Hegel and Political Philosophy

  Charles Taylor considers Hegel important partly because he is deeper than abstract formal rationality in politics concerning rights and the state. The role of history and civil society makes the abstract concrete. Taylor thinks much modern liberal theory tends toward an overly abstract picture of the human person and political life. It often begins with isolated individuals possessing rights prior to history, culture, language, institutions, and communal life. Political reasoning then becomes largely procedural: How do we protect autonomy? How do we secure neutral rules? How do we regulate competing preferences fairly? Hegel thinks this picture is too thin because it abstracts the individual from the concrete historical and social conditions that make freedom possible in the first place.

      For Hegel, freedom is not only the ability to choose arbitrarily in isolation. Genuine freedom requires formation within ethical and social life. (Aristotle and Aquinas would agree.) A person becomes capable of rational agency only through participation in the family, civil society, education, law, language, economic life, and political community. This is why Hegel’s political philosophy is often described as “concrete” rather than merely formal.

      Take rights. A purely abstract theory might say that all persons possess equal rights. Hegel would agree in principle. But he would ask what social conditions make those rights real rather than merely theoretical? A starving person formally possesses freedom of contract, but this freedom may be hollow if economic desperation leaves no meaningful alternatives. That seems like common sense and yet it is lost on liberal (capitalist) political philosophy. Likewise, freedom of speech presupposes education, linguistic formation, public institutions, and a culture capable of rational discourse.

    So Hegel tries to think freedom not merely juridically but institutionally and historically. This is where “civil society” becomes crucial.For Hegel, civil society is the sphere between isolated private life and the state proper: that is, markets, professions, associations, guilds, voluntary organizations, public discussion, educational institutions, and the complex web of social interdependence. It is within these mediating structures that abstract individuality becomes concretely formed human personality. Taylor finds this important because it resists both atomistic individualism, and totalitarian collectivism, distortions of the human person. The individual is not dissolved into the state, but neither is society reduced to isolated choosers connected only by contracts, as in capitalist society. Instead, identity itself is socially and historically constituted.

     This is also why history matters so deeply for Hegel. Reason does not appear fully formed outside time. Human beings gradually come to understand freedom through historical development. For example, ancient societies recognized civic belonging but often lacked strong individuality; modern liberal societies recognize subjective freedom and rights but modernity also risks fragmentation, alienation, and loss of shared ethical substance. Each stage contains truth and limitation.

      Taylor appreciates that Hegel avoids the fantasy of a purely neutral political order detached from substantive conceptions of human flourishing.Every society already rests upon inherited moral intuitions, historical practices, shared languages of value, institutions embodying visions of the good. Even liberal rights depend upon cultural and historical conditions sustaining respect for persons and mutual recognition. This is humanly important even if it is only raw material for capitalism. This strongly influenced Taylor’s critique of what he calls the “procedural” or “atomistic” self in some strands of liberalism.

    And this connects to what is important to me. The need for roots. The importance of tradition, formation, practices, moral education, educated emotions and imagination, and indeed the insufficiency of purely formal rationality. We do not first exist as detached rational calculators and then later enter community. Rather, meaning, language, judgment, and even rationality itself arise within historically formed worlds of significance. True, my stress on transcendence and the inexhaustibility of reality keeps me from fully accepting Hegel’s confidence that the modern state can embody rational reconciliation in anything like a final form. That places me closer to the hermeneutic and phenomenological descendants of Hegel than to Hegel himself.

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     And yet Hegel was connected with fascism, also in Italy. I recall Dan Breazeale telling us of a pro fascist Italian film where a character after justifying it says "that is what Hegel said". I cannot recall the film. Hegel was indeed appropriated by some authoritarian and fascist thinkers, especially in Italy, even though the relationship between Hegel and fascism is wrong-headed. The key figure here is Giovanni Gentile, sometimes called “the philosopher of Fascism.” Gentile was heavily influenced by Hegelian idealism, though in a distorted way. He developed what he called “actual idealism,” in which reality was understood as the act of thinking itself, and he interpreted the state as the ethical realization of collective spirit. Under Mussolini, Gentile became Minister of Education and helped shape fascist intellectual culture in Italy. Fascist theorists sometimes used Hegelian language about the ethical state, individuality fulfilled in the whole, and the inadequacy of atomistic liberalism.

     Hegel certainly criticized atomistic liberal individualism – itself probably “fascist” for hardcore liberals – and believed that freedom is realized concretely within ethical and political institutions. He unfortunately also spoke of the state in extremely exalted language, calling it at one point “the actuality of the ethical Idea.” Those passages made later authoritarian appropriations possible. But Hegel’s actual political philosophy is far more complex than simple statism or proto-fascism. He defended constitutional government, the rule of law, civil society, mediating institutions, property rights, and aspects of modern individual freedom. And fascism fundamentally involved elements profoundly alien to Hegel such racial mythology, a cult of violence, irrational nationalism, charismatic will, anti-rational propaganda, biological tribalism, and contempt for universal rationality. Fascism was closer to a revolt against the rational universalism central to German Idealism.

     The danger in Hegel lies elsewhere. Because he viewed history as rationally intelligible and the state as an embodiment of ethical life, later thinkers could interpret existing political power as historically justified or necessary. The language of reconciliation between individual and state could slide into sanctification of political authority. This is one reason thinkers like Karl Popper attacked Hegel in The Open Society and Its Enemies, though his reading of Hegel was highly reductive and historically unfair.

      What I find deep in Hegel resists such appropriation. If reality transcends our systems, if understanding remains partial, if history discloses truth but never fully contains it, then no political order fully incarnates reason and tragedy reveals irreducible finitude. Those aspects of Hegel's thought weaken the tendencies that could be turned into political triumphalism.