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Hegel, the end of 

history, and thetriumph of the

liberal ideaRethinking liberal theory 6

 by John MacBeath Watkins

History ended on a Tuesday afternoon, October 14, 1806. We know this because Georg

Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel told us so.

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It was about 1 p.m. that Napoleon made the decisive move that defeated the forces

of the Prussian monarchy at the Battle of Jena. To Hegel, that meant that the ideas of the

French Revolution had triumphed in the world, by which he apparently meant the

German-speaking part of northern Europe, and we would henceforth take as our standard

of good government liberty and equality, rather than the custom, faith and force that had

legitimized the Prussian monarchy.

 Never mind that the French Revolution had devolved into the Terror and reformed

itself into a despotic and aggressive empire, Napoleon never the less represented the

triumph of liberte, egalite, fraternite and that meant that man's long evolution from stone-

age tribe through its various eras was at an end.

Sure, history as it is usually understood, people doing stuff and people writing

about it in an effort to shape how people remember them, would continue to occur, but

history as envisioned by Hegel, a dialectic that worked to a definite end, had reached that

end.

Hegel was a dialectical idealist. He is unfortunately largely remembered as the

 precursor to Karl Marx's dialectical materialism, but he is actually part of the liberal

tradition rather than the Marxist one. Marx used his idea of thesis meeting antithesis, and

the conflict producing a synthesis that became the new thesis, but he used it to advocate

for a quite different system than Hegel admired.

However, unlike Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, Hegel saw mankind not as the

 product of a fixed nature, but as an evolution of history. As a result, instead of the sort of 

thought experiment about what sort of government was natural to man, his philosophy

was teleological, one in which man aspired to greater perfection and worked through the

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dialectic of history to the goal of the perfect form of government.

Oh, sure, there were still monarchs, Oriental despots, dictators and aristocrats in

the world, but they were atavistic after the Battle of Jena. Edmund Burke fought a gallant

rear-guard action with Reflections on the Revolution in France, maintaining that custom

and prejudice were the organic wisdom of society, but he could not claim history was on

his side, and one of his intellectual heirs, William F. Buckley, in 1955 wrote of his own

 publication, “….if NATIONAL REVIEW is superfluous, it is so for very different

reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so,

or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

Conservatives have defined themselves as backward-looking, even those who

follow the radical logic of Ayn Rand or libertarian thinkers.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, Frances Fukuyama wrote his famous essay

analyzing the delegitimation of Communism as The End of History, published in the

summer, 1989 issue of The National Interest .He later expanded this into a book.

The 2011 Arab Spring saw history ending again in another part of the world, and

the efforts of the Green movement in Iran showed that the theocratic state was none too

solid. In China, a Communist Party that no longer practices Communism is clinging to

 power and trying to justify one-party rule through solid economic growth and

nationalism, which is certainly more stable than Napoleon's attempt to justify his rule

through military victory and chauvinism, but may not be as enduring as a form of 

government that has the relief valve of letting the people peacefully choose a new leader.

Even the worst dictators often seem to feel a need to hold rigged elections,

 because if they cannot make even the most implausible claim to be chosen by the people,

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they have no other claim to legitimacy. Why is this? Why do other forms of legitimacy

fail, when for most of history, mankind has been ruled by force and faith?

I maintain that this represents a change in our dominant mode of thought. Much

of the wisdom of ancient civilizations was transmitted in a mytho-poetic manner,

explaining the world through the actions of capricious gods and spirits, coordinating

civilization through religion and custom.

The weird, wonderful word of symbolic thought that we live in with our minds

and our culture while our bodies inhabit the animal world of food, sleep and sex brought

awe to the human mind before it brought reductionist logic. The mythic world of beauty,

grace and terror has a pull on our minds that appeals no matter how logical we attempt to

 be. At a time when our practical, problem solving abilities were primarily aimed at

making better tools and growing crops or hunting game, our minds were exploring the

virtual reality of the imagination, and the ancients were organizing their lives around

symbols of power, beauty, strength and fear.

We will, I hope, never be free of this world of songs, poetry, faith and art, nor 

should we aspire to be. But as wealth increased, and our problem-solving selves were

evidently the reason for it, reason itself became recognized as a source of power. And if 

reason could solve the problem of how to build better ships, could it not also solve the

 problem of building better ships of state?

As we discussed in the first installment of this series, the religious conflicts of 

Enlightenment Europe made continued reliance on mythic justifications an untenable

source of legitimacy for governments. If half your people belong to one religion and half 

to another, neither will stand for being ruled by an apostate, and the wars will be without

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end, or at least for thirty years.

Reason was on the rise outside the realm of government already. The Black 

Plague had killed off a third of Europe, and since arable land was the main source of 

wealth, this meant that the survivors were wealthier. It also meant that there was plenty of 

used clothing to make rag paper. Earlier generations had engaged in palimpsest, erasing

ancient texts because they needed the velum to make a new psalter or such, but Johannes

Gutenberg found plenty of paper on which to use his moveable type.

In addition, wealth had begun to feed on wealth, and Europe had begun its great

era of exploration, which resulted in the European settlement of much of the rest of the

world, including the conquest (or if you like, theft) of three continents. Reason increased

our wealth, not just through business, but through the instruments of navigation and

improved ships of exploration and improved weapons of conquest. Europeans gained

material benefits, it seemed, wherever reason was applied, and as reason began to

dominate the way we organized our societies, making myth and custom seem old-

fashioned.

We called the rise of reason as an organizing social force the Enlightenment. But

of course, the light shined brightest in European culture, and the light cast some strong

shadows as well.

Those who were not enlightened by European culture viewed as benighted. That

included the first peoples of the conquered continents, who were viewed as a lower order 

of human, and could only be "enlightened" by giving up their old culture and adopting

the new one, even if this had to be forced upon them by removing children from their 

homes and punishing them any time they spoke their native tongue.

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In addition, while reason can be used to solve problems, it can also be used to

 justify what you want to believe, which is how the Fascist movement gave a scientific

sheen to its racism (although really, they were about tribalism, and the doctrine of  blood

and soil.) And it can be used to take a false premise and logically move from there to a

wrong conclusion, which I maintain is pretty much the story of the Communist project.

David Hume, the most powerful thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment, said that

"Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." After all, my computer 

doesn't think about anything I don't tell it to, because it lacks passion. My car does not

drive itself, because it has no destination. If it had appetites, it might be as fractious as a

mule when I run the gas tank low, but it doesn't care if the engine is starved for fuel

 because it lacks the capacity for caring.

This capacity for caring is the main restraint on those powerful ways of 

organizing our world, faith and reason. Marx saw that the faith of religion sometimes

 produced injustice, and concluded that religion should be done away with, saw that the

logic of the market sometimes produced injustice, and concluded that markets should be

done away with. The results were disastrous, as the main organizing principles of society

were abandoned and the only remaining organizing principle was force. Marx had the

same goals as the French Revolution, liberte, egalite, fraternite, but his philosophy

 brought on even more spectacular Terrors. Such is the nightmare of reason.

Liberalism is a term that usually is taken to mean a belief that society should be

organized around liberty, free markets, and free and fair election of government

representatives. But the way the word is used in American politics has another element.

Conservatives advocate traditional religious views and somewhat radical free market

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functioning, with the claim that these produce just outcomes.

Liberalism has come to mean that the capacity for caring, an empathy with one's

fellow citizens, acts as a restraint on the excesses of markets and religious doctrines.

Burke thought the ascendance of reason and the excesses displayed in the Terror could

only be restrained by clinging to tradition and custom, maintaining that they were the

organic wisdom of a civilization.

But there are reasons no one today offers the forthright defense of "prejudice"

Burke did, because prejudice itself is in need of restraint. You don't have to know the sad

history of lynching in America or the struggles of the civil rights movement to understand

this. You need only have a little empathy for the kid who gets beat up for being a "queer,"

or the customer treated badly because of race.

It is this very empathy that modern conservatism disdains in modern liberalism,

yet in the end it is the main restraint on the excesses of faith, the cruelty of prejudice and

the nightmare of reason.

But is liberalism the end of history? It is hard to imagine a new force organizing

society with greater legitimacy, but the old forces remain potent. New mythologies are

arising, as noted in my post about the Rapture of the Geeks. At this writing, the

Republican candidate leading the polls in the selection of a nominee to run for president

is Rick Santorum, a sort of pre-Vatican II Catholic who has trouble imagining any

governing idea not based on religion.

In a campaign stop in Ohio Feb. 18 2012, Santorum said our current president

 bases his rule on the wrong theology. From the New York Times:

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“It’s about some phony ideal, some phony theology. Oh, not a theology

 based on the Bible, a different theology,” he said. “But no less a

theology.”

This is a sort of paleo-conservative view that finds it impossible to imagine any

source of legitimacy other than religion, and it appeals to conservatives who share that

view. There may be enough of them to nominate a presidential candidate, and probably

there are more of them now than there were when John F. Kennedy ran for president.

During that campaign, he found it necessary to give the following reassurance:

"...These are the real issues which should decide this campaign. And they

are not religious issues — for war and hunger and ignorance and despair 

know no religious barriers.

"But because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected

 president, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured — perhaps

deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparentlynecessary for me to state once again not what kind of church I believe in

 — for that should be important only to me — but what kind of America I

 believe in.

"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is

absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he beCatholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners

for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public

funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office

merely because his religion differs from the president who might appointhim or the people who might elect him.

"I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on

 public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any

other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose itswill directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of 

its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against

one church is treated as an act against all."

Barack Obama had to give a speech demonstrating that he also would not shape

his rule to suit his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. But Santorum represents a kind of tribalism,

and for him his faith is the right one to be a part of the tribe. He portrays President

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Obama as the Other, because he sees faith and tribe as the sources of legitimacy for the

 presidency.

This means that history has not ended. It has instead entered a recursive loop, in

which we must choose time and again between tribe and faith on the one hand and reason

and empathy on the other. The first can fall prey to the doctrine of blood and soil, the

second to the nightmare of reason, so the loop serves a purpose.

Links for this series:

Rethinking liberal theory 1: Thomas Hobbes, blasphemer and patriot

Rethinking liberal theory 2: The outlaw John Locke, terrorist, liberal, and advocate of freedom

Rethinking liberal theory 3: A compact to protect property, or a conspiracy to create meaning?

Rethinking Liberal Theory 4: John Milton and the many shapes of truth

Rethinking Liberal Theory 5: Adam Smith, moral philosopher of the marketplace

Rethinking liberal theory 6: Hegel, the end of history, and the triumph of the liberal idea