Hegel on Freedom and the State, Essay Example

In order to understand Hegel’s conceptions of freedom, it is necessary to first examine his philosophy of subjective spirit, or philosophy of mind. Mind, in Hegelian thought, is the integral foundation of freedom. With mind, life itself becomes spirit (Geist). The capacities of the mind, such as consciousness and intuition, representation and language, memory, thought, and will, all of these are fundamental to being ‘spiritual’, and all can be distinguished by the degree to which they are seen to manifest self-determination.[1] Hegel states: “In so far as I am practical or active, i.e. in so far as I act, I determine myself, and to determine myself means precisely to posit a difference.”[2] It is this self-determination, product of mind, that constitutes the basis of freedom as Hegel conceives it.

The will occupies a special place in Hegel’s thinking about the mind. The will embodies the ability of the ego to self-reflect and to abstract. By this process, the ego can use the will to determine some desired outcome, and then move towards it. This is what the will makes possible, and considered thusly, it is obvious that it must be absolutely foundational to Hegel’s conceptions of freedom. In realizing its desires, the will destroys one set of circumstances and gives rise to another.[3] The will turned to actuality, Hegel states, “becomes in the relam of both politics and religion the fanaticism of destruction, demolishing the whole existing social order, eliminating all individuals regarded as suspect by a given order, and annihilating any organization which attempts to rise up anew.”[4] If I will myself to work my way up through the corporate hierarchy to the apex, and my aims succeed, I have destroyed one set of circumstances—the company as it was before I decided on my aim and put it into effect, and created a new set of circumstances as the result.

To be truly free, though, the will must be able to do something very important: it must be able to own and exchange property. This requires some exposition, because it is a rather complex concept. The fundamental idea is that the will, although internal to the person, can nevertheless be used to affect the external world. Hegel lists a number of examples that demonstrate the concept, all of which are products of the mind given some kind of physical-external form: “Intellectual [geistige] accomplishments, sciences, arts, even religious observances… inventions…”[5]

Moreover, the idea of freedom is fundamentally grounded in inter-subjectivity and thus, reciprocal relations in society. Freedom, Hegel believed, only exists as such when it is recognized by others. Without this process of mutual recognition, one is not and cannot be truly free. The anchorite hermit in his fastnesses cannot be “free” because he lacks a social context in which to be free, in which to practice extending and receiving freedom.[6]These are the fruits of the mediation of the spirit: they are the products of the will, and have an external existence [Dasein]. The ability to placethe will into any given thing was, for Hegel, a right, one that implied ownership. The will itself is the basis of this: the ability to see a dead tree, determine that it would make a fine source of fuel, and then act upon this by felling the tree and cutting into logs gives the one who so does the right to the firewood that they have cut. Similarly, the ability of the artist to project their will onto the canvas with paint, or of the sculptor to project their will into a piece of marble with hammers, chisels, and other tools, also entails ownership. In all cases the thing produced is the concretization, the physical emanation, of the will, and as such it belongs to the one who willed it.[7]

This defense of private property as the manifestation of the will owes much to Smith and his account of political economy in The Wealth of Nations. Following Smith, Hegel saw in the capitalist market economy a means of achieving both individual and collective well-being. A system of private property allows individuals to own the products of their respective wills. This produces the conditions for material well-being, as individuals are free to sell the products of their labor. Smith’s butcher or baker who provides services not out of some sense of public good or civic devotion, but rather in order to secure for himself the means of his own subsistence, is for Hegel case in point. Guided by Smith’s invisible hand, butchers and bakers and candlestick makers everywhere seek to provide goods and services for their own private gain, but in the process they benefit society.[8]

This, Hegel says, attests to the fact that the private goods of private property also constitute social, public goods: it is good for everyone that private property be protected. Indeed, it is the only way to achieve the common good, and thus the only rational structure for a society to have. It is rational, Hegel says, because it allows for diverse people to choose to do diverse things. There is room for the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, as well as the yoga instructor, the Impressionist painter, and the teacher of interpretive dance. All of these individuals have the freedom to choose to do what they wish in order to secure the means of their subsistence, selling the proceeds of their labor—or their labor directly, in the case of the worker who works for a wage. This is the beauty of a system that protects private property: it also protects self-expression and individuals’ vocational choices. And the consequence, of course, is better for everybody, since society now consists of uncoerced individuals going about their business and making their living as they see fit. This freedom, importantly, produces a collective good: a free and prosperous society.[9]

Freedom, then, exists when individuals have the ability to acquire private property by dint of their creative efforts, and do as they please for their sustenance. From this it follows very straightforwardly that a social-political formation that allows the exercise of these rights, or at least more of these rights, is a freer and therefore better social-political formation than one that does not protect these rights, or at least does not protect as many of these rights to the same degree. But for Hegel this was not simply a matter of historical materialism, because—again—Hegel’s idea of freedom is an intrinsically spiritual one. Here one must remember that above all, Hegel is an essentialist and an idealist, and these perspectives pervade every corner of his thought. For Hegel, the whole of world history is essentially a teleological narrative, whereby the self-conscious world-spirit of universal reason has been awakening through centuries and millennia of historical development.[10]

Hegel identifies several phases in this schema: Oriental, ancient Greek, Roman-Christian, and Germanic, each of which had its own social ethos. The ‘Oriental’ despotisms of Egypt, Babylon, Persia, India, China and the like were governed by the principle of intuition. These peoples, Hegel says, knew only that their kings were free. The torch of history then passed to the Greeks and their Republican Roman successors, who saw themselves as free men and citizens. Of course, they were free men who owned slaves, and they tended to have very dim views of foreign peoples to boot. As such, they knew only that some were free. The capitulation of the Roman Republic to the imperial monarchy founded by Augustus represented quite a reversal in Hegel’s scheme. However, Hegel does not treat of this reversal merely in terms of its obvious effects upon political life, i.e. the dominance of an autocrat. Instead, he charges that the Roman Empire sapped the desire of the individual Roman citizen to defend his homeland. The result, Hegel claims, was a profound atomization of Roman society: deprived of meaningful political life, the Roman allowed the defense of his city and its vast domains to become the preserve of the standing army created by Augustus, in place of the citizens’ militia that had once done the job. Thus the Roman was alienated from his fellows. In the long-vaunted splendors of the Pax Romana, Hegel saw the degradation of the once-free Republic, the suffocation of the civic spirit by the hand of autocracy.[11]

But the weight of the soul-crushing hand of Roman autocracy, the misery in which Hegel believes the captive peoples of Rome languished, ultimately produced a new development for the world-spirit: Christianity. It was from the Jews, a nation undoubtedly oppressed by Roman domination, that this new doctrine emerged: the idea of God’s objectivity over the corruption of worldly things, a vision of salvationist eschatology that drew converts because it appealed to those who suffered from Roman tyranny.[12] “The spirit now grasps the infinite positivity of its own inwardness, the principle of the unity of divine and human nature and the reconciliation of the objective truth and freedom which have appeared within self-consciousness and subjectivity.”[13]

But Hegel, of course, was far from an ardent defender of Christianity. He readily grasped both the tremendous joys with which the practice of the religion has been linked for its followers, and the innumerable oppressions and calamitous outrages it was pressed into service to license. Hegel, then, takes an uncompromising but rather balanced view of the Church, recognizing both the importance of faith for believers and the tremendous abuses of institutional power in the name of Christianity. This has ramifications for how the state should be run: it should be secular, protecting the right of individuals to worship as they please, just as it should protect the right of individuals to own property and buy and sell it as they please. It therefore follows, from Hegel’s schema, that those nations which best embodied these features constituted a new development of the world-spirit.[14] Hegel saw in the Germanic nations of Denmark, the Netherlands, England, Prussia, and to a lesser extent Romance-speaking France, the embodiment of this new development in the world-spirit: the modern nation-state that protected property and individual rights, at least to a point, and was secular, again at least to a point. History culminates in these nations, at least for the time being, because of their social and political progress. And this, Hegel says, is why it is only in a modern nation-state that someone can truly be free, possessing property and able to work and worship as they see fit.[15]

It is difficult to do justice to the critiques of Hegel, and to give a proper accounting of one’s own, for at least two reasons: the depth and breadth of Hegel’s thought, and that of the critiques raised against him, many of which one finds one’s self agreeing with if only in part. Nonetheless, one cannot help but look askance at his essentialist, teleological schema of world history. In light of two centuries of scholarship since Hegel, his portrayal of ‘Oriental’ civilizations now seems an embarrassing caricature, and indeed Orientalist. His mystical view of nations and their sociopolitical development is hopelessly outdated against Moore’s (1966) analysis of class relations, Anderson’s (1983) account of the origins and spread of nationalism, Scott’s (1998) penetrating analysis of the uses and abuses of state power in service to high modernist agendas,or the work of Bueno de Mesquita and Smith (2011) on selectorate theory. Hegel essentialized entire peoples, and in an age when scholarship has increasingly sought to dissect ruling coalitions and cast light on peasant and subaltern narratives he reads as hopelessly poor history and political science.

The deficiencies of Hegel’s history are bound up with the deficiencies of his philosophy. Working in Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic times, Hegel can perhaps be forgiven for a certain amount of messianic historicism of the kind that later led a certain prominent historian, in a more recent era, to see the endpoint of history in the verdict of 1989-1991. What is more problematic in Hegel is his prioritizing of the world-spirit, again by means of essentializing entire peoples, over the affairs of individual people. As Russell so capably observes, Hegel is not concerned with the promotion of democracy in the least. It is an authoritarian vision that he holds up as the ideal. After all, since the world-spirit expresses itself through entire peoples, it does not matter if the nation in question—case in point, Prussia—is ruled by a monarch, so long as the monarch establishes the property rights and rights to worship that Hegel prioritizes.[16]

While private property may be all well and good, without a consideration of the many other aspects of social, economic, and political life that make up a modern nation, one is left with an impoverished view of how best to order society. I find Hegel’s mystical, idealist, essentialist outlook intrinsically problematic for the ways in which it minimizes or entirely overlooks such considerations. Perhaps worst of all is the view he takes of the state. While bearing in mind the differences of the era in which Hegel lived, in view of the many horrors that even democratic states such as the U.S. and the UK have perpetrated, his view of the state and of state power seems almost unbearably naïve. As such and in sum, I find that Hegel’s conceptions of “freedom” are as lacking as his history, and should be rejected for this very reason.

Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1983.

Avineri, Shlomo. Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State. 1972. Repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce, and Alastair Smith. The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics. New York: PublicAffairs, 2011.

Hearfield, Colin. Adorno and the Modern Ethos of Freedom. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2004.

Hegel, George W.F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Edited by Allen W. Wood. Translated by Hugh B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Houlgate, Stephen. “G.W.F. Hegel: An Introduction to His Life and Thought.” In A Companion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur, 1-20. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2011.

Moore, Barrington. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1966.

Neuhouser, Frederick. “The Idea of a Hegelian ‘Science’ of Society.” In A Companion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur, 281-296. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2011.

Russell, Bertrand. History of Western Philosophy. 1946. Repr., New York: Routledge, 2013.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New York: Vail-Ballou, 1998.

[1] Stephen Houlgate, “G.W.F. Hegel: An Introduction to His Life and Thought,” in A Companion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2011), 10-12.

[2] George W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. Hugh B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 36.

[3]Houlgate, “G.W.F. Hegel,” 11.

[4] Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 38.

[5] Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 74.

[6] Colin Hearfield, Adorno and the Modern Ethos of Freedom (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2004), 32.

[7] Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 75-77.

[8] Frederick Neuhouser, “The Idea of a Hegelian ‘Science’ of Society,” in A Companion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2011), 285.

[9] Neuhouser, “The Idea of a Hegelian ‘Science’ of Society,” 285-286.

[10]Hearfield, Adorno and the Modern Ethos of Freedom, 32-33.

[11]Hearfield, Adorno and the Modern Ethos of Freedom, 32-33; Houlgate, “G.W.F. Hegel: An Introduction to His Life and Thought,” 12; ShlomoAvineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (1972; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 26.

[12]Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, 28-29.

[13] Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 379.

[14]Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, 30-31.

[15] Houlgate, “G.W.F. Hegel: An Introduction to His Life and Thought,” 12.

[16] Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (1946; repr., New York: Routledge, 2013), 667-670.