The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  26.4 MARX AND SOCIALISM

  An instructive paradox: the thinker who had the greatest influence any philosopher ever had on the course of history did not develop a ‘political philosophy’. Marx was engaged in the debate that began upon Hegel’s death between the ‘old Hegelians’ attached to the letter of his writings, and the ‘young Hegelians’ or ‘left Hegelians’ who wanted to conserve the spirit of the dialectic, but purge all ‘theological’ aspects from the system. Marx’s intervention in this debate consisted in realizing that what was needed was to go beyond (the Aufhebung!) Hegel’s conception of politics—as primarily an affair of the state—and to surpass the conception of philosophy as a discourse on the world: ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.’67 The direction of that change is indicated by words that Marx did not invent, but which remain attached to his name: socialism (a term invented by Pierre Leroux or Saint-Simon), communism (a term that Marx borrows from Moses Hess).68 However, these terms do not refer to the state but to entities which are not considered, especially since Hegel, as essentially political; ‘society’, ‘community’. In fact, the ultimate aim of revolutionary politics is not the creation of a ‘free state’, but the dissolution of the state, whose existence is solely necessitated through it being an instrument of oppression in the hands of the ruling class.69 The ‘bourgeois’ state is solely one element of the ‘enormous superstructure’ built on the ‘economic base’ of social life, that is, the ‘mode of production of material life’, and its disappearance will correspond to the end of the ‘prehistory of human society’.70 But since the abolition of the state supposes the disappearance of class struggles and of these social classes themselves, Marx introduces between capitalist society and communist society a kind of transition—socialism—in which ‘the state will be no more than the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.’71 The ambiguity of Marx’s relation to the state is evident here. Moreover, this ambiguity will not stop increasing in Marx’s posterity. On the one hand, the state is no longer considered as the key to the functioning of societies. On the other hand, the state is called upon when it is a question of imagining how the previously dominated class will exercise power. Evoking Saint-Simon’s injunction (taken up again by Engels in the Anti-Dühring) ‘to substitute the government of things for the government of people’, the Communist Manifesto indicates that the ultimate goal is to ‘transform the state into a simple administration of production’.72 However, in order to arrive at that point, once the proletariat has been installed as the ruling class it will be necessary to ‘centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state’.73 The consequences that have been drawn from this proposition, which Marx could hardly have imagined, are well known.

  On the philosophical level, the principal aspect of Marx’s paradoxical politics is the reversal of the hierarchical relation between the state and society that Hegel established. From his incomplete 1843 commentary on Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right onwards, Marx is convinced that the state must be overturned, because the state, an ‘abstraction of society’ is only the ‘mirror of the truth’, and the truth resides in bourgeois civil society.74 This idea is not peculiar to Marx, it can be found in the work of the young Hegelians. Against the cult of the state, they sought to rehabilitate society, the forge of a community to come: ‘no more state, but a society!’ (Arnold Ruge). But what Marx adds to the young Hegelians’ distrust of the state, which is only society’s ‘business manager’ (Saint-Simon), is the idea that the ‘anatomy of civil society must be found in political economy’, and not in political philosophy.75 This is why Marx focuses all of his efforts, from 1844 onwards, on developing a ‘critique of political economy’—this is the subtitle of Capital. It will give communist politics the normative and conceptual framework that it needs, and it is a thinking not of ‘political emancipation’ (that is a trap) but of ‘human emancipation’.76

  26.5 CONSERVATISM: FRIEDRICH JULIUS STAHL

  In nineteenth-century Germany, conservatism was born in a hostile reaction to the French Revolution. Its original orientation was thus strictly reactionary. Its ambition was then to move from the simple rejection of ‘French ideas’ to the constitution of a positive doctrine. After 1789, the first German conservatives claimed to adhere to Burke’s ideas. Friedrich von Gentz translated Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and August Wilhelm Rehberg transposed Burke’s analyses in his own Untersuchungen über die französische Revolution (1793); to which Kant replied in his Theory and Practice and Fichte in his Considerations on the French Revolution. Gentz, Metternich’s influential advisor, developed an effective argument against the constitutional and representative regime; he incarnated the ‘modern’ wing of the counter-revolution, the wing that did take into account contemporary evolutions in society. Another tendency, strictly reactionary, was represented by Karl Ludwig von Haller, whose Restauration der Staatswissenschaft (6 volumes published between 1816 and 1834) develops a patrimonial theory of the state, which recalls, 150 years later, Robert Filmer’s Patriacha. At several points in his Philosophy of Right Hegel vehemently denounces Haller’s ‘thoughtlessness’ and ‘hatred of law’, which indirectly testifies to the influence Haller enjoyed over the governing classes of post-Napoleonic Germany.

  The Philosophie des Rechts by Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802–61) owed its success to having crystallized the central themes of nineteenth-century German conservatism. By its very title the work refers to Hegel, from whom the work’s terminology—for example, the idea of ethical Empire (sittliches Reich)—appears to be borrowed.77 However, the enterprise is directed against Hegel. Whilst the liberals accused the latter of carving out too large a role for the state at the expense of individual citizens and civil society, Stahl accuses Hegel’s more ‘governmental’ than ‘monarchical’ philosophy of assigning too many responsibilities to the state to the detriment of the real author of the ethical empire, God. The ‘falsehood’ of the Hegelian theory resides in its ‘considering the state as a work and complete and perfect empire, as the ultimate goal, and not as the simple vehicle of a superior ethical existence of man, as a simple substitute and an imperfect tool that merely serves to prepare the eternal reign to come’.78 Instead of situating ‘ethical life’ (Sittlichkeit) in the sphere of objective spirit and affirming the latter’s relative autonomy with regard to absolute spirit, Stahl considers that the ethical dimension of the person—a notion that Hegel reduces to its juridical skeleton—inscribes the latter in a higher dimension than that of the state, that of religion. He agrees that the ‘ethical Empire’ designates the organization of human community, and that the state should be defined as an ‘institution of domination’, but this human order is merely an instrument of the ‘divine order of the world’, such that the ‘true ethical empire’ is the ‘empire of God’.79 What Stahl does not accept in Hegel and the moderns is the secularization of politics. This sheds light on his often cited definition of the state of law (Rechtsstaat): ‘the state of law is in no way characterized by the goal or content of the law, but only by the mode and character of its realization’.80 In Stahl’s work, this does not signify—as in the liberal jurists who theorized the Rechtsstaat (R. Mohl, R. Gneist, L. von Stein)—that political action must be framed by legal norms, but rather that the state must realize supra-juridical and supra-political goals ‘according to the mode of the law’, which remains ‘external’. It is therefore not in the name of the rights of the individual that the state’s powers should be restricted, but rather in the name of what, in the individual, surpasses social and political individuality; that is, his moral and religious ‘personality’. This is the aporia of German conservatism, which will lead it to perilous ground. To respond to the errors of the liberals and the democrats a politics is needed, but this politics is derived from a religious vision of the world. This is why Stahl inscribes his defence of the ‘monarchical principle’ in a history whic
h is not, as in Hegel, the realization of reason, but rather, as in Schelling, its ‘ek-stasis’, its exit from itself.

  26.6 THE RISE OF NATIONALISM: TOWARDS A POLITICS OF RACE

  Up until the middle of the nineteenth century, nationalism is a variant of progressive liberal or democratic ideology, as can be seen in Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation. This nationalism is not free from ambiguities: sometimes it contains anti-Semitic elements, as can be observed in the 1817 discourse pronounced by the philosopher Fries at the annual reunion of the students’ corporations (Burschenschaft), which militates in favour of German unity—a discourse Hegel lambasts in the Philosophy of Right. In contrast, the monarchist and conservative milieu, along with Metternich, is favourable to the status quo, and therefore hostile to the nationalist ‘Greater Germany’ movement. In 1848–9 the conservatives bring about the failure of the project of national unification. They also block the installation of the constitutional regime that was foreseen by the Constitution adopted at Frankfurt.

  From mid-century onwards—in particular within Prussia, a growing power—the conservative movement, incarnated in Bismarck, appropriated the nationalist idea, whilst the socialist left, on the other hand, aligned themselves with internationalism (‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’). The work of Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–96), an eminent representative of the German Historical School, is quite revealing with regard to this transfer—it incarnates the thenceforth dominant nationalist and conservative ideology. This orientation is noticeable in his grand historical works, but it is especially evident in essays like ‘Bundesstaat und Einheitsstaat’, a manifesto for the doctrine of state-power (Machtstaat), in which he writes ‘the essence of the state is: first, power; second, power; and third, power.’81 A lecture given by Treitschke in 1862 on the occasion of Fichte’s centenary indicates just how much the landscape had changed. Fichte, a friend of the Revolution, is presented by Treitschke as the exemplar of chauvinistic nationalism, and the universalist dimension of his philosophy is completely swept under the carpet. This kind of interpretation of the Addresses is actually quite close to that practiced in France; it is as if some kind of agreement had been struck between both sides of the Rhine to turn Fichte into the representative of a new spirit of the times. Such a tacit accord will end up leading to the great confrontation of nationalisms that concluded the long nineteenth century. From this point onwards nationalist ideology will no longer need to base itself on a political philosophy: it felt itself carried forwards, so to speak, by the very movement of history.

  At the end of the century a racist component is grafted onto the pan-German and nationalist ideology. This evolution is illustrated by a book by Houston S. Chamberlain, Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (1899). Close to Wagner, and influenced by the French essayists Vacher de Lapouge and Gobineau, Chamberlain, referring to an anti-Darwinist anthropology, developed the thesis of the supremacy of the ‘Aryan race’ and its ‘teutonic’ core over the Semitic, African and Asian races. The Jews in particular are stigmatized: ‘their existence is sin, their existence is a crime against the holy laws of life.’82 This thesis is explicitly presented as a political project. Whilst admitting that the efforts to produce a scientific definition of race are not convincing, Chamberlain nevertheless declares: ‘what is clear to every eye suffices, if not for science, at least for life’.83 For clarity’s sake, he states: ‘Though it were proved that there was never an Aryan race in the past, yet we desire that in the future there may be one’.84 Similar views can be found in the work of Oswald Spengler, whose immense text The Decline of the West (1918–22) was written for the most part before 1914. Whilst recognizing ‘the enormous difficulty to be met in grounding the nature of race’, especially for ‘the scholar who measures and weighs’, Spengler affirms the importance of a notion ‘that can only be lived and felt’; that is to say, ‘race […] is something decisive for all vital questions, something that each and everybody has clear knowledge of as soon as he stops trying to capture it via the understanding’.85 A racial politics emerges from Chamberlain and Spengler’s writings, all the more irrefutably given its foundation on something that escapes rational thought: ‘the unity of a soul’.86 National-socialism developed its own well-known translation of these ideas.

  26.7 THE WITHDRAWAL OF THE POLITICAL?

  At the same time as a nationalist and racist tendency developed in German political thinking, certain major philosophers began to quit the political domain, a domain of crucial importance for Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. Without going back to Schelling, we can mention Schopenhauer (1788–1860) whose masterpiece The World as Will and Representation (1819) only evokes politics in passing. In contrast to his predecessors, Schopenhauer turns the ‘pure theory of law’ into a ‘chapter of morality’, and identifies compensation for private injustice as the only legitimate occupation of the state, criticizing the ‘strange mistake’ that saw the state’s goal as being the promotion of morality.87 The state is ‘a means used by egotism equipped by reason to attempt to contain its own harmful effects which turn against it’. Moreover it only manages to do this in an imperfect manner since ‘the discord between individuals cannot be entirely dissolved by the state’.88 A minimal politics, therefore, concerned with rectifying the ‘strange mistakes’ of those who ‘search in the clouds for what is already at their feet’.89 It results in a ‘utopia’ which is assumed as such, that of the ‘despotism of the wise and the noble forming an authentic aristocracy’.90

  Nietzsche offers another instructive example of a withdrawal from politics. Despite his cult of ‘aristocracy’, he proclaims his repudiation of politics, especially of the ‘patriotic itch’ of his contemporaries,91 and his distrust of the ‘new idol’ that is the state, ‘the coldest of all the cold monsters’.92 It is ‘there where the state ends’ that one must search for something that will go beyond politics, nations, and even man himself, which is ‘something that must be surpassed’: the superman.93 Can one nevertheless speak of a Nietzschean politics of the superman? This would be a paradoxical politics, whose discourse would be one of ‘arming the strong against the weak’,94 and especially of aspiring to ‘live and believe apart from others’.95 The thinking in which nineteenth-century German philosophy ends is a thinking for which politics, like man, must be surpassed.

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