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76 3 Das Volk als Staat: National Identity as a Component of Political Identity Hegel’s definition of patriotism, I argued in the last chapter, does not primarily concern membership or pride in one’s country. Hegel describes patriotism as local engagement, as a way of shaping arbitrary desires into owned desires, and as requiring consciousness of political ideals. In discussing these characteristics, he essentially neglects mention of affection for one’s country or national culture. Patriotism is instead primarily a response to the structure of the state’s institutions. I have argued that this description of patriotism is not idiosyncratic on Hegel’s part, given the history of the word. But during Hegel’s lifetime , and with rapid acceleration directly thereafter, national identity became an often central and sometimes defining component of individuals ’ identities. Historical sources show that patriotism as used to describe allegiance to one’s nation rapidly overtook patriotism’s local or cosmopolitan connotations in the mid-nineteenth century. Shortly after Hegel’s death, patriotism came to be essentially synonymous with loyalty to or affection for a nation. Hegel very rarely uses the word in this way. But defining the place of national identity within political identity was, if we look beyond the Philosophy of Right, one of his central concerns. Perhaps importantly, key passages in which Hegel does associate patriotism with national pride appear in his last complete lectures on political philosophy, given in 1824–25. By 1824, patriotism’s connotations had perceptibly altered, driven by pressing questions about a German constitution and German identity.1 Perhaps becoming aware of this change, Hegel for the first time comments here on patriotism as national pride. Trust, we know, was a central part of the definition of patriotism. In his 1824 lectures, Hegel says that “trust can take the form of national pride, the simple consciousness that I am a Prussian or English, the simple consciousness that I am a citizen of this state, that I am that which the state is, that the state is my being.” But, he adds, this trust can also take the form of more “developed insight.” It can, he says, be 77 D A S V O L K A L S S T A A T knowledge of the great deeds of his people [Volk], of what his nation [Nation] has done. Everyone has a part of this; he takes pride in these accomplishments and in the consciousness of his identity with the whole. It can also occur around closer insight into the institutions of the state; the individual can in other words have the consciousness that his interests are secure, can have insight into how his spiritual needs are met through art, science, and other things in the state. (VPR 4: 642) This passage is to my mind a departure in Hegel’s use of the word “patriotism,” since it associates patriotism with pride and with membership in a cultural group.2 But this passage also explicitly places the nation in the context of the state: although my national pride is focused on being Prussian or English, it is consciousness of being a citizen of the state, of having my spiritual needs met by the state, that gives me “my being” and meets my “spiritual needs.” How then more precisely does Hegel conceptualize the relation between a nation and a state? The first obstacle to answering this question is terminological: the word generally translated as “nation,” namelyVolk, presents perhaps even more etymological complications than does Patriotismus. During the political transformations of Hegel’s time, the meaning and use of Volk were also energetically contested. Herder was perhaps most influential in definingVolk as a group related through its unique language, customs, literature, and music. But political reformers used the word as well in an attempt to inspire change; budding nationalists used it also in their quest for ethnic cohesion. Hegel himself uses it in three distinct ways: in order to isolateVolksreligion as a religion of the heart as opposed to rational religion; to designate the masses in the political sense of “we the people”; and to isolate a cultural, linguistic group such as Germans, Italians , or Jews.3 Hegel complicates matters further by using bothVolk and Nation—sometimes, as in the passage above, apparently as synonyms. In the Philosophy of Right we find another case in which Hegel uses the two words synonymously: he writes that when the family expands beyond its immediate definition, it can become “a people [Volk] or...

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