Hegel’s Retreat from Eleusis: Studies in Political Thought by George Armstrong Kelly (review)

BOOK rREVIlllWS 167 Hegel's Retreat from Eleiisis: Studies in Political Thought. By GEORGE A&-v.rsTRONG KELLY. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978; Pp. ix, Q59. $16.$0. This book is a collection of eight essays, three of which have been written especially for the present volume, the others having appeared earlier in various journals. It is not a work of one piece, but rather a series of reflections on Hegel's political thought. Yet there is a continuity to it; for Kelly sees his work as an attempt simultaneously to do " archeology " and " renovation," resting on the dictum that " interpretation without renewal is empty; renewal without interpretation is blind" (6). His work is informed by a humanistic concern for the preservation of our cultural heritage as well as for the control of our own destinies through reason. In this way he might be said to be continuing the task begun in his earlier Idealism, Politics, and History, now giving Hegel his full attention as well as attempting to " refute" Pelczynski's claim that Kelly's approach cannot speak to our present concerns. Furthermore, the book is not " genealogical," as the title might suggest; it does not trace Hegel's development from his early years to the times in Berlin. Rather, Kelly studies specific and recurring prohlems which arise in any attempt to understand H~gel's thought and reflect on it in our own context. The first essay attacks straightforwardly the question of the relationship of Hegel's political writings to his philosophy in general and of politics to philosophy. Against the notions of Pelczynski and others, Kelly argues rightly that Hegel's political thought is inextricably bound up with his system as a whole, with metaphysics in particular, and, above all, with the problems of knowledge. A major aspect of the importance of this is that when Hegel's political thought is understood in this way in its proper context, the ideologizing which has plagued his thought in the hands of others can finally be laid to rest. Hegel is not an ideologist but " a philosopher-like Plato and Aristotle-who was constantly preoccupied by the relationship of the quality of the political order to the generation of knowledge " (8). After a general but remarkably clear description of Hegel's own conception of philosophy in relation to the history of philosophy and the culture of the times, Kelly argues for the relation of politics to philosophy, the main points of which are summed up in the following passage. In viewing Hegel, it is important to grasp what he takes philosophy itself to be, especially in its relationship to living culture, since it is to the creation and preservation of culture in time and through time that the task of politics is ultimately addressed. Second, as the effective v::ssel of culture, the state must be so arranged as to "know," to miderstand , its conscious _purposes.. Third, .culture is the vital substance of a people, and philosophy is its culminating expression; they are and exist, not as noble fan- 168 BOOK'tU!lVlJ!lWS tasies that the pain of the present inflicts on the imagination, but llll shared spiritual realities that reveal the eternal in the human; Similarly, the state exists to incubate and transmit them: there is no transcendence; it is fatuous to theorize something that cannot operate, when the real stakes are in our lives and this world. Fourth, the human wound administered by self-consciousness to naturalness must, in a sense, be healed by the medicines of .speculation, which restores, remembers, salvages, reconciles, and justifies. This is also the fate of Europe, transcribed in its arduous recovery of politics. (27) In this first essay Kelly articulates Hegel's true realism and true idealism in a way that demands our attention and careful thought. This first essay forms, together with the last chapter, what Kelly describes as "an envelope" for the rest of the book. He is correct in this, but here more than anywhere else one wishes rather that it were the first page of the letter, continuous with succeeding pages, rather than an envelope . Questions of the relationship between wisdom in one generation or epoch and succeeding...