4

Europe’s Logic

Greece: Slavery as the Condition of Self-Sufficiency

Hegel’s world history thus really gains its focus when he switches to Greece, which is not much of a surprise. Greece is where the story really starts for him, since it is where the kind of reflective self-consciousness that propels a philosophical history (in his sense) first plants its feet firmly on the ground and where he is simply better informed than he was about Africa, China, India, Persia, or Egypt. It also means that despite its claims to be a philosophical “world history,” the rest of the lecture series is about Europe, since like Polybius’s Rome, modern Europe (for Hegel) is the defining element of the modern order. It also means that from that point on, Hegel’s story is entirely European, which as a history of modernity, he thinks is only proper (but which is not the whole story of modernity, even in his own time, although it would have been hard for him to have known that.)¹

Like others before and since, Hegel regarded the emergence of classical Greece as something of a wonder—the idea of “Greek miracle” so often cited—and although it was unprecedented, it was not without precedent. On his account, the ancient pre-Greek world, paradigmatically in Egypt, had foundered on its own unintelligibility. Greek life, however, gave the ancient world the more developed form of self-consciousness, the reflective distance it had otherwise lacked. The Greek world now rested on making sense of what it meant to be a sense-making agent.²

Hegel does note how the Greek world grew out of the turbulence of the ancient world and the collapse of what we now call the “Bronze Age” of civilization in that part of the Mediterranean.³ It seems that what brought this about was not some, or even a few, identifiable causes but what Eric Cline has suggested might be a “perfect storm” of climate change, earthquakes, foreign invasion, internal rebellion, the cutting of trade routes, disease, the eruption of volcanoes, and mass migration.⁴ The collapse of the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean meant that the earlier organization whereby only “one was free”—a sacred ruler who embodied all power in himself—itself collapsed and lost its hold.⁵ The effect was to force the reduced population of the early ancestors of classical Greece into living in closely knit units that were severed from the ancient organization wherein only “one” was free. The Greek miracle, as it were, was its creation of the polis, a new form of social and political organization in history in which the ability to defend the community united with an ancient conception of justice into a new kind of unity that broke with the past and thereby combined the advantages of the emotional closeness and solidarity of traditional tribal life with the reflective and economic advantages of an urban life.⁶

Hegel’s classicism shows up most clearly—but again hardly as a surprise—in his treatment of ancient Greece in the lectures on the philosophy of history. His own views on Greece are informed by and large by a mixture of Herodotus and Thucydides, all restructured so as to present his own account of why the ancient Greeks both present a certain highpoint in civilization and why, as good as it was, it could not endure. From Herodotus, he takes over the narrative that it was the Greek decision to preserve Greek freedom that heroically led them to defeat the Persians, and, also like Herodotus, he sees this not merely as one battle among many but as the world-historical decisive confrontation of Greek freedom against Asiatic despotism (That idea from Herodotus became a theme with a long afterlife in European thought.) From Thucydides, he takes over the narrative of the glory of Periclean Athens as both dazzling and fundamentally doomed, as yielding to a fate that seemed to be directing it from without. The defeat of the Persians serves for Hegel as one of the key manifestations of the path-dependency of history. At that point, as Hegel puts it, “world history’s interests hung in the balance.”⁷ If the Persians had defeated the Greeks, then the philosophical sense Hegel makes of history would probably not have been possible. Everything would have been different.

However, Hegel thought that the basis of Thucydides’ explanation of the decline and collapse of Athens was, although overall in the right direction, wrong in one fundamental way in its diagnosis. For Thucydides, the diagnosis lay in a characteristic of Greek hubris, an overreach against one’s limits and thus an overstepping of the boundaries of the virtues on the part of the Athenians that led Athens to move from self-confidence to aggression, and caused Sparta, among the other Greek city-states, to fear the extension of Athenian power and ultimately to face down Athens and defeat it. As Thucydides suggests, the overreach that characterized Athens is written into human nature such that one can expect the same kind of thing to happen again with regard to some future and otherwise successful state.

However, what for Hegel was missing in Thucydides’ account was that Athens and the whole Greek system of democratic city-states were doomed from the outset because of the constellation of principle and passion that necessarily attends the organization of such city-states. It was not hubris and the decay of virtue, but a deep contradiction at work in that constellation of passion and principle that was to constitute the fate of Athens, the outcome of which was that Greek life ended up with a deep unintelligibility about itself. It was not that Hegel disputed Thucydides’ suggestion that something like the Athenian overreaching lay in human nature (nor did he dispute that it would most likely happen again in history). However, it was essential to understanding the logic of historical development that such a conviction did not rule out the idea that we could nonetheless be making progress in our interpretations about what it meant to be a self-conscious subject.

On Hegel’s account, what compels our attention to the Greek shape of life was at the heart of its dissolution. In his negatively mythical versions of Chinese, Indian, Persian, and Egyptian shapes of life, individual subjects were more or less either fully absorbed into their natural and social worlds such that they could not get an adequately critical distance on their own practices or were so abstractly disconnected from their social worlds that getting an adequately critical grip on them was also not possible.⁸ In such a positive order of things—where the basic rules are simply “given”—there would be lots of room for the intellect to make changes and adjust principles, but there is no room for any more radical, rational reflection, and each subject remained fully dependent on his or her involvement in the whole (even for what looks like the exception, namely of those dominant individuals who in rulership laid down the law for others but were subject to no law governing themselves). In contrast, the Greek shape made real the formation of an individual who could plausibly claim to be fully self-sufficient. The concept of the individual in Greek life, which specified the aspirations around which the real individuals of that life ideally modeled themselves, was that of a self-sufficient individual, or, as Aristotle at one place characterizes the virtuous man, a “law unto himself.”⁹

It is the place where, in Hegel’s words, “beautiful individuality” shows up. The Greek shape of subjectivity, in its origin, bases itself on the conviction that the goods pursued by subjectivity are objective and part of nature. The gods themselves are part of the world, not located in some “beyond” outside of time and space. Yet, in distinction from Hegel’s imagined “Orientals,” the Greeks also had a place for self-conscious subjectivity as occupying a status that can put itself above, as it were, all the goods that are presented to it as reasons for belief, feeling, or action. The Greeks never resolved the obvious tension between those conceptions, however heroically their artists gave expression to it and however systematically their philosophers drew the implications. As Hegel sums it up: “Rather, spirit as the in-between between of both extremes is the concrete abstraction.… Between the sensuousness of the person as such and his mindedness in the form of thought, of abstraction, is the particular subject the middle-term and that makes the Greek character into beautiful individuality, which is brought forth by spirit in its reshaping of what is natural into spirit’s own expression.”¹⁰

The Greek subject in his ideal form as such a self-sufficient virtuous individual thus achieved a kind of self-distancing that is not possible in a fully absorbed life. He could place himself a distance from the social and natural world that otherwise constitutes everything such subjects are, and, in the Greek case, for a very short period, this type of individual lived in harmony with the social world. As Hegel succinctly summarized that view: “The Greeks in their immediate actuality lived in the happy middle between both self-conscious subjective freedom and the ethical substance.”¹¹ That “happy middle” also included the self-sufficient individual whose social space was nonetheless essentially dyadic (as a citizen of the polis).

However, what held Greek life together was not originally a fully worked out conceptual comprehension but something more like an aesthetic unity. In the Hegelian conception, in every genuine work of art, there is an aspiration to bring together certain basic tensions not simply in terms of cataloging them and laying them out side by side but rather as holding them together so that a kind of harmony emerges in the work itself, the experience of which falls under the concept of “beauty” (but which is “aesthetic” and not natural beauty). Greek political life, which leads to the Athenian ideal of a commitment to democratic participation by citizens under conditions of equality, embodied such an ideal of aesthetic beauty. The political order did not exist on the basis of externally compelling people to participate. Each citizen freely joined the deliberative body. To the extent that individuals came together to deliberate about what to do as a collective, they could each be assured that no matter how deeply the passions went pro and contra certain policies, each citizen was deliberating with the interests of the city-state (especially in Athens) in mind. Differences of opinion were about how best to serve Athens’ interests, and not about different interests themselves. Outside of that common commitment to the good of Athens, individuals could thus develop their own idiosyncrasies and talents more or less as they pleased. As Thomas Hobbes rendered Pericles’s speech to his fellow Athenians, Pericles boasted: “And we live not only free in the administration of the state, but also one with another void of jealousy touching each other’s daily course of life; not offended at any man for following his own humour, nor casting on any man censorious looks, which though they be no punishment, yet they grieve.”

The model for Athens was that each citizen was to be self-sufficient and could be confident of having his views heard and debated. The whole functioned organically in a way analogous to that in which the organs of animal function worked together to produce and sustain the whole without any particular “organ” having such a unity as its aim. If each citizen did his part, then even though great passions could be provoked and great disputes might arise, the social whole would spontaneously harmonize. Full equality was maintained among self-sufficient citizens, but its beauty did not consist in equality in which real difference did not emerge. (This was what he thought the “mass” society of equals in “China” was all about.) What made it beautiful was the element of negativity, the very distinctness of the citizens, the way they distinguished themselves from each other in their actions and thus the way their whole personality necessarily showed up in public life. As Hegel put it, “the democratic [constitution] is what was suited for the Greek spirit, for living, self-sufficient individuality. In that city, each could be present with his whole particularity in order to actively co-contribute.”¹² It was therefore a world in which the unifying principle was not really so much of a principle but something more akin to the sensible intuition of beauty. Art had its home there, since the artist could express the truth of Athenian life in a sensuous work and have it be complete, requiring nothing outside of itself. In Greece’s golden age, no philosophical commentary would be required for a Greek to comprehend the truth that was being offered up in aesthetic form. He lived that truth in his political life in the polis, and he saw and heard it in the work of art.¹³

But that was its problem. Women and slaves were excluded from all this, and this exclusion was not accidental to the nature of the Greek polis. To be a citizen, a man had to be self-sufficient, a law unto himself. The individual self-sufficiency of the member of the polis required that the dirty work of his everyday life had to be done by others so that he was free from manual labor or even craftwork. As Aristotle phrases it, “it is the mark of a free man not to live at another’s beck and call,” and a craftsman or laborer has to take orders from somebody else.¹⁴ The beauty of Greek life, its achievement in the arts and in philosophy, thus came at a high price: slavery (and the oppression of women, although that was by no means Hegel’s main concern).

The Greek, democratic model differed from the so-called Asiatic despotic model (on the accounts given by Herodotus and Thucydides) in that it defended freedom (at least in the figure it assumed within the Greek shape of life), and individual citizens were dependent on themselves, not on the arbitrary wills of others. As long as such citizens exercised their virtues, no despot could take power from them—except for the fact, more or less unacknowledged, that Greek male citizens were in effect despots within their own circle (which also meant that those circles outside of the despotic rule of men had to be excluded from political life).

A second sense of self-sufficiency for the ancient Greek subject is that he has no need to consult anything other than his own self to determine his actions. The exemplary model of freedom in this shape of life was the mythical Greek hero. The Greek hero is an aesthetic creation: He is portrayed as completely self-sufficient in that he acts without principle, but he also does what he takes himself to be required to do.¹⁵ As Hegel likes to put it, although he founds cities based on law, he lives by the laws of no city. Passion and principle unite in his person because in essence, as a founder of cities, there is in his case no real difference between passion and principle. Acting on his passion is his principle, and when a hero acts in such a way, he is justified. He is not unreflective, but he does not have to reflectively identify himself with his desires (of whatever rank he gives them), nor does he have to reflectively justify what he does, since the hero is entitled by virtue of who he is to do what it is he needs to do. He is thus the very model of what it would mean to be a law unto oneself.

The hero is necessarily also a fictional character, a kind of cultural ideal who, if he were real, would resemble a sociopath.¹⁶ Yet the subject who does what he needs to do and is justified in doing so remains a powerful picture of freedom, and in the sensible portrayals that art gives—in poetry, painting, or sculpture—this kind of freedom offers up the richest possibilities for aesthetic portrayal. It gives rise to a kind of art which cannot, Hegel says, be surpassed—in the sense that no better sensuous and intuitive presentation of freedom can be given.

However, the hero does not instantiate any general principle. He simply acts and does what he has to do. Being a human—or the son or daughter of a human and a god—he acts as any human would in founding a new political order, but being a hero, he does this in a way that no contingent human could do. The hero, as a law unto himself, is autonomous. What the aesthetic presentation of the hero obscures, however, is that such full autonomy as an ideal seems to make sense ultimately only in a social order that is also in essence based on domination of others—in other words, the slave society that was ancient Greece.

Its downfall lay partly in the way that it could not make sense of itself—it could not exist without slavery but slavery ultimately was problematic for that shape of life. For example, since slaves could be manumitted, what was the real difference between a slave and an ex-slave? Aristotle gave slavery an unconvincing justification with his idea that some people are “natural slaves,” since they supposedly cannot rule themselves and therefore require masters, but after him, most Greeks simply gave up trying to defend it without virtually anybody seriously suggesting that they abandon it. For them, as for the rest of the ancient world, slavery was an institution that hardly seemed justified, but nobody in power thought they could do without it. At its heart, classical Greece had a tension within itself that gradually grew into a tension emerging as a self-conscious contradiction. Eventually, the various attempts at avoiding the contradiction by redefining terms, arguing for “natural slaves,” or more closely specifying the duties between slaveholder and slave were seen as inadequate, and the contradiction now appeared not as the temporary failure of those thinking about it to get out of it but as a kind of insoluble unintelligibility at the heart of things.

Linked to the tension between the necessity and the indefensibility of slavery was the way in which classical Greek life demanded as its key value a kind of self-sufficient individuality, which, when it fully developed itself in actual practice was actually completely at odds with the system that nurtured it. It was only as a citizen that somebody could be self-sufficient, a law unto himself, but to be a citizen, he had to be recognized by other citizens with the requisite authority to recognize his own authority over himself, and for him to be recognized as having self-sufficiency in that sense, he also had to be free from dirty work and mundane matters. Thus, the world in which citizens think of themselves in terms of the aspirations to self-sufficiency in this one-sided way necessarily sustained itself as a slave society even if it could not ultimately make sense of doing so.¹⁷ Its unintelligibility to itself made it, so Hegel thought, in the long run unable to sustain the passionate normative allegiance that had earlier fueled the defeat of the Persians. Nonetheless, out of its experience of slavery, it developed the concept of freedom, and out of the Greek experience, the opposition of freedom/slavery became a defining concept for what happened after it.

As it first emerged in Greece, freedom was conceived as a negative phenomenon: To be free was not to be a slave. Rather, freedom, as a new component of a shape of life, was to be in a social order where one exercised authority over one’s own life, and freedom was what the name for what slave lost when he or she became enslaved. However, out of its negative definition, its positive sense developed on its own: Freedom was about self-direction in one’s own life, which in turn depended entirely on one’s entitlement to the principled status of “citizen” in a polis.¹⁸ A person outside the polis could not exercise human freedom. Living outside of any polis, he could only be, as Aristotle noted, either a beast (and thus not free at all, since he could not participate in practices of recognition) or a god (and thus a creature whose authority was completely self-derived, a status which could only be mythical). Freedom was thus not an inherently human possession. It was a status that only a few members of a social class possessed. Free people could make what really matters effective in their lives and in their world. Unfree people could not, and if there really were “natural slaves,” as Aristotle entertained the idea, there were some people who simply could not have the capacity to make what matters truly effective. Their status was somewhere between children and animals.

On Hegel’s view, nonetheless, the art of classical pre-Socratic Greece was never to be surpassed, since as a shape of life held together in a fundamentally aesthetic way, its modes of ultimate intelligibility to itself were fundamentally aesthetic.¹⁹ The way in which citizens were called to respond and justify themselves to each other was anchored in the sense that each acting in their required but nonetheless spontaneous ways would lead the social whole to spontaneously harmonize such that a political work of beauty would be the result. The giving and asking for reasons by Greek citizens was rooted in an aesthetic-religious condition, not fundamentally a more narrowly conceptual comprehension because, as a spontaneously produced harmony, it needed no concept to guide it (to put it in the way Kant characterized aesthetic judgment). Yet it also conceived of itself as acting under a sense of “eternal” justice, out of a necessity that lay in the very nature of things aesthetically portrayed, and which could only be accessible through the reflective capacities developed by the Greek shape of mindedness itself.

Yet, since this aesthetic ideal contained the archetype of self-sufficiency for each citizen, it was also fundamentally at odds with itself. The tensions between the Greek idea of justice as a kind of necessity born out of what spontaneous harmony requires and the necessity of an ideal of beautiful individuality that is required of such an aesthetic conception itself comes to its most nearly full presentation, so Hegel famously thought, in Sophocles’s Antigone, where the central character demanding recognition for himself is not in fact a “himself” at all but Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, who self-consciously disobeys the command from her uncle, Creon, not to perform the religiously required burial rites on her dead brother’s corpse. Antigone embodies almost all the contradictions in Greek life within herself. As a daughter of a ruling family, she demands full recognition, which is fully at odds with the status of women in that shape of life. Her uncle, Creon, has the unlimited right to issue commands for the good of the community, and he has clearly spoken. Whatever she does—obey Creon or disobey Creon—is, on the terms of the polis itself, equally right and wrong. Even worse, whatever she does violates the bedrock principle that she is not to make up her own mind about where her practical requirements lie, since there is no stance outside of the polis and its spontaneous harmony that could function as a standard for her to make up her own mind. Antigone comes to an end because of these contradictions. She is the heroine of the play because she basically is Greece as it has unfolded itself in time.²⁰

Tragedies such as Antigone brought the Greek public face to face with the deeper contradictions at work in their collective life. The eternal laws of justice, as embedded in the divine organic order, are themselves necessary to produce spontaneously the kind of beauty in which the upending of the natural organic order of things is put aright by some form of punishment in keeping with those eternal laws of justice.²¹ However, when the laws are carried out by fragile humans, they will not always be consistent with each other, since in a world of conflicting gods making unconditional but conflicting demands on human allegiance, there will always be a world of tragic human conflict—tragic because the conflicts are internal to the shape of life itself and are not merely conflicts with the religion of another shape of life. A tragedy such as Antigone makes those conflicts doubly problematic since the tragedy presented a kind of failed reconciliation. It exhibited a world where Antigone’s doom must happen as a result of the divine order of things—since the basic structure of that world has been thrown out of kilter, it must be set aright again, and that entails Antigone’s suffering—and yet it implicitly provoked, without having explicitly to raise the issue itself, the doubt as to whether that order made any sense. If it is senseless, Antigone’s suffering is also senseless.

For the Greek democratic political ideal to be real, citizens had to assume that debate in the public arena was conducted in a way such that each citizen firmly had the good of the polis as his basic, unyielding commitment.²² That commitment itself was beyond deliberation, and commitment to the agreed-upon policies had to be equally stringent. Tragedies like Antigone raised the thoroughly disturbing thought that the gods might be such that they could make even the best of such deliberations ineffective since all human deliberation might result in policies that contravene the divine order. If that were the case, then even the most ordinary citizen would have to be able to think for himself about which law—the “divine” or the “human” law, or even which among many “divine” laws—he was required to follow. That left citizens at odds with themselves and potentially at odds with each other. In such a world, the move from a fundamentally religious and aesthetic comprehension of things to a more secular and rational comprehension suddenly came on the agenda, and that meant that tragedy was to be replaced by philosophy. If the world was to make sense (and for us to be reconciled to it), it had to make sense rationally. That required a new and more alienated form of self-relation which developed out of the breakdown of the initial Greek conception of subjectivity. It provoked the Greeks to move from tragedy as an aesthetic way of understanding themselves to philosophy as a search for a conceptual and not aesthetic comprehension of things. Greek life moved from the tragic view of the world to the philosophical.

Despite its beauty and its cultural achievements, this was not a system that could ultimately make sense of itself. The good fortune it enjoyed in defeating the Persians could not be expected to last forever (and it was overreaching to think it could). To keep its democratic equality real, it also had to remain small, which made it ultimately indefensible against larger, stronger powers (first against Macedon and later more definitively against Rome). More to the point, the very ideal of self-sufficiency itself could last only as long as such putatively self-sufficient individuals could maintain the ideal that required each of them to put Athens’ good before his own good. The very activities of separating oneself from the social whole that was the core of Greek democracy meant that eventually people would put their own interests ahead of the social whole, and when they did, the sophists were ready and waiting to sell them the skills they needed to get their private way in public debates. Small wonder, Hegel noted, that this beautiful system in its full bloom only lasted about sixty years.

The rise of Alexander, who always carries the epithet, “the great,” came after the classical Greek shape of life had ceased to exercise its authority as it had done in the past. While it is probably true that Alexander—Aristotle’s student—was indeed a charismatic individual who could inspire others to organize and even more others to carry out his will, he was also the end of the story. The empire that resulted from his conquests (achieved with extraordinary brutality) was what we call a conquest state—it subjugated independent peoples under its own rule and used plunder to finance itself. Typically with conquest states, when the elements of plunder are no longer there, the conquest state quickly vanishes, and so it was with Alexander’s great “empire,” which fell apart immediately on his death. Like so many others of his own time and afterward, Hegel more or less bought into the idea that by virtue of such conquests and his allegedly noble character, Alexander really deserved his epithet, “the great,” and Hegel dismissed those who criticized Alexander’s harsh methods and mercurial personality. He seems to have accepted Pliny the Elder’s story that Alexander had his conquered peoples send his beloved teacher, Aristotle, specimens from the East (in particular, an elephant or details about elephants), thus enabling Aristotle to write his history of animals. (The story has been disputed.²³) But even on Hegel’s own account, Alexander’s greatness came about only in the interim of the breakdown of an older shape of life and its replacement by a new shape which was growing at the same time.²⁴

Because of the necessity of the ideal of self-sufficiency, the polis had to be small enough to enable face to face interaction. This made the Greek polis too small to defend itself, and when another, well-organized powerful empire showed up at its door, it no longer had the power, motivational or otherwise, to resist.²⁵ Classical Greece’s long, slow breakdown and final, stunning submission to Roman rule finally came as no surprise. Its successors had to discard what did not work in that shape of life and had to fashion a new understanding out of the new reality on the ground (the rise to world domination by Rome). In terms of a more Hegelian metaphor, it was time for spirit to move on.

Roman Dominance and the Cultivation of Inwardness

In Hegel’s philosophy of history, the move from one period to another is characterized as that of “determinate negation.” The failure of a way of life is expressed in the way in which it fails to sustain allegiance to itself, and in the dissolution of such a way of life, those living during its dissolution have to pick up the pieces that still seem to work, discard what is no longer of use or value, and fashion some new whole out of what remains, almost always without any overall plan for what they are doing. The succeeding shape of life is different, but it is not the “abstract negation” of what succeeded it. That is, its own shape is not just that it is “not” the same as its predecessor. Rather, it has the shape it does by virtue of the way it tries to make good on the failures of its predecessors and the way it sees itself as dealing with the failures and successes of its predecessor. It is “not” its predecessor in a very determinate way.

The passage from Greece to Rome is illustrative of this. It is not a dialectical generation of Rome out of Greece—Greece does not “produce” Rome—and thus it differs from the way Hegel otherwise proceeds in most of his other work. The Logic, for example, claims to generate the kinds of claims that go on in “Essence” out of the necessities of making sense of “Being.” So Hegel’s claim goes, the very intelligibility of the ways in which we describe, count, and classify objects requires us to look at the way things are described as appearances or as causal products of something else, and the answers to the questions “What caused that?” or “Why does it appear that way?” are not a matter just of describing, classifying, or counting. Rome does not, however, appear as a logical derivation from Greece. Rome had an independent—and from the standpoint of Hegel’s Logic, arbitrary—founding (which it mostly mythologized), and it construed itself as bound by the acts those founders carried out in the founding.²⁶ It is just not that we (or some cosmic spirit) have to make sense of Greece by coming up with a new category, “Rome.” (That would be a claim so wildly implausible one would wonder why anyone would want attribute it to Hegel.) Rome’s own founding, and its relationship to Greek civilization, also depended quite obviously on the nonlogical fact that both operated in a Mediterranean sphere.

Nonetheless, Rome succeeded Greece by incorporating the workable elements of Greek life into itself and necessarily changing those elements in doing so. On Hegel’s view, the Greeks had a more natural unity whereas the unity of the Roman world was so clearly man-made. The significance of this in terms of Hegel’s principle was that the Greeks embodied a kind of metaphysics that viewed the world as fundamentally possessing a kind of order to itself such that if people followed out the requirements of their stations in society, the whole would spontaneously harmonize with itself. The early Greeks did not have to have much of any kind of theoretical account of how the elements of the whole cohered with each other. It was enough that the spontaneous harmony produced something of beauty. (As it were, the early Greeks no more needed a theoretical account of the unity of the elements of their life than a painter needs a theory of the unity of the different colors with which she is painting. What counts is how they all add up to a beautiful whole, not what concept the whole manifests.) This meant, however, that political unity—what Hegel calls the formation into a state²⁷—required a mutual recognition among citizens about who was and who was not a citizen, and in the Greek context, that carried over into some relatively natural way of identifying people (in Greece, such as being born in Athens to an Athenian man and woman, and so forth). Some social requirements were thus taken to be rooted in natural but nonetheless normative or principled facts about life. This also implied that the only political unities that could be established were small ones, and that ultimately meant that the Greek city-states could not defend themselves against larger powers (or that despite their early successes, their luck was bound to run out, as it did when they encountered Rome).

The Roman Empire, on the other hand, was clearly a constructed entity.²⁸ There was no ethnic unity to those peoples who fell under Roman rule. What instead united Rome was a clear understanding of how to use power to dominate others. The Greek city-states could not form a single political unity, even though they could from time to time establish successful alliances with each other. There therefore had to be very different political psychologies at work in Greece and Rome. In essence, Rome was a political unit that required itself to be always at war since there was no other real basis for holding it together, and that produced a very different psychology. If Greece was about the dynamism of full participatory democracy—putting aside for a moment the positions of women and slaves—Rome was about the use of power and violence to achieve one’s ends. Greek psychology exhibited the virtues of courage that came out of loyalty to the good of the polis. On Hegel’s reading, Roman political psychology had at its root the courage and valor more appropriate to a band of thieves.²⁹ It was the value of those who valued domination above all else, and the kinds of family relationships and sets of virtues to which it gave rise. (Hegel seems to have accepted at face value Polybius’s view that Rome had world domination in view from its beginning. However, Rome’s emergence as an imperial power is arguably much more contingent than either Polybius or Hegel takes it to be.³⁰)

Like Alexander’s empire, Rome too was at first a conquest state essentially organized around constant expansion of its power and control. Like Alexander’s conquest state, its economy was basically that of plunder, and Rome had to face up to the problem of collapse when it could no longer expand. With its characteristic pragmatism, Rome transformed itself into a tributary state, which typically established links with local elites, set up bureaucracies, or set up subjects to collect the taxes and to stabilize such tax collection and other demands of empire.³¹

Rome thus put into place a different set of principles than those which governed Greek life in that it brought people into a functioning political unit who otherwise did not share the same ethnicity, religion, local commitments, family life, and so forth. Greek life fundamentally depended on relatively small communities—the so-called city-state—in which face-to-face contact was part of the glue that held things together. Rome both permitted and required a larger social unity to function.

Rome, although not by design, fashioned itself into a multi-ethnic political unit, even though in its founding narratives, Rome itself still presented itself in ethnic terms: In its stories of itself, the Roman people were said to have thrown off the rule of Etruscan kings—in other words, rule by another “people”—and to have replaced it with their own rule over themselves.³² Yet at the same time, more or less throughout its history, Rome also thought of its core members as “citizens,” not as subjects, and it eventually extended Roman citizenship to a wide variety of people living within the empire. In the process, Romans managed to move away from thinking of “we” as members of an ethnic group to “we” as citizens of something else.

In the wake of its success at domination and conquering, Rome began to legitimate its dominion by thinking of itself as having a universal mission, that of being the model of what we would now call a “classical” civilization in the Mediterranean.³³ Since in its own eyes, its success had to lay somehow in its being pleasing to the gods—in taking its success as lying in the very nature of things, not in mere chance—it saw its own conception of humanitas as the proper model to which barbarians could aspire. However, the ideal of humanitas was too abstract to give any real orientation to life under Roman power except for that of imitating what was going on in the capitol. Rome was no so much a paragon as it was something that demanded to be imitated or held itself out for imitation simply because it was so powerful.

In effect, the Romans took themselves to be rulers because they were meant to rule and believed authority within at first the Republic and then the Empire was there because it was supposed to be there. They had no deeper conception of the nature of that authority, and the uncomfortable reality of it was, on Hegel’s terms, that its conception of authority as it was practiced actually amounted to that simply of domination and accounts constructed after the fact to legitimate it. Its conception of authority vacillated from mythical accounts of great and virtuous founding figures in the past (somewhat resembling in that way Greek heroes) to accounts of contemporary authorities whose “authority” was really only that of power backed up by force. In that way, the move from “Republic” to “Empire” did not involve any great change in Roman political psychology. The sense of public life that had animated early Roman history had already begun to unravel under the pressure of its having no basis for itself except that of war-like conquering activity, and once that sense had more or less thoroughly dissolved, the Republic gave way to the Empire, which nonetheless continued to speak of itself in the Roman after-the-fact way as a continuation of the Republic. Since Rome’s own self-understanding was that of keeping faith with its founding, it invented myths for itself about how the great innovation that marked the shift from Republic to Empire was in fact no innovation at all but only a way of continuing the same way of doing things.

Such a conception of authority meant that Roman philosophy had to remain fundamentally abstract since their political life, rich and detailed as it was, was also fundamentally abstract in its outline.³⁴ There are no fundamental sets of principles holding the whole thing together. Instead, there was only, at best, the original virtue of Roman patriotism which itself dissolved under the opposing pressures of the Roman shape of life itself. The various detailed virtues that Romans could cite as constituting the essence of the Roman life were themselves abstractly conceived and put to different use as the demands of power shifted. The psychology that held Rome together could not survive the pressures that becoming a conquest state put upon it, but becoming a tributary state only intensified its need for further domination.

The Greeks had held themselves together out of allegiance to something like an aesthetic religion, articulated into a variety of different gods. They took themselves to be bound to very specific requirements that were written into the nature of things, with the justification resting on the conviction that if everybody carried out the requirements of their social position, the whole would spontaneously harmonize into a work of beauty. Rome had no such belief in the inevitable beauty of its rule, and it had no developed working out of what the principles of such rule should be. It simply did what it thought it had to do to maintain its rule. Yet this did not mark a retrogression of any sort. Unfavorably as Rome looked to classicist temperaments such as Hegel’s when they were compared to the Greeks, the Romans made innovations that surpassed those of the more idealized Greeks. If the Greeks were about beauty—“poetry”—it was with the Romans, Hegel says, that the world learned to speak prose. The Romans built roads, laid down laws in books, constructed engineering marvels, and crafted the instruments of a sober, pragmatic (and even a sort of multicultural) rule.³⁵ They were open and admiring of the achievements of past cultures, especially those of the Greeks, whom they conquered, and they moved to incorporate what they saw as effective in Greek life into their own way of life. They picked up the pieces of other civilizations as they subjected these peoples to Roman rule and used what was useful to them.

In effect, Hegel thought the history of Rome was an ongoing struggle among different classes and groups. In one of its main origin myths, it saw its own beginnings as a people oppressed by foreign (perhaps Etruscan) kings which a set of aristocratic families managed to force out and thereby to create a republic of citizens governed by those aristocrats. In that particular origin story, Roman political and social authority thus ideally rested on a myth of a liberation movement driven by a united “people” led by its best members. That unity lasted until the pressures latent in it began to appear, and thus there followed a period of struggle between the plebeians and the aristocrats over power and status, including struggles over whom could hold high office. (That story itself also had highly mythologized core to itself.³⁶) After the plebeians had won some place for themselves, the Roman state gradually dissolved into a struggle that its thinkers liked to style, following the idea that they were keeping with their founding, as going on between private interest and public virtue but which more realistically involved all kinds of important constituencies attempting to grab some of the power and wealth for themselves and their clients. Faced with this, the Roman shape of life had no way to understand it except as a continuous decline of virtue on the part of people and thus to tell stories about a golden period when the good of the state and sacrifice for the good of Rome was supposed to have been uppermost in people’s psychologies—that is, the golden age when those now struggling for recognition had not had the temerity to do so.

The great pragmatism of the Romans enabled them to survive various crises and create the energy for more conquest out of them. Nonetheless, since the deeper principle of Roman life and which therefore informed its psychology was that of domination (Herrschaft) pure and simple, legitimacy continued to be underwritten by gaining and then exercising domination over others.³⁷ The principle holding people together beyond that, so Hegel argued, could therefore only be that of property, family history, military standing, prestige, etc., that is, a set of socially sanctioned entitlements to various things (including entitlements to other people as one’s slaves). That in turn meant that subjects were fundamentally granted effective social recognition only, as it were, as office-holders. One’s status as a subject was defined by the de facto rules that bestowed domination of land and people (or that likewise could be employed to deny an entitlement to oneself, as was the case with slaves). That for large stretches of Roman history, various personages were also recognized through various practices as exemplary men of virtue, heroes of battle, and so forth does not, or so Hegel thought, undermine the more basic idea that there is no real basis for any recognition in Roman life than as an office holder. There was nothing deeper to Roman subjectivity than its being a place-holder in a normative social space. The only true social reality was thus the relation of power masquerading under the form of authority, of one will struggling against another, and the Roman shape of life therefore was at its basis one long ongoing struggle for recognition.

Metaphysically, for the Romans, there was nothing more to subjectivity than socially defined entitlements and commitments. Thus, when they turned to the idea of what authority Augustus and later emperors might claim, they resorted to the idea that somehow his authority was “patrimonial,” that he was in effect the natural head of the household for all of Rome and its territories. That put a stop, however ill conceived, to the regress that otherwise seemed to follow from Augustus’s claim to imperial (commanding) authority.

That the Empire supplanted the Republic was not an accident. The principle of domination in effect ensured that eventually, in the right circumstances, somebody would make a play for power and succeed. Even if later Roman thinkers may have thought the Republic’s collapse was brought about because of matters such as a decline of virtue, it was in fact a consequence of the principle of Roman life itself.

If nothing else, the limited freedom of Roman property-holders was defined against the background of the unfreedom of the vast group of slaves and other people on the lower points of the hierarchy. Even more than with the Greeks, the concept of freedom for Romans was determined negatively. Its sense, what it meant, as it had meant for the Greeks when they first formulated it, was that it was “not” something else. Freedom was what slaves and all those dominated lacked.

Hegel characterizes the move from the defeat of the Persians by the Greeks, and the establishment of the Greek spirit as the leading edge of historical progress as the way in which, as Hegel puts it, “spirit takes its leave of nature.”³⁸ It would seem therefore that if Greek life was still bound to the idea of the cosmos as providing authoritative reasons within itself (in terms of natural, divine harmonies producing a thing of beauty), Rome would have offered the more successful alternative of spirit’s bidding nature adieu—or at least Rome would have been just one step away from it—but Hegel does not draw that conclusion. The fact that each will was in contest with every other will, and the fact that some had more power than others forced them to the conclusion that there had to be a kind of “fate” to the course of things that escapes all efforts on the part of subjects to direct it or even to comprehend it. Roman subjectivity took its shape and its filling by its participation in a public sphere, and it was only actual in that sphere.

However, because of its own logic, Roman life over the ages effectively emptied subjects’ lives of any kind of meaning to be found in the public sphere, and Romans were thus provoked into inventing a new form of inwardness (Innerlichkeit), where their subjectivity was at least felt still to be at work.³⁹

With that, the passage from the ancient world which, on Hegel’s rendering, is a vastly different concatenation of meanings from our own, began. Many of his contemporaries thought that there was more continuity between the ancient world and his own such that we could call for a return to “Roman” or “Greek” virtue. On Hegel’s view, such calls simply failed to see the chasm that separated Hegel’s world from that of the ancients: “In this respect, there is nothing so shallow as the constant appeals to Greek and Roman precedents we hear so often.… Nothing could be more different than the character of those nations and that of our times.”⁴⁰

For the late Romans, the chief concern shifted into that of cultivating their inner self. Although the world around such a Roman might have been going in a contingent direction indifferent to any of one’s aspirations or needs, the inward world of thoughts and senses were thought to remain under his own direction. This new form of inwardness was first expressed in the philosophies of stoicism, skepticism, and Epicureanism.⁴¹ For the Romans, the subject’s essential purpose turned out to be not only its own purposelessness but also its sustaining itself in finding its own essential meaning in that purposelessness, in the calm acceptance of fate and making it part of one’s volition.⁴² In that way, Romans managed to shift the conception of freedom away from its negativity—its not being slavery—into a more positive matter of the individual “will” and its purported strength or weakness in accomplishing what it commands. In doing so, Rome was also just one step away from nihilism, and when it fell apart, although many were indeed distressed, the world’s heart was not “broken,” as Hegel said it had been with the eclipse of Greece.⁴³ It was merely a sad passing.

History’s Watershed: Rome to Christianity

Now, it is not exactly unknown that Hegel thought it was Christianity that stepped into this unsustainable shape of life and offered a way out of it that shuffled off the elements of Roman imperial life that could no longer really work and replaced them with a view that the truth was indeed both “within” us (as subjective) and, at the same time, universal and timeless (as the Greek philosophers had thought).⁴⁴ So it would seem that Roman life, having both emptied itself out and universalized itself as the mission of bringing humanitas to the barbarians, and Christianity, in having given a purpose back to Romans that was consistent with this universalization, would have seemed to offer the kind of solution that fit the Hegelian scheme. However, this would have meant that the collapse of the empire was something contingent. After all, on Hegel’s terms, why could Roman life not have carried out reforms and gradually mutated itself into something livable and sustainable? In any case, the empire did Christianize itself under Constantine, and for centuries, Western Christians continued to think of themselves as “Roman.”

Why then did Hegel not draw the conclusion that Rome could have, but for contingent reasons did not, continued to function as a going concern? It seems that he thought that this kind of universalization of Roman political psychology was itself unsustainable precisely because it had to deny something which it itself had developed as fundamental to its shape of subjectivity. What it denied was something like the necessity of having a bounded social space that provided its members with a fundamental orientation in life—that is, a social space in which determinate goods are available to people which are made up of the elements of a common way of doing things and institutions transmitting that into practical knowledge of the world. Such goods are the elements that make a satisfying life—a life in which certain things of importance are within the real powers of real subjects to achieve and are not merely possibilities available only in daydreams. Those goods can only be formed and sustained in bounded communities where a certain base level of solidarity can be sustained, and that, so Hegel thought, can only persist in smaller, more determinate communities. Roman universalism had no way of recognizing the authority of such communities within its own mode of self-comprehension and thus had no way of comprehending those goods. For the Romans, as Hegel puts it, “different peoples did not yet count as legitimate, the states were not yet reciprocally recognized as essentially existing.”⁴⁵ At the time of the Romans, the only workable conception of community had to be that of an ethnic community, an ethnic people (a Volk) as the Greeks supposedly had. There was no way in which Rome could successfully project its universalizing movement into one overarching ethnic community.

Roman life was therefore parasitic on other communities sustaining those more determinate, community-bounded goods despite Roman domination, and once the facts on the ground of Roman domination began to change, there was nothing left to hold the whole together. Success at being a Roman subject—at occupying something like a legal status, an “office” in a social space—became impossible as it became impossible to be a Roman. If the Greek polis had been too small to defend itself, the Roman Empire was too big to govern itself with the resources Rome had at its disposal, since its size made it depend on the virtue of those ruling in its name in the far-flung provinces. Roman psychology, based on domination, could not sustain that type of virtue forever since it rested on Rome continuing its domination. Holding it together would require a different form of universalism that recognized the equal standing of individuals and, as Hegel came to think, the equal respect for different communal identities can only exist in some kind of mutual recognition among nation-states, and not in a pluralistic political state (or at least not ideally in such a state, or at least not in that time in history). Roman life had no resources within itself to develop such a view.

This deficiency in Roman life, however, was itself rooted in a deeper problem. Roman life had to be based on an idea that subjectivity consisted in nothing more than occupying a social space in which one undertook socially defined commitments and received socially defined entitlements. It in effect “thinned” out the “thicker” Greek conception of subjectivity as consisting in a way of securing a kind of excellence in life that constituted an “infinite end,” that of Greek Eudaimonia, of flourishing in terms of natural standards of excellence. However, this thinned-out Roman conception of subjectivity actually marked a way in which progress might be made. Rome in effect brought the sociality of subjectivity into full view for the first time and laid the practical groundwork for the way in which our conceptions of subjectivity historically had to, at least at first, bid nature adieu as a first step toward reintegrating a conception of subjectivity back into the natural world. But if Roman subjectivity lacked a conception of the normative status of subjectivity apart from its location in social space, how exactly is that a lack? And how is it a lack internal to the development of Roman subjectivity itself?

The passage from a Greek conception to the Roman conception is illustrative of, and crucial to, Hegel’s idea that the metaphysics of subjectivity itself, and not just our conception of the metaphysics of subjectivity, develops in historical time. The abstract “concept” of subjectivity is that of a self-ascribing subject moving in a principled and normative logical space.⁴⁶ The “Idea” of subjectivity, taken in the abstract, is that status possessed by self-conscious rational animals, a status which thereby requires recognition from other subjects. On that conception, there can be still only the thinnest invariant moral or normative core of the “Idea” of subjectivity. The various conceptions of subjectivity are thus expressions and articulations of deeper sense of the kind of subjectivity at work in our practices.⁴⁷ There is something to the core of a self-conscious human life seeking to realize its purposes and comprehending its “purposes as purposes” that like all other animals seeks to repulse attacks on itself and the like, but it takes a community of recognition to turn that into a determinate set of action-informing principles. More modern principles, such as that of the “dignity” of individual subjects, could only emerge out of the struggles for recognition and, most importantly, emerge out of the ways in which a shape of life failing to incorporate those principles into itself leads to its failure as a whole in making sense of itself, to its breakdown as the subjects operating in terms of such conceptions—in bringing themselves under “that” determinate concept—could not achieve the purposes they took to be essential to the historical shape subjectivity had taken at that point.⁴⁸

This kind of movement follows the outlines of Hegel’s Logic: there is an initial, “speculative” concept with a meaning to it that forms the “in itself” (Ansich) of the subjects in question—what it means to be that kind of being, its “concept”—and as it becomes articulated and worked out (“posited,” gesetzt in Hegel’s terms), the tensions within that conception become more apparent. That “positing” in turn prods a reworking of the practices and the terms by which subjects attempt to make sense of their practices. In those situations, how to put the practices into the proper conceptual or linguistic form is itself a matter of contestation, since one way of doing so will rule certain things in and other things out that another articulation would not.

Hegel’s peculiar “internalism” about reasons and motivations comes home to roost in such an overall view. Following Aristotle, Hegel holds that there will be certain parts of the human condition that will be always be at issue for people: how to deal with emotions such as fear and anger, how to deal with the desire for status, how to deal with wealth and the desire for more of it, the facts of aging and infancy, and so forth. Those set the bounds of what can count as a reason for such self-conscious organisms. If success comes about by acting in light of reasons, then when our own subjectivity is conflicted—such that the reasons for us are inherently at a deep enough level in conflict with themselves—that form of subjectivity cannot succeed in its purposes. It comes to be increasingly and explicitly at odds with itself and others, and the process of dissolution easily sets in as its shape of life no longer makes sense to it.

Roman life and practice puts on display the historical development of a conception of subjectivity that makes social structures of recognition into the constitutive aspects of subjectivity. What made this impossible to live with was that it put such a strain on the emotional and intellectual capacities of people so that it ultimately made it impossible to be those people. For the Roman shape of life, being a subject was simply being a member of the Roman legal order with all of its complicated divisions among local laws, imperial laws, and the like. There was no further essence, as it were, to subjectivity. Subjectivity just was acting in terms of the normative order of legal right. If subjectivity is a position in a legal order, then it depends on the relations of power that keep that legal order—especially an imperial legal order—in force. One’s very subjectivity is thus fragile and dependent in the deepest sense on who, as it were, is giving the orders. The reflective move prompted by the failures of a scheme of purely social recognition—of individuality as merely that of an office-holder—disclosed a new set of reasons having to do with the cultivation of inwardness as a sphere where one’s subjectivity was still at work and not failing, as it seemed to be doing in the wind-down of Roman rule.

Early Roman Christianity only apparently filled the void that Roman life brought with itself. The Greeks had at first lived in a world that seemed to make aesthetic and religious sense, but that had proven to be unsustainable. The Roman world offered a different account, but as its own internal tensions began to be more and more apparent, the sense it had given to things and which had successfully ruled for hundreds of years began to unravel. Early Christianity substituted a claim that although things might not seem to make sense now, their sense would indeed in time be made known unto us, and until then we must exhibit “faith” that all of this will become clear. The senseless Roman world will one day reveal its sense to us, and until then, we only see through a glass darkly and sustain the hope that it will become disclosed to us.

Christianity also brought the principle that “all are free” to the forefront. In the idea that God does not play favorites but loves each equally, Christianity began to supply the content for such inwardness—that is, it provided an account that specified the goods by which an individual could comprehend his or her own life as itself being of worth in more than just the terms of whatever “office” they were recognized as holding. Moreover, it offered an account of how their own subjectivity was at work in that life, such that their worth was not a matter of unpredictable “fate” but a matter that fell within the requirements of their own subjectivity as abstracted away from the given Roman legal order and subject to a more comprehensive, divine order.

The original Roman sense of freedom had been negative—one was free if one was not a slave. The Christian alternative folded itself more deeply into the idea that subjectivity was an office in a social space—that of being a “Roman” with the privileges that came with it—and worked out at first abstractly that it was something having to do with the individual’s own inwardness and self-direction. In the Christian world order, the subject could be his or her own person—could be in Hegel’s terms, bei sich—if he or she was willing to repent of sin and thus to free him- or herself from the slavery to those passions and inclinations that were at odds with the subjective core of subjectivity to be found in religious faith. From the Christian point of view, even the masters of Rome had turned out to be slaves to such passions, and it was the “truth” that was embodied in the Christian message that would set all, master and slave alike, free.

Although Rome was the incubator of such a sense of freedom, it could not make that principle a reality in people’s lives and remain truly Roman. The true standing that individual subjects had could not come from each other but only from the one king of kings, the Christian God himself. Paul formulated this Christian idea in his well-known pronouncement in Galatians 3:28 that, in Christ, there was neither master nor slave, neither male nor female, neither Jew nor gentile. Each Christian now occupied not so much a worldly “office” as a metaphorical place in the divine family.⁴⁹ Each was a son or daughter of God and therefore, in the divine order, a brother or sister to each other. The position of being a child of God in turn required one to carry out the father’s wishes, and that called for an act of interpretation, since the father was no longer issuing clear directives himself but, after his earthly appearance through the “son,” He only issued directives and wishes via his human intermediaries. Who had the authority to interpret those directives became the key issue of life, not who was in control of the Roman center of power. However, the comprehension of ethical requirements as divine directives from a monotheistic but still personal God opened up the possibility of a fully monadic, as opposed to dyadic, understanding of the ethical order. In that move, the concept of morality as distinguished from ethical life—or at least the concept “in itself,” an sich, of morality as the monadic relation of an individual to a rational moral order—showed up as a possibility awaiting further development. It involves measuring oneself in terms of one’s justification before God, and it therefore calls for the individual to take a deeper, inward turn. One’s immediate relation is to the divine order of the rules established by God. In Christianity, however, there is also the relation to others as being part of the divine family, as standing as brother or sister to others. This created a tension that itself had to be developed in historical terms.

Being a son or daughter of God, each was now called to figure out what really was required of them as individuals to make those principles real, at work, wirklich, in their lives. This added a positive, subjective sense of self-direction. Christianity thus seemed to displace the Roman idea of freedom which could only be obtained negatively. Roman freedom consisted in having others dependent on oneself but being free of such dependence on others. Christianity substituted, at first, an idea that all of us were free in relation to each other since all of us were dependent on a heavenly master, who, like a Roman father, had powers of life and death over us and the authority to command, but who, unlike a Roman father, loved us all. (Or, as Milton was later to put it, “but Man over men/He made not Lord; such title to himself/Reserving, human left from human free.”)

The heavenly kingdom was a just order, and in that system of justice, all of us were, by accepting Christian faith, now freed from slavery of a certain type. Articulated in that way, however, the statement of the faith had little institutional import in Roman life, and thus, Roman life in its original form could not determine what that freedom might look like in practice. But what was this freedom? Christian freedom, after all, at first certainly did not exclude subordination, secular slavery, or serfdom.

This Christian alternative became an actual reason for individuals only with the breakdown of Roman life. The relation of the individual to the moral order instead of the embedding of the individual in ethical life became the prime object of reflection. Once that possibility of moral life became a real possibility, it was now also possible to project it retrospectively back across time and understand the earlier failures of shapes of life as having failed for not having made that possibility actual. On the new conception, each could be free, at one with themselves in actions that ultimately made sense, even if the whole world sometimes seemed allied against them. In its failures, Roman life had generated out of the weight of its own deficiencies a revised version of the more positive, Greek version of freedom as self-direction. However, why then was Roman universalism together with Christian inwardness not enough? Why did Hegel think that history necessarily passed from the Roman world to the “German” world?

“Germans,” Germans, and Europe

Polybius had seen that suddenly with the rise of Roman power, there was now a new topic for history, namely, “universal history,” which is animated by an idea of the purpose toward which the world had been moving. Hegel took that a step further and asked what had happened since the fall of Rome. That is also equivalent to asking if a new form of psychology, of the link between “principles” and “passions” had arisen. The solution was to look at how the “universal particularizes itself and is herein identity with itself” in new circumstances. Was there a new shape of subjectivity that had to be developed for this to take root?

To this end, Hegel turned to the emerging sciences of ethnicity in his day particularly as they had been abstractly elaborated by G. R. Treviranus and J. F. Blumenbach. His thoughts on the matter are both straightforward (and, in that sense, clear) and also a bit uncharacteristically muddled. He more or less accepted Blumenbach’s typology of the races as an established empirical fact, and he concluded that for each racial type, there was a corresponding psychology that accompanied it, which he then extended into the concept of an organic “people” (or “nation”). Nonetheless, what holds a “people” together are the “principles” to which it is committed, not its ethnic makeup, but, so he also held, the ethnic makeup of a people partially shapes the kinds of principles and collections of principles to which they can become committed. He says, for example, that “spirit in history is an individual which is both universal in nature and at the same time determinate: In short, it is a ‘people’ (Volk) in general, and the spirit with which we are concerned is the spirit of the people (Volksgeist).”⁵⁰ Moreover, this kind of ethnic difference is not accidental but conceptual. The various ethnicities (Völker) can be comprehended in terms of the kind of unity of “universal” and “particular” is at work. That is, they can be comprehended in terms of how close their own mindedness is to their natural dispositions—or, in other words, how much degree of self-determination is and can be manifested in each of them. Although Hegel at least toyed with the idea that there may be a “logic” to ethnic difference, Hegel’s conception of ethnicity actually resembles the much more recent concept coined by the ethnographer, A. D. Smith, of an “ethnie.” In Smith’s accounts of the rise of nationalism, an “ethnie” is a group sharing common myths and memories, whose members enjoy a kind of cultural intimacy with each other. An “ethnie” is thus not primarily a racial concept.⁵¹

Now, on the one hand and in one sense, this is not at odds with Hegel’s more general view. On his view, it will be the case that there will be different psychologies at work in different kinds of orders of thoughts. A sea-faring commercial people may well generate a correspondingly different psychology than a land-locked agricultural people. However, the nineteenth-century temptation to take the empirical facts in what can only be described as a racialist direction was always on hand to tempt Hegel, and he did not always resist that temptation. Since Hegel’s views on subjectivity neither imply a racialist attitude nor necessarily support it, if it were just left at that, there would have been nothing in his overall view that would have ruled out his expunging such racialist ideas in his writings.⁵² In principle, Hegel would only have needed to be confronted with the distance between his statements and what the evidence supports to have felt the necessity to change his mind. However, Hegel did not do that and took his ethnic views one step further. Each “ethnie,” or so he sometimes seemed to claim at various points, could by virtue of its natural makeup only take on certain types of principles, that is, could only develop a certain type of order of thoughts. The tie between psychology and principle is tight enough, so Hegel thought, that if it were the case that some groups of people naturally had psychological dispositions of a certain sort, it would be at least ultimately unlikely that they could develop orders of thoughts that more closely fit what the demands of reason would require. Moreover, so Hegel claimed, an examination of the various peoples of the world leads us to exactly that conclusion. The philosophy of history is a history of such peoples and the kinds of orders of thoughts to which they gave rise.⁵³

Yet, on the other hand, Hegel quite explicitly argued against the idea that ethnic difference in any way licensed any kind of natural subordination of one people to another: “Descent affords no ground for entitling or denying entitlement to freedom and dominion to human beings. Man is in himself rational. Therein lies the possibility of equal rights for all men and the nullity of any rigid distinction between races which have rights and those which have none.”⁵⁴ However, he still held that this was compatible with his conception of ethnic “peoples” (“ethnies”) and of some of those “peoples” living at less progressive stages in history.

The question which animates his philosophy of history—his modified version of the Polybius question—has to do with how is it that Europe has managed to achieve “modernity” and to make a non-question-begging claim to be the universal standard-bearer for humanity. His answer turns out to be at odds with some of the fundaments of his theory. In particular, his stated views on how “spirit” develops in terms of a logic of dissolution and succession are completely at odds with his views about ethnicity determining the ultimate shape of principle, while, on the other hand, his views about how Europe comes to be such that it forms the avant-garde of historical development depends on his views about the relation between “ethnies” and principle.

Polybius argued that it was the superiority of Roman religion and its public virtues that made it almost inevitable that Rome should rise to prominence in the world. Hegel’s question is how it is that, if that is true, Rome itself should have finally gone under and been succeeded by what eventually came to be modern “Europe” as a collection of independent nation-states.

The answer to how it is that “Europe” succeeded Rome turns out to involve the “ethnies” of the people who ended up sacking Rome and establishing their own dominant culture, and these were the “Germanen” (not the Deutsche, the Germans). In claiming this, Hegel was drawing on a widely held view—widely held even for centuries—that the tribes who lived beyond the Roman borders, and who supposedly refused and fought off Roman domination and eventually overwhelmed Rome, were barbarians called the “Germanen,” who brought their own ethnic culture to bear on Roman civilization and changed it forever. These Germanen were originally described by Caesar, who grouped all the tribes resisting Roman rule east of the Rhine under that rubric. Later, Tacitus wrote a celebrated essay on them around 98 AD. In Tacitus’s account, although they were admittedly a crude people, they displayed a set of otherwise admirable virtues: They were devoted to freedom (of a crude, stubborn kind), were virtuous, were fiercely loyal to the very end to each other, simple in their tastes, were “like unto no other tribe,” manifested exemplary courage in battle, and had always lived in their ancestral lands. These Germanen later became accepted among wide swaths of the German intelligentsia from the Renaissance to the twentieth century as the genuine ancestors and models for “who” the Germans (the Deutsche) really were.

Unfortunately for all those who believed in Tacitus’s Germanen as Germans, all of this was for the most part a myth.⁵⁵ Tacitus’s essay on the Germanen was in effect a political tract meant to criticize the contemporary state of Roman life. In it, he compared the current Romans—corrupted, as he saw it, by luxury and power—to an idealized and mythical tribe who, although unsophisticated and barbaric, at least manifested the virtues so conspicuously lacking in the Rome of his day. Tacitus in fact most likely never actually observed the whole of the people whom he called the Germanen. He more or less made them up. However, much later—sometime in the Renaissance—Tacitus’s book was picked up by Germans who took over and modified themes from it with the belief that the book revealed the “true nature” of the German people. (The most disastrous of these became the idea that since they were “like unto no other tribe,” they were racially pure, even though Tacitus’s reference to them in that regard was simply a well-used trope in ancient writing.⁵⁶) Those mythical Germanen even appear in Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws in their Tacitean form, where Montesquieu suggests that perhaps the French themselves (or at least the French aristocracy and royalty) are descendants of those virtuous, freedom-loving Germanen, like unto nobody but themselves. Unfortunately for all the people who relied on the text, there simply never were any “Germanen” in the sense that Tacitus describes. The tribes described as Germanen were in fact a collection of many different tribes, not one pure ethnic unit.⁵⁷ The Germanen were not the “Germans.”

What was it about them that made the bearers of the new order of thoughts? To answer that, Hegel falls back on Tacitus’s myth. The ancient Germanen had, so Tacitus claimed, an inherent love of freedom, and Hegel endorses this: “The ancient Germans were famed for their love of freedom. The Romans formed a correct idea of them in this particular from the first. Freedom in Germany (Deutschland) has been the motto down to the most recent times.”⁵⁸

Nonetheless, despite having bought into the myth about the “German” love of freedom, Hegel was not completely taken in by the myth as it had taken shape up to his own day. For him, those “Germanen” were not Rousseauian noble savages (and, for that matter, even Rousseau did not use the Germanen as his model), and they were not particularly to be admired. They were, in Hegel’s various descriptions, barbaric, dull, narrow, ignorant, and inane. What they had going for them was, besides their love of freedom, their commitment to living according to the virtue of Gemütlichkeit—a kind of easy-going, unhurried way of life coupled with a love of coziness. On Hegel’s view, this otherwise dull, unsophisticated, sometimes even loutish virtue had nothing to recommend it, except that it made the Germanen ready to receive the more advanced Christian virtues into the substance of their lives.

Was it a matter of luck that there was no trouble transplanting the incipient moral psychology of Christianity linked to Roman universalism into the habits of the Germanen? For Hegel, in fact, their own rather lackluster culture even helped to pave the way, since their attachment to their own religions was so weak (because their intellectual life was so undeveloped) that they quickly abandoned their native religions for the new one of Christianity without much protest or struggle at all. Because they were also imbued with a strong sense of fidelity to each other and to the leaders to whom they swore allegiance, they were therefore on Hegel’s view the ideal clay to be fired into modern Europeans.

What they supposedly lacked was any commitment at all in their ethnic identity to any sense of universality. They recognized only particular rights and privileges, and thus, the states which they formed for the first few hundred years of their rise to prominence was itself only an amalgam of contradictions. It claimed a universality that was completely at odds with what is required of a state to be a free state. Instead, they formed irrational, even fanatical, murderous states that persecuted each other and continually waged war. Born out of their stubbornness, feudalism as a system of oppression and inequality ruled for hundreds of years. Although feudalism itself developed and shifted its shape over that period, the distinctive metaphysics of subjectivity that manifests itself in feudalism (or so Hegel’s claim goes) remained throughout much of that reshaping until it finally broke down under its own self-imposed pressures and became something else. Nonetheless, since universality as a matter of principle can be learned, the deeper commitments to freedom and fidelity meant that they had a good many of the building blocks required to shape (eventually) the modern order of thoughts based on rights, moral duties, and the socially established goods of the modern family, the regulated although market-driven civil society, and representative constitutional government (which Hegel also thought had to be monarchical).⁵⁹

To his credit, Hegel bought into none of the more rabid nationalistic myths of his own time about the Germans.⁶⁰ Rejecting the view that “Germans” were once pure but then had either let their native virtues degenerate or lost them altogether, and that modern Germans thus needed to reclaim their native purity and virtue (a view held by many others in his time), Hegel thought that the very idea of a “German” golden age that had to be recovered was simply ludicrous. There was no value in trying to resuscitate the practices and beliefs of those early Germanen. As Hegel put it, his German contemporaries who thought so, who thought that this was a way of recapturing “German-dom” simply demonstrated that they were “German-dumb.”⁶¹ For modern Germans, the cultural traits of the early Germanen had, as he put it, been “simply a past history, swept clean away with a broom.”⁶² Contemporary Germans could find much more of importance about themselves in studying the Trojan War than in reading any ancient tale about, for example, Nibelungen.

Nonetheless, he did more or less accept the part of the myth that the peoples described by Tacitus were in fact the ancestors of the Northern Europeans and that it was their particular love of freedom that made them the carriers of the Christian principle of freedom and therefore the “ethnie” forbearers of modern Europe. Only that would explain the close link between the psychology of the northern Europeans and the principles of freedom which had come to play such a core role in European life after the French revolution. Did he thus think that those Germanen had a special psychology that enabled them to be the leading edge of spirit’s progress? Since Hegel also holds that “psychology” rarely names some set of merely given impulses or dispositions, the passions at play in such historical transitions are intrinsically linked to principles, such that a change of principles also brings along a change in the status, if nothing else, of the passions. However, if spirit bids nature adieu with the Greeks and Romans, how then does nature reappear several centuries later with the Germanen?

Path-Dependency with Infinite Ends

Hegel’s account of how it is that European modernity came about is clearly a path-dependent story. On this account, it could not have happened without the particular twists and turns it took from Greece to Rome to the Christian Germanen and finally to the French Revolution. Thus, although the path to modernity may have been necessary to modernity being what it is, it does not follow that the path to modernity was itself necessary. Moreover, it also does not follow that there is no other path that could have arrived at much the same point, so that it could turn out that many alternative paths to that same point are possible. It could well be that perhaps some of them are even actual. Even though Hegel’s argument may have established the historicity of subjectivity, that is, the conception of our basic norms being indexed to very specific historical situations, it would not have established Hegel’s more fundamental claim to progress. What is at stake is whether without an appeal to the Germanic “love of freedom,” Hegel could establish his argument.

Development in history is different from development in nature because history is the manifestation of spirit, of human collective mindedness.⁶³ As the manifestation of spirit, history presents a succession of shapes of life, that is, ways in which people are bound together by virtue of their common commitments and shared understandings of what it means and what it takes to put those commitments into practice. Viewed at its most general level, it presents us with different metaphysical shapes of subjectivity.⁶⁴ These shapes are, as already said, a unity of passion and principle, each mutually reinforcing the other. This means that, in history, people are, to put it in more bloodless terms than is the case in historical reality, giving and asking for reasons, along with other activities, such among others, engendering children, plundering, negotiating, laboring, threatening, just making do, and so forth. However, as self-conscious subjects, in all these activities, they seek a type of authority for their actions, beliefs, and tastes, and this self-consciousness—not always, or even typically, reflective—manifests itself in history. Each person is making (or trying to make) sense of her world in light of the way in which her social world has taken root in her as a set of habits, expectations, virtues, and the like. As a manifestation of spirit, history is an arena in which people seek and have sought reconciliation—that is, a kind of justification of their lives—in their social worlds, and they have sought this both individually and collectively. Stated like that, there is nothing in that conception that implies that there is progress in history, much less necessary progress and certainly nothing that implies necessity.

Hegel’s argument draws on his discussion in the Logic about how the “Idea” of the Good” and the “Idea” of the True” mesh together.⁶⁵ Roughly, that argument takes the following shape. At least for modern subjects, the good is that which a subject posits as preferable or desirable in the face of a world otherwise indifferent to the subject, and the subject actualizes that good by using certain worldly means to bring it about. However, once a subject has come to a comprehension of itself as a subject—that is, as not merely knowing what is the case by means of its cognitive receptivity to the world but also as knowing that it knows this and by becoming reflectively self-conscious—what had been merely the contingencies of the past come to possess a meaning that they otherwise did not have, namely, as the manifestation of an infinite end, which is fundamentally that of subjectivity as Geist coming to an adequate self-consciousness.⁶⁶ That is, it now understands itself not merely as history but as history that has a meaning for it, as “comprehended history” (begriffne Geschichte, as Hegel calls it).⁶⁷

History’s contingent path-dependent development is the development of a certain way in which subjectivity both understands itself and evaluates itself. As subjectivity conceives of itself, it also conceives of what it takes to be a successful subject, and that has both changed and progressed over time. In Hegel’s version of Aristotelian naturalism, it is subjectivity conceiving of itself as an entity that flourishes in a certain way—namely, by using its reason—and its flourishing takes different shapes as it collectively conceives of itself differently. Although Hegel substitutes “satisfaction,” Befriedigung, for the Aristotelian Eudaimonia, there is a similarity in the overall purport of the two terms. (Hegel does, however, firmly reject the substitution of “happiness” for Befriedigung.) A satisfying life is one lived in terms of what is worth doing, suffering, undergoing, and entertaining, where the element of reflective self-consciousness plays a crucial role, and for both Hegel and Aristotle, this is characterized as an activity, not an achieved state.⁶⁸ It is an infinite, not a finite, end. New orders of thoughts institute new ways in which those lives can be led and effectively rule out certain other lives. The satisfying life is that in which one has been able to accomplish matters of importance. Thus, there is one way in which speaking of the “ends” of life according to Hegel can be misleading. The infinite end of self-comprehension (and of justice) is not an end at which one aims and then chooses the most appropriate or efficient means to achieve. The final end is more like an activity characteristic of the life of a self-conscious human subject—an “activity of soul in accordance with virtue,” as Aristotle described the life of Eudaimonia.

The argument is that there is a conception of the “good” as something like—to keep matters very general—making sense of things and one’s life, that is, living a life that is worthwhile. This good is collectively and individually realized in a variety of ways, each of them intrinsically limited (and therefore “finite” in Hegel’s terms). A shape of life enters the path to dissolution when it stops making sense. That is, when the people in it begin to give up hope that there is a way of making sense of those determinate goods (which are embedded in the shape of life) in these kinds of circumstances (in the material and social world surrounding them).

Now, there are two ways of seeing this progression in time. On the one hand, there is the obvious way of viewing it as it genuinely appears. History is a series of different ways of life, and the reasons for change are varied and fit into very little order.⁶⁹ On that view, history presents a version of what Hegel calls the “bad infinite”: We can delimit one period, one way of life, one epoch only in distinguishing it from another, ad infinitum. Or it might turn out that the series of events in history has no order to it, and it is more like that of the series, “1–1 + 1–1 …”, that is, it converges on nothing. In that case, it would be only a bad infinite and nothing more—something along the line of, “One dynasty succeeds another.…” There is no a priori assurance that the world is not such an unintelligible infinite series. (This is true even in the Logic. It takes an argument to show that in fact a principle for a certain infinite series can indeed be developed, and that is what the Logic claims to be able to do. It claims, that is, to have constructed an argument for something for which there was no assurance in advance it would discover or be able to construct.)

However, Hegel’s claim is that there is indeed an infinite end at work in history—even if nobody is entertaining the end as such an end—and that is the end of making sense of things.⁷⁰ Such an end need not be manifested in all behavior. One can, for example, have health as an end without making every single action in one’s life being carried out as a means to further one’s health. Nor need one subordinate all other ends to an infinite end. If one wishes to be healthy, it does not follow that one ought to consider everything else one does in light of how it contributes to one’s health. To understand the “affirmative infinite,” as Hegel calls it, is to understand an infinite series in terms of the principle behind it.⁷¹ There is a way of understanding history in terms of an infinite end, and because there is, there is also a way of asking whether there is progress in history. Hegel’s metaphor for this is the “cunning of reason,” the way in which despite the setbacks and horrors which appear in human history, there remains the need for self-comprehension which picks up its pieces and sets out anew.⁷² New forms of moral and ethical authority precipitate out of the breakdown of old ones. Reason, as it were, asserts its own authority and also tears it down.

Moreover, this series in history has to be an unending series of plural goods. A good is what makes a claim on a subject as preferable, but given the finitude of all subjects and the circumstances under which they think and act and feel, there will be many such goods, or, as Hegel puts it, “in terms of its content the good is something limited, there are many kinds of good. Good in its concrete existence is not only subjected to destruction by external contingency and by evil, but by the collision and the conflict of the good itself.”⁷³ Hegel’s claim that there is “a” good in history therefore cannot be the more Pollyanna claim that things are always getting better, nor is it the sweet (and false) banality that there is a silver lining in every dark cloud. It is certainly not that the idea that the good will always triumph since, as Hegel puts it, the good is always subject to “destruction by evil.” In fact, without such a conception of the good, there could be no recognition of its persistent destruction by evil. The infinite end of self-comprehension cannot be self-assured that it will always or even eventually win out in its best form.⁷⁴

There is an additional difficulty for Hegel’s view. If the good of freedom is indeed contingent on there being a prior affective engagement, then it itself can be an unconditional good (and not, as Kant would say, a heteronomous good) only if either: (1) this natural affective engagement is itself conceptually necessary; Hegel thought he had that conceptual necessity in the Germanen, but, as we have seen, this stands in contradiction to his own version of the link between principle and passion in a shape of life, and, besides, no such Germanen existed anyway. Or (2) if this originally heteronomous good could detach itself from its prior grounding in the psychological makeup of the Germanen and transform itself into an unconditional good. This would be the modern shape of spirit itself in which the function of being a subject is determined as good in fulfilling the rational purposes required of such subjectivity. Especially, if there were no such Germanen, then the second alternative is the only one open to Hegel, and, fortunately, it is perfectly consistent with the rest of his views. His actual arguments do, however, still rest on some unfortunate assumptions about the Germanen.

In this sense, there is a necessity to history only if there is a logic of justice that requires that an adequate conception of justice cannot be based on the view that only “one” is free or that only “some” are free. If that argument can be made, then there is a necessity to history, although not a metaphysically causal one.⁷⁵

From Feudal Dependency to Justice as Freedom

When seen from the standpoint of Hegel’s “philosophical” history, the origins of post-Roman Europe took their shape mainly around themes of power and domination. The ruling groups fell by and large into two: the Christian church, which at least potentially could stake a claim to universality, and the various other tribes and rulers with claims to have descended from the Germanen (the Visigoths, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Lombards, Franks, etc.), who established dominion and rewarded their clients. Part of the authority they claimed and through which they tried to legitimate their rule was to have themselves recognized by the Church, and the Church likewise tried to retain and extend its power by claiming the right to anoint or appoint them. Behind it all was a natural human inclination to seize power where it could be seized and to hold onto it, a passion that the institutional arrangements of the time did little to check.

Charlemagne (748–814), one of the greater rulers of the early period, managed both to extend the power of the Franks by conquest and get himself crowned as a Roman emperor by the Pope. Nonetheless, however much Charlemagne’s nascent Holy Roman Empire looked like it might be or was the beginning of “Europe” out of a constellation of petty principalities, and despite its successes and achievements, it was, all in all, a false start for “Europe.”⁷⁶ Although Charlemagne’s empire did indeed think of itself as “Roman” and more importantly as “Christian,” it did not yet have the idea of “Europe” at its heart. (That was a later meaning cast upon it when “Europe” began to think of itself more in those terms.⁷⁷) The institutional securing of the idea of justice and its elaboration within the appropriate set of practices were missing. Justice as an end was present but unsecured, “for religion had not yet such an authority over men’s minds as to be able to bridle the rapacity of the powerful.”⁷⁸ The empire established by Charlemagne thus collapsed soon after his own death.

In the early formation of “Europe,” the shape of life, the particular union of passion and principle, of subjectivity itself, was not yet so structured so that such a “European” system could have been established. Instead, what counted as a practical reason was localized to particular peoples and particular warlords and ecclesiasticals. On Hegel’s account, Charlemagne’s goals and specific proposals for raising revenues, establishing armies, founding schools, setting up systems of legal justice, however admirable they may in retrospect appear, lacked the appropriate institutional underpinning, and his reforms were powerless against the other interests who took themselves to be entitled to do what served them best. In the violence that followed his death, what emerged was not justice but the more concentrated and continued rule of the more powerful. Nor was Charlemagne’s failed attempt the only one. Others, such as the later rule of the Hohenstaufens (roughly 1138–1254), were also false starts. One of the Hohenstaufen emperors, Friedrich Barbarossa, looked at first as if he would unite the German empire with large parts of Italy. However, the power of local loyalties proved too great for either emperors or popes to overcome. Moreover, the legality of the system of subordinations was always itself under pressure from its own members. While the gradations of dependence of vassals on lords higher than them looked firm on paper, in practice, vassals were always keeping one eye open for a way out from under the subordination to their betters, and when they saw their chance, they took it. No “Europe” therefore emerged out of Charlemagne’s or Barbarossa’s conquests (or of others of the period). But what does it mean to say that these were all false starts?

The violence that characterized such a shape of life impelled people to look for protection where they could find it. The ideal of justice in this shape of life could therefore only manifest itself as an ability to defend oneself against other wills (something Hegel claims is typical of “barbarians”), and thus, the only system of justice really possible was that imposed by the rule of the strong, by those who could promise protection.⁷⁹ The development of this state of affairs, of dependency in a world characterized by widespread violence, was feudalism, a social order based on inequality and personal dependencies, in which everybody was subordinate to somebody else, and only a combination of a sense of personal fidelity and the threat of force could hold the whole system together. It was, in Hegel’s words, a system of “universal injustice” that firmly planted itself and held sway for hundreds of years.⁸⁰ In order to sustain and legitimate itself, such a system had to develop a comprehension of itself as divinely ordained, as somehow very basically adhering to the order of the cosmos. However, as it developed itself, that kind of system showed itself in the long run not only to be impossible to defend philosophically, but also to become more and more difficult to live with as it made less and less sense and as the resistance against it became more and more successful.

In such a shape of life, a certain form of political psychology quite naturally took root. Its focus was formed in the sense that doing what is required of oneself consists in acting according to the commitments that one has to others by virtue of where one stands in the order of dependencies. Something like “honor,” and not freedom per se, has to be seen as the final end of life, yet “honor” itself is something that one freely takes on by committing oneself to a certain lord. From the side of the subordinate, the sense of subjectivity at work in the relation was that of swearing fidelity to one’s lord, to putting one’s passions at the service of another. This was in its root a different conception from the Roman principle of mere recognition as occupying a position in social space.⁸¹ Nor was it stoic in that it did not authorize a rejection or withdrawal or indifference to the social space. It instead gave subjects a reason to cultivate a certain code of honor and to see their own commitments to their superiors not merely as obligations assumed in a social space but as subjective activities which only they as individuals could carry out.

The very senselessness of this feudal way of living, embedded as deeply in the life of the times as it was, thus also had to make its appearance off and on in those periods. This ongoing threat of senselessness, of even nihilism itself was, by Hegel’s lights, not merely a phenomenon of modern times but a phenomenon that extended over long stretches of European history. Worries about it swept over vast areas, and these anxieties about skepticism and nihilism were basic to the development of European history. It is the background of Hegel’s metaphor that with the dissolution of the Greek model, the world’s heart was, as he put it, broken, and it sunk into mourning.⁸² The way in which life’s purposes were embedded within a social world such that a kind of beautiful harmony could be expected when those purposes were adequately actualized became a defining memory and object of mourning for European history, something that it had to work through. The present was measured by that now idealized past and found wanting. The threat was that the loss might be irreparable, and dealing with that threat seems to occupy much of European history afterward. Nonetheless, such nostalgia, so Hegel thought, is almost always completely out of place. Or, as he put it, “One finds in recent times great and deep men … who seek what is better by looking backwards. That is a mistake. We will indeed eternally feel drawn to Greece, but we will not find the highest satisfaction there, for what is lacking in that beauty is truth. The higher principle always appears for what is earlier and lower as ruination, as that through which the laws of the existing world are denied, are not given recognition. This denial is what robs the states and the individuals of their virtue.”⁸³

Hegel realized that nihilism, although it can be entertained in theory, is psychologically impossible for almost everyone. The idea that it might nonetheless be real can thus only provoke various ways of carrying on that help to disguise it and thus help one to disengage with it, which often enough takes the form of engaging in actions that border on the monomaniacal or even the insane. Thus, Hegel took up the period surrounding the Crusades as particularly illustrative of this, since the Crusades themselves, as monumentally senseless as they were, came about when “as it were, a universal feeling of the nothingness of their condition coursed through the world.”⁸⁴ Whatever other examples of courage and adventure they provoked, the Crusades were nonetheless more or less insane bids for power. They began “with the slaughter and plundering of many thousands of Jews, and after this terrible prelude, the Christian peoples set out,” and, after conquering Jerusalem, “still dripping with the blood of the slaughtered inhabitants, the Christians fell down on their faces at the tomb of the Redeemer, and directed their impassioned prayers to him.”⁸⁵ They did this to seek something that even their own views told them was unobtainable. In Christian doctrine, Jesus had risen, and the most they could ever hope to find was only the “empty grave,” which, again according to the doctrines of the Christianity they claimed to profess, would prove nothing and resolve nothing. In Hegel’s eyes, a similar madness arose in the sixteenth century with the burning of witches when the dawning possible senselessness of the world again provoked an explanation of its shortcomings in terms of some vast, indeterminate evil that had to be at work in the world. To counter this, many thousands of women were judicially murdered.

Hegel took the medieval period not as many of his Romantic contemporaries understood it, namely, as a time of religious certainty in which worries about meaninglessness were held at bay by the deep roots that religion had struck in life. In fact, on Hegel’s interpretation, it was a time in which the senseless of the world that followed the dissolution of the ancient world began to bubble up in the minds of people with a potency that was tamped down only by a combustible mixture of feudal ideology, the exercise of brute force, and episodes that bordered on insanity. The very liveliness of the medieval world and its color were expressions of these deep doubts about itself. These bouts of folly that rolled around the medieval world extended into the early modern European world.

The institutional and practical context for the gradual abandonment of the ethos of the medieval world was already giving itself shape as people tried to keep the whole in working order, and the path was thus already being laid for the downfall of the ancien régime across what was to become “Europe,” although almost nobody was consciously entertaining that idea. Moreover, that nature itself might be the ultimate source of the values that make a life satisfying was increasingly being undermined by the new science.⁸⁶ Technology, especially gunpowder, changed the context of battle and furthered the dissolution of the myth that the aristocracy was necessary as a function of military ethos and defense of the realm.⁸⁷ The senselessness of the order of dependencies and their required inequality that was at its root produced the rot of the rest of the practical edifice holding the structure up.

Whereas those ends of life had until then resided in some other ways of making sense of things, in the new order gradually taking shape “the new, final banner was unfurled around which the peoples gathered, that of the flag of the free spirit which is at one with itself, which exists in the sphere of truth and indeed only exists in that sphere—the flag under which we serve and which we bear.”⁸⁸ Justice, rather than requiring a cosmically underwritten system of subordination in which some were by the very essence of things authorized to rule over others, began to seem to require instead freedom for the individual—to express a world in which “all were free.” The metaphysics of subjectivity was beginning to shift.

The secularization that grew in tandem with these changes gave a new sense to what would be a legitimate order of thoughts. Religion would not vanish in the face of secularization but rather would continue to exercise an altered type of authority by occupying a new place in the emerging normative scheme of things. Likewise, the new ethos emerging from the medieval period’s deep anxiety about the point of its whole order made the study of the ancients more attractive. Thus, the virtues championed by the ancients began to appear in the Christianized world as it further secularized itself.⁸⁹

In this way, a new shape of subjectivity asserted itself, not by virtue of being invented by some clever philosopher or merely as the causal result of a vortex of social forces but as something arising closer to the ground. The honor-bound ethos of feudalism fell apart under its own weight. In its own self-conception, as articulated in many of its arts, the feudal order rested on a free choice by an individual to subject himself to the will of another and to stay bound to that individual only by virtue of the strength of the committed vassal’s making it a point of honor for himself.

The late medieval and early renaissance sense of defending one’s honor—whether directly through the defense of honor itself, or in matters of love, or in demonstrating one’s fidelity to one’s lord—had to do with the holdovers of the idea of “personal self-sufficiency,” the primary quality of a free man since Greek times. It at first looked like the older model of subordination, and it took its initial self-understanding out of that. However, such subordination, in the aesthetic telling of the story, is supposed to arise out of the vassal’s own free assumption of his obligations to his lord or lady in the name of honor, love, or loyalty. The loyal vassal campaigns not for anything like “rightness” in general but for something more like “recognition and the absolute inviolability of the singular subject,” that is, himself, by another singular subject, namely, his lord or lady.⁹⁰ The deep thread of subordinations of feudal life become reconceived as freely chosen and therefore honorable subordinations.

Yet in all that the tension between freely choosing individuals and deep, natural subordinations only became more heightened. The contradiction at work in late medieval and early modern Europe was intense: When they thought of themselves via the aesthetic conception of their shape of life, they thought of themselves as inherently monadic individuals, whose only dyadic obligations to specific others rested on their free choice—for example, to promise fealty to a lord or faithfulness to an idealized lady. Outside of that kind of oath or act of swearing fealty, there were no obligations except those of honor and Christian duty itself. Yet at the same time, the entire order was one of overlapping dependencies. Everybody was subordinate to somebody else, everybody had demarcated duties to specific others, and there was no place for such monadic duties.

Eventually, under those normative pressures, the chivalric individual character shifted its shape and became a Shakespearean individual, an individual who has not severed him or herself completely from the idea of a cosmic order of justice but who now placed first and foremost the idea of being their own person and accepting all the idiosyncrasies that involved. Hegel describes Shakespeare’s characters as “consistent within themselves. They remain true to themselves and their passion, and in what they are and in what confronts them they beat about according only to their own fixed determinateness” of who they are.⁹¹ They are not embodiments of any divine pathos, as were the Greek characters, whose individual pathos reflected a deeper conflict within the divine order itself (something to be expected from a polytheistic view). They are instead the modern and different conception of subjects as “keeping the faith” with themselves and their social world, knowing that the contingencies of the world in general may knock them off their path or destroy them. Shakespearian characters are the prototypical “amphibians” of modern life.

What was Hegel’s account of this transition from the old society of orders to a modern world in which the principle is that “all are free”? The crumbling of feudalism and its transformation into the forms in which a modern politics of “justice as freedom” could emerge itself took shape around a variety of contingent factors and false starts. None of that could go smoothly until the correct institutional supports for the new shape of subjectivity were in place. In Germany, after the “wars of religion,” the old princes of the feudal era, who had been vassals to a higher lord, themselves became for their own part independent princes. At first primarily in Italy and then later across wider swaths of Europe, the towns became independent centers of power, and the townspeople in them formed themselves into estates and guilds, with the result that the princes were forced to cede authority to these new centers of power certainly not out of principle but out of practical necessity. The process was not uninterrupted, not smooth, and not free of violence, but it worked its way out into the rudiments of the modern form of family, society and state orbiting around a conception of individual rights and the presumption of a universal moral order. The “Idea” (in Hegel’s sense) of freedom began to take on more specific contours: the opposition of “barbarian/civilization” became transmuted into a countryside/town opposition, where freedom was to be attained in the towns. The older ancient conception of free subjectivity as not being a slave was transformed into being a townsperson and not a serf, but with the new twist of the kind of self-direction that came in the wake of taking up an artisanal trade in the town and in the kind of new family life that emerged in those conditions. (The medieval German proverb for this was “Town air makes one free.”—“Stadluft macht frei.”⁹²) As Hegel had argued for all the cases, how this transition was carried out depended on the “nationalities”—what we would nowadays more likely call “cultures” and “traditions”—in question, so that there was not one single process of building this new status of subjectivity.⁹³

During this development, for large parts of the early modern world to the people living through it, the meaning of events had to look as if the powers in Europe were closer to finalizing the shape of the feudal society of orders and not to anything as momentous as shifting allegiances to the modern state. The rule of the Hapsburg Charles V as the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain (1515–1556) looked as if it might finally be the realization of what first Charlemagne and then later the Hohenstaufens had attempted: A European, even a global “universal monarchy” in which the feudal order would be brought into a unified empire and system. In fact, Charles’s empire was even more universal than what Charlemagne could have only dreamed about: As Holy Roman Emperor, Charles possessed many of the German domains as his property, he ruled Spain, the Netherlands, large sections of Italy and, to add to that, much of the Americas. His rule had the genuine claim to be a global kingship.

Nonetheless, from the point of view of the philosophy of history, his rule was “without internal interest.”⁹⁴ Despite the worldwide breadth of his holdings and the grandeur and interest he himself exhibited as a person, his far-reaching ambitions eventually amounted to no new shape of subjectivity. Checked by France, forced to squabble forever with his feudal vassals, he was also led into the fight against the rise of Protestantism, and during his reign, both the Jesuits and the counter-Reformation movement were founded. In the beginning of the “wars of religion,” where he took the side of the Catholics against the badly organized Protestants, he was eventually, and very surprisingly, even forced into a peace settlement by a much lesser figure, Moritz of Saxony. Even more strikingly, Charles V’s empire (under Philip II) was later defeated by the Protestant Dutch in their war of independence. His “universal monarchy” had grown up in the structure of feudalism and was at odds with the now clearly conflicted shape of subjectivity that had grown up within it. However grand and imposing his achievements were, they “left no world-historical result behind and proved to be powerless within themselves.”⁹⁵ In the end, Charles V’s empire crumbled and left only beautiful ruins in its wake.

Protestantism, which Charles was fighting, had carved out an exceptional authority for private conscience, and the Protestant movement itself was the expression of a deeper sense of secularization at work in that emerging shape of life. However, during Charles V’s time, “the state had not yet divided itself into the duality of a secular and an ecclesiastical polity set off from the rest.”⁹⁶ That in turn meant that without the recognition of this duality as a “rightful” (ethical and legal) distinction, there was really no way out for the Protestants to secure the legitimacy of their interpretation of the right to conscience without war since “the question was not one of simple conscience but involved decisions respecting the owners of public and private property,” including those of the established church.⁹⁷ In this context, there could only be a situation of not relative but “absolute mistrust.” Such “absolute mistrust” eventuated into a distinct kind of civil war—wars which are “internal” to a shape of life, shaped by contradictions in it that have taken political shape and exercise power, and not the typical civil wars involving rebellion of one center of power against another.⁹⁸ As it were, during the “wars of religion,” the “absolute” seemed to go to war with itself.

The tension between the chivalric, monadic conception of one’s duties and rights took shape as a conception of “rights” themselves. The early modern theorists of rights are well known. (The names themselves—Hobbes, Locke, Bodin, et al.—are famous enough.) The conception of inalienable or at least ground-level basic “rights” emerges as an answer to the dissolution of the more on-the-ground “dyadic” world of feudalism, in which all obligations were owed to specific individuals. (Of course, feudalism is not properly speaking dyadic but would be “multiadic,” if there were such a word.) If a dyadic “right” (a duty to a specific other) emerges out of a things like a contractual duty to another person—such that by freely contracting, I now have a duty to another who as a correlative has a right to my carrying out that to which I contracted—then likewise, a monadically construed right to, say, noninterference or to liberty of expression can function as a protection in the same way. The great conceptual breakthrough during this time came with the great theorists of early modernity understanding that perhaps all of the political duties that formerly seemed necessarily dyadic (such as all the requirement of justice and all the other political relations of loyalty, etc.) could be reconstrued as essentially monadic duties whose only apparently dyadic shape was the result of a contract. This functioned to underwrite a shape of life that was seeking to conceptualize itself as a society of “individuals” for whom the appropriate structure of morals, ethics, and epistemology was monadic in all instances.

However, the real world and its contingencies, as Hegel always stresses, does not shape itself neatly along the lines of conceptual distinction: “To be sure, historical transitions are not always so pure as they have been presented here, and often many of them happen at the same time; but one or the other always forms the preponderant part.”⁹⁹ Thus, the structure of social life was not completely done over to conform to the monadic rights of the social contract. Moreover, the “wars of religion,” as conflicts generated internally to the tensions in the basic commitments of early modern Europeans, were in many cases also not purely religious conflicts. They also involved the kinds of political tensions that were ingredients of that shape of subjectivity as it was giving itself its shape. For example, in the one of the more famous incidents of the period, in 1685 Louis XIV of France revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had granted toleration to the Protestants. In doing so, he thereby provoked a religious war in France. Hegel notes that at its outset it was not even yet a purely religious war since the Protestants had been continually suspected of being too easily tempted by the English to take positions contrary or even antagonistic to the Catholic French court’s interests. Thus, at the beginning of the conflict, this still bore many of the marks of a “rebellion.”¹⁰⁰ Likewise, in England, the dispute between Protestants and Catholics took on the character of a constitutional conflict. Puritanism, “the high point of inwardness” as a shape of subjectivity, took over power under Cromwell, even though English puritan practice itself was a mixture, in Hegel’s words, of the “fanatical” and the “ridiculous.”¹⁰¹

In the transition to a confessionally divided Europe, the Thirty Years War in Germany (1618–1648) stood out. It took part mostly in Germany and devastated the country. The economy was devastated, entire villages were destroyed and disappeared off maps, and the population fell drastically. (Württemberg, for example, where Hegel was born and grew up, declined from a population of 445,000 in 1622 to only 97,000 in 1639.)¹⁰² The end of the Thirty Years War ushered in the period of a balance of power among separate states, but otherwise it was simply the result of exhaustion—“without anything having been won for thought, without an Idea, with the exhaustion of everyone, a total devastation in which all forces has smashed themselves into pieces, which ended by leaving the facts on the ground in place for all parties on the basis of external forces.”¹⁰³ As he noted, “The exit from the war was of a political nature. There was neither a basic principle recognized nor a union of co-religionists produced.”¹⁰⁴

The result for Germany was that it was splintered into a variety of independent states, some relatively large but many others resembling postage stamps stuck randomly on a map of central Europe. This result in the settlement was, in Hegel’s terms, a “constitutionally secured anarchy,” brought about through the raison d’état on the part of the French minister, Cardinal Richelieu, who suppressed the Protestants in France at the same time as he was siding with them in the war in Germany.¹⁰⁵

The “wars of religion” hastened the development of the modern European state. The loyalties of people began to be focused on more centralized authorities and bodies, and a form of economic dynamism began to show up in ordinary life, which in turn assisted in the consolidation of the often contending authorities into a more unitary source of authority, the “state,” which built itself up out of the more archaic “ethnies” (to use Smith’s term again) of the European world. Because of a variety of different factors (including the experience of warfare and the growing need for “standing armies” on the part of monarchs, in order for sheer self-defense), a reconceptualization of the various key statuses in social life came about. In 1757, a British writer could say that “Of all honour that’s truest … hath been won by the sword in a purple field of blood” and “the ‘best gentleman’ was the one who made his fortunes by ‘hewing them out of his enemies’ bowels’.”¹⁰⁶ Only a few years later, that seemed to make little sense at all and even to seemed to run up to the very point of ludicrousness. As new forms of authority crystallized around new movements and demand for recognition, new virtues began to form and older ones lost their place. The former ethos of aristocratic glory in pursuit of war was replaced by the ethos of professional armies, and the so-called virtues of the aristocrat seeking glory were effaced in by the professional officer who selflessly took his orders from the higher command.¹⁰⁷ Thus, by 1700, Oxford’s professor of geometry could make the argument that not equestrian skill but logic and philosophy were better training for the upcoming elite, including the military elite.¹⁰⁸ Likewise, the “great Barons” of France became mere “office-holders” instead of independent sources of political power, and the similar lords in the Ottoman Empire became something more like civil servants.¹⁰⁹ What might have looked like mere rationalizations of existing practice were in fact the appearances of a new shape of subjectivity forming its practical and institutional life around itself.

On Hegel’s account, the modern state thus arose in no specifically rational or conscious manner but instead grew out of a variety of factors. In some cases, the Catholic religion was the binding glue that led to the formation of the state. In those cases, the authority of the church manifested itself as a “externality within an inward turn,” the mode in which subjects, instead of making up their own minds about what they believed, followed instead the directives of the church, of something they would understand as possibly even beyond their own capacity to understand.¹¹⁰ Such a shape of subjectivity comprehends itself to be following something like the rules of a practice where the authority for determining what exactly counts as following those rules is turned over to somebody else, and it can only keep its grip on people when the basic social institutions maintain a purely “positive,” given authority to themselves—when the key institutions that both embody and dispense authority “rest on positive possession,” as he puts it, rather than on “genuinely eternal right,” that is, on an institutionally secured reflective distance from all given institutions.¹¹¹ So he thought, such “reflective distance” can only be secured by some kind of Protestant religion within which the kinds of institutions that can secure such a reflective, conscience-oriented stance for the citizenry can develop themselves. Likewise, that kind of Protestant religion can ultimately be comprehensible in the source of its authority by drawing on something nonreligious, namely, philosophy as the rational consideration of what makes sense—or what it is to ultimately make sense of things and to make sense of making sense.

The modern nation-state, for Hegel, thus arises out of the different “ethnies” of early modern Europe being forced by economic factors, war, and contradictions within the bases of their structures of authority into more consolidated arrangements of power. This in turn both results in and results from a different shape of subjectivity which takes its locus in a modern order of thoughts based on a global system of “states” vying with each other, and the actors within those states no longer understanding the old set of virtues as relating to one’s fixed place in a social hierarchy as making sense. This new shape of subjectivity was at first turned inward—in an “Insichgehen,” in Hegel’s German—and tended to adopt a position that took itself as detaching itself from all social standings, that is, as having a more “moral” and less an “ethical” view.

However, as Hegel notes, given their self-contradictory natures, the embryonic states of early modern Europe basically concocted a recipe for continual warfare.¹¹² Simply listing the numbers of wars in the early modern period after the devastation of the Thirty Years War would take up many megabytes of information. Moreover, during this period, the cost of warfare kept rising with the advances in technology and in modes of recruitment. Indeed, the seventeenth-century arms race and the increasing costs of warfare put great strains on loyalty and especially on finances, which in turn contributed to setting the stage for the emergence of the modern state.¹¹³

However, as long as the “state” was seen to be something that the monarch possessed as his property, the traditional view of the purpose of monarchical rule as the striving for “glory” determined much of the course of events, and striving for “glory” meant striving for conquest. Louis XIV, whose form of absolutism (for Hegel) represented the turning point between the old, quasi-feudal “state” and the new modern state, summed this up in his own 1679 treatise on kingship: “when one looks to the state, one is really working for oneself. The welfare of the former secures the glory of the latter. The ruler who makes the state content, prestigious and powerful also promotes his own glory.”¹¹⁴ The state was his property, and the link was so close that the glory of one was equivalent to the glory of the other. (Unfortunately, for those who prefer the received story, he most likely did not actually say “L’état, c’est moi,” even if the sentiment was indeed truly his.¹¹⁵)

As Hegel saw things, Louis XIV represented the last failed attempt after the earlier failed effort by Charles V to establish a “universal monarchy,” or indeed, as he put it, a system of “world domination.”¹¹⁶ Like Philip II earlier, Louis XIV also came to grief at the hands of the Dutch (in his case, in 1678). Louis XIV’s plan for establishing French domination upset the emerging balance of power in European life whereby small states (particularly those postage-stamp principalities precipitating out of the ruins of the Thirty Years War) might manage to defend themselves against larger, aggressive states. Hegel notes that this emphasis on the balance of power itself indicated a departure from the older order of thoughts of political units in Europe, since the system of a balance of power “took the place of the earlier universal end, that of Christendom whose focal point was that of the Papacy.”¹¹⁷ No such religious epicenter could provide for the unity of European powers any more. The loss of a religious focal point also meant that, somewhat metaphorically speaking, subjectivity had to rethink itself and what its absolute aims were.

Although Hegel does not go into any detail about Louis XIV’s wars in the lectures, in one place, he did not need to do so. The Dutch defeat of the French was well known to his audience, and, in addition, all educated Germans knew about what in English is often called the “devastation of the Palatinate.” In an attempt to force the hand of the Hapsburg Emperor and thinking that the English were too preoccupied by their “glorious Revolution” of 1688 to be worth worrying about, Louis launched a war on German territory in 1688 that, along with some other policy goals, was intended to show France’s capacity for shock and awe (and thereby intimidate the Hapsburgs). Louis XIV’s troops pillaged, sacked, and burned to the ground several German towns (including Heidelberg). This war lasted until a treaty was signed in 1697, and it created in many generations afterward in Germany a view that France was somehow Germany’s natural enemy.¹¹⁸ To his credit, Hegel did not in any way share that view about France. In fact, Hegel notes that unlike Charles V, Louis did not base his aspirations to establish a French “universal monarchy” on the basis merely of raw power but on the superiority of French culture itself, which, as Hegel put it, gave him a “higher entitlement” to such an aspiration than Charles had possessed.¹¹⁹ After all, “France,” Hegel said, “is the land of culture (Bildung).”¹²⁰

The absolutist state—brought to its most nearly complete form in France—was the final abstraction resting on the modern idea of all political duties as having a monadic structure. The sovereign had the rights and duties of a sovereign alone. He owed them to no other specific individual or group. The elimination of almost all of the vestiges of what the Germans had called the Ständestaat—the state of estates—had removed the remaining “dyadic” duties of sovereign and the basic political and social groupings of society, where each had, as it were, duties to each other and corresponding rights (even though that very terminology of “rights” and “duties” is not quite accurate to describe how they saw themselves). The shift from the state as a property of the ruler to the state as an independent constitutional order of thoughts came quickly, but it was the French who accomplished it at first in principle and then later in practice with their revolution. Louis XIV had managed to defang the nobility and, by making himself the very pinnacle of state authority, turn himself into something approaching an absolute monarch. His failure to establish a “universal monarchy” for himself provoked the move to comprehend the state as a source of authority independent of the monarch himself. By successfully shifting all authority to himself as the living embodiment of the state, he successfully undermined the kinds of recalcitrant authorities still at work in French society and thus set the stage for the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a constitutional state. That, by the standards of historical time, this happened rather quickly is illustrated by a remark made by a French observer in the middle of the eighteenth century—before the French Revolution—that “today, hardly anyone dare say in Parisian society, I serve the king.… You’d be taken for one of the chief valets at Versailles. I serve the state is the expression most commonly used.”¹²¹

Central to Hegel’s view of the shape of the modern world—but not as much emphasized in the edited versions of the lectures on the philosophy of history—was the Dutch resistance and victories over, first, the Spanish—with the revolt beginning against the empire of Charles V as inherited by his son and successor, Philip II, and ending in 1648—and then later the successful Dutch resistance against Louis XIV, ending in 1678. The Dutch put the new shape of subjectivity front and center and made it the center of their revolt and their founding of a modern commercial republic. Hegel was himself enormously impressed with life in Holland when he visited there in 1822, and he saw it as the embodiment of what he took to be the exemplary elements of the dynamic of modern life.¹²² Nor did he neglect this theme in his other lectures. For example, in his lectures on the philosophy of art, he placed a heavy emphasis on the Dutch experience of the modern world. The Dutch had fought a successful war of independence against Spain between roughly 1566 and 1648, and they had established a successful, rich, and tolerant nation based on trade. They reclaimed their land from the sea, they established peaceful and efficient political orders, and, most importantly, they established a successful and flourishing shape of life whose art captured the Dutch sense of a “joy in the world as such … domestic life in its decency, cheerfulness, and quiet seclusion.” With them, the distinction between nobility and commoner simply vanished in importance.

The principle that “all are free” was worked out in practice by the Dutch even before it had been fully formulated in philosophy. Their fight for freedom and independence from Spain was carried out, in Hegel’s words, “not by a superior nobility expelling its prince and tyrant or imposing laws on him, nor a people of farmers, oppressed peasants, who broke free, like the Swiss” but by “townspeople, burghers active in trade and well-off, who, comfortable in their business, had no high pretensions, but when it was a question of fighting for the freedom of their well-earned rights, of the special privileges of their provinces, cities, and corporations, they … courageously shed their blood and by this righteous boldness and endurance triumphantly won for themselves both civil and religious independence.”¹²³ Their art—by which he meant seventeenth-century Dutch painting—thereby “developed the greatest truth of which art is capable,” at least under modern conditions.¹²⁴

Hegel’s claims for the revolution in France as the turning point of the modern world (a view he had held since his youth) are well known, but Hegel had also entertained the idea that the Dutch example, although much less celebrated, formed one of the other major alternatives in modern life. To Hegel, the Dutch, more than anybody else, seemed to have put into practice the modern structure of rights, moral duties, and goods (specifically, those of family, civil society, and state) that Hegel had systematically explicated in his 1820 Philosophy of Right. Nonetheless, the Dutch example might look as if it might be just a quirk of a particular type of personality on the part of the Dutch themselves since they did not carry out their war of independence nor establish their new “bourgeois” way of life on the basis of any clearly articulated set of universal claims. It was not the Dutch wars of independence but the French Revolution that rested its legitimacy not on anything particularly “French” but on the universal “rights of man.” Without the French Revolution supplying the ideas behind a possibly reconciled modernity, the Dutch example would seem therefore to be only a one-off event. Although the French were the avant-garde in raising the issue of human rights as a basis of legitimacy, the Dutch seemed to have provided the more useful blueprint for a tolerant, free, modern order. The modern world thus generated two somewhat competing models of how to be a modern state: the Dutch and the French.

If the French were the avant-garde of the rights of man, the Dutch were the avant-garde, as it were, of the Protestant German lands. In effect, the Dutch example showed, in Hegel’s view, that the Protestant German lands had in principle worked out the lineaments for the resolution of one of the bigger problems to which the modern world had given shape: It had established the idea of governance according to legal rules and fashioned a social space in which individuals could carry out their own aims in large areas of social life without much reflection on how that all added up to the good of the whole. All the Protestant lands now needed was the underpinning of the Rights of Man, which the French had provided and which German philosophy from Kant forward had underwritten.

The nihilism that had been a bubbling undercurrent of so much European history was submerged in the commitment to a new and better founded ideal, that of freedom as the condition of justice being actualized, and the way in which the kind of psychology that took root in the Protestant lands meshed, so Hegel thought, without much friction with those new principles. In the Dutch-German lands, the idea had taken deep root—again so Hegel thought—that the arbitrary will of the prince could not be the source of law’s authority but rather that the prince’s “will is worthy of respect to the extent that he wisely wills what is lawful, what is just, and for the good of the whole.”¹²⁵ The rule of reason had usurped the rule of domination by the powerful. In the older order, the princes and the emperors had stood as symbolic fonts and dispensers of justice. As Louis XV expressed this order in a quite non-symbolic way: “The magistrates are my officers charged with administering on my behalf my truly royal duty to dispense justice to my subjects.… Sovereignty resides in my person alone … and my courts derive their existence and their authority from me alone.”¹²⁶ What the various Louis’s did not quite see was that such a role was now shifting, also very nonsymbolically, to the constitutional state and away from them. The Dutch put them on notice. The French Revolution closed the deal.

Enlightenment, Germans, and the Revolution

For Hegel, the rule of reason arrived on the scene not just because of the collapse of absolutism in European political life. The French also played a major role in laying the groundwork for the way in which that collapse came to mean something more special to the people living through those events. This was their contribution to the movement of the “Enlightenment,” which was conceptually joined to the collapse of the authority of the absolutist court. That collapse in turn helped to make the way in which the building blocks of modern life as a free life showed up in all their salience.

In this period, “Enlightenment” contrasted with the emotionalist religions opening up in Europe such as Jansenism in France, Wesleyanism in Britain, and Pietism in Germany. The world of “faith” (as distinct from “religion” per se) looked to the emotions as disclosing the divine presence in one’s world, the way God was supposedly at work in one’s innermost life and outward deeds. It found its expression in baroque art for both Catholics and Protestants. (The great Catholic Baroque cathedrals sat comfortably down the road from Bach’s great Protestant music.) Yet just as much as they took themselves to be opposites and to regard each other with something like distrust bordering on contempt, both were equally expressions of the way in which the people taking on the shape of subjectivity fitting to that shape of life tried to find new orienting points for themselves. In becoming gradually unmoored from the old order of things, people sought the immediacy of emotion in the new religious movements, or they sought to put the stakes of the tent into the ground on Enlightenment principles.¹²⁷ Likewise, just as so many sought an intensity of emotion in their religion, they also sought an intensity of emotion in their art, and many of the paintings of the day (especially the French school) celebrated it. The shape of subjectivity that was forming itself was cleft between a devotion to reason and a cult of feeling and “sensibility” (as it was called at the time). How it would be possible for subjects to be at one with themselves under what looked like the contrary pulls of those two seeming absolutes which shaped much of the tumult surrounding the growth of the “Enlightenment” and the French Revolution. (Hegel credits Friedrich Schiller for identifying the problem and its need for a reconciliation between reason and sensibility.¹²⁸)

The mythical early Germanen, in their mythical early condition, were (supposedly) virtuous barbarians, capable of admirable feats of loyalty and bravery to their lords (to whom they freely bound themselves) but on whom the rule of law and bureaucracy had no affective grip. It was supposedly the harsh education of a thousand years of feudal rule and its concomitant violence that led them to reshape their disposition and motivational makeup so that they were able to accept both the rule of law and the bureaucratic apparatus necessary for a free life that was also a satisfying life. Hegel quite famously characterized this fusion as the union of morality—as a system of rules and principles formulated from the standpoint of universality, coupled with a felt necessity to act according to such principles—and “ethical life,” Sittlichkeit, as the kind of social formations and practices necessary to produce the kinds of characters who exhibit the virtues (the union of passion and principle) necessary for a free and satisfying life. Quite pointedly, Hegel also argued (or at least claimed) that universalistic morality could have no real grip on people unless it was integrated into the more particularistic modes of ethical life. One of the genuine places where the moral life is carried out, where morality becomes real, is in a civil society structured into various mediating institutions that in principle are both different from each other and yet harmonize with each other.¹²⁹ On its own, universalizable moral constraints do not provide sufficient content to enable people to make concrete decisions. For that they need more basic first principles for their more explicit practical reasoning, and those ends must appear in those shapes of life as settled dispositions. (They are values that have also become psychological facts.) To that end, civil society had to be structured in terms of various estates (Stände) and “corporations” (institutions that were more like guilds than like the impersonal modern globalized behemoths of today) that embody a kind of practical know-how in orienting oneself in an increasingly complex modern world.

To Hegel’s own question—Why did the Revolution occur in France and not in Germany?—Hegel’s answer was in part that France came to possess only a very thinly constituted civil society.¹³⁰ In France, the dissolution of feudalism had left a social world of individuals contending with each other in a patently unjust regime within which the structures of official power still rested in feudal orders. Without the mediating effect of the guilds and the estates, whose social authority had been decimated by the absolutizing tendencies of Louis XIV, each individual was abandoned to his own resources. With the feudal structure rotting out from within, the only loyalty had to be either to the family or to the “nation” itself and could not be mediated by loyalty to something like one’s estate. If the virtues are the dispositions and passions connected to the concept of what is right—are a matter of character and good judgment—then without the mediation of a vital civil society, the virtues become mere dispositions to be of service to the state or loyalty to family. This puts the state in a position where it ought not to be, and when the state is still seen as embodied in the monarch himself, it leads to a form of policing society that places terror at its disposal.

Moreover, in Hegel’s rather negative view of the potentialities of the Catholic religion, as a Catholic country, France was subject to an authoritarian religion that prevented the formation of a deeply grounded civil society because of its refusal to recognize the principle that private conscience had to be protected. Hegel cites in particular (and in several places) the role that the Inquisition played in Spain. Although it billed itself badly enough as the “persecution of clandestine Jews, Moors, and heretics,” it of course became an organ to “persecute enemies of the state,” that is, of the king, such that it even “claimed supremacy over bishops and archbishops.”¹³¹ By making one’s suspected dispositions themselves an object of punishment, it laid the ground for the Terror of the French Revolution. Without the restraining elements of civil society, the Inquisition became the model for a well-honed tool of state power, and although the French did not have an Inquisition, they had all the tools to make one happen.

In particular, the court life of the ancien régime in France had pushed the modern conception of subjectivity into one of its penultimate forms. The structure of recognition at work in the Bourbon French court had resulted in a form of monarchical absolutism. The aristocratic ideal that they and only they were capable of governing since they were not bound to the essential purposes of the “middling” classes, namely, the more egoistic demands of pursuing wealth and status. They, the nobility, supposedly already had the required status and thus do not need to seek it, and (in the ideology that underwrote this claim) they were also willing to risk their lives for the good of the state and thus deserved the political power they wielded. (The “middling” classes were supposedly too self-involved to do any of these things.) Since position in the order of thoughts required recognition from those possessing the authority to confer recognition, a pyramidal structure resulted with the monarch sitting at the top: He recognizes but needs no recognition from others, since his authority comes from divine origin. However, since it takes quite a bit of wealth to be able to participate in court life, and because court life is itself an avenue to wealth, historically the nobility ceased to be the group dedicated to the martial glory it claimed for itself. Moreover, the technological and social changes in warfare in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had increasingly made soldiering into a specialized profession and war into a pursuit of strategic political objectives. The place for the satisfaction of the older aristocratic thirst for “glory” was vanishing.

In light of those pressures, the nobility ceased to be warriors and became instead courtiers, intent on gaining glory by recognition at court rather than by risking one’s life on the battlefield. Even the noble who pursued a military career was no longer the knight of legend out to seek his own honor. He was now subordinate to his superior officers and was expected to make good on that.¹³² In such a world, real glory consisted in moving up in the court’s hierarchy of status, not in martial glory. In such a world, as Hegel put it, the alleged heroism of the medieval world had given way to a bourgeois world pretending it was still part of a medieval military aristocracy. Heroism on the battlefield was replaced by the insider maneuvering of courtiers, and, as Hegel put it, in such a world, “the heroism of silent service becomes the heroism of flattery.”¹³³

That the distinction between the nobility and the middling, merchant sort—the pursuit of glory versus the pursuit of wealth—was thereby not really actual any more became ever more obvious to all concerned. This paradigm of developing one’s personality to succeed at court life meant that since each noble seeks, as his chief purpose, to receive recognition from the monarch, this also means that he must renounce his legal personality (since the monarch is the source of all legality). What is left open to him is contingent on the whims of other, more powerful individuals. The life of the court is thus that of subjectivity that seems to consist in pure recognition, but it is not a repetition of the Roman order. The subject is now, in Hegel’s terms, “reflected into himself,” and self-consciousness is now inherently self-distanced: “Self-consciousness is essentially judgment,”¹³⁴ thoroughly reflective, keeping a tally on itself and others, jockeying for position, and increasingly aware of the nothingness of its own position and social life.¹³⁵

The result was a conception of subjectivity as self-directing but fundamentally theatrical. Within that shape of life, each is an actor writing his own script so that he shows up in the social world as somebody to notice, all the while realizing that he and everybody else in the scene is fully aware of this element of theatricality. In such a world, the actor’s own individuality eventually becomes hollowed out and the issue of whether the play is worth continuing becomes more and more up for grabs. Success for this form of subjectivity is making oneself be noticed by others, but being noticed by others becomes less and less a matter of any obvious objective value.

The life of the court’s witty ironies about itself—that all was vanity, that it was all just a show—helped to fuel the movement that came to call itself the “Enlightenment,” and which at first, at least in France, defined itself almost entirely negatively, as “not faith.” It quickly grew out of its own negative definition and took on the identity of a movement based in reason alone, with its own faith in science, publicity, and inquiry driving it forward.¹³⁶ The appeal to reason and the movement that went along with the Enlightenment—that of casting aspersion on the court and the government—put even more pressure on the ruling powers. That court life had become an empty theatrical playground of both deadly seriousness and disinterested wit finally pushed it over the edge. The abstraction of the absolutist state as embodied in an unlimited monarch evaporated and with it the lingering sense of natural noble entitlement.

The Enlightenment highlighted the shape that subjectivity had taken in the social tumult leading up to the French Revolution. As that shape of subjectivity understood itself, it was a shape of subjectivity that took itself to be an exercise in humility—in contrast to the arrogance of court life and the ecclesiastical practice of the time—in that it abjured superstition and “faith” in favor of reason, yet it recognized the limits of reason and steadfastly and honestly refused to cross those lines. In Hegel’s terms, such a shape recognizes its own finitude and refuses to puff itself up beyond that finitude. Kant’s philosophy is the most developed expression in which that shape of subjectivity gives voice to itself. In its conception of a necessary structure of appearance—the world as we must find it—and its denial that this could be knowledge of the way things are in themselves (of things as they are apart from all possible experience), Kant gives voice to this dual self-asserting and self-humbling conception of subjectivity. (That Kant also held that we could with precision know what practical reason requires of us, while at the same time putting strict limits on how far theoretical reason can go, made it all the more expressive of this shape of subjectivity.) This shape of subjectivity takes the ultimate—the “absolute”—objects of thought to be beyond its comprehension, beyond its capacities for knowledge, limited as they are by the need for a sensible, intuitive component to them.

Kant takes there to be a limit to what is thinkable, and he stands, as it were, above the limit. That requires us, as Wittgenstein was later to remark, “to set a limit to thought,” which in turn requires that “we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e., we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought)” and that is, on its own terms, impossible.¹³⁷ When it is taken apart from its Kantian expression, the same figure of thought as the “view from above” becomes less humble. In the terms that court life set for itself, such “finitude,” which takes the shape of humility in Kantian thought, instead becomes the arrogance of the courtiers. The shape of noble and royal subjectivity that takes everything to be vanity takes itself to be better than the vanity of others since it knows that it is vain. This view from above, as an impersonal point of view above the fray, has no real content to itself except to know that it at least has the honesty to know the limits of its knowledge.

As it begins to formulate itself, it seeks a rational standard for this “view from above” the limits, and it finds it, so it thinks, in the abstract principle of utility. The appeal to utility is not, after all, an appeal to the vanity of personal interest but to something like the best state of affairs. It is a genuine view from above since it is impartial. It is not “my” utility that counts so much as it is utility in general, the best possible state of affairs achievable in our circumstances.¹³⁸ What counts is happiness, but not necessarily “my” happiness.

In the theatrical world of the court, “the view from above” consists in the witty assurance that it is all for show. In the world of the French philosophes, the “view from above” is the appeal to utility. In Kant’s hands, that “view from above the limit” turned into a powerful set of arguments to underwrite the reality of human freedom and a secularized, although abstract, ideal of human freedom and equality as membership in a “kingdom of ends.” After the twin events of Kant’s moral philosophy with its “kingdom of ends” and the French Revolution with its declaration of the rights of man, the idea that all are free—that nobody by nature has authority to command others—became what was at work, actual, wirklich in modern life. It was actual not in the sense that suddenly all the forms of irrational domination suddenly vanished (they obviously did not), but rather in the sense that it was now impossible to give a rational legitimation of the natural domination of some by others. Nor did it mean that people gave up trying to give those arguments (they obviously did not), but that there was no way after that turning point for actually making that case. It also meant that there were necessary consequences of this new view—for example, the irrationality of the natural authority men had traditionally claimed over women—that many people, even Hegel himself, did not want to draw.

Ultimately, all these are various and different, but nonetheless penultimate, expressions of a more reconciliatory view that reason’s grasp is itself unbounded, unendlich, and that reason can work out its own limits from within itself. That is the task of something like Hegel’s Logic. Hegel’s Logic is the articulation of the “view from within” modern subjectivity itself, and the practical consequence is that reason has the wherewithal to shape a habitable world with its own tools. However, that more reconciliatory view could only appear on the scene once the alternations between humility, arrogance, and the kind of impartiality that discounted the view from within subjectivity itself had played themselves out. A reconciliatory view of rationality that incorporates within itself the partiality of the different viewpoints of subjects—as a way in which “the universal particularizes itself”—had to be developed historically out of the breakdown of the Enlightenment shape of subjectivity as the impartial view from above. That was what Hegel took his own philosophy to be: Not the “view from above” but the logic of the “view from within,” where the difference of the “inner” and the “outer” was reconceived along the lines Hegel took his dialectical logic to have explicated, in which they are distinguishable but not separable moments of a single whole.

Even if the Enlightenment was one-sided in its view of reason as “the view from above,” it was nonetheless the driving and constructive force of the French Revolution. Whatever its limits, its elevation of the natural sciences was nothing less than positive: The world bequeathed by the Enlightenment “sets the external world free” and “people turn to nature in order to know it and the result is that the experiential sciences flourish and prosper anew and even finer than they did in Greece.”¹³⁹ The leading ideas of the Enlightenment coursed through Europe, and, as Hegel put it, in the American war of independence “the thought of freedom came out on top.”¹⁴⁰ The Enlightenment had finally put “thought in the driver’s seat.”¹⁴¹

Hegel seemed nonetheless to think that, world-historical as it was, the French Revolution was a unique event, the result of a perfect storm resulting from a failed authoritarian regime identified with an authoritarian, anti-progressive church totally out of step with the growing demand for equal justice as calling for equal liberty, together with the economic failures of the royal regime. Into that storm was tossed Rousseauian calls for emancipation and self-direction, French utilitarianism, and behind the tumult was a mix of Romanic and Mediterranean sets of passions.¹⁴² But that is not to underestimate it—as Hegel told his students, “It was a glorious dawn. All thinking beings joined in the celebration of this epoch.”¹⁴³

The result was a modern world that could not turn the clock back, however much some continued to long to do so. The French Revolution had legitimated itself around the idea of the universal rights of man, and with his repeated victories, Napoleon in effect made the Revolution into the problem for all European states. Although, to put it more mildly than it should be put, Napoleon did not exactly have the promulgation of the rights of man first and foremost in his mind as he staged his conquests and victories, nor when he put many of his relatives on the thrones of his newly created duchies, he did nonetheless embody the new idea of the individual gaining stature on the basis of his (and eventually her) own merit. Whereas the old order had understood itself as a rigid hierarchy that claimed (and to many even seemed) to be natural and which brought with it an official set of virtues—in particular, that of being content with one’s lot and not displaying the vice of pride in seeking to rise higher than God had intended for you—the new order quickly undermined that as a virtue at all. (The theory of the virtue of being content with one’s lot had always been at odds with the practice in many ways, but that was a feature of the contradictory shape of subjectivity of medieval and early modern concatenations of authority.) Napoleon as the ideal (as distinct from Napoleon the actual man) seemed to be the living embodiment of how the disposition to ambition could in fact be a virtue. That he could have risen so high through his own ambition and work was enough to make him the symbol of the new individual which was to take shape afterwards, when so many ambitious industrialists expressed their aspiration as wanting to be the “Napoleon” of some or another area of life.¹⁴⁴

For a while after the downfall of Napoleon, following his ill thought-out and completely calamitous Russian campaign, Hegel was indeed worried about which way the hands of the clock were turning, but he was reassured by the fact that the Congress of Vienna, which more or less consciously set out to turn the clock back, in fact did not really reverse things, even though it did its best to stop things dead in their tracks.¹⁴⁵ The old order had collapsed under its own weight and its inner inconsistencies. However, rather than collapsing into an unintelligible world, it was being succeeded by the post-Enlightenment world that had grown up within it, in which the intelligibility of the whole was rapidly coming into focus. Or so Hegel thought.

In Hegel’s view, there were other lines of development that showed that the upheaval of the French Revolution was not a fate for all modern regimes. For example, Great Britain had avoided the fate of the Revolution because of the strength of its own civil society (and because England had already had gone through its own gory, fanatical civil war to secure Protestant rule there). The establishment of the United Kingdom in fact showed that a modern state could arise out of very different “ethnies” in such a way that was not the end-product of some kind of organic growth out of a pre-existing ethnic-religious unity: “Great Britain is divided within itself, into England, Scotland, and Ireland, and each of these lands represents a shape of religious life: the Episcopal, the Presbyterian, and the Catholic.”¹⁴⁶ Moreover, to their credit, the English (one of the ethnies) express this in their economic life and are the “missionaries of all peoples with respect to industry and technology, and, through legal trade, they connect the whole world.”¹⁴⁷ (In the lectures, he seems to have failed to note the large Scottish presence in all of that British trade.) However, despite these advantages, the English part of the regime was still infected by too many feudal privileges: “The government is in the hands of the aristocrats. In England, law is in the worst state, and it exists only for the rich, not for the poor.”¹⁴⁸ England nonetheless functions because it has an aristocracy that was both trained for and experienced in politics, which Hegel thought helped hold together what seemed otherwise a creaky and corrupt system based on “rotten boroughs.” (He also had misgivings about the English aristocracy, insinuating that he took them to be mostly a rather debased set of pudding-eating fox hunters who mistook their noble birth for brains.¹⁴⁹ But he had never visited England, so it is unclear where he got his less than unenthusiastic view of the English aristocracy.)

Germany, on Hegel’s view, had avoided the revolutionary upheaval largely because of accidents about its past. The German Empire (The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation) had been an elective empire, with the nobles choosing the emperor, and thus, so Hegel claimed, “because it was an elective realm, it never became a state.”¹⁵⁰ Germany also suffered both the bad luck of being decimated by the Thirty Years War into a myriad of nominally independent political units, and, as he put it, from “not having, as France did, the focal point of a conquering family.”¹⁵¹ These so-called deficiencies, however, in fact turned out to be an advantage for Germany in the modern world. Because it had not been a “state,” it could accept the principles of the French Revolution (for example, those of human rights and meritocracy) without having to overthrow the king or storm the Bastille, in large part because there was no German king to overthrow or German Bastille to storm. Because its union of passion and principle was, so Hegel also thought, already founded in its deeply felt acceptance of the Reformation and the fundamental right of the protection of conscience, Germany also could dispense with the Revolution and simply accept its principles. This was in part because of the initial French victories over the Germans in the wars immediately following the Revolution. This “French oppression” de facto imported the positive results of the Revolution into Germany and was then made into the basis of a widespread reform of the German legal system by the Germans themselves.¹⁵²

This was more or less true, he thought, despite the fact that “Germany” remained divided between Catholic and Protestant populations, since, so he also thought, “the Catholic church was also on its own part reformed through the Reformation.”¹⁵³ In fact, Hegel argued against the idea that Germany was an ethnic nation that naturally needed unification, and even that the whole idea of German unification was altogether a bad one: “On a small scale, interests can be the same. On the large scale, as in Germany, the interests of the Bavarians, the Austrians, the Pomeranians and the Mecklenburgers are highly distinct.”¹⁵⁴ By virtue of the historical accidents of its past, Germans had, so Hegel claimed, been developing a lively civil society (and thus the new set of appropriate modern virtues) and a commitment to the rational rule of law (and thus something like Kantian morality). They were thus were in the position to stage the necessary reforms to their economic and social structure without the calamity of a violent revolution.

Germany, in fact, had been the home where the penultimate development of the modern “moral” point of view had been pushed into grasping itself as embedded in a different practice. “Morality,” as the doctrine that people have to act on universalizable reasons and not just in terms of the ethos of the particular communities in which the relevant actors were members, reached this penultimate statement of itself in the immediate Kantian aftermath in the 1790s and early 1800s. In that short space of time, the “moral point of view” that had been one of the driving forces in early modern European life had come to be adequately conceptualized. The “moral point of view” was to be conceived in monadic terms. The relation of the moral actor to principle was conceived as only mediately a relation to specific others. A moral injunction was to “do right” and not “do wrong,” and the other agent whom one might wrong in one’s actions was not essential to the action’s being right or wrong. One might indeed do wrong in harming another, but what makes such an act wrong is its violation of a principle and (and perhaps “or”) the relation in which the wrongdoer stands to the principle. Doing wrong is more like violating a rule in a game. The monadic conception of the moral order has as its correlate a monadic moral order in the world. To the extent that by doing something wrong, an agent fails at being an agent—fails in its most basic function, to put it in the Aristotelian terms Hegel tends to favor—the importance of acting morally and getting into the correct relationship with the moral order becomes crucial to such agency. It becomes the warp and woof of emotional life itself.

In the Romantic appropriation of Kantian morality in Germany, so Hegel thought, this led not accidentally to a doctrine of “beautiful souls,” that is, a conception of agents who took their primary concern to consist in avoiding doing wrong (and, if one had done wrong, to have thereby stained and soiled one’s soul). The beautiful soul is obsessed in a self-involved way with his own standing in the system of moral rules and is thus blind to the more justice-oriented concerns with the others as others. As it were, the beautiful soul is obsessed with whether he is winning or losing the game according to the rules and not with, say, a concrete concern for the other person. Such a conception of moral action leads such beautiful souls to a practice of inaction. Because of the contingency of all action in the world, any action can result in a nonforeseen “staining,” and the only way thereby to preserve one’s purity is either not to act at all or effectively to shift the moral register into a conception of purity of intention or true conviction which stands in sharp contrast to the impurity of almost all worldly action. The rules of the moral game, that is, seem to point to a refusal to act, since any action might cloud the purity demanded by the rules. The end-result of such a moral stance, Hegel rather sarcastically notes, turns out to be merely that of two monadic subjects hearing their own echoes within an empty space, each expressing its own self-involved relation to the moral order and not directly speaking at all to each other.¹⁵⁵ To borrow a term from Marx, each has fetishized the moral order as if it were some self-standing all important game which it was up to each to win or lose.

In his own time, the impossibility of sustaining this as a living, practical project had, so Hegel thought, more or less become clear, and, analogous to the way the ancient relations of mastery and servitude had proved to be unintelligible and ultimately unlivable, the relations among such “beautiful souls” were also proving to be either in or at the edge of a similar breakdown. In Germany, so he thought, the deeper roots the Reformation had struck meant that the social nature of agency as involving dyadic and not merely monadic judgments of the normative social space therefore did not require a revolutionary breakdown for its adequate expression. It was instead to be found in a secularized version of Christian doctrine. Beautiful souls had to understand themselves as metaphorical sons and daughter of God, not as separate individuals focused on their own single relation to the moral order. The “dyadic” nature of such a conception—after all, one can be a “brother” or “sister” only to an other, another “brother” or “sister”—becomes expressed in acts of mutual forgiveness for taking such a haughty, moralistic, and self-involved stance to each other. Beautiful souls have to hold tightly onto the idea that whatever messiness their lives might seem to have, their inner purity (which is therefore invisible to others) remains untouched by that world’s disarray. Because of that, beautiful souls inevitably fail in their agency—their “hard hearts,” as Hegel says, have to break—since they cannot help but be involved in the messiness of life.¹⁵⁶ The hard heart necessarily breaks because the conception of the monadically conceived moral order as having the resources within itself to sustain itself has to break and acknowledge that it makes sense only within the context of a dyadically structured ethical order.

The monadic moral stance thus had to give way to its truth, which involves the way universalistic morality is made livable and secure by its being embedded within more rational, dyadic modern institutions. The individualistic shape of agency that had been developed in early modern Europe was in the process of giving way to a more dyadic shape of life in which individualism could be cease to be self-defeating. The very existence of monadic rights and duties could be real (or “actual”) only within a complexly structured set of dyadic rights and duties, and thus, the Greek ideal of self-sufficient subjectivity as sustainable only in a certain political and social order could be realized in a modern and thoroughly non-Greek way. The British, French, Dutch, and German examples were all fair expressions of this new shape of self-conscious life in which individuals freely associated with each other in terms of the principles embodied within a rational political order. Or, again, at least so Hegel thought.

The idea that Germany had pushed the emerging monadic moral order to its breaking point and then resolved it by returning to its anchor in something like Protestant secularized Christianity and its emphasis on the necessity of our involvement with each other in a shape of life marked the difference in the German and the French responses to the breakdown of the ancien régime. As Protestant countries, the Germans and the English had long since, as Hegel bluntly put it, “finished their revolution.”¹⁵⁷ The principle of monadically conceived individuals had slowly been displaced for them since the ideal of the individual confessing to other, equal individuals rather than to a priest had taken root.¹⁵⁸ Where this had not been established institutionally, the principle remained that of individuals conceived as “atoms” sharing a common space where they interacted.¹⁵⁹ Where the “atomic” conception of social individuals dominated was where the Revolution played out. (As Hegel notes, in France, Spain, and in Italy—Naples and Piedmont—and, he says in passing, “Ireland is also to be counted” as having the conditions for such a revolution.¹⁶⁰)

Where Hegel speaks of the Protestant versus the Catholic religion in these contexts, he makes it clear that he thinks that history has moved to the point where a modern state must not have its final authority resting on a church or residing in church officials: “It is indeed a matter of the most profound wisdom to entirely separate the laws and constitution of the state from religion, since bigotry and hypocrisy are to be feared as the results of a state religion.”¹⁶¹ However, the basic practices and shape of self-conscious life cannot be separated from the kind of political order of which one is speaking, so religion still plays a key role. Thus, even though in the Revolution the French had put more or less entirely correct principles into place (with their “declaration of the rights of man and of citizens”), they remained merely principles without the necessary practical backing in the practices that make up a shape of life. For a modern constitutional state based on freedom, the shape of life must have the kind of social or “dyadic” shape that he thinks has arisen in those places informed by the more Protestant way of comprehending one’s place in the whole.

What holds the modern constitutional state together are the dispositions—the Gesinnungen, or what might be better called the “cast of mind”—present in the lives of the agents who live under that common order. Such a cast of mind exists not just where all individuals each assent to the same principles but where they for the most part genuinely share an order of thoughts within a combination of passion and principle. Where the cast of mind is “atomic,” monadic, the virtues can only be seen as tendencies to follow the correct set of rules. From that and the idea that each is an “atom,” the logic leading to the guillotine is, as Hegel reconstructs the story, not that long a story. Since the revolutionary society can hold together only if people have internalized the habit or disposition to adhere to the principles of the revolution—to exhibit revolutionary virtue—it is crucial to be on the lookout for those lacking such a disposition, those who do share the right cast of mind. Once the state and the government realizes it has to investigate not merely whether behavior is lawful but also whether the cast of mind is correct, tyranny follows, since one can always be under suspicion for having the wrong cast of mind. Thus, the “atoms” of Revolutionary France seeking freedom but lacking the dyadic structure that grows out of a Protestant way of life only had the principle of reason taken to be guided by something like “utility.” On that principle, it can well turn out that some must suffer so that the whole can prosper, so that Robespierre could say consistently with that point of view, “Louis must die, that the republic can live.” None of that would be necessary, so Hegel thought, where individuality was to be respected as a matter of social union, as in the Protestant countries. For them, he says, “the revolution is over … in terms of their external constitutions the protestant lands are very different, for example, Denmark, the Netherlands, England, Prussia; but the essential principle is present that everything in the state ought to be validly in force, must proceed from insight, and thereby be justified.”¹⁶²

The situation in Europe in Hegel’s own day—in 1830–1831, in the lectures where he spoke of the matter—had to do with what he termed the “bankruptcy” of liberalism—“first, of the grand firm in France, then its branches in Spain and Italy.”¹⁶³ By “liberalism,” Hegel meant the post-1815 French liberalism which for some of its adherents drew on the principles of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism. (Bentham had even been made an honorary citizen of France in 1792.) Bentham’s ideas were influential in certain opposition circles in French life after the final collapse of Napoleonic rule in 1815. However, they were never the dominant trend—even before 1815, French liberals such as Benjamin Constant had in fact subjected Bentham’s approach to fierce criticism. (Late in his life in the 1830s, in one of the less probable meetings in history, Bentham himself tried to convince Hegel’s friend and ally, Eduard Gans, that Gans the Hegelian was really on the same page as Bentham’s own liberalism. It is not clear that Bentham understood just how Gans as a Hegelian might have deeper views that were at odds with his own views.)¹⁶⁴

“Liberalism” was in Hegel’s day a new concept. It was hardly in use anywhere at all before the 1810s. (Thus, those who in our own day are brought under the rubric of “liberal” thinkers, such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume, or even Kant, were not for those of Hegel’s day really thought of as “liberals” at all.) The rubric of “liberalism” had in particular come to characterize certain aspects of the post-1815 French regime, even though a great number of the people in that regime who characterized themselves as “liberals” (or were so characterized by others) actually thought of themselves as standing in opposition to the regime. Hegel sarcastically characterizes the French governmental system from between the Congress of Vienna to the July Monarchy—1815–1830—as a “fifteen year farce.” The constitutional document under which the government of France supposedly operated from 1814–1830 was itself given by the king, Louis XVIII (brother of the guillotined Louis XVI). Its terms were fashioned so as to create the fiction that the revolution of 1789 had never really happened and that the royal succession was continuing as if it had always been there. The “Charter,” as it was called, mimicked the English setup of two houses and a king with representative government, but it had no democracy. It was quasi-liberal in that it recognized careers open to talent, civil equality, a free press (after a fashion) and freedom of worship (with the Catholic church nonetheless officially entitled to be the established church), but it was also non-liberal in its insistence on the power and status of the monarchy.¹⁶⁵ It was thus based on the strained idea that the Revolution never happened and that the major results of the Revolution were to be incorporated into the new regime pretending to be the old regime.

The other fiction underlying its legitimacy was that all the parties—taken as the sum total of all the rational individuals living under the regime—had agreed to its terms. However, it became very clear very quickly that the regime of the “Charter” was more of a temporary cease-fire rather than a truce between the adherents of the ancien régime and the secular “liberals” who looked to 1789 as their year of birth. Such liberalism is based on, as Hegel put it, “the atomistic principle, the principle of singular wills, which maintains that everything that happens should emerge out of their express power and have their express consent.”¹⁶⁶ Liberalism, on its own abstract terms, could not conciliate the two opposing groups. The die-hard adherents of the ancien régime—the “ultras” as they were called—wished to see the Church and the nobility restored to what they imagined to be its traditional and rightful authority. They found no middle ground with the “liberals”—who were known as the Doctrinaires—who firmly held that the modernity of civic equality which the Revolution had brought into existence was not to be sacrificed. To that end, they pushed for an interpretation of the “Charter” that made it seem to call for limited monarchy and civic equality with something like a kind of Benthamite utilitarianism undergirding its policies. The whole edifice came tumbling down in a matter of days in 1830, with the “Charter” being replaced by a new, much more emphatically “liberal” social order, and the Bourbon king (by this time, Charles X) being dispatched to exile in England in favor of an Orleaniste king (Louis Philippe), who quickly became known as the “bourgeois king.” That was to last until 1848, at which point “liberalism” made an even more forceful entry on the scene, contra to Hegel’s prediction of its bankruptcy. At that point, “liberals” in France had also distanced themselves from Bentham’s utilitarianism, a distance that never really got closed again.

Hegel’s prediction of “liberal” bankruptcy was thus far off its mark. His critique, however, retained some of its force. The new modern order where “all are free”—the shape of spirit which underlay the revolutionary order in which the rights of man was the new banner—required more than just setting up principles and assuming the parties would agree. It required a new set of practices and institutions that would produce the requisite union of passion and principle. If the new “bourgeois” order was to succeed, and people were, for example, supposed to be inclined on rational grounds to trade, bargain and compromise with each other, then people needed something to trade, and the bargains they struck had to fit with people’s expectations as being morally preferable to the alternative of continuing to fight. The psychology of mutual respect had to be in play, and an appeal to abstract principles alone would not necessarily bring it into play. The form this problem took in Hegel’s day did not seem to have been overcome in France, or, for that matter, even to be on the horizon of being overcome.¹⁶⁷

The liberals grasped the impossibility of repressing pluralism, and they wished in principle to merge that with a respect for different casts of mind and to throw into the mix the ideal of individual self-improvement. However, the “ultras” saw no reason to submit to such a bargain with the opposition “modernists.” They understood that the modern shape of life spelled the end of the ancien régime, and they, at least, were still ready for a fight. In that way, the conflict between “ultras” and “liberals” seemed for the time being to be beyond reconciliation in France. The “liberals” put their faith in reason and the rational administration of government by something along the lines of utilitarian thought, but so Hegel argued, that could not suffice to overcome the conflict. For there to be the genuine acceptance of the liberal principle of mutual respect, such a principle had to be a living part of a rational practice. Otherwise, the conciliation could not succeed, or, as he put it, “it is a false principle that the fetters which bind right and freedom can be broken without the emancipation of conscience—that there can be a revolution without a reformation.”¹⁶⁸

For the impasse, Hegel blamed Catholicism and its nonmodern insistence on authority that was beyond rational criticism. As it were, on Hegel’s interpretation, the standoff was between the Catholics, who adhered to the principle “Thy will be done,” and the liberals, who held to the principle “My will be done.” That put them both absolutely at odds with each other, and it meant that the liberal appeal to administrative rationality was bound to fail in light of such intransigence. Such obduracy in the confrontation of religion and public practice was not at least in principle the case, he held, in Protestant countries.

Alas, Hegel was succumbing to something like wishful thinking in sticking to his views about how German protestant worldliness was now more or less clearly taking the Dutch path. Armed with the 20/20 hindsight of those living later, it is not hard for us to see that Hegel was being unfoundedly optimistic in his views on how deep and how widespread was the conviction in German life that reason now ruled and the princes were mere figureheads.¹⁶⁹ Not all Germans, and certainly not all the noble elite, and surely virtually none of the Prussian royal elite thought that the prince’s “will is worthy of respect” only when it conforms to a kind of post-Enlightenment rationality, nor did the cast of mind run deeply that no German prince could even get away with ruling in contravention of the principles of reason itself. It was not the case that this commitment to a form of reason in everyday life had by then become so widely accepted that it had counted as a fact, and not merely an aspiration, in the German shape of life.¹⁷⁰ In reality, the “rights of man” still remained far more of a distant ideal than a living reality in German life. Even Hegel himself near the end of his life began to have worries about whether things were starting to fall apart in his own time. Nonetheless, his belief that the principles of “justice as social freedom” had so set themselves firmly at root in the modern world even led him to conclude that “in Europe nowadays each nation is bounded by another and may not of itself begin a war against another European nation.”¹⁷¹ He was right about the utter irrationality of such a war, but he was, alas, dead wrong in thinking it therefore would not happen.¹⁷²