Category Archives: Political Science

Wading into the Deep End with Hegel: First Impressions upon Encountering Hegel’s Philosophy of History

20 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by in Hegel, History, Philosophy, Political Science, Religion and Spirituality

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Of all the philosophers immortalized by membership in the western canon, Hegel appears to be the one who’s philosophy is best embodied by the popular notion that humanity can be described as the universe examining itself. How this idea became part of the pop cultural landscape is, potentially, a fruitful topic for a later discussion. What is clear, however, is that this idea probably didn’t enter popular discourse through the work of Hegel himself, which can be both dense and frustrating, and when it comes to his notion of God, sometimes even ambiguous.

As the editor Allen Wood of the Cambridge edition of Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right puts it: “The difficulty and obscurity of Hegel’s writings posed problems for them [critics], just as they have for subsequent readers.”
– Allen Wood, editor. “Editor’s Introduction,” Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ix.

Despite the difficulties, I have found much to be fascinated with in Hegel, from his concept of the universe actualizing itself through history to his analysis of Socratic irony. The suggestion that Socrates was indeed a corrupter of Athenian youth, his irreverent take on the mores of the city-state poisoning them against authority and promoting the individual at the expense of the communal, first revealed to me the originality of Hegel’s approach.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

I originally fell in with Hegel, not through a study of pure philosophy, but instead through my interest in history. Desiring to make a study of the philosophical bases and justifications behind the discipline of history, I began, naïvely as it turns out, with Hegel. Hegel is famous, in part, for his work on the philosophy of history and his view that history is animated by the Worldsoul or the Geist. This notion mixes a teleological and metaphysical component into the study of history which contemporary academic historians find troubling. One difficulty is that it appears to suggest a transcendental consciousness driving history, a notion in direct conflict with modern scientism and academic orthodoxy, and suggestive of religious eschatology. Another perceived flaw in Hegel’s theories is that, from the contemporary view, they adhere to a paradigm of social progress that denies, by definition, the relativistic equality of value placed on all life and lifestyles, all cultures past and present, a notion in direct conflict with modern anthropological ideology.

Where Hegel sees freedom of the individual to be truly himself as the mark of societal progress, the contemporary academic sees a stifling conventionalism rooted in Eurocentric notions from a bygone era. Lynn Hunt, in her book History, Why it Matters complains,

“The German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel inaugurated a long history of denigrating the East or Orient in his lectures on the meaning of world history in the 1820s: “The East knew and to the present day knows that only One is Free; the Greek and Roman world that some are free; the German World knows that All are free.””
– Lynn Hunt. History, Why it Matters (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2018), 58.

I make no defense of any cultural insensitivity perceived or imagined, though I do believe that the trope of Oriental despotism clearly precedes Hegel by some many hundreds of generations, and is not, as Hunt would have it, a Hegelian invention. The point that Hegel is making is one that is not dependent on any one culture or ethnicity, rather, his critique depends upon the style and manner of governance itself.

Despotism and absolutism are the governments that inhibit the actualization of the individual, and it is these qualities, not their geographical locations, that Hegel deplores. The progressive awareness is that in a despotism only the despot is free to be himself. The ancient solution was democracy and republicanism, which resulted in partial freedom. His dismissal of the East as indicative of despotic forms of governance is wrong, and something that we can recognize as a form of casual elitism and culture bias, but it has little to do with the actual point that the philosopher was making, despite its flawed cultural assumptions.

Whatever the objective truth value of Hegel’s notion concerning a worldsoul or Geist working for a solution to self realization in the historical sphere, it can, at least, provide a useful framework for looking at historical events. Since history is indeed in the past, it is perhaps not entirely unhelpful to look at them from a teleological perspective. Hegel’s ideas, therefore, should not be dismissed out of hand. Instead, it may be that we can accept the Hegelian challenge as historians, and, when examining our subject, look for the ways in which historical problems have resulted in apparent solutions through the actions of the many over time.

The core component of Hegel’s philosophy is that history follows laws and that these laws are the rational reflections of the Geist at work, attempting to express itself through history in its own terms. Whatever the nature of this Mind—it may be that it is a will in the same way that gravity seems to will to bring matter together—the conclusion is that it is subject to being understood. It is rational and explainable. History moves with purpose towards an ideal state. It may never reach that state, or, once that state is realized it may begin to seek out a new telos, another end to be desired. What we do know is that history, according to Hegel, follows a rational trajectory towards an attainable objective. By knowing the object we can know the trajectory and thus the direction of history.

Certainly, Hegel is one of the fixtures in the sub-field of philosophy of history and deserves to be read both cautiously and seriously. On the other hand, in order to accomplish this requires a more complete picture of Hegel’s metaphysical philosophy, a survey beyond the scope of my original intent. In other words, I now find myself locked into an unintended relationship with a cantankerous German philosopher from the early 19th century, delving into notions of dialectic and ontology in order to better grasp his view on the trajectory of human events. I expect this will become, then, an ongoing concern. Nonetheless, I do think it worthwhile to summarize my findings to date.

First on the agenda must be to establish what kind of force is meant by the Geist or Worldsoul or God in the philosopher’s lexicon. Clearly there are several possibilities and before we can decide on Hegel’s view of history, we must try and understand his conception of what sort of thing it is that animates it. For Hegel, history is the expression of a trans-human consciousness expressing its will through historical events as enacted by lesser but fundamentally dissimilar human wills taken in the aggregate. It is this aspect, with its pseudo-religious terminology, that I believe offends many historians.

Despite this language, however, my suspicion is that Hegel’s notion of the Worldsoul is far less a reflection of the personal god of protestantism, though perhaps informed by such, and something closer to an impersonal principle or set of principles which expresses itself as the aggregate of many consciousnesses interacting, a sort of multi-mind unnoticed and beyond the conventional awareness of casual observers of historical events. This is what M. C. Lemon refers to as the immanentist interpretation:

which construes ‘God’ as synonymous with the known principles inherent in Existence. The analogy of a spontaneously evolved system may help. Such a system (e.g. the ecological system) is not designed by anyone, yet the interconnections between its parts can be explained (via cause and effect).
– M. C. Lemon. Philosophy of History: A Guide for Students (London: Routledge, 2003,) 204.

The key, in my opinion, must be in this consciousness’ relationship to the material world. If the Geist arises out of human minds acting in concert, then man creates god and not visa versa. Otherwise, if the Geist can impose its will upon the material matrix of the universe without the intervention of the human, then we have a more traditional version of spirits relationship to matter and we are veering towards what Lemon refers to as the pantheist vision, where God is synonymous with the universe.

There is, perhaps, a third possibility to my thinking, however, which is more in the Platonic register than either of the other two, though this is speculative on my part. In this case we might consider consciousness itself to be the substance of spirit, which through the powers of the will, interacts with the material realm, though it is not properly a part of this realm. This interaction is weak at the physical level and grows stronger as more complex forms of life develop, allowing the will of the Geist to be more perfectly realized though the use of more receptive vehicles, namely mankind.

This is only the beginning of my relationship with Hegel. I began at the end of the story and now feel compelled to fill in the lacunae. This essay is not to be considered an end unto itself. Nor should it be considered an accurate portrayal or summary of Hegel’s philosophy. Rather this is part of an ongoing study into Hegel’s philosophy and reflects only my initial reactions to it. Parts of this essay must be considered merely speculative with regards to Hegel’s true beliefs, which I am still in the process of parsing. All opinions within it are my own, and subject to revision.

— Wm. J. M. —

Post Scriptum: One article that I would like to recommend to interested readers is one that appeared recently in Aeon digital magazine, written by Georgetown professor and Hegel biographer Terry Pinkard. This article, entitled The Spirit of History, went a long way towards reanimating my own spirit of interest in the Hegelian world view, and went a long way towards simplifying some of Hegel’s more difficult conceptions for this novice reader of his works.


Long Read: Was Thucydides the first Positivist?

14 Tuesday May 2019

Posted by in Ancient Greece, Bibliographies, Books, Features, Greek Classics, History, Long Reads, Political Science, Thucydides

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While it may seem obvious to many in the contemporary world that human history is a story of progressive and cumulative change, moving civilization and its citizens towards ever greater material, technological, and social advancement, such ideas are rather uncommon in the history of history. To modern social theorists, growth is everything. Technocrats and economists continually refine their measurements of per capita GDP and capital stockpiles in order to verify that we are, in fact, still growing materially. Such growth, according to theory, will result in the increased well being of individuals and the improvement of quality of life for each. Though scholars and academics often decry the so-called myth of progress, in practical terms it seems to have embedded itself in the socio-political matrix of the current age.

Traditionally, however, such linear and progressive views of history were unusual or even aberrant. Ancient myths often saw human history in terms of a decline through successively more brutal and decadent stages. What had once been a Golden Age of gods and god-like-men, was now, for the ancients, a corrupted Age of Iron and bloody warfare. Christian and Hebrew histories, too, saw civilization in terms of a fall, both material and spiritual. And, while Plato, in his Republic, envisioned a Utopia ruled by a philosopher king, even this perfected city-state was subject to decline and a reversion to anarchic type. The moral arc of history was unreliable at best, at worst perverse, and it appeared to bend in the wrong direction.

In the Early Modern Period (c.1500–c.1800), theorists such as Giambattista Vico, writing in his 1725 study of political philosophy, the New Science, could still see, in the rise and fall of civilizations, a cyclical and recursive process. Even more recently, public figures such as Steve Bannon have notably adhered to theories of cyclical history, such as the so called 4th Turning, which hypothesizes regularly predictable crises appearing in world history.

In light of this background, then, perhaps 19th and 20th century positivism may itself seem the deviation rather than the rule. But if it is the exception, then it is one that has ensconced itself within the societal control room, and Oz-like, has had its hand upon all the levers of politics and commerce for many decades.

The 18th century… saw the greatest flowering of belief in progress, with belief that a benevolent providence had secured for us perfectibility of knowledge and reason. In the 19th century belief in progress continued to flourish, with Comte and Marx equally enamoured of it.”

Simon Blackburn. “Progress,” Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy.

In its progressive and political modes, positivism envisions society, properly managed, as susceptible to impelled growth by interventionist policy. Such theories have been linked with paternalistic colonialism, classical liberalism, racism, and unrestrained capitalism by their critics. They have also provided a concrete framework and systematic approach to governmental concerns by modern technocrats and economists since such positions began to move away from the control of political patrons and into the domain of professional careerists. But the base assumption is that the movement of history is in a positive direction; that happiness, if not goodness, increases; and that things are better, or at least grander, than they once were.

History came to be seen as a single linear progression encompassing every region of the globe. The future came to stand for improvement, rather than degeneration from a previous golden age or simply a product of inevitable cycles of rise and fall.

Lynn Hunt. History: Why It Matters. Polity Press: 2018. 93.
Bust of Thucydides. Roman copy (c. 100 CE) of an early 4th Century BCE Greek original.

As far as we know, Thucydides is the first historian to take an analytical approach to history, and in the Archaeology in particular, he attempts to provide a progressive account of Greek history. Thucydides purpose is not merely to describe what happened or relate popular stories about events, but to understand the causal reason behind events. Thucydides knew what had happened, he wanted to know why.

The Archaeology is normally considered to be comprised of the next twenty chapters following the first—by some accounts twenty-two—of the first book of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. In the Jones and Powell’s Oxford critical edition, the standard scholarly version of this work, the Archaeology consists of fewer than 150 lines of Greek text. The text is so named, not because it deals with archaeology in the modern sense of the word, but rather because it is an account, a logia, of ‘the earliest events’ (archaia) (Hornblower, A Commentary On Thucydides, 1991:3).

The purpose of the Archaeology is to defend Thucydides’ initial supposition that the war was the greatest (megista) of any such events up until that time, and that it was necessarily greater due to the relative weakness of the Hellenes and their states in prior eras.

Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it….  Indeed this was the greatest movement yet known in history, not only of the Hellenes, but of a large part of the barbarian world—I had almost said mankind. Thucydides: I.1.1-2


Thucydides. The Landmark Thucydides. Robert Strassler editor. Free Press: 2008. 3.

In order to demonstrate this, Thucydides provides the reader with a broad overview of the development of Greek power from the earliest times known to him: through the Minoan period, the Trojan war as related by Homer, and finally down to his own present, the 5th Century BC.

To show that this war was the greatest conflict ever engaged, Thucydides needed to illustrate how an expansion of power and organization could build up a civilization out of the rough building blocks of brigandage and raw subsistence. Thucydides invents the idea of progress in order to justify his history. What Thucydides constructs with this new model of thinking is the history of a Greece, and especially an Athens, that possesses an ever widening circle of influence and power. From this it must follow that only in his own time were the Greek powers able to undertake such an all-encompassing endeavor as the Peloponnesian war, since in prior ages they lacked both the political unity and the resources to do so.

So powerful is Thucydides’ belief in his thesis that he is willing to directly challenge received tradition, even when that tradition is the semi-sacred Homeric account of the Trojan War. Thucydides represents the powers of Mycenaean antiquity in their invasion of Illium, not as a massive overweening power gone abroad to project its power, but as a pathetic ragtag force of would be pirates, barely able to sustain itself in the field.

So that if we strike the average of the largest and smallest ships, the number of those who sailed will appear inconsiderable, representing as they did, the whole force of Hellas.
    And this was due not so much to scarcity of men as of money. Difficulty of subsistence made the invaders reduce the numbers of the army to a point at which it might live on the country during the prosecution of the war. Even on the victory they obtained on their arrival… there is no indication of their whole force having been employed; on the contrary, they seem to have turned to cultivation of the Cheronese [a nearby peninsula] and to piracy for want of supplies. Thucydides: I.1.10,5 ff.


Thucydides. The Landmark Thucydides. Robert Strassler editor. Free Press: 2008. 9.

This great new modern power of Athens, now active as an empire in Thucydides’ own time, is shown to be possible because of three factors: economic growth leading to surplus resources, the spread of Greek culture and language across the Aegean and onto the Ionian shores of Asia Minor, and the political unification of diverse island and coastal populations under the umbrella of the Delian League.

The Olympias: A modern reconstruction of an ancient Athenian Trireme, workhorse of 5th century navies.

While Sparta, though a land power, leads the Peloponnesian League, all of Athens’ power lies in her ability to project force and the threat of force through her navy, and the revenue which that produces. What the Archaeology’s analysis attempts to demonstrate is that all of this power and growth has been due primarily to sea power, and as such directly favors the Athenian camp. The Archaeology is not merely a statement of historical fact, but rather, since it attributes expansion as belonging to a particular kind of power, namely naval, it is also a kind of political manifesto.

That Athens was eventually defeated does nothing to lessen the impact of Thucydides’ hypothesis, since defeat only happened after Spartan forces themselves had acquired a sophisticated modern navy and could challenge the Athenian empire both on land as well as at sea. For Thucydides, naval power must ultimately be triumphant, since it was the best and swiftest vehicle for the spread of commerce and culture. It was his view that whosoever controlled shipping controlled the ancient Aegean, and who every controlled that controlled the world in which he lived. It was this insight, that the progression from rude exchange and clumsy piracy into expansive trade networks and sophisticated armadas, could be driven by the adoption of new technologies, openness to commerce, and the willingness to risk failure for the sake of expansion, that changed forever how power was viewed by history, historians, and the rulers who read them.