How to Think Politically

by James Bernard Murphy

  At the core of Paine’s assault on monarchy and aristocracy is his belief that the only legitimate basis of sovereignty is the people, a view he shared with Rousseau. Although he rejected educational and property qualifications for voting, a radical position at the time, he stopped short of advocating direct democracy or a universal franchise. Like other revolutionaries in the United States and France, he wanted the vote restricted to men; even Wollstonecraft failed to convince her friend otherwise. And Paine was a republican rather than a democrat, in the eighteenth-century understanding of those terms, meaning he supported the people’s right to elect representatives rather than to participate directly in governing. He also wanted the sovereign will of the people to be limited by the principal purpose of the state: the protection of the natural rights of its members. In this Paine was closer to Locke than to Rousseau, for whom the general will was absolute. But even Paine’s idea of republican representative government was too much for most of the American Founding Fathers, such as James Madison, who were terrified of mob rule and favoured extensive checks and balances in government to curb the power of the popular will. John Adams complained that Paine’s ideal was ‘so democratical, without any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counter-poise, that it must produce confusion and every evil work’.

  On the question of revolution Paine sided with Locke against Hobbes, who had argued that there can be no society without government: overthrowing the latter would destroy the former, plunging us into a war of all against all. Instead, like Locke, Paine believed that society does not depend on government for its existence. Society arises naturally to better satisfy our wants, whereas government was added later by humans to protect us from each other by ‘restraining our vices’. Society is a blessing and government a ‘necessary evil’, he said. Society without government is not only possible but preferable when the state tramples on our natural rights. Then it becomes an unnecessary evil that should be removed, by force if necessary. For Paine, our natural rights are a ‘fixed and steady principle’ against which to determine the legitimacy of any government.

  If governments originate in the desire to protect our natural rights, then where do those rights originate? According to Paine, their source is God, just as the US Declaration of Independence famously proclaimed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’. This is also Paine’s view: the moral basis of government is ultimately divine, although he denied that this involved an act of faith. He optimistically believed that knowledge of God and morality are directly discoverable by anyone who listens to ‘the simple voice of reason and nature’ unclouded by the emotions, prejudices and habits that Burke cherished and found so essential to social and political order.

  Like most of the leading writers of the Age of Enlightenment, Paine was a deist, believing in a universal, benevolent, rational creator-God. He was severely critical of all revealed and organized religions, which are not based on either reason or evidence, for him the only true sources of knowledge. The harshness of his attacks on Christianity would later damage his reputation in the United States, to which he returned a few years before his death in 1809, when a wave of religiosity was beginning to sweep over the young country. Many denounced him as ‘a filthy little atheist’, as he was branded by the future US president Theodore Roosevelt because he was anti-Christian, even though Paine was as opposed to atheism as he was to fanaticism. He even helped to found a new deist Church of Theophilanthropy in France. He relied on popular eighteenth-century defences of deism, such as the argument from design (what is today called ‘intelligent design’), to make his case for the existence of God. If Paine did read Hume’s influential criticisms of these ideas in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, they don’t appear to have made any impression on him when he set out his defence of his moral and religious views in his book The Age of Reason. This is unfortunate, since he made his ethical and political principles depend on religious arguments that had already been subjected to withering criticism by Hume.

  Where Hume and Paine did agree is that commerce is a major civilizing force in human history. Both optimistically believed in the power of markets, when judiciously regulated and corrected by governments, to harmonize competing interests, integrate society and promote human wellbeing. Paine and Hume alike expected commerce to foster unity between nations as well as within them. Paine condemned the ‘greedy hand of government’ for ‘thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping the spoil of the multitude’. The irony of this from someone who, as a young man in England, had been a tax collector for King George III was not lost on Paine’s enemies, who missed no opportunity to highlight his apparent hypocrisy.

  Although Paine considered private property to be a God-given right that the state should protect, he also supported the state’s right to confiscate it in the public interest, a stance that has given rise to questions about his consistency. He personally benefited from this when the Senate of New York granted him a small farm which had been confiscated from an exiled Loyalist, although he later complained that he should be offered something better. ‘Say not that this is revenge’, Paine wrote of such confiscations, ‘call it rather the soft resentment of a suffering people’. He also favoured a system of taxation to limit inequalities of wealth and to fund public welfare, social insurance, free public education for the poor and pensions for the elderly, ideas whose time would not come until the twentieth century. Among the more radical public policies Paine advocated was that of giving all citizens a one-off payment of £15 when they reached the age of 21 to launch them into the world with a fighting chance of success. While he was not a socialist, or even a social democrat, Paine inspired many on the left and far left after his death with his arguments for some common provision for the welfare of citizens in need of it, funded by taxes on those who can afford it.

  The case for a commercial republic that Paine presented would not have impressed either Hume or Rousseau, both of whom believed that republican virtues are incompatible with commercial society. One must choose, they believed, so Hume chose commerce and Rousseau republicanism. Looking at the United States today, it is difficult to disagree with Hume and Rousseau on this point. Commerce has been supreme for too long in the United States for the idea of a republic to seem anything but quaint now. The combination of commercialism and republicanism that Paine supported in the relatively small, predominantly rural, early American republic is not plausible today. As Rousseau saw, republics only really thrive on a small scale and in conditions of simplicity, solidarity and equality that commercial society tends to undermine. These conditions are virtually impossible to sustain in the massive, complex, globalized and increasingly unequal capitalist society that most people now inhabit in the West.

  Paine’s writings were so successful in his lifetime in part because he was able to connect contemporary events in America and France with a very powerful narrative of human progress and enlightenment that was immensely attractive to many ordinary people who hoped for something better. They will continue to inspire readers as long as that optimistic narrative has appeal, as it always will, to some degree. But there are many other powerful narratives competing with it, as we have seen here throughout the history of ideas.

  17

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The Mystic

  Napoleon defeated the Prussian armies in 1806 and then captured Jena, the academic home of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Seeing Napoleon triumphantly enter the city, the awed German philosopher was reported to have said ‘I have seen the World-Spirit today on horseback’. Hegel, who called himself a professor of World Knowledge, no less, had a philosophical imagination of unparalleled scope and ambition: he aspired to explain everything, from atomic physics to modern politics. This cosmic philosophical ambition is regarded as ludicrously overblown and pretent
ious by some philosophers, but as inspiring and impressive by others.

  Although some contemporary ‘Hegelians’ have attempted to predict the future, Hegel himself insisted that philosophy is necessarily backward-looking, since we can only understand things in retrospect: ‘the owl of Minerva [the Greek symbol of wisdom] takes flight only at dusk’, he said. Although life must be lived prospectively, it can only be understood retrospectively. Hegel did not predict the victory of Napoleon – let alone the ‘end of history’ – but he did attempt to explain that (short-lived) victory philosophically. According to Hegel, all of human history reflects the action of divine mind (what he called ‘Geist’ or ‘Spirit’) in the pursuit of human freedom. History is ‘theodicy’ – that is, the story of divine justice. Individual leaders, classes, nations and empires all come before the judgement seat and chopping-block of history. Often the good seem to be defeated and the evil seem to prosper. But nothing happens by accident: every historical event in its own way marks the progress of reason and freedom, although this is usually only apparent in retrospect. In biblical history, divine providence turns even the ‘defeats’ of Israel into instruments of ultimate victory. Similarly, in world history, what Hegel calls the ‘cunning of reason’ ensures that even war, slavery and imperialism ultimately serve to promote human freedom.

  The French Revolution, even in its ‘fury of destruction’, was necessary, says Hegel, to destroy the feudal order in France and to liberate human personality. Every year of his adult life, Hegel celebrated Bastille Day and toasted the Revolution. But he also recognized the Revolution’s limitations. Inspired by purely abstract ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, it was purely negative and destructive, capable only of destroying the old regime, not of creating a new one. What history demanded was not a counter-Revolution to undo progress and attempt to restore the status quo ante, but a leader to consolidate the gains of the Revolution in a stable and viable new political order. Napoleon thus ‘saved’ the Revolution by defeating its reactionary opponents. If the Revolution was a thesis and the counter-Revolution the antithesis, then Napoleon was a temporary synthesis, combining the legal equality of all citizens (including, for the first time, Jews) with the stability of traditional autocracy. Of course, the ultimate defeat of Napoleon is also explained by Hegel: Napoleon attempted to impose French political institutions and law upon Spain and Russia, leading to a violent assertion of national traditions in the face of French ‘universalism’.

  Although Hegel saw Napoleon’s destruction of European autocracy as necessary, he strongly rejected both French imperialism and Prussian feudal traditionalism. Out of this deadly conflict, he saw the rise of a viable synthesis in a modern constitutional state in which the rule of law protected human equality and freedom, but within the Prussian traditions of monarchy, bureaucracy and agriculture. Hegel famously described the modern Prussian state as the march of God through history: the triumph of modern freedom in the context of traditional institutions, the victory of universal ideals in a local context.

  Because Hegel offers a totalizing theory of politics, which incorporates everything from the family, morality and custom to the market, law and government, his theory is often misunderstood as somehow ‘totalitarian’. Indeed, the titanic struggle on the Eastern Front in the Second World War has been described as a battle between Hitler’s right-wing Hegelianism and Stalin’s left-wing Hegelianism. Hitler’s fascist corporatism and Stalin’s Marxism do have connections, however distorted, to Hegel’s thought. No doubt Hegel would describe both fascism and communism as inevitable reactions to the challenges of modern industry and mass society; he would also point out that both fascism and communism, by destroying the Prussian and Russian aristocracies, could be seen to pave the way for the success of modern social democracy. Hitler, it turns out, did inadvertently promote post-war German democracy – a great example of what Hegel called ‘the cunning of reason’, or the way that history realizes the goal of freedom by the most improbable strategies. Everything that seems bad really serves an ultimately good end – the expansion of reason and freedom. Hegel’s philosophy of history can thus be deployed to explain anything, which leads many people to suspect that it explains nothing.

  Hegel’s philosophical method, called ‘dialectic’, is better known than any of his philosophical theories. According to Hegel, when two ideas seem to be in opposition (as thesis and antithesis), we can often reconcile them by recourse to a higher-level synthesis. How does this dialectic work in actual history? One of his favourite sets of examples comes from the contrast of the ancient Greek polis and the modern constitutional state. For all of its artistic, intellectual and military greatness, the ancient Greek city-state could not escape tragic conflict between the community and the individual conscience. The greatest of ancient Greek dramatic tragedies, says Hegel, is Sophocles’s Antigone. Here the right of the community to punish traitors comes into stark conflict with the right of individual conscience. The ruler of Thebes, Creon, rightly forbids anyone to bury the body of the traitor Polynices. But Antigone claims that divine law rightly enjoins her to bury her brother, despite Creon’s command. Similarly, in actual Athenian history, we see Socrates condemned by his fellow citizens for impiety and corrupting the youth; Socrates claims that he was only following the divine voice of his conscience.

  According to Hegel, Antigone and Socrates must die because, within the limits of the ancient Greek polis, there is no way to reconcile the competing claims of the state (the thesis) and of the individual conscience (the antithesis). It is only with the rise of the universal Christian principle of the inviolability of conscience, as recognized by the modern liberal state, that these tragic conflicts can be overcome. Modern political communities, says Hegel, are objectively superior to ancient city-states precisely because they transcend these tragic conflicts by protecting both the rights of the community and the rights of individual conscience.

  Whatever one thinks of Hegel’s sweeping vision of history, he can help us to think through the many conflicts we see in liberal societies between individual rights and communal customs. He attacked the natural rights theorists from Hobbes to Kant for starting their political theories with individuals and their abstract rights. If we start with an individual, shorn of any social context, an ‘unencumbered self’, and endow him or her with an abstract set of rights to autonomy – equality, free expression and the like – then we shall create endless conflicts once we place him or her back into society. These rights are so open-ended and expansive that they make it impossible for individuals to live together. All actual communities involve limits on autonomy, equality and freedom so that people can co-exist and co-operate in families, firms, armies and polities. Indeed, Hegel attributes the failure of the French Revolution to the attempt to endow all citizens with abstract rights to liberty, equality and fraternity, which were then used to destroy all claims of existing social institutions.

  Instead of starting with individuals shorn of social context and armed with abstract rights, Hegel says that we must begin with lived human communities and ethical customs. Unless our moral ideals and legal rights are embedded in social customs and habits, they will always feel alien and merely external to our conduct. Genuine natural rights must become second nature through habituation in custom. Hegel rejects the conservative appeal to prescription, custom and tradition as brute fact. What gives our social customs normative force is not merely that they are traditional but that we can see their rational purpose.

  When Hegel says that ‘the rational is the actual and the actual is the rational’, he is not saying that ‘the rational is whatever exists’ or that might makes right. The rational is always the actualization of human freedom, not just what happens to exist, which may need to be swept away by revolution. The mere existence of a set of social practices is no argument for their legitimacy: habits and customs are essential for genuine social freedom, but only if they actualize rational autonomy. Hegel thus transcends and includes both
Burke, defender of particular custom, and Kant, defender of universal right. Hegel proposes instead a theory of rights in context, of rights defined not as abstract principles but in the lived reality of families, corporations and states. Instead of rights of persons, we should have rights of parents, rights of workers, rights of Christians and rights of citizens. Hegel rejects both abstract universals and concrete particulars: he instead champions what he calls ‘concrete universals’. Particular social customs and institutions should be understood and reformed so that we see how they embody universal rights; and abstract rights should be incarnated into particular traditions and practices. Liberals tend to see Hegel’s emphasis on ethical custom as merely a rationalization of traditional mores in the name of freedom, while conservatives tend to see Hegel’s emphasis on the progress of freedom as a justification for destructive and revolutionary change.