Hegel and the Third World: The Making of Eurocentrism in World History

Conclusion

324 Conclusion Equality was a principle with the early Christians. . . . [H]umility, the principle of not elevating one’s self above anyone else, the sense of one’s own unworthiness, was the first law of a Christian. —G. W. F. Hegel, The Positivity of the Christian Religion I have attempted in this work to show how Hegel invested a significant part of his formidable intellectual power to rationalizing Europe’s global domination of the Third World. In the Philosophy of Right, he justifies the right of “civilized nations in regarding and treating as barbarians those who lag behind them in institutions which are the essential moments of the state. Thus a pastoral people may treat hunters as barbarians, and both of these are barbarians from the point of view of agriculturalists, &c. The civilized nation is conscious that the rights of barbarians are unequal to its own and treats their autonomy as only a formality.” With regard to modern European colonial expansion, Hegel justifies the rationality of the right of the West against the rest of the world. He writes about the “inner dialectic of civil society” that “drives it—or at any rate drives a specific civil society—to push beyond its own limits and seek markets, and so its necessary means of subsistence, in other lands which are either deficient in the goods it has overproduced, or else generally backward in industry, &c.” This “push beyond its limits” of civil society can lead to “colonizing activity—sporadic or systematic—to which the mature civil society is driven and by which it supplies to a part of its population a return to life on the family basis in a new land and so also supplies itself with a new demand and field for its industry” (1967, 219, 151–52). Adriaan Peperzak states that the two fundamental pillars of Hegel’s concept of right as stipulated in his most mature work on the subject, the Philosophy of Right, are “property and sovereignty” (2001, 656). Colonialism is that system that takes away these two rights, property and sovereignty, from Conclusion 325 those it colonizes. For Hegel, the colonized apparently do not deserve the right to property or sovereignty. Hegel’s views on colonial expansion stem in part from his views regarding war.1 Critiquing Kant’s theory of “perpetual peace,” he says, “In war there is the free possibility that not only certain individual things but the whole of them, as life, will be annihilated and destroyed for the Absolute itself or for the people; and therefore war preserves the ethical health of peoples in their indifference to specific institutions, preserves it from habituation to such institutions and their hardening.” By analogy, “just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would result from a continual calm, so also corruption would result for peoples under continual or indeed “perpetual” peace” (1975, 93). Two decades after he wrote this passage, he restated it affirmatively in his Philosophy of Right (1967, 210). I have also shown in this work that Hegel was critical of many forms of injustice and oppressive social relations, including those in Europe. In Aesthetics, he calls the right of rulers in the caste system in India and serfdom in Russia, among others, the “unrighteous right of barbarism.” These rulers were “like barbarians who resolve on and carry out what is absolute injustice.” Furthermore , if the “legally privileged individual just uses his right for his own private ends, from a particular passion and selfish intentions, we have before us not just barbarism but a bad character into the bargain” (1998–99, 1:212). In his “On the English Reform Bill,” written a few months before his death, he chastises the English for their oppression of the Irish (1999, 245–47). Yet Hegel is not critical of any aspect of the three pillars of negative modernity . Indeed, he justifies them despite the fact that these three pillars constitute the “unrighteous right of barbarism,” “absolute injustice,” and “bad character.” Hegel, the staunch critic of injustice when he wants to be, rationalizes them all with callous indifference. His philosophy may articulate a sophisticated case for human freedom, yet the same philosophy comes up with the coldest rationalization of genocidal murder and carnage. Such contradiction is built in the very structure of the Hegelian system of knowledge production. It is possible because Hegel’s philosophy of world history is based on a paradigmatic apartheid . He considers the vast majority of the world...