Feminine charms were essential for a woman to advance in 18th-century European society. Wollstonecraft abhorred the fact that a woman had to attract a man to provide for her.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 to a family whose fortunes were in decline. In her early 20s she set up a progressive school in London, and then became a governess in Ireland to the children of Lady Kingsborough, whose vanity and disdain did much to foster Mary’s views on women.
In 1787, she returned to London to write for the radical magazine Analytical Review. In 1792, she went to France to celebrate the Revolution and fell in love with American author Gilbert Imlay. They had a child, but did not marry, and the relationship failed. After a move to Sweden, and a failed suicide attempt, she returned to London and married William Godwin. She died in 1797 giving birth to their only child, Mary, who wrote the novel Frankenstein under her married name of Shelley.
Key works
1787 Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
1790 A Vindication of the Rights of Men
1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
1796 The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria
See also: John Stuart Mill • Emmeline Pankhurst • Simone de Beauvoir
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
Idealism
FOCUS
Human consciousness
BEFORE
350 BCE Aristotle claims that slavery is natural because some people are natural leaders, while some are subservient.
1649 René Descartes argues that consciousness is self-evident because you cannot deny your mind’s existence at the same time as using your mind to do the denying.
AFTER
1840s Karl Marx uses Hegel’s dialectic method in his analysis of the class struggle.
1883 Friedrich Nietzsche creates his image of the Übermensch (overman) who trusts his own intuitive sense of what is good and evil.
The German philosopher Georg Hegel’s great work The Phenomenology of Mind (or “Spirit”) appears at first to have little to do with politics, as it deals with difficult and abstract arguments about the nature of human consciousness. However, his conclusions regarding the way we reach a state of self-awareness have profound implications for the way society is organized, and pose difficult questions concerning the nature of human relations.
Hegel’s philosophy is focused on how the thinking mind views the world. He wants to understand how each human consciousness creates its own worldview. Crucial to his argument is his emphasis on self-consciousness. For Hegel, the human mind, or spirit, desires recognition, and indeed needs that recognition in order to achieve self-awareness. This is why human consciousness, for Hegel, is a social, interactive process. It is possible to live in isolation without being fully aware, Hegel believes. But for the mind to fully exist – to be free – it must be self-conscious, and it can only become self-conscious by seeing another consciousness react to it.
Master–Slave
According to Hegel, when two minds meet, what matters to both is being recognized: receiving from the other the confirmation of their own existence. However, there is only room for one worldview in the mind of each individual, so a struggle ensues about who is going to acknowledge whom – whose worldview is to triumph. Hegel describes how each mind must try to kill the other. The problem is, though, that if one destroys the other, the loser will no longer be able to give the affirmation the winner needs. The way out of this dilemma is a Master–Slave relationship, in which one person “gives in” to the other. The one who values liberty more than life becomes Master; the one who values life more than liberty becomes Slave. This relationship evolves not only in literal master and slave situations, but in any situation where two minds meet.
Hegel appears to be implying that slaves are only slaves because they prefer to submit rather than die, and they collude with their masters. He wrote, “it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained”. He asserts that terror of death is the cause of oppression throughout history, and at the root of slavery and class distinction. He admired Napoleon for this reason, and praised Napoleon’s willingness to risk his own life in order to achieve his aims. Hegel is suggesting that slavery is primarily a state of mind, which finds echoes in the later case of escaped American slave Frederick Douglass (1818–1890). Dragged back to his master, Douglass decided to stand up and fight, even if it might mean death, and afterwards wrote, “however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact”.
Napoleon Bonaparte‘s vision for a new order and courage in battle made him a man “whom it is impossible not to admire”, according to Hegel, to whom his was a “Master” mentality.
Dialectical relationship
Today, the choice between death and slavery seems an unacceptable one to have to make. But it may be that Hegel’s arguments about the Master–Slave relationship are much less literal, and far more subtle and complex. He suggests ways in which the Slave might in fact benefit more from the relationship than the Master. He describes the development of their relationship as a dialectic. By this he means a particular kind of argument that begins with a thesis (the minds) and its antithesis (the result of the encounter between minds), which together produce a synthesis (the resolution into Master and Slave). This dialectic is not necessarily a description of a real struggle between a slaveowner and slave. Hegel is talking about a struggle for domination between minds – and there is no room in his conception for cooperation: there must be a resolution into Master and Slave. He goes on to show how the relationship develops further. The synthesis seems to confirm the existence of the Master’s mind. At first, everything appears to revolve around him, and his ability to get the Slave to serve his needs confirms his own freedom and self-consciousness. The Slave’s independent self-consciousness, meanwhile, is totally dissolved. However, at this point another dialectic relationship develops.
Since the Master does nothing, he relies on the Slave to affirm his existence and freedom. He is, in fact, in a dependent relationship with the Slave, which means that he is anything but free. The Slave, however, is working with real things – with nature – even if only for his Master. This reaffirms his existence in a tangible, external way that the idle Master cannot hope to emulate: “In [his work for] the Master, the Slave feels self-existence to be something external, an objective fact.” In making things, and making things happen, “self-existence comes to be felt explicitly, as his own proper being, and [the Slave] attains the consciousness that he himself exists in his own right.” So now their situations become inverted – the Master disappears as an independent mind, while the Slave emerges as one. Ultimately, for Hegel, the Master–Slave dialectic may be more harmful to the Master than it is to the Slave.
Hegel asserted that a Slave, while engaged in tangible work, would come to experience a realization of his own existence (and therefore become “free”) in a way that his Master would not.
Slave ideologies
So what happens when the Slave reaches this new kind of self-realization – yet is not ready for a fight to the death? At this point, Hegel argues, the Slave finds “slave ideologies” that justify his position, including stoicism (in which he rejects external freedom for mental freedom), scepticism (in which he doubts the value of external freedom), and unhappy consciousness (in which he finds religion and escape but only in another world).
"If a man is a slave, his own will is responsible for his slavery… the wrong of slavery lies at the door not of enslavers or conquerors but of the slaves and conquered themselves."
Georg Hegel
Hegel finds these Master–Slave relationships in many places – in the wars between stronger states and weaker states, and conflicts between social classes and other groupings. For Hegel, human existence is an endless fight to the death for recognition, and this fight can never properly be resolved.
Hegel’s influence
Karl Marx was strongly
influenced by Hegel’s ideas and adopted his idea of the dialectic, but found Hegel too abstract and mystical in his concentration on consciousness. Instead, Marx chose a materialist approach. Some find Hegel’s argument that only fear keeps people enslaved inspirational; others consider that his insistence that submission is a choice is a case of blaming the victim and does not relate well to the real world, in which power relations are complex. Hegel remains one of the hardest political philosophers to understand, and one of the most controversial.
A slave, about to be whipped by his master, could be to blame for his position, following Hegel’s logic. Critics of Hegel argue that this position is clearly unjust.
GEORG HEGEL
Georg Hegel was born in Stuttgart in the German Duchy of Württemberg. Much of his life was lived in the calm of Protestant southern Germany, but against the backdrop of the French Revolution. He was a student at Tübingen University at the height of the Revolution and he encountered Napoleon at Jena, where he completed The Phenomenology of Mind.
After eight years as rector at the Gymnasium in Nuremberg, he married Marie von Tucher and worked on his great book on logic. In 1816, after the early death of his wife, he moved to Heidelberg, and many of his ideas are contained in notes from the lectures he gave to philosophy students there. He died in 1831 after returning to Berlin during a cholera epidemic. Perhaps appropriately for such a complex thinker, it is said that his last words were “And he didn’t understand me”.
Key works
1807 The Phenomenology of Mind
1812–16 The Science of Logic
1821 The Philosophy of Right
See also: Aristotle • Hugo Grotius • Jean-Jacques Rousseau • Karl Marx • Friedrich Nietzsche
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
Realism
FOCUS
Diplomacy and war
BEFORE
5th century BCE Sun Tzu states that the art of war is vital to the state.
1513 Niccolò Machiavelli argues that even in peacetime, a prince must be ready and armed in preparation for war.
1807 Georg Hegel states that history is a struggle for recognition that leads to a master and slave relationship.
AFTER
1935 German general Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff develops his notion of a “Total War” that mobilizes the entire physical and moral forces of a nation.
1945 Adolf Hitler cites “the great Clausewitz” in his last testament in the bunker.
Few phrases from military theory have been as influential as Prussian soldier Carl von Clausewitz’s statement that “war is the continuation of Politik by other means”, taken from his book On War, published after his death in 1832. The phrase is one of a series of truisms Clausewitz coins as he attempts to put war in context by examining its philosophical basis, much as philosophers would explore the role of the state. The German word Politik translates as both politics and policy, covering both the principles of governance and its practicalities.
War leads to politics
For Clausewitz, war is a clash of opposing wills. “War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale,” he writes, “an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will.” The aim is to disarm your enemy, so that you become the master. But there is no single, decisive blow in war – a defeated state seeks to repair the damage of defeat by using politics. Clausewitz is keen to emphasize that the business of war is serious in intent, and no mere adventure. It is always, he says, a political act, because one state wishes to impose its will on another – or risk submission.
War is simply the means to a political end that might well be achieved through other means. His point is not to highlight the cynicism of politicians who go to war, but to ensure that those who wage war are always aware of its overriding political goal.
Otto von Bismarck declared Wilhelm I of Prussia Emperor of Germany in 1871. Bismarck had provoked war with France to achieve this political end.
See also: Sun Tzu • Niccolò Machiavelli • Thomas Hobbes • Georg Hegel • Smedley D. Butler
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
State’s rights
FOCUS
Slavery
BEFORE
5th century BCE Aristotle says that some people are naturally slaves and slavery helps build skills and virtues.
426 CE Augustine states that the primary cause of slavery is sin, which brings some under the domination of others as a punishment from God.
1690 John Locke argues against the idea of natural slaves and that prisoners of war can be enslaved.
AFTER
1854 In his speech in Peoria, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln outlines his moral, economic, political, and legal arguments against slavery.
1865 Slaves are emancipated in the United States.
The United States Senator John C. Calhoun made an impassioned speech on the issue of slavery in 1837. Throughout the 1830s, pressure for the abolition of slavery had been building in the US, and Southern slaveholders were feeling beleaguered. In retaliation, they argued that there were natural inequalities ordained by God, which meant that some are suited to command and others to labour. Moreover, they claimed, black slavery could avert conflicts between workers and employers, and the tyranny of wage slavery that threatened the wellbeing of the nation every bit as much as the abolitionist cause.
"The relation now existing in the slaveholding states… is a positive good."
John C. Calhoun
Good for both races
It was the sending of the issue to the Senate committee that prompted Calhoun to stress that Congress had no place interfering with the basic right to own slaves guaranteed by the Constitution. To go down the route of abolition would mean that the slaveholding and non-slaveholding states would live under different political systems. “The conflicting elements would burst the Union asunder, powerful as are the links which hold it together. Abolition and the Union cannot co-exist.” Instead of defending slavery as a necessary evil, he asserts that black slavery is, in fact, a positive good for both races. “Never before has the black race of Central Africa,” he claims, “…attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually.”
See also: Aristotle • Thomas Jefferson • Abraham Lincoln • Henry David Thoreau • Marcus Garvey • Nelson Mandela
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
Liberal republicanism
FOCUS
Revolutionary warfare
BEFORE
1494 In the Treaty of Tordesillas, the territories of the Americas are divided between Spain and Portugal.
1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau argues against the divine right of kings to rule.
AFTER
1918 Following World War I, US president Woodrow Wilson lays out a reconstruction plan for Europe based on liberal nationalist principles.
1964 Che Guevara addresses the United Nations, arguing that Latin America has yet to gain true independence.
1999 Hugo Chavéz becomes president of Venezuela with a political ideology he describes as Bolivarian.
Christopher Columbus claimed America for Spain in 1492, opening the way for an empire that would extend over five continents. The Spanish would rely on the collaboration of local elites to manage their lands. Venezuelan revolutionary Simón Bolívar saw this aspect of their empire as a source of dynamism but also as a potential weakness.
Small but strong republics
Spain’s power began to crumble in 1808 when Napoleon invaded and placed his brother on the throne. Bolívar recognized this as an opportunity for the Spanish American countries to throw off the yoke of colonialism. During an 18-year fight for freedom, Bolívar was exiled for a year in Jamaica. As he planned for the future, he pondered how he could ensure a state large enough to govern, but small enough to foster the greatest happiness for its people.
Bolívar considered the question in “The Jamaica Letter”. In this letter, he explained
his reason for rejecting monarchies: kingdoms were inherently expansionist, driven by a king’s “constant desire to increase his possessions”. A republic, on the other hand, was “limited to the matter of its preservation, prosperity, and glory”.
"The distinctive feature of small republics is permanence."
Simón Bolívar
Bolívar believed that Spanish America should become 17 independent republics, and the ambition of these must be to educate; to help people in their fair ambitions; and to protect the rights of all citizens. Each would have no reason to expand its boundaries, because this used up valuable resources while bringing no advantages. In addition, “a state too extensive in itself, or by virtue of its dependencies, ultimately falls into decay”. Worse still, “its free government becomes a tyranny”, its founding principles are disregarded and it “degenerates into despotism”. Small republics, he said, enjoyed permanence; large ones veered towards empire and instability.
Bolivar’s portrait is held aloft during a pro-Hugo Chávez rally in Venezuela. Chávez describes his political movement as a Bolivarian revolution, stressing its anti-imperialist stance.
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