by John Marini
Subsequently, the metaphysical concept of nature, as well as the political doctrine of natural right, as a theoretical perspective, would lose its authority in terms of establishing a meaningful ground of human understanding concerning politics, morality, and religion.
The end of History is the end of philosophy as the quest for knowledge, and the end of politics and religion as central to the understanding of the fundamental human dilemma. That dilemma was thought to have originated in nature and was revealed in human nature itself. In transcending rational limitations on human knowledge and nature, it becomes possible to transcend those limitations on human freedom that had been thought to be imposed by natural necessity. In denying the liberalism of Locke and the American Founders, the Progressives, influenced by Hegel, were convinced that the old conception of nature, and the political doctrine of natural right, had produced only a negative understanding of freedom. As a result, they had established the purpose of government to be the protection of the rights and property of the private individual. But, as Hegel noted: “The national spirit is the substance; what is rational must happen. The contractual form of constitutional development is not in fact the rational, but merely a form of property. But the rational must always find a way, for it possesses truth, and we must cease to fear that bad constitutions might be made.”7 In Hegel’s view, new constitutions, now understood as states, are products of human freedom or will. As he noted, “Whether the State coheres on the basis of nature or of the freedom of the will is what forms the dividing line between constitutions. Every concept begins in immediacy, in nature, and strives toward rationality. Everything depends on the extent to which rationality has replaced nature.”8
In moving beyond the contractual as a defense of property and individual rights, Hegel advanced a rational and positive view of freedom that made it possible to reconcile the antagonism between the particular and the universal, the private and the public, or the individual and society. Those antagonisms can be resolved within the unity created on a new intellectual and moral foundation established within the state. Hegel insisted that “the essential being is itself the union of two wills: the subjective will and the rational will. This is an ethical totality, the state. It is the reality wherein the individual has and enjoys his freedom—but only insofar as he knows, believes, and wills the universal” (Hegel’s emphasis). As noted before, it was the protection of individual rights and property, based on an understanding of human nature that had made limited government necessary. Hegel insisted that such an understanding could provide only a “negative conception of freedom.” But, he maintained: “As against this negative concept of freedom, it is rather law, ethical life, the state (and they alone) that comprise the positive reality and satisfaction of freedom. The freedom which is limited in the state is that of caprice, the freedom that relates to the particularity of individual needs” (emphasis mine).9 In the new society, man is not free as an individual, but as a self-legislating member of a community, or a citizen of the state.
The state, Hegel suggested, “is the realization of Freedom, i.e. of the absolute final aim, and … it exists for its own sake. It must further be understood that all the worth which the human being possesses—all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State.… Thus only is he fully conscious; thus only is he a partaker of morality—of a just and moral social and political life. For Truth is the Unity of the universal and subjective Will; the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth.”10 Within the state, it becomes possible to transcend the antagonisms thought to be inherent in the nature of things. It was this understanding of nature that animated the earlier liberal political thought of John Locke and the American Founders. It was this philosophic view, derived from metaphysical reason, and religious belief dependent on faith (or the inability to ameliorate the tension between reason and revelation), that made the political-theological problem the fundamental human dilemma. If the historical process is rational, the moral order is created through the use of freedom or will as necessary for determining the ongoing conditions of progress. When rational freedom, or will, establishes the foundation of morality in each historical epoch, it becomes possible to transcend the political-theological problem. Moral will provides the unity that makes it possible to unite theory and practice on behalf of rational purpose, or History. Consequently, Progressivism, as a political movement, attempted to unify the sacred and secular (church and state), public and private (community and individual), or government and civil society, through the concept of the state. The state becomes the vehicle for the administration of progress.
Once the idea of the state established the ground of political legitimacy, the necessity of the unity of theory and practice within the state undermined the theoretical ground of nature, and natural right—understood in terms of metaphysical reason. Moreover, it undercut the necessity of political prudence, or practical reason, as the essential element of practical political science. In the old view, nature itself had established rational limits on human freedom. The political conditions of human life required recognition of the fact, as Madison noted, that factionalism is inherent in human nature. Although political philosophy could make the principles of natural right intelligible, prudence would always be necessary to determine the practical requirements of politics or political science. It was not possible to ignore the sphere of prudence by establishing a wholly theoretical and applied rational science. Constitutionalism, therefore, was thought to be the best practicable solution to the political problem of reconciling freedom, equality, and natural necessity. Consequently, although the human problem, like the political-theological problem, is capable of reasonable accommodation, the political and religious antagonism remains insoluble.
On the other hand, historicist political science rested on the assumption that the replacement of theoretical (and practical) reason by philosophy of History made it possible to actualize the conditions necessary for the replacement of politics and religion by administration and a rationalized science of economics and society (or culture). The final principles of politics—equality and liberty—would be embodied as the rights of man within the state itself. But political right, or morality, could no longer be derived from an understanding of nature or reason. Rather, positive freedom, or rational will, as it developed within the state, would establish the ground of morality, and hence, the legitimacy of evolving human rights.
With the end of politics and religion, the use of practical reason, or prudence, would become not merely superfluous as a political virtue but perceived as a reactionary defense of the irrationality of the past. If will established the ground of legitimacy, or political right, it would be immoral not to carry it out. Administration, by replacing politics, would provide the technical or rational means of carrying out the will that establishes the moral legitimacy of law within the state. Thus, efficiency becomes the primary practical necessity of the modern state. As a result, in its origins, social science was intended to be the applied rational science of the state. When professionalized as specialized societies within the universities, it would generate the scientific knowledge required to solve every political, social, economic, or cultural problem. Consequently, for the Progressives, the human problem, as well as the political-theological problem, is theoretically and practically soluble in a technical or rational way. In their view, nature, and the human problems understood in terms of nature, including politics and religion, must be transcended on a higher plane, one that makes it possible to ameliorate human problems scientifically, within the framework of the rational state.
The discovery of the rationality of History would transform the theory and practice of politics in the nineteenth century. Progressive intellectuals, after Hegel, accepted the view that History, not nature, would establish the ground of meaningful knowledge concerning human affairs. They targeted the economy or society as the driving force of
an evolving political organism, under the direction of organized intelligence, or bureaucracy. Freedom itself, would come to be redefined in terms of social rather than individual purpose. The state, consequently, would come to be understood as an ethical or moral organism, a vehicle for the rational administration of progress. It is within the state that a common ground of freedom and citizenship could be established by progressively discovering and securing rights.
One important American Progressive thinker, Mary Parker Follett, who published The New State in 1918, outlined the distinction between the old and new definitions of freedom and rights in a very clear way. She noted:
Democracy has meant too many “natural” rights, “liberty” and “equality.” The acceptance of the group principle defines for us in truer fashion those watchwords of the past. If my true self is the group-self, then my only rights are those which membership in a group gives me. The old idea of natural rights postulated the particularist individual; we know now that no such person exists. The group and the individual come into existence simultaneously: with this group-man appear group-rights. Thus man can have no rights apart from society or independent of society or against society. Particularist rights are ruled out as everything particularist is ruled out.… The truth of the whole matter is that our only concern with “rights” is not to protect them but to create them. Our efforts are to be bent not upon guarding the rights which Heaven has showered upon us, but in creating all the rights we shall ever have.
Consequently, Follett insisted that as “the group process abolishes ‘individual right,’ so it gives us a true definition of liberty. We have seen that the free man is he who actualizes the will of the whole. I have no liberty except as an essential member of a group … to obey the group which we have helped to make and of which we are an integral part is to be free because we are then obeying our self. Ideally the state is such a group; it depends upon us to make it more and more so. The state must be no external authority which restrains and regulates me, but it must be myself acting as the state in every smallest detail of life. Expression, not restraint, is always the motive of the ideal state” (emphasis mine).11
The new understanding of rights required that government within the state should provide for the satisfaction of all human need. Men are free not as individuals, but as members of groups that form an ethical whole: the state. Rights are created in the process of self- or group expression. Creativity, or self-expression, becomes possible only when humans are free of necessity, natural or man-made. As FDR liked to say, “necessitous men cannot be free.” Consequently, the power of government cannot be limited; its purpose is to relieve man of necessity by providing a rational solution to every human problem. Freedom of expression, or self-creation, then becomes a human reality.
Hegel’s historical philosophy had provided the theoretical foundations for the revolution in thought that established itself as the intellectual and political authority for nineteenth-century Progressivism. But the thinker whose writings proved more immediately useful to the new academic disciplines established in the emerging American universities was August Comte. It was Comte’s positive philosophy that would become the most successful attempt to establish a scientific methodology compatible with the new understanding of man as an historical being. The origins of the social sciences and the transformation of the American university were a product of that positivist view, which sought to combine the spirit of science with what Comte would call “the religion of humanity.” Taken as a whole, the new theories of Hegel and Comte undercut the intellectual and moral foundations on which the theoretical structure of the old order was based. It brought into question the very possibility of preserving the kind of education and those moral virtues necessary for the perpetuation of a regime of civil and religious liberty. The social sciences, developed mainly in the universities, were meant to replace the theological and metaphysical foundations of human knowledge.
August Comte’s positivism was dependent on a theory of the evolution of the mind, understood as an ongoing historical and rational development. It presupposed an acceptance of Hegel’s philosophy of History, with the view that its rational character is revealed at the end of the process. Comte, in elaborating on historical evolution, insisted that the progress of the mind moves, as a kind of ascent, through three stages. In the first stage, it was theological knowledge that informed human understanding. Subsequently, in the second stage, theological knowledge was replaced by metaphysical, or abstract, but destructive knowledge. In the last stage, the highest and final stage of the development of the mind, human knowledge is informed by what Comte called scientific, constructive, or positive philosophy. At the positive stage, the scientific mind is complete; at that point man can begin to rationally order society. When the mind attains the positive, or scientific, stage, it recognizes the illusory character of every earlier stage in the evolution of knowledge.
Consequently, Comte’s analysis made it possible to show that only empirical, or scientific, knowledge is genuine, meaningful, and useful knowledge for human, or social, life. He created a systematic theory of social science, which established a scientific methodology by which to transform society. In short, August Comte’s positive philosophy was quite successful in undermining the theoretical foundations of metaphysical and theological knowledge. Philosophy and religion, relegated to the realm of normative values, subjective and meaningless in terms of genuine knowledge, would relinquish authority to science and empirical methodology.
The triumph of the philosophy of History had resulted in the secularization of society and the transformation of religion into what would become the absolute philosophy, science. The method of science would provide the foundation for overcoming the absolute or universal, but spurious, claims to knowledge once made by religion and philosophy. In Comte’s formulation:
All of our fundamental conceptions having thus been rendered homogeneous, philosophy will be constituted finally in the positive state. Its character will be henceforth unchangeable, and it will then have only to develop itself indefinitely, by incorporating the constantly increasing knowledge that inevitably results from new observations or more profound meditations. Having by this means acquired the character of universality which as yet it lacks, the positive philosophy, with all its natural superiority, will be able to displace entirely the theological and metaphysical philosophies. The only real property possessed by theology and metaphysics at the present day is their character of universality, and when deprived of this motive for preference they will have for our successors only a historical interest.12
August Comte’s positive philosophy was predicated on the assumption that with the completion of the scientific mind, it had become possible to begin the process of rationally ordering society. Positivism and its methodology were therefore not practicable before the Hegelian demonstration of the rationality of the historical process.13 But, once established, positivism would undermine the universal character of theology and metaphysics and subsequently displace the authority of both. In short, both philosophy and religion would come to be understood only historically, as relics of a prescientific past.
The State as Moral Organism: Reconciling Hegel and Christianity
The American Founders had attempted to derive the moral law from the laws of nature, or metaphysical reason. Freedom was therefore subordinate to the moral law; rational limits on human freedom were imposed by nature and the natural desire for happiness. But, as John Dewey later noted: “The earlier liberals lacked historic sense.… It blinded the eyes of liberals to the fact that their own special interpretations of liberty, individuality and intelligence were themselves historically conditioned, and relevant only to their own time. They put forward their ideas as immutable truths good at all times and places; they had no idea of historic relativity, either in general or in its application to themselves.”14 In the new Progressive view, freedom was not to be understood in terms of natural limitations, individual intelligence, or ha
ppiness, but in terms of “historic relativity” and the progress of social intelligence. It is mind, not nature, that reveals social reality as historically conditioned. Therefore, it is the progress of mind, or social intelligence, derived from the ongoing consciousness of its freedom, that establishes relative, or historic, truth.
The new disciplines of the social sciences were constructed on the assumption that evolving consciousness of freedom, or will, would determine the intellectual and moral foundations of each historical epoch. They accepted the views of Kant and Hegel that the ground of political rights originates in freedom, or will; not nature, or reason. And morality itself is to be determined by the uses of freedom, and the manner in which will becomes universalized and hence rational, or moral. Thus, the moral will would establish the ground of political legitimacy; rights and freedom are created, secured, and reconciled only within the state and its laws. When coupled with the method of positive science, the state and its government provide the possibility of the ongoing transformation of society and man.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Charles Merriam, a young political scientist who helped organize the new discipline of political science, thought it necessary to characterize the difference between the new Progressive political science and that of the American Founding. He noted that the Founders were familiar with the works of the political philosophers, but “these leaders were not attempting to work out a science of politics.” Until the Civil War, Merriam observed, “there was little energy expended in the study of systematic politics, in comparison with the contemporary English and Continental developments in social science, economics and politics, where the rise of the science of society under the inspiration of August Comte, and of Utopian and proletarian socialism, aroused general interest in social problems.”15 But, he noted, “in the last half of the nineteenth century, there appeared in the United States a group of political theorists differing from the earlier thinkers in respect to method and upon many important doctrines of political science. The new method was more systematic and scientific than that which preceded it, while the results reached showed a pronounced reaction from the individualistic philosophy of the early years of the century.”16