Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T07:07:43.506Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Hegel's Conservative Liberalism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

F. R. Cristi
F. R. Cristi
Affiliation:
Wilfrid Laurier University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Hegelian scholarship is rent between conservative and liberal interpretations of Hegel's political philosophy. These one-sided interpretations miss his attempts to reconcile freedom and authority. Conservative liberalism, I submit, rightly describes his posture. A dialectical procedure allows Hegel to derive rationally a conservative State from the liberal principles embodied in market society. The key to this dialectical derivation lies in the spontaneous order that springs naturally from the self-seeking behaviour of individuals. Hegel's realization of the negative ethical value generated by that spontaneous order, and the failure of corporations to discipline the business classes, prompts the powerful role he confides to the State and its monarch.

Résumé

Les études hégéliennes sont partagées entre l'interprétation libérate et l'nterprétation conservatrice de la philosophie politique de Hegel. Ces interprétations unilatérales negligent les efforts de Hegel pour concilier la liberté et l'autorité. Cet article propose le terme de « libéralisme conservateur » afin de décrire adéquatement la pensée de Hegel. Un processus dialectique permet à Hegel de déduire un État conservateur des principes libéraux incarnés dans la société de marché. La clef de cette dérivation dialectique se trouve dans l'ordre spontané qui surgit naturellement du comportement egoiste des individus. La conscience que Hegel a de la valeur morale négative engendrée par cet ordre spontané et le fait que les corporations ont négligé de discipliner les classes commerçantes, l'incitent à confier un rôle puissant à l'État et au monarque.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 22 , Issue 4 , December 1989 , pp. 717 - 738
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Aristotle, Metaphysics E1, 1026a30–31.

2 Numbers in parentheses refer to paragraphs in Hegel's PhR. For their translation I have consulted extensively the work of Knox, T. M. (Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans, with notes by Knox, T. M. [Oxford: Clarendon, 1967]).Google Scholar

3 Pelczynski, Z. A., “The Hegelian Conception of the State,” in Pelczynski, Z. A. (ed.), Hegel's Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 3.Google Scholar

4 According to Weil, “le prince n'est pas le centre nilerouage principal de l'Etat” ( Weil, Eric, Hegel et l'Etat [Paris: Vrin, 1950], 62).Google Scholar

5 Smith sees Hegel as a communitarian who, “like Montesquieu before him and Tocqueville later,… understood the crucial role played in modern society by ‘corporations,’ or intermediary groups” ( Smith, Steven, “Hegel's Critique of Liberalism,” American Political Science Review 80 [1986], 136).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Scruton, Roger, “Hegel as a Conservative Thinker,” The Salisbury Review (July 1986), 49.Google ScholarOttmann, Henning gives a comprehensive overview of both liberal and conservative interpretations of Hegel's political philosophy in Individuum und Gemeinschaft bei Hegel, vol. 1: Hegel im Spiegel der Interpretationen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977).Google Scholar

7 Taylor, Charles, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 452.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Attempts have been made to compensate a linguistic deficit that restricts our choice to the terms “liberal” and “conservative.” Some authors introduce the expressions “liberal conservative” and “conservative liberal.” Thus, Müller uses “liberal conservative” to refer to a number of thinkers, like Burke and Tocqueville, whose work synthesizes liberal and conservative political principles. The line dividing liberal conservatives from “doctrinaire liberals” like Hayek and Mises, according to Müller, is the latter's acceptance of social nominalism ( Müller, Johann Baptist, “Was heisst ‘Liberalkonservativ,’” Zeitschrift für Politik 29 [1982], 351–75).Google Scholar Gissurarson, by contrast, uses “conservative liberalism” to describe Hayek's economic and political philosophy. The dividing line—Hayek's opposition to the rationalism of enlightened liberals—is drawn again according to an epistemological criterion. See Gissurarson, Hannes H., Hayek's Conservative Liberalism (New York: Garland, 1987).Google Scholar

9 Hegel's reconciliation of freedom and authority is noted in Seyla Benhabib's essay “Obligation, Contract and Exchange: On the Significance of Hegel's Abstract Right,” in Pelczynski, Z. A. (ed.), The State and Civil Society: Studies in Hegel's Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 174–77.Google Scholar However, this peculiar association of freedom and authority is not a Hegelian trademark. Krieger views it as a common German phenomenon, one that “has been traced back to Luther and up to Hitler” ( Krieger, Leonard, The German Idea of Freedom [Boston: Beacon Press, 1957], ix).Google Scholar

10 Taylor, Hegel, 452.

11 Hume, David, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), 42.Google Scholar

12 Events, admits Hume, “seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another; but we can never observe any tie between them” (Ibid., 49). The political translation of this empiricist approach is made by economists like Adam Ferguson, for whom establishments are “the result of human action but not the execution of any human design” (quoted in Hayek, F. A., Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 1: Rules and Order [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973], 150).Google Scholar

13 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm, Werke, ed. by Schroeter, M. (München: C. H. Beck, 1965), 299.Google Scholar

14 Hegel's Logic, trans, by Wallace, William (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 67Google Scholar (modified translation); emphasis in the original.

15 Compare with Tocqueville's, description of French revolutionaries in The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 147:Google Scholar “Our revolutionaries had the same fondness for broad generalizations, cut-and-dried legislative systems, and a pedantic symmetry; the same contempt for hard fact; the same taste for reshaping institutions on novel, ingenious, original lines; the same desire to reconstruct the entire constitution according to the rules of logic and a preconceived system instead of rectifying its faulty parts.”

16 Hegel's Logic, 62.

17 Hegel, G. W. F., Natural Law, trans, by Knox, T. M. (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), 69.Google Scholar

18 Compare with Kroner, Richard, Von Kant bis Hegel I (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1921), 287.Google Scholar

19 Hegel's Science of Logic, trans, by Miller, A. V. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1989), 589.Google Scholar

20 Compare with Ilting, Karl-Heinz, “Zur Dialektik in der ‘Rechtsphilosophie,’” Hegel Jahrbuch (1975), 38.Google Scholar

21 The articulation of the forward-moving synthetic moment with the backward-moving analytical moment in Hegel's argument is compared by Ottmann to a “Spring-prozession,” a carnival dance that moves to and fro ( Ottmann, Henning, “Hegelsche Logik und Rechtsphilosophie. Unzulängliche Bemerkungen zu einem ungelösten Problem,” in Henrich, Dieter and Horstmann, Rolf-Peter [eds.] Hegels Philosophie des Rechts. Die Theorie der Rechtsformen und ihre Logik [Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982], 383–84).Google Scholar

22 Compare with Kant's account of the matter. An analytic or regressive procedure, according to Kant, “signifies only that we start from what is sought, as if it were given, and ascend to the only conditions under which it is possible” ( Kant, Immanuel, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, with an Introduction by Beck, Lewis White [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975], 23Google Scholar n.4). And in Kant's Fragments one reads: “Rousseau proceeds synthetically and begins with natural man; I proceed analytically and begin with civilized man” (quoted in Cassirer, Ernst, Rousseau, Kant and Goethe [New York: Harper and Row, 1965], 22).Google Scholar

23 Hegel, Natural Law, 94.

24 Ibid., 98.

25 I shall follow the practice introduced by Charles Taylor and leave the notion of Sittlichkeit untranslated. Compare with Taylor, Hegel, 376.

26 Montesquieu avoided the one-sidedness of both idealism and empiricism for he “did not merely deduce individual institutions and laws from so-called reason, nor merely abstract them from experience to raise them thereafter to a universal… [but] comprehended both the higher relationships of constitutional law and the lower specifications of civil relationships down to wills, marriage laws, etc., entirely from the character of the [national] whole and its individuality” (Hegel, Natural Law, 128).

27 Ibid., 67–68.

28 Compare with Hyppolite, Jean, Introduction à la philosophie de I'histoire de Hegel (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1968), 74.Google Scholar

29 Kant, Immanuel, The Critique of Judgement, trans, by Meredith, J. C. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), 60–67.Google Scholar According to Kant, our understanding moves “from the analytic universal to the particular, or, in other words, from conceptions to given empirical intuitions.” But one can also think of another understanding, an intellectus archetypus, which would proceed “from the synthetic universal, or intuition of a whole as a whole, to the particular—that is to say, from the whole to the parts” (63). Our understanding is forced to consider isolated parts first, and from there it can recreate a whole in a composite manner. To an intuitive understanding, on the contrary, it would be possible to grasp the whole in itself immediately, and from it proceed to view the parts as issuing from that original unity.

30 Hegel, Natural Law, 67.

31 Plato, , Statesman, trans, by Skemp, J. B. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 66.Google Scholar Compare with Hegel, Natural Law, 96.

32 In the Heidelberger Enziclopädie he writes: “… contract, namely the arbitrary agreement between different persons with respect to an arbitrary and adventitious thing” (para. 440).

33 Steven Smith marks the mediating role of corporations in Hegel's political philosophy. They allow him successfully “to find a middle ground between Hobbes and Robespierre, between the market place and citizen virtue” (Smith, “Hegel's Critique of Liberalism,” 137). By contrast, Charles Larmore notices Hegel's only “fleeting reference” to corporations and his “neglect of intermediate associations.” Hegel's conception of civil society, accordingly, “comprises only egoistic behaviour,” leading in the end to “social atomism” (Patterns of Moral Complexity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], 105). Similarly, Levin and Williams believe that in Hegel's corporations “particularity has not been overcome but merely elevated” ( Levin, Michael and Williams, Howard, “Inherited Power and Popular Representation: A Tension in Hegel's Political Theory,” Political Studies 35 [1987], 111).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 Hegel has been able synthetically to move from subject to substance, reversing the analytical procedure of his Science of Logic where substance gave rise to a free subject. Compare with Reck, Andrew, “Substance, Subject and Dialectic,” Studies in Hegel: Tulane Studies in Philosophy 9 (1960), 109–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 In his 1819–1820 lectures Hegel states: “The Sittliche has no duties” ( Hegels Philosophic des Rechts: Die Vorlesungen von 18/9/1820 in einer Nachschrift, ed. by Henrich, Dieter [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983], 127).Google Scholar

36 In Hobbes's words “a son cannot be understood to be at any time in the state of nature” (De Cive I, 1, 10).

37 Ilting explores Hegel's affinities with the French doctrinaires in his introduction to an edition of Hegel's 1817–1818 lessons on the Philosophy of Right. He notes that Constant was the first to use the expression “constitutional monarchy” ( G. W. F. Hegel: Die Philosophie des Rechts. Die Mitschriften Wannenmann [Heidelberg 18/7/18] und Homeyer [Berlin 18/8/19], ed. by Ilting, Karl-Heinz [Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1983], 20–28Google Scholar and 339, note 282). Compare with Giusti, Miguel, “La Diferencia entre Sociedad y Estado como Rasgo Esencial de la Modernidad,” Revista Latinoamericana de Filosofia 13 (1987), 318–21.Google Scholar

38 It is common to interpret Constant as an antagonist to sovereign power. But, as Holmes sees it, “his desire to restrict the discretionary authority of the police was not a sign of hostility toward the concept of sovereignty” ( Holmes, Stephen, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984], 10).Google Scholar

39 Diez del Corral, Luis, El Liberalismo Doctrinario (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Públicos, 1973), 118.Google Scholar Compare with Schmitt, Carl, Verfassungslehre (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1928), 7–8, 52–55, 286–89.Google Scholar

40 According to Constant, the monarch “floats… above human anxieties.” Inhabiting “an inviolable sphere of security, majesty [and] impartiality” the monarch allows the conflicts of civil society to rage unchecked, “provided they do not exceed certain limits, and which as soon as some danger becomes evident, terminates it by legal constitutional means, without any trace of arbitrariness” ( Constant, Benjamin, Principle of Politics Applicable to all Representative Governments, in Political Writings, ed. by Fontana, Biancamaria [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988], 187).Google Scholar

41 Steinberger, who acknowledges Hegel's choice of an absolute monarch, suggests that there is “nothing in Hegel's absolutism for a modern liberal to fear. The king, insofar as he fulfills the requirements of his role, will indeed be fully responsive to the needs and judgments of the people” ( Steinberger, Peter J., Logic and Politics: Hegel's Philosophy of Right [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988], 227.Google Scholar

42 A certain affinity between the role Hegel confides to the monarch and Schmitt's, Carl decisionism is noted in my article “Hayek and Schmitt on the Rule of Law,” this Journal 17 (1984), 531–32.Google Scholar

43 I have attempted to defend this interpretation of Monarch, Hegel's in “The Hegelsche Mitte and Hegel's Monarch,” Political Theory 11 (1983), 601–22Google Scholar; and in “Hegel and Roman Liberalism,” History of Political Thought 5 (1984), 281–94. Bourgeois, Bernard and Cesa, Claudio offer similar interpretations. Bourgeois asserts that the prince's power of decision is “l'alpha et l'oméga-de la vie de l'Etat hégélien” (“Le Prince Hégélien,” in Planty-Bonjour, Guy [ed.], Hegel et la Philosophic du Droit [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979], 116).Google Scholar Even if one were to accept that his decision is purely formal, its defining feature is not its material content, but the formalism that determines “sa valeur politique absolue” (117). Claudio Cesa, for his part, agrees with Bourgeois’ assessment and uses it as a starting point for his own argument (“Entscheidung und Schicksal: die fürstliche Gewalt,” in Henrich and Horstmann [eds.], Hegels Philosophie des Rechts. Die Theorie der Rechtsformen und ihre Logik, 185–86). Bourgeois admits that the prince's absolute power is circumscribed within the framework of a constitutional monarchy and suggests this tantalizing formula: “le pouvoir de prince hégélien est le pouvoir absolu d'un monarque non absolu” (129). For purposes of conceptual clarity and semantic economy I see no point in denying the title “absolute monarch” to those who concentrate absolute power in their hands. At the same time, one should recognize that the authority of Hegel's monarch is confined to the realm of fundamental political decisions.

44 Jaeger, Werner, Aristotle (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1923), 122.Google Scholar

45 “Though the act of sense-perception is of the particular, its content is universal” (Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 100al6. Compare with Owens, Joseph, “The Universality of the Sensible in the Aristotelian Noetic,” in Owens, Joseph, Aristotle: The Collected Papers of Joseph Owens, ed. by Cattan, J. [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981], 59–73).Google Scholar Randall, on the other hand, expressly relates Hegel's concrete universal to Aristotle's conception of universality ( Randall, John H., Aristotle [New York: Columbia University Press, 1960], 43).Google Scholar

46 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 100bl-3.

47 Smith, “Hegel's Critique of Liberalism,” 135.

48 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1113a32. Compare with Aubenque, Pierre, La Prudence chez Aristote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), 45–46.Google Scholar