Fichte’s later writings are less openly revolutionary, but they maintain his attachment to the principles of 1789 and 1793: liberty and equality. In the Foundations of Natural Right (1796), he defines the conditions of possibility for a community of free beings, given that man can only be free in a community wherein each individual’s ‘original rights’ are recognized; that is, the rights derived from the very idea of personhood.27 Such a community requires the institution of a right of constraint to be conferred to an ‘irresistible coercive power’, the state, whose ultimate goal is to render its own action superfluous.28 The institution of the state occurs via a ‘civil contract’, from which is then derived a series of partial contracts: the ‘property contract’ (each engages to respect the other’s property); the ‘protection contract’ (each engages to look out for the other’s property), and the ‘unification contract’, which unites the previous two in a global social contract ‘that each individual makes with the real whole of the state, a whole that forms and maintains itself by means of the contracts that individuals make with one another’.29
Out of this detailed contractualism Fichte draws a series of bold consequences, consequences that have caused him to be identified as a precursor of socialism.30 According to him, the ‘principle of all rational state constitution’ is that ‘everyone must be able to live off his labour’.31 If this is not the case, then the individual has ‘a rightful claim to assistance’, and the state is obliged to provide it to him by redistributing that part of the social product that has been collected via taxes. However, in order to avoid creating permanent dependency on welfare, each individual engages to do as much as possible to live via their own means. Elsewhere Fichte prescribes state control and restrictions on the transfer (sale) and transmission (inheritance) of personal property.32 In short, the Fichtean state is not solely a state of law, like the Kantian state; it is also a social state whose principles, inspired by the Jacobin constitution of 1793 (article 21 identifies ‘public assistance’ as a ‘sacred debt’), prefigure the welfare state.
Later in his career Fichte’s political thinking took on a nationalist and statist tonality. This can certainly be excused by historical circumstances (Napoleon’s occupation); nevertheless it did give rise to some unhealthy echoes. The Closed Commercial State (1800) asserts the necessity of restricting the right to property on the grounds that ‘nobody is free if everybody is free without restrictions.’33 But in order for the state to guarantee equilibrium between its citizens, it is necessary to forbid any private commercial relationship with foreigners. The state has a monopoly on international trade, and such trade must be reduced as far as possible.34 As for the Addresses to the German Nation (1808), they did not abandon the principles of the earlier texts—liberty and equality. Moreover, Fichte confirmed his attachment to the Republican form.35 But now he considers that solely the ‘originary people’ (Urvolk) that is the German nation is capable of realizing these principles and establishing ‘the perfect state’. And yet, although he claims to be solely addressing the Germans, he does declare in the seventh Discourse ‘whoever believes in spirituality, and in the freedom of this spirituality […] wherever he may have been born and whatever language he speaks, he is of our blood.’36 The universalism of the Considerations had not been completely forgotten.
As presented notably in Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820/21), Hegel’s political philosophy had considerable historical impact, thanks in no little part to its extension by Marx. It has the reputation of generating a cult of the state, the latter being described as an ‘earthly divinity’.37 However, in reality Hegel’s political philosophy is organized around the delimitation of the sphere of politics and the state, and of civil society. Since the end of the eighteenth century, a new conception of civil society had been in gestation, especially in Scottish moral philosophy (Ferguson, Smith, etc.). This term will no longer designate the political community alone (since Cicero, societas civilis had been the accepted translation of the Aristotelian term for the city, koinonia politikè). But Hegel was the first to distinguish between civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) and the state (Staat).38 This allows him to both underline the properly political vocation of the state (its business is living-together, and not the tasks of ‘social management’) and to account for the relativization of the political, which is one of the characteristics of modernity. In his early writings, Hegel, as an enthusiastic reader of Rousseau, opposes the particular and egotistical point of view of the bourgeois to the universal meaning of ‘citizen’.39 In contrast, in his mature work civil society is seen as ‘the sphere of mediation’ between individuals and the state.40 This mediation is carried out by what appears to be the least ‘ethical’ element of civil society; that is, the sphere of production (which Hegel names ‘the system of needs’), which is structured by the division of labour. Although this ‘system of all-round interdependence’ is subject to a split between the particular and the universal, it does call for their reconciliation by the state.41 Within the system of needs itself, the reconciliation of the general interest and particular interest—a reconciliation provoked by the ‘invisible hand’s’ regulation of individual actions—takes the form of a submission to blind necessity. Genuine reconciliation, on the other hand, takes place through the state, the institutional incarnation of liberty. Nevertheless, the Hegelian theory of civil society, which brings to the fore the structuring role of institutions like the legal system, the estates (Stände) and the corporations, does make the perspective of a ‘political union’ plausible, and in the end justifies the rational state.
However, this reconciliation does not take place without friction. Civil society is the theatre of pathological processes described in §§241–6 of the Philosophy of Right. The more or less ethical character of civil society depends on each individual belonging to an institutional group, the corporation, which compensates for the de-socializing effects of the logic of the market.42 Yet the formation of an asocial section of society, the ‘rabble’ (Pöbel), carries the risk of society’s ethical dissolution. The misery of the masses endangers the very idea of community. Hegel takes very seriously the recent historical emergence of a Lumpenproletariat; he lucidly sounds out the sharp contradiction that it installs in the heart of modern society. What is not so clear is his prognosis: can this contradiction be politically surpassed (by means of the corporations, or the state), or does it present a structural threat to any political resolution of social conflict? In the last resort, Hegel’s conviction that it is always possible to surpass social contradictions is founded on his philosophy of history.
Hegel wishes to reunite private interest and general interest. In contrast to the ‘bourgeois’ locked inside his egotistical interest, the citizen of the rational state reunites within the unity of a ‘political disposition’ ‘the extreme of individuality’ and ‘the extreme of universality’.43 Everyday civic spirit is the real patriotism: neither passive submission to institutions, nor arbitrary representation of what form the state should take.44 Everyday patriotism, which is neither spectacular nor claims any particular ‘virtue’, is simply a stable aptitude to conform to the objective conditions of freedom. The state is therefore just as much a shared aspiration to living together as it is an objective system of institutions. This is how one should understand the statement that the state’s ‘true content and end’ is ‘union as such’: its institutions must allow individuals to ‘lead a universal life’.45 This leads Hegel to revise the usual definition of constitution. Rather than a set of organizational norms, the constitution is the dynamic through which the state constitutes itself as an interaction of subjective dispositions and objective structures46—hence his refusal of the constructivism of contractualist theories. The genuine constitution of a state is in harmony with the spirit of the people (Volksgeist), which nobody can manipulate. It is a mistake to believe that there are institutions which are good in themselves that can be set up wherever and whenever one would like: ‘each
nation has the constitution appropriate and proper to it’.47 Thus one cannot offer to a people institutions that it does not want. On the other hand, when the conditions for the emergence of a new regime are ripe, any effort to oppose it is doomed to fail. In 1820 what was written on the agenda of the world spirit was the emergence of constitutional monarchy and nothing could seriously be opposed to that regime. But Prussia, where Hegel lived, was not a constitutional monarchy.
This conception of the constitution implies an original view on the distribution of powers within the state. First of all, Hegel dismisses the common conception of the separation of powers. He prefers to speak of a differentiation of the state’s power into functionally distinct but united moments. This differentiation, which opposes a constitutional state to oriental despotism or radical democracy, is ‘the one essential canon to make liberty deep and real’.48 But this division is not a separation of powers: on this point Hegel diverges from liberal ideas, which in other matters he shares. He rejects the idea of checks and balances, developed in the footsteps of Montesquieu by the authors of the Federalist Papers. In his view such a system would no doubt succeed in generating a ‘general equilibrium’ but not ‘a living unity’.49 Against this ‘atomistic’ vision, Hegel considers the legislative, governmental, and princely powers as logical moments of the state’s single power. Thus sovereignty belongs to the state itself. Neither the people nor the government, nor the representative assemblies, nor even the prince (who is the physical emblem of sovereignty) are the sovereign. On the other hand, the constitutional state has concrete existence solely through these intermediary moments, and its power has to be distributed amongst relatively autonomous institutions.
Hegel’s political philosophy is crowned by a philosophy of history which inscribes the former in the perspective of a non-linear progress of political rationality. Hence the tensions within each state and between states on the stage of world history, which is marked by brutality, but nevertheless remains ‘the actualization of the universal spirit’.50 History is the work of freedom; a freedom that always includes negativity, and which lives off negativity.
26.3 ROMANTICISM: SCHELLING
It is difficult to speak of the political philosophy of German romanticism, because the positions of its representatives fluctuated wildly. Carl Schmitt even estimated that the only stable characteristic of ‘political romanticism’ was ‘political occasionalism’.51 Whether this is true or not, the political conceptions of the romantics derived from the judgements they made concerning the French Revolution, judgements which evolved. In any case, for all of them, politics is understood as a subordinate moment, capable at most only of contributing to the realization of the aesthetic ideal. As Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) says: ‘the state is the supreme work of art’.52 Although the young Schlegel, in his Essay on the Concept of Republicanism (1796), undertakes to justify the Revolution and declares himself in favour of a democratic republic, it is sufficient for the aesthetic aspect of the state to be modified to give rise to a negative judgement. An example of this distrust is provided in the text known as ‘The Oldest Systematic Programme of German Idealism’, written by Hegel’s hand at the Stift of Tübingen, but whose real author could easily have been Schelling or Hölderlin, whose concerns can be recognized here:
I want to show that there is no idea of the state because the state is something mechanical, just as little as there is an idea of a machine. Only that which is the object of freedom is called idea. We must therefore go beyond the state! — For any state is obliged to treat a free man like a mechanical cog; and this is what cannot happen. For this reason the state must disappear.53
In place of the ‘mechanical’ idea of the state a ‘moral world’ must be substituted; for whose realization religion, philosophy, and poetry are necessary, because ‘the idea which unites everything is the idea of beauty’.54
From this basis different positions become possible, and have been successively adopted, sometimes by the same author. The young Schlegel, as we have seen, advocates a democratic republic. His views change radically later: he judges that the Revolution and the society that it installs run the risk of making politico-economic interests independent of moral and religious perspectives: ‘wherever there are politics or economics, no morality exists.’55 Friedrich Hölderlin also placed all of his hopes in the horizons opened by the Revolution. In 1793 he writes to his brother: ‘Liberty will triumph one day, and virtue will flourish better in the healthy and warm lucidity of liberty than in the glacial sphere of despotism’.56 But, again for him, the revolution has a trans-political meaning. He advocates ‘a revolution of the dispositions of the mind and of modes of representation that will eclipse everything known in the past’.57 His Hyperion marks the limits of the struggle for a better world. Culture and the cultivation of people’s minds prevail over political action; culture must assure that each individual is open to beauty. The real reconciliation to which the poet aspires is situated beyond politics. Novalis develops what appear to be more conservative views, since in Glauben und Liebe (1798) he cultivates the idea of a monarchic republic. But monarchy also has a trans-political sense in his work. It symbolizes a situation in which contingency is overcome and the community unified. This idealized monarchy tends, moreover, towards becoming a republic in which everyone, once capable of ascending the throne, would decide their destiny together: ‘the real king will be a republic, the real republic a king’.58 Here one gets a clear measure of the difference between the politico-artistic ideal of romanticism, its ‘apotheosis of the future’, and a systematic political philosophy.59
Schelling did not compose a real political philosophy either. He also considered that politics in any case needed to be founded on something that surpassed it. However, it would be inaccurate to consider him as a simple reactionary, nostalgic for a more or less mythical past. Even the positions he took in 1848 reveal an unmistakable state of tension. Strictly speaking, his political positions varied widely; they run from approval of the French Revolution to a severe critique of the state in his mature writings. But on one point he does not change: the state and politics are mere means for realizing the freedom of the individual. Yet this freedom is ambiguous in that it calls for an order shored up by necessity. Schelling does not share the faith of the Enlightenment philosophers and of Kant’s Perpetual Peace in reason and progress. These ideas, he says in his Würzburg lectures (1804), ‘lose for the most part their meaning when one adopts the standpoint of eternity.’60 The state is not the realization of freedom, but solely a necessary historical determination, because freedom can also realize itself in the choice of Evil.
In the only text (incomplete) that he devotes to politics, the New Deduction of Natural Law (1796), Schelling pleads for law to be understood as the other face of liberty, the problem then being—and this is where the text finishes—that of ‘making the physical power of the individual and the moral power of law identical’.61 This was supposed to lead to a ‘new science’ of the state, which was never written. In the meantime Schelling abandoned the individualist premises of both that text and social contract theories in general: they belong, he explained later, to a ‘mechanistic’ conception of the state: ‘In the state, everything must be necessary, not in the way in which everything is necessary in a divine work, but like in a machine moved by constraints and external impulsion.’62 He thus renounces the programme of a political philosophy since ‘civil society, as long as it has to pursue empirical ends to the detriment of the absolute, can never establish anything other than a superficial and artificial identity, never a genuine inner identity.’63 Of course, it is not a matter of giving up on all institutions guaranteeing public order, especially in a time of political instability. But, from a systematic point of view, the state ‘must disappear’ because it is nothing more than a means.
The text On the Methods of Academic Study defines the state as the ‘objective organism of liberty’, in which a harmony is attained between liberty an
d necessity.64 The state is historically necessary, but the limits of its vocation must be respected. It must regulate what needs to be regulated: it must be neither too strong nor too weak, neither despotic nor constitutional. One should not expect anything more from it, because it is ‘a consequence of the curse that weighs on men’.65 The critique of the state is thus a leitmotif in Schelling’s philosophy; it can also be found in his ‘positive philosophy’ which is far removed from political concerns. In opposition to Hegel, Schelling maintains that the state ‘makes up, in contrast to all the manifestations of superior spiritual and ethical life, what is the most negative’; and this is why ‘the real idea of our epoch is to impose limits on the state.’66 Yet this doesn’t stop Schelling, during the 1848 revolution, from calling for a ‘strong state’!
The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Page 97