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Unit 10: George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
principle aim was “to fight against the open society, and thus to serve his employer, Frederick Notes
William of Prussia”.
Popper, like Rudolph Haym, was very critical of Hegel’s deification of the state. He was also
critical of the bureaucracy’s role in stabilizing society. He was critical of Hegel for his historicism
and approach to the social sciences, which assumed that historical prediction was their principal
aim, and which assumed that this aim was attainable by discovering the “rhythm” or the “pattern”
: the laws or the trends that underly the evolution of history.
Popper also argued that Hegel’s identification of the rational with the actual inevitably led to a
philosophy of the pure politics of power, where might was right. The irrational forms of “state
worship” led to the “renaissance of tribalism”. Another important fallacy in Hegel was that he
admitted that since the process of history was partly controlled by the direction of knowledge, and
since that direction could not be predicted, there was a gross underestimation of this factor of
openness and unpredictability in Hegel.
Interestingly, immediately after Hegel’s death in 1831 (when Hegel was ‘canonized’ by the Prussian
state), apart from the beginning of the two parallel streams of right Hegelianism and left
Hegelianism, one important criticism appeared which raised many of the points raised by Popper.
In 1839, K.E. Schubart rejected Hegel’s doctrine both as a Prussian and a Protestant. He questioned
Hegel’s insistence that Prussia was a constitutional monarchy, as according to him it was not one
since Prussia was a dynastic state. It was an absolute monarchy. “It is always the monarch through
whom all others act and can act”. Kaufmann, criticizing Popper, wrote, “it would be absurd to
represent Hegel as a radical individualist but [it] is equally absurd to claim as Popper does, that
Hegel’s state is totalitarian”. Popper ignored the spheres of “subjective freedom” in the Hegelian
system.
Singer criticized Popper on the following grounds : (a) all his quotations were not from Hegel’s
own writings; (b) one of them was a mis-translation; (c) the Hegelian state did not incorporate
only the government but referred to the entire social life—there was no glorification of the
government against the people; and (d) the Popper quotations needed balancing by others. But in
spite of such criticism, Singer acknowledged “that the extravagant language Hegel used to describe
the state, and his idea that true freedom is to be found in rational choices, are both wide open to
misuse and distortion in the service of totalitarianism is undeniable; but that it is a misuse is
equally undeniable” (Singer 1983 : 43). Cassirer stated that “Hegel could extol and glorify the
state, he could even apotheosize it. There is, however, a clear and unmistakable difference between
his idealizations that is the characteristic of our modern totalitarian system”. Similarly, Marcuse
also pointed out the many fundamental differences between Hegel’s presumptions and National
Socialism.
However, all these critics of Popper did not endorse many of the authoritarian implications of
Hegel’s political philosophy. Their objection was the parallel between Hegel’s authoritarianism
and twentieth-century totalitarianism, as there was a debate in Marxist theory about the exact
relationship between nineteenth-century Marxism and twentieth-century Communism. But here
one could point out a serious limitation in Hegelian enterprise, as it was in the Marxist one, that
it could not envisage that a serious misuse of its framework was possible. If Hegel was interpreted
in this light, then Popper’s criticism of Hegel became relevant for our times. One need not always
agree with Skinner’s argument, “to demand from the history of thought a solution to our immediate
problems is thus to commit not merely a methodological fallacy, but something like a moral
error”. A history of political theory was not merely an intellectual history, and the primacy of the
political is always there. The continued attraction of the classics was in their handling important
themes like justice, education, rights, welfare, international relations and equity, and what we
could learn from them and incorporate in enriching our own vision. In this sense, Locke and Kant
remain closer to us now than Hegel and Marx. Rawls begins with Kant, and Nozick with Locke,
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