? Clearly, one must do a particular thing in order to realise the good—that is, one must do something in particular which one thinks is a duty or is right. As such, Hegel suggests, the realisation of the good within subjectivity must be dictated by conscience. This becomes an important concept of will: the good is not merely a principle, but rather a force which compels individuals to act according to principle. Through conscience, the individual will ‘mixes’ particular actions with principles. In this way, one becomes conscious of the manner in which principle engenders freedom. Through conscience, one arrives at particulars as well as universals. Conscience gives the good a particular form, and in so doing, it salvages the good from indeterminacy. In short, it makes a judgment about what is good through its own sense of being convinced it is good.
It is readily apparent, however, that conscience and principle exist in a tenuously symbiotic state. Conscience is dependent on principle, and principle is dependent on conscience. Because the strategies which underlie conscientious action are arbitrary, there is no way to determine whether the actions themselves will be acknowledged by others as representative of their freedom. Conscience, then, does not make right, nor does it ameliorate the destruction which results when conscientious actions are not really right. Let us examine this problem with greater scrutiny.
Morality, as opposed to abstract right, subsists in two modalities. First, morality contains the good—the universal principle according to which we acknowledge the interconnectedness of our will with the wills of others. Second, morality contains moral subjectivity or conscience—the realisation of good through particular actions. The good is merely the principle according to which one ought to will one’s freedom in accordance with the freedom of others, and it must be made real in the world. However, because it is universal, it cannot have any particular guidelines. It is, in this sense, independent of inclinations. The universal good is distinct from individual will because individual will is contingent. Thus, by itself, the good is without content. Particular actions must realise it in the world.
Moral subjectivity, as I have already mentioned, gives a particular form to the good. It asserts an abstract principle in conjunction with the assertion of individual will. In this way the good co-opts or appropriates conscience. The problem is that there are no particular objective principles in conscience. It is, by definition, a particular strategy defined arbitrarily by an individual will. For this reason, Hegel argues that conscience can easily degenerate into wickedness whenever conscience renders the good obsequious to individual interest and subjectivity, and overriding moral principles are superseded by the particularities of conscience.
Hegel concludes that this view of morality, like abstract right, must be reconstructed with a view to the inherent dynamism of principle. That is to say, although the universal principle is inexorably linked to conscience, conscience itself requires objective principles to direct particular courses of action. Ultimately, it is the ethical life of the State that provides the principles according to which the individual conscience becomes capable of realising the good. Properly speaking, these are the ‘laws’ of the State.
Various aspects of social living—in effect, social laws—provide both a sense of individuality and also principle. In society, we act as individuals in ways conducive to our own particular life plans. But we also receive guidelines by which we direct our consciences and act morally—that is, in a way that acknowledges the freedom of others. In Hegel’s view, recall, the rational is a combination of the universal and the individual, and one cannot be subordinate to the other. Thus, the social dynamic is needed to keep individuality and the universal in balance.
This social dynamic is the basis of civil society—especially as it appears in work life and associations. In Hegel’s view, work life is derived from the system of needs. Society comes into existence in the private lives of families, which are themselves units of a larger social whole. Within a family context, one not only develops an idea of herself/himself as individual, but also as a member of a family who acts in the interest of said family (with all its independent needs, projects, aspirations, etc.). This compels individuals to enter work life. In this context, workers become mutually dependent on one another; one acquires what he needs through working, and others get what they need through his work. In this way, an individual receives a kind of social ‘education’ (Bildung). That is, he begins to view himself in a larger context wherein individuality is universalised and, with the emergence of the corporation, he comes to view himself in terms of his occupation.
Finally, in civil society people who freely work in various occupations develop a division of labour (the classes or estates). Insofar as work within the estates conduces the fulfilment of particular ends, it becomes efficacious for individual workers to promote the ‘honor of [their] estate’. This view to the interconnectedness of people within work associations culminates in citizenship, in which an individual comes to see his life as coextensive with the life of society as a whole. The laws reflect the fact that the life of the state subsists in individual, subjective wills. They protect families and individuals precisely because they acknowledge that the state lives in and through these things. Thus, society is viewed as an end in itself. It is valued for its own sake. Whereas in work life private interests are carried out with a view to one’s interconnectedness with others, life in the state involves the identification of private interests with social interests. That is, insofar as society is an end to be valued in itself, one begins to work towards the building up of society by looking after the interests of all individuals. The objective will and the subjective will collide as individual morality recognises the universal life of society. In this way, the state is the ‘actuality of the substantial will’.
For Hegel, laws are independent, subjective interpretations or constructions, but they are also rooted in the universalised ‘ought principle’. Through laws, therefore, the good and conscientious actions are united in a social, rather than individual, conscience. Here, Hegel is not suggesting that all people in a given society agree on everything in practice but rather that they share a common conscience or ‘fundamental Spirit’ which is actualised in their actions. This fundamental Spirit is like the good, but it is a real as opposed to abstract force—the realisation of ethical Spirit mentioned in the Phenomenology.
Recall, however, that Spirit in the Phenomenology is at first only passively experienced in ethical community; it is experienced as something that ‘happens’ or ‘comes about’ rather than as a consequence of communal decision-making. What is more, the individual only recognises itself as in-itself (i.e., in the being of ethical Spirit) and not as for-itself. The concept of State that appears in the Philosophy of Right circumvents this alleged shortcoming by positing a dual self-consciousness in ethical community: individuals in the state are (a) conscious of themselves as self-conscious and autonomous and as individual actualisations of ethical Spirit; and (b) conscious of the absolute dependence of ethical Spirit on their own actions (e.g., the formulation of laws and customs). This change is more than a mere shift in emphasis. On the contrary, whereas the Phenomenology presents primitive ethical community as an early moment in Spirit’s dialectical journey toward self-consciousness that is soon supplanted by other moments, the Philosophy of Right articulates a related but different dialectic: one in which primitive ethical community, with all its attendant problems, is ultimately replaced and cured through the realisation of the rational state:
The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea. It is ethical mind qua the substantial will manifest and revealed to itself, knowing and thinking itself, accomplishing what it knows and in so far as it knows it. The state exists immediately in custom, mediately in individual self-consciousness, knowledge, and activity, while self-consciousness in virtue of its sentiment towards the state, finds in the state, as its essence and the end-product of its activity, its substantive freedom.
Again, the State in both the Phenomenology and Philosophy of Right is not merely the ‘system of right’ (i.e. government) but rather a community of individuals who share common laws and customs. The institutions of family and civil society are the realisation of a common ethical Spirit. This Spirit, in turn, both constitutes and is constituted by a self-conscious community of self-conscious, reciprocally-recognizing individuals. The most crucial difference, of course, is that in Philosophy of Right the State as ethical community is realised and maintained through the institution of a coercive, hierarchical ‘system of right’. We need not concern ourselves with the specific details of this system. It is enough to note at this point that the ‘rational’ state has police, a class system, a bureaucratic government apparatus, and even a monarch. To this extent, it bears much in common with the pre-Revolutionary feudal kingdoms. The question we must ask at this juncture is why?
Recall again that for Hegel freedom is realised only in ethical community. A free will is one which wills its own freedom, and this is only possible in a community of reciprocally-recognizing self-conscious individuals. This is precisely because freedom just is belonging to such a community. In other words, to be free is to come together with other self-conscious individuals in a community of reciprocal recognition. The Philosophy of Right departs from the Phenomenology in its suggestion that a hierarchical, centralised, and coercive system of right (which constitutes the institutional realisation of the State) is necessary for the preservation of freedom. The purpose of this system is to demarcate the range of acceptable actions within society—i.e., those actions which are optimally conducive to reciprocal-recognition and thus to living freely. Individuals’ shared desire to live freely through reciprocal-recognition is therefore expressed as a kind of ‘general will’ in the system of right. It is general in the sense that it wills both individual freedom and social freedom, where the former can only be achieved through the latter.
Marx and other radical Hegelians took great exception to this justification of the state, as section II demonstrated. In briefly reviewing their objections, my purpose was not to show that they are decisive against Hegel’s theory in Philosophy of Right, but rather to elucidate the extent to which the Phenomenology anticipates, reinforces, and ultimately circumvents them. The last section will demonstrate what I see as the essential harmony between the incomplete political vision of the Phenomenology and the anarchist communist ideal of Bakunin.
V
It is worth recalling once again that Hegel’s discussion of politics in the Phenomenology ends with the bloodshed and havoc of the Reign of Terror. Instead of describing what a viable post-Revolutionary state might be like, he instead turns to considerations of morality and religion. Finding fault with both the Kantian notion of duty and the Romantic notion of conscience, he concludes with the dialectic of evil and forgiveness, which culminates in the reconciliation of active conscience with the beautiful soul. Interestingly, although he also addresses duty and conscience in the Philosophy of Right, the ‘dialectic of evil and forgiveness’ is never once mentioned in that work. Moreover, whereas Hegel regards the development of the moral point of view as a dialectical consequence of the failure of civil society and the State in the Phenomenology, he regards it as a dialectical condition of or a precursor to the triumph of the State in the Philosophy of Right. How might we make sense of these changes? To begin with, whereas the Philosophy of Right is limited to an analysis of Spirit’s manifestations in political life, the Phenomenology explores the shapes of Spirit taken as a whole. It does so, moreover, in a concretely historical way. In other words, the Phenomenology not only attempts to explain the dialectical development of civil society and the State, but it does so in a way that ties this development to actual historical epochs and events (such as the French Revolution). For this reason, one has the distinct impression that within the Phenomenology, there is no such thing as ‘the State’ apart from its concrete realisation in actual world-historical entities. Thus, whatever dialectical fate befalls the Revolutionary state is, by extension, the dialectical fate of all states. The same is not true of the Philosophy of Right, in which the State, though derived dialectically, is far more abstract and ahistorical—much closer, arguably, to Rousseau’s ‘state of nature’ or Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all’.
In both of Hegel’s works, the state develops as a response to certain conflicts and contradictions within civil society. The difference, again, is that the development of civil society in the Phenomenology follows upon the more general historical development of utility and, before that, the pure insight of Enlightenment, whereas in the Philosophy of Right it follows upon the successive breakdown of duty and conscience with the ethical order. This is by way of saying, again, that each work presents a distinct and mutually exclusive account of the dialectical emergence of both civil society and the State. Obviously these institutions cannot be, at the same time and in the same respect, both the condition as well as the consequence of the development of the moral view of the world.
In order to reconcile these competing theories, one would have to argue that the dialectical breakdown of morality (in both its Kantian and Romantic modalities) preceded the historical development of bourgeois capitalist society and the Revolutionary state, and that the very same breakdown reemerged in the aftermath of the Revolutionary state’s collapse, albeit for different reasons. Such an argument is not only counterintuitive, but also patently false. For Hegel, the development of the concept of conscience, for example, is inexorably tied to a real historical era, the unfolding of which is inconceivable apart from the stage of Absolute Freedom which came before it. The whole point of the Phenomenology, recall, is to provide an explanation of real historical events in terms of the dialectical movement of Spirit. As such, the events in question cannot be construed as mere metaphors or examples intended to illustrate or otherwise clarify an abstract philosophical position, and so cannot be extracted from the actual historical circumstances in which they occurred. In short, if the emergence and subsequent collapse of morality truly constitutes a moment in the journey of Spirit that both obtains in and accounts for a particular concrete historical epoch (viz., the post-Revolutionary period), then the State could not possibly have developed in the way Hegel suggests in Philosophy of Right.
It may be argued that the Philosophy of Right is an eschatological rather than historical theory—in other words, a theory that portends the coming of a future State not yet realised, as opposed to describing the historical emergence of states as such. The problem with such an argument, obviously, is that Hegel had already come to believe by the time he wrote the Phenomenology that history had reached an end. This is not to suggest, as some critics have, that he believed the Prussia of 1803, or any other European polity, to be the ideal or rational State. Whether he did so or not, the point is that such a State could not possibly come about in the way he suggests in the Philosophy of Right. The dialectical moments he describes had not only already taken place, but indeed had given rise to a State (in the form of the Revolution) which was diametrically opposed to his vision of the rational state. Once again, it is not only false but impossible that society in the aftermath of the Revolution could revert to the primitive ethical community with which the Philosophy of Right begins, culminating in the establishment of a rational state at some point in the future.
The point of this discussion is that, for the Hegel of the Phenomenology, the rise and fall of the historical French Revolution was coextensive with the dialectical development and failure of the hierarchical, centralised, and authoritarian state. Again, the fact that Hegel follows his discussion of ‘absolute freedom and terror’ with an analysis of morality and religion rather than further political speculation hints at disillusionment and disappointment with the modern state on his part. In the aftermath of Jacobin terror, who could blame him? Moreover, this progression intimates a desire to ground the future of human community in something other than a State form, which had not only failed but failed as a matter of dialectical necessity.
The reconciliation of active conscience and beautiful soul, which appears to be contemporaneous with the further articulation of Spirit through religion and absolute knowing, is the end-state of the Phenomenology. But it is an end-state that is mostly spelled out at that level of individual consciousness, and so is devoid of a determinate political form. The question with which I close, and which I hope to answer in light of the foregoing considerations, is this: what sort of society or political system is capable of bringing about and sustaining this reconciliation ? To put it another way, if the modern State is incapable of uniting the universal and the particular in the way required by the climax of subjective self-certainty, what is left? The answer, as I have been suggesting all along, is anarchist communism.
As Hegel himself makes clear, consciousness has reached its limit in the condition of absolute freedom which precipitates both Revolution and the failure of the State. The moral experimentation which follows these moments does not involve any further qualitative development on the part of subjective consciousness; it is merely an attempt to resolve the lingering conflicts within fully liberated consciousness as it seeks to organise and manifest itself politically. Ultimately, we are told, consciousness finds peace in the union of universality and particularity, where this means, among other things, the union of individual and community. But how can this be brought about?
As we have seen, all objects of the absolutely free individual consciousness are perforce products of its own will. Consequently, the praxis of the corresponding political community or social organisation must constitute an equal and undifferentiated expression of the general will (that is, the will of each individual consciousness). By definition, a hierarchical, centralised, or authoritarian government—even one with a system of parliamentary representation—cannot accomplish this, nor can a system of private property and alienated labour. Through its monopolisation of political and economic power, such a society necessarily alienates consciousness from the products of its own will, and this is precisely why the modern capitalist state fails.
Obviously the only political and economic mechanisms that could ever hope to circumvent this problem are (a) a direct democracy which forms all decisions by unanimous consensus—a point all too familiar to students of Rousseau; and (b) socialised ownership and control of the means of production. The problem, of course, comes in trying to realise solidarity and mutual aid among atomised, absolutely free consciousnesses. This is precisely the difficulty which the section on morality in the Phenomenology seeks to address. Ultimately Hegel proposes a morality of conscience as a solution, but the relativistic indeterminacy which characterises this form of morality remains troublesome. The reconciliation of active conscience and beautiful soul which occurs at the end of this section is obviously intended to dispel this trouble, but exactly how it does so is less than clear. I would suggest that the ‘dialectic of evil and forgiveness’ should be read as a rudimentary articulation of the ‘dual self-consciousness’ which appears in the Philosophy of Right, with a few crucial qualifications. The idea is that absolutely free individuals are not only conscious of themselves as self-conscious and absolutely autonomous and as individual actualisations of ethical Spirit, but are also conscious of the absolute dependence of ethical Spirit on their own actions (e.g., the formulation of laws and customs). In the Philosophy of Right, however, the continuing existence of civil society, along with its tendency to reinforce self-interest at the expense of social conscience, necessitates the existence of coercion and authority within a state form.
If private property were abolished, however, there would no longer be any impediment to the cultivation of this dual-consciousness. The individual consciousness (understood here as the particular, active conscience) would come to realise that its interests are inherently and inexorably linked to the interests of all other consciousnesses. To put it prosaically, it would recognise that none of its particular individual wants, needs, desires, and aspirations—indeed, its very capacity to be free—can be actualised or achieved apart from its being-for-others in society. Likewise, the community itself (understood here as the abstract and universal ‘beautiful soul’) would recognise its complete dependence upon the concrete actors that comprise it. In other words, the good of community would be, as Bakunin and other anarchist communists suggest, inseparable from the good of all its members. While it is true that social ‘laws’ would remain necessary, not only to coordinate action but to give concrete form to the ‘fundamental Spirit’ or ‘collective conscience’ of the community, there is no reason why such laws could not be formulated in a way that preserves the absolute freedom of consciousness. With the disappearance of private property, the range of authentically ‘selfish’ interests would be so dramatically reduced that it is hard to imagine what further obstacles to direct democracy would exist. The solution to the problems of social organisation which Hegel outlines in the Philosophy of Right could truly be actualised without any need for police, politicians, nor any other coercive apparatus, since there would no longer be any civil society to protect, and thus no selfish interests left to curb. This is how the reconciliation of active conscience and beautiful soul, of universal and particular, is achieved: by the cultivation, within a collection of absolutely free individual consciousnesses, of a social consciousness which is simultaneously the product of all wills, which lacks any causal efficacy apart from their joint decision-making, and which never has to compete with the particularised and egoistic interests of a bourgeois capitalist society. This, I contend, is the essence of Bakunin’s anarchist communist society.
VI
I began this essay by providing brief synopses of two of Hegel’s most important works, the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right. My point in so doing was to expose their related but ultimately distinct dialectical models, as well as the distinct place the State inhabits in each. Whereas the latter argues for the existence of a ‘rational state’ which is necessary to moderate civil society, the former emphasizes the failure of such a state to resolve the contradictions inherent in civil society. By turning its attention away from states and toward non-political considerations in formulating a vision of post-Revolutionary society, the Phenomenology provides a way of thinking about the sort of stateless, classless society advocated by Bakunin. To this extent, a radical possibility is revealed in Hegel that is mostly overlooked in Marx’s and Bakunin’s criticisms (which, as I have argued, apply more readily to the Philosophy of Right than to the Phenomenology). More work needs to be done in explaining what a ‘full communist society’ would mean in an explicitly Hegelian context, not to mention how the development of such a society would fit into Hegel’s dialectic framework. But for the time being, we have at least shown that such a project is possible and, perhaps, promising as well.