Right-Hegel Meets Left-Hegel

No idea has fallen flatter than the “end of history,” popularized by political philosopher Francis Fukuyama in his eponymous 1993 book. Few still believe that all human beings will accept liberal democracy and free market capitalism as the final forms of society and are uninterested in any alternative. But like many truly awful ideas, the end of history had its 15 minutes, or in this case 15 years, of fame, as a catchall motivation for America’s misguided attempt to export democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq.

This perverse episode of intellectual history had an even stranger provenance. The end of history began as a Marxist conceit invented by a Russian émigré to France, Alexander Kojève, whose farrago of Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger taught a generation of French existentialists—the identity-obsessed grandparents, so to speak, of today’s woke ideology. An apologist for Stalin, Kojève went on to a high position in the French civil service. But how did he become the ideological godfather of the “global war on terror” and the Bush “freedom agenda”?

Fukuyama explained later:

The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organization. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU’s attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a “post-historical” world than the Americans’ continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.

Fukuyama conceded that his idea came from Kojève more than Hegel: “There is, of course, a legitimate question as to whether Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, presented here, is really Hegel as he understood himself, or whether it contains an admixture of ideas that are properly ‘Kojèvian’ … In subsequent references to Hegel, we will actually be referring to Hegel-Kojève, and we will be more interested in the ideas themselves than in the philosophers who originally articulated them”

Stranger than fiction is the backstory to Fukuyama’s thesis: He was a doctoral student of University of Chicago philosopher Allan Bloom, author of the 1988 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind, who in turn was an acolyte of America’s most influential conservative philosopher Leo Strauss. It was Strauss who sent Bloom to Paris to learn Hegel from his friend Kojève.

At the same time as he invented the “end of history” meme that so influenced the neoconservative right, Kojève also contributed mightily to the triumph of critical theory in European and later American academia. As the late Sir Roger Scruton reported:

The dialectic of Self and Other is the great gift of German idealist philosophy to modern European culture … that we come to freedom and self-consciousness only by the path of alienation, and that the self is born from the confrontation with the other, in whose refusal to succumb and to be absorbed we recognize the truth of our own condition—the truth that we too are other, and limited by others like us. Now this story, told many times, entered the culture of France through a peculiar route—namely the public lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology given between 1933 and 1939 in the École Pratique des Hautes Études by an émigré Russian, Alexandre Kojève … The lectures were attended by almost everyone of that generation who was to make a contribution, after the war, to the emerging literary culture of a guilt-ridden France. Sartre, de Beauvoir, Marcel, Lacan, Bachelard, Levinas, Bataille, Aron, Merleau-Ponty—and many more—all attended. Each came away from the lectures with his own version of the ‘Other’.”

The notion that history has an end begins with Isaiah’s prophecy of a messianic era in which the lion will lie down with the lamb (although the lamb won’t get much sleep, in Woody Allen’s qualification). Belief in the coming of the Messiah is a fundamental principle of Jewish faith in the list of 13 formulated by Maimonides, who added, “though he tarry.” Jewish heresies frequently take the form of “forcing the Messiah,” that is, claiming that human action rather than unknowable divine will can bring about the end of history. Forcing the Messiah pops up in Jewish history in countless guises, from Karl Marx’s proletarian revolution to the belief of some ultra-Orthodox Jews that a certain density of Torah study will persuade God to send the Messiah. The German émigré philosopher Eric Voegelin derided political messianism as “immanentizing the Eschaton,” or asserting this-worldly control of matters reserved for Providence.

America’s neoconservatives evinced a quasi-religious belief in the propagation of democracy, and some critics accused them of harboring the messianic illusions of their youthful dalliance with left-wing organizations. As Germany’s ex-Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer once told me: “It was a matter of great good fortune that I started my career on the extreme left of politics. When I came to Washington as foreign minister during the [George W. Bush] administration and met the neoconservatives, I instantly recognized them as the old comrades! I got the book by Richard Perle and David Frum, An End to Evil, and took Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution from my bookshelf, and compared them page by page. Except for some changes in terminology, they were the same book.”

The neoconservatives’ juvenile Trotskyism bore no relation to the unrepentant Stalinism of Kojève. On the contrary, Allan Bloom and his co-thinkers found their way to Kojève through their teacher Leo Strauss, who was never a left-winger.

Strauss and Kojève were the Odd Couple of political theory. Their friendship began in Paris in 1932, where Strauss worked on a fellowship, and continued through the mid-1960s. Their correspondence was published and read to tatters by two generations of Straussians.

Their professional as well as personal friendship reflected an overlap in their thinking—at least as some of their disciples interpreted it long after their deaths. If we know (thanks to Hegel as twisted by Marx) what the outcome of history should be, then we can save time and trouble by taking shortcuts that get us to that end state faster. And if we identify the natural rights that should apply to all peoples at all times and in all places, we simply need to put regimes in place that promote these natural rights. Presto-change-o, there’s nothing more to do in politics except bicker over the government budget. History comes to an end.

What brought Strauss and Kojève together was a shared misreading of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831). Strauss had one big idea, namely that ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle had conceived of a timeless notion of natural right, while the moderns, starting with Machiavelli and Hobbes, worshipped power and pragmatism. After the First World War, a generation of scholars blamed Hegel for the failures of the German Empire, casting him as a toady to reactionary monarchists. Scholarship has long since buried this “black legend,” notably in Klaus Vieweg’s magisterial Hegel biography, The Philosopher of Freedom, released this year in English translation. In the 1930s, though, Kojève provided Strauss with the straw man that Strauss required to discredit the most prominent modern philosopher as a “historicist,” that is, a pragmatist like Machiavelli or Hobbes who excused tyrants on the grounds that they suited their historical circumstances.

Hegel did no such thing, but he did something far more damaging to the program of Leo Strauss: He argued that reason could not flourish except in a free society. For “reason,” Hegel used the term Vernunft, which has the same root as vernehmen, to interrogate, as in a police investigation. Hegel argued for a state based on Vernunft, which in turn required the interchange of ideas among free citizens. To exercise Vernunft means to step outside one’s own premises and investigate how our minds frame ideas in order to elicit better ones.

The nub of Hegel’s celebrated chapter on “Lordship and Bondage” in the Phenomenology of Mind is an idea inimical to Strauss’ power-oriented elite politics, namely that the exercise of power in slave societies corrupts the thinking of the elite. In Hegel’s telling, the master who enslaves other human beings becomes a slave himself through his dependency on the labor of others, and the slave who does the actual work becomes a master by virtue of his labor. Just as the slave defines himself by the master, the master defines himself by the slave. Therefore, no one is free unless all are free.

Hegel’s argument takes a form similar to the familiar joke about the am ha’aretz who asks a rabbi for Talmud lessons. The rabbi asks: “Two burglars go into a house, one through the door and the other down the chimney. Which one washes his face afterward?” The man replies: “The one that went down the chimney.” “Wrong!” instructs the rabbi. “The one that went down the chimney sees his accomplice’s clean face and assumes that his face is also clean, and the one that went in the door sees the other burglar’s face and assumes that it is also dirty—so the one who went through the door washes his face.”

Hegel is making a deeper point about the nature of freedom. If you can choose anything you want, then all choices are equally meaningless, not to say unsatisfying; think of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Absolute, arbitrary freedom is no different from slavery. Hegel was no relativist in the sense of Karl Savigny’s German historical school, which he abhorred. He does not believe that all ideas have equal validity in their time. On the contrary, he tries to demonstrate that only a free society can bring forth a fully developed concept of freedom itself.

Hegel proposes to solve the antinomy of freedom and necessity by cultivating a critical reason that freely chooses what is necessary. His Vernunft is self-critical and therefore has a social dimension, unlike Aristotle’s passive contemplation of the world. Franz Rosenzweig, who wrote his dissertation on Hegel, expressed the same critique of antiquity more colorfully, by reference to Aesop’s fable of the fox who observes that many tracks lead into the lion’s cave but none lead out:

People, State, and whatever else the societies of antiquity may have been, are lion’s caves before which one sees the tracks of the Individual entering, but not leaving. In fact, the individual human stands before society as a whole: he knows that he is only a part …
The State and the individual do not stand in the relation of a whole to a part. Instead, the state is the All, from which the power flows through the limbs of the individual. Everyone has his determined place, and, to the extent that he fulfills it, belongs to the All of the State …
The individual of antiquity does not lose himself in society in order to find himself, but rather in order to construct it; he himself disappears. The well-known difference between the ancient and all modern concepts of democracy rightly arises from this. It is clear from this why antiquity never developed the concept of representative democracy. Only a body can have organs; a building has only parts.
[ Franz Rosenzweig, Stern der Erloesung (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt 1988), pp 59-60, author’s translation].

“We see real freedom blossoming in Greece,” Hegel wrote, “but still in a certain form, caught in a specific constraint, because there still were slaves, and because the states were conditioned by slavery. Superficially we can make a first attempt to characterize freedom in the Orient, in Greece, and among the Germanic [Hegel means European] peoples in the following abstraction: In the East only one (namely the despot) is free; in Greece a few are free; in European life, the dictum holds that all are free, that is, the human person qua person is free. But in this case, the lone individual in the East cannot be free, because a precondition for this is that the others also were free. Thus we encounter in the East only desire, arbitrariness, that is, formal freedom, the abstract identity of self-consciousness, or ‘I = I.’ By contrast, in Greece, the particular statement is at hand; thus the Athenians and the Spartans are free, but not the Messenians or the Helots.”

Strauss insisted that reason could derive natural right at any time and place that philosophers might discover it. The fact that most cultures at most times in history do not recognize natural right is irrelevant, Strauss wrote in Natural Right and History. Yet it is hard to pin down a definition of Straussian natural right. Infanticide was commonplace in classical Greece, and unambiguously defended by Aristotle for children born with eight months or less of gestation. A quarter of Athens’ fifth-century population were slaves. Athens killed the men of Melos and enslaved its women and children in 416 BCE Greek society not only tolerated but in some cases promoted homosexuality. So where do we stop relativizing?

Kojéve validated Strauss’ claim that Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage” chapter is a normative portrait of the relation between ruler and subject, which is in turn crucial to Strauss’ assertion that both his political theory and Hegel’s begin with Thomas Hobbes, the apologist for absolute monarchy. In November 1936, Kojéve wrote to Strauss: “Everything you write is correct. Hegel undoubtedly takes Hobbes as his point of departure. A comparison is surely worthwhile, and I would have liked to make it with you.” Strauss exulted in response: “I know only one truly intelligent man in Paris, and that is—Kochevnikoff (Kojéve’s original Russian name before he Gallicized it).”

This is provably tendentious. In his lectures on the history of philosophy, Hegel states plainly that Hobbes advocates the opposite of Vernunft: “Hobbes insisted on passive obedience and the absolute arbitrariness of royal power … Hobbes’ law is to subject the private will to the general will.” As the late political theorist Patrick Riley observed, Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage” critiques slave societies one step removed from the state of nature. By no means it is a rationalization for Hobbes’ absolutism. Riley’s 1981 dissection of Kojéve’s misrepresentation of Hegel predated Fukuyama’s book, and should have discouraged its publication. The Strauss-Kojéve thesis about Hegel and Hobbes has been discredited by more recent scholarship, notably by Ludwig Siep.

It is revealing that neither Strauss nor Kojève addressed Hegel’s mature political treatise, The Philosophy of Right, as Patrick Riley has noted. The debate between tradition and reason—between Russell Kirk, among others, and the Straussians—appears as an either/or in American discourse. Meanwhile, Hegel’s view is and/both. That is not a compromise between values inculcated by experience and ratiocination, for Hegel associates these factors with different functions of the mind. We imbibe our being, that is, our ethics and identity, from the family, over which we have no choice. Civil society, including the marketplace and the professions, is the realm of free individual choice, but the market draws on the calculating and sorting faculty of mind, or the understanding. Vernunft, self-critical reason, is what we might refer to as the vision thing. We cannot extricate ourselves from tradition, but we do not have to receive it uncritically; and we cannot have a free society without a free market, with the proviso that the market cannot regulate itself.

It is a chilling thought that Kojeve’s distortion of Hegel’s ideas is so virulent that it became the ideology of default of Western academia on both sides of the political aisle, dictating the failed politics of empire at the same time as it dictates the politics of woke street protesters who claim to welcome the empire’s fall—an irony that Hegel would likely have appreciated and cited as proof of his understanding for how history moves. Perhaps the best cure for left Hegelianism in both its woke and neocon forms is Hegel himself.

Hegel is the great refuter of the notion that philosophy can yield absolute truth. The recurring antinomies of philosophy—dogmatism vs. skepticism, nominalism vs. realism, the one and the many, finitude vs. infinity—all reflect the way we formulate problems. Philosophy gives us tools to critique the way we think, but it cannot tell us what to think. No philosophy can demonstrate that every human being is a living image of God. Only God can.