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X. Intellectual Antecedents: Hegel and theGerman Ideology
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151 x Intellectual Antecedents Hegel and the German Ideology The situation in which we find ourselves involved to-day is an extraordinarily complex one. The world is passing through a process of violent change, accelerated by war and revolution, the effects of which are felt even in the most remote and backward societies of Asia and Africa. But it is in Europe that this movement of change originated and it is from Europe that it has been propagated, so that it is only by understanding Europe that we can understand what is happening to the world. Unfortunately the crisis has become so much a part of our daily lives and affects the conditions of our material and social existence so immediately that we are obliged to take action whether we understand the nature of the crisis or no. And, since the primary responsibility for action falls upon the politicians, it is they and not the philosophers who have to explain to the ordinary man what is happening and what he has to hope and fear in this changing and catastrophic world. Now we cannot expect the politicians to look very deep into the past or very far into the future. Their answers must be simple, easy and optimistic, otherwise they could not expect to gain majorities or to win support for their party politics. Nevertheless it is not the politicians who are primarily responsible for the crisis. The scientists and the technicians, the philosophers and the theologians and the men of letters have played a larger part than the politicians themselves in producing those great changes of culture which have transformed the modern world and ultimately led to the 152 Understanding Europe present world crisis. In the preceding chapters we have seen how the making of Europe and the successive changes of Western culture are mainly the result of spiritual and intellectual forces which are not political in origin though they have their consequences on the political plane. The average man is at least dimly aware of the existence of such movements as Christianity, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, modern science and technology, Liberalism, Socialism and Communism—though he is not fully aware how deeply they have entered into the substance of his life and thought. What we all tend to forget, however, is the way in which even the most irrational phenomena in the modern world, such as nationalism, racialism and totalitarianism have been conditioned and in some cases created by the philosophies and ideologies of the past, so that behind the modern demagogue and dictator there stands the ghost of some forgotten metaphysician. This point is so important and so underestimated that I think it is worth while to take the case of one of the most influential philosophers of the past before we attempt to analyse the nature of the present crisis. This philosopher is Hegel, who stands as it were at the cross-roads of the nineteenth century. It is not merely that his thought has helped to form the German political ideology and the German idea of the state. He stands for much more than that. Indeed his is one of the most seminal minds of the nineteenth century. He stands behind Karl Marx and the modern Communist ideology. He inspired the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia before and after Marx. He had a great influence on Fascism, especially on the rationalization of the Fascist state by Gentile. Alone among modern works, his Philosophy of Right has had an equal influence on the conservatives and the revolutionaries and there is hardly a political movement in modern times that has not been affected by it in some measure. Yet in spite of his international importance , he remains profoundly and characteristically German, and it is not surprising that many thinkers have looked on him as the source of the ideas which have had such a devastating effect on European civilization during the last thirty years. “In the bombing of London,” wrote Professor Hobhouse during the last war, “I had just witnessed the vis- [3.85.85.246] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:55 GMT) Hegel and the German Ideology 153 ible and tangible outcome of a false and wicked doctrine the foundations of which lay, I believe, in the book before me”—Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. But if the Philosophy of Right is the quintessence of Prussianism, how is it that it should have had so powerful an influence on Communism and Liberalism, while...