The merit of Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right lie less in its solutions, constitutional monarchy, than in the way it grasps the fundamental problem of modern politics. Politics does not begin with individuals in some kind of pre-political state of nature, or as some kind of undifferentiated raw material. Politics, the state, comes after the institutions of the family and civil society, and these institutions are not just functional elements of society, they are, foundational in shaping the perspectives and conflicts of politics. The social is the antechamber of the political.
Such a formulation is perhaps striking, even debatable, for those who recall that the Philosophy of Right is written in in terms of trajectory in which family, civil society, and the state, function as moments in a progression. Each comes to recognize its limits and need for the others. As I wrote in The Politics of Transindividuality:
"In the section on ethical life, or Sittlichkeit, this trajectory passes through three different institutions: family, civil society, and the state. These institutions each have their own particular rules, norms, and ways of relating to each other, which define not only the institution, but also the particular organization or articulation of individuation found in each. The family, civil society and the state, are not each just a set of rules, or even a set of relations, but a way of living in the world. The world, others, and oneself look differently when viewed from the perspective of the family, civil society, and the state. Which is to say that it is possible to view each section as part of the transindividual constitution of individuality. The passage from one to another is a transformation of individuation, a destruction and a creation. As Balibar writes,
Ethical life can then be understood as a linear, diachronic, progression of an individual through each of these spheres, or relations, from the family, with its emphasis on selfless love; to civil society, grounded on individual competition; and finally to the state, grounded on an understanding of one’s place in a larger order. Or it could be understood as synchronic presentation of the different aspects of ethical life, whose contradictions and conflicts reinforce and necessitate each other: the family requires civil society to meet its needs, while civil society requires the state to mediate and ameliorate its conflicts, and the state requires the family to produce and educate its subjects, and so on. To inhabit one, to live by its rules and norms, is to inhabit the others. Regardless of which reading is pursued the fundamental fact to stress is that these various spheres, or institutions, are not just places which different individuals pass through, but transindividual relations, constitutive and constituted by different individualities. These institutions are transindividual in that they are constituted by and constitute the individuals that pass through them."
Reading for the trajectory, we can ask the question as to what happens when this progression is stalled, when one does not move from one institution to the next. It is possible that someone could never leave one aspect to go to the others, never find the family to be inadequate and move into the basement. Far more drastic of a problem, at least politically, is what happens when the passage from civil society to the state is interrupted. Hegel argues that the need for state institutions emerges from civil society itself, from the fact that private interests and private goods are actually a public matter. As Hegel writes,
"In the indeterminate multiplication and interdependence of daily needs, the procurement and exchange of means to satisfy these (a process on whose unimpeded continuance everyone relies) and the need to rise to aspects of common interest in which the business of one is at the same time carried out on behalf of all; they also give rise to means and arrangements which may be of use to the community. These universal functions and arrangements of public utility require oversight and advance provision on the part of the public authority. (§235)
and
"The differing interests of producers and consumers may come into collision with each other, and even if, on the whole, their correct relationship re-establishes itself automatically, its adjustment also needs to be consciously regulated by an agency which stands above both sides. The right to regulate individual matters in this way (e.g. by deciding the value of the commonest necessities of life) is based on the fact that, when commodities in completely universal everyday use are publicly marketed they are offered not so much to a particular individual as such, as to the individual in the universal sense, i.e., to the public and the task of upholding the public's right not to be cheated and of inspecting market commodities may, as common concern, be entrusted to a public authority [Macht].--But the main reason why some universal provision and direction are necessary is that large branches of industry are dependent on external circumstances and remote combinations whose full implications cannot be grasped by the individuals who are tied to these spheres by their occupation (§ 236)
Civil society thus creates the need for the police, in the broad sense of the term, someone to check to make sure the products being sold are not contaminated or adulterated. While Hegel's police probably go well beyond the limits of the modern state, especially in the US, the basic idea remains the same, there needs to be something more than competition of interests to protect the fundamental needs of individuals. Even though the Owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk, Hegel seems to have predicted the need for the FDA (just as he predicted the conflict over social welfare). No one wants to wait around for the "invisible hand" of the market to put a company selling contaminated food to go out of business. In Hegel's view the he very consciousness that emerges from civil society, that of isolated individuals pursuing their common interest, eventually comes to recognize its dependence on others, and thus eventually recognizes the limitations of its point of view. Even Adam Smith thought the public would have to pay for schools in order to keep workers from falling to a level of barbarism produced by the division of labor. As much as civil society, what we call capitalism, provides in terms of needs, it also has its limitations, and the awareness of those limitations points to something beyond it, to the public beyond competitive individuals and the state.
Of course it is precisely this transition which is very much in question these days. We have witnessed a massive rollback of the elements of the state that protect us from the excesses of civil society, from competition of isolated individuals. Many of these cuts are done more in the image of competition than its reality. Which is to say that these cuts are often done according to the idea of efficiency and cost savings, an idea in which all government regulations and rules are by definition wasteful, but prove to be wasteful and costly in the end. The program to control the screwworm was cut in the name of government efficiency, but the return of the parasite will increase the cost of meat, and not that the worm has returned to North America it will be more expensive to control. The costs of the cyclospora outbreak have yet to be entirely calculated, but it will probably cost more, in health care costs, in lost profits, and in monitoring, than the basic food inspection service that was cut.
The world seems to be moving in a direction opposite to the one Hegel posited, rather than civil society coming to the realization that it needs the state, of particularity recognizing itself in the universal, we have a stubborn particularity, as the economy, or an image of the economy asserts its priority. As I have written before, in The Politics of Transindividuality, this is one way of understanding the way that Marx interrupts Hegel. As I wrote about this earlier on this blog,
"To begin with the point of overlap, Hegel and Marx each engage in a critique of political economy, at least in terms of its particular ontology of individuation, its Robinsonade. Hegel, however, situates this critique within a Bildungsroman in which the particular self-interest is educated through work and consumption into the perspective of the universal. Marx interrupts this transition by demonstrating that there is no passage from the particular to universal in political economy: no way in which the perspective of isolated self-interest is forced to confront the limitations of its perspective and recognize its constitutive relations with others. The name of this interruption, this impasse, is commodity fetishism: fetishism understood not simply as a critical statement about the limits of bourgeois political economy, but as a critical perspective on consciousness in capitalism. The “perspective of political economy” generates a point of view in which the economy appears to be independent and autonomous. It is no longer seen as the sum total of the effects of individual actions, as a sphere of human activity that can be transformed and acted on, but as a quasi-natural phenomena with its laws, its own crises and transformations. As Marx writes, reflecting on the relation of individuals to the economy, their own economic activity: “To them, their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.”
This is a somewhat different framing of the relationship between Hegel and Marx, less about rational kernels and mystical shells, or about idealism or materialism, than it is about the relationship between knowledge and society. Whereas Hegel asserts that the partial and incomplete viewpoint of civil society, or political economy, the perspective of isolated individuals engaged in competition necessarily recognizes universality, begins to see in its particularity the interrelatedness of these perspectives, ultimately recognizing its dependence, Marx would assert that such a transition is fundamentally blocked, as they say in Maine, "You can't get there from here." There is no way to get from the particularity of competition to the universality of cooperation. Earlier I gave this impasse the name "commodity fetishism," which is just a way of saying that this perspective, the perspective of political economy, is not just a lack, partial or incomplete knowledge, but a lack that constitutes its own fullness, its own imaginary. Or, framed differently Hegel would seem to believe that universality can be grasped and seen in a society defined by particular antagonist interests, but Marx would assert that the order and connection of ideas is the same as that of things. What could be called universality, the recognition of our mutual dependency is something that must be practically realized rather than simply grasped. For Marx the universal comes from below, from the proletariat as the universal condition, rather than from above, from the state.
All of which would seem to bring us back to the divide between idealism and materialism, does the universal arrive in thought or through practice. Such a division does not do justice to not only Marx or Hegel, but to the reality of the problem, which is the intersection of knowledge and practice. One of the interesting things about Hegel's Philosophy of Right is that we get the text complete with Hegel's additions and comments from his lectures on the text. It is in the addition to §268 that Hegel comments on the limitations of the very transition from particularity to universality,
"Uneducated people delight in argument [Räsonieren] and fault finding, for it is easy to find fault, but difficult to recognize the good and its inner necessity. Education in its early stages always begins with fault-finding, but when it is complete, it sees the positive element in everything...Thus people's apparent political disposition should be distinguished from what they genuinely will; for inwardly they in fact will the thing [Sache], but they fasten to details and delight in the vanity of claiming superior insight. They trust that the state will continue to exist [bestehen] and that particular interests can be fulfilled within it alone; but habit blinds us to the basis of our entire existence [Existenz]. It does not occur to someone who walks the streets in safety at night that this might be otherwise, for this habit of [living in] safety has become second nature, and we scarcely stop to think that it is solely the effect of particular institutions. Representational thought often imagines that the state is held together by force; but what holds it together is simply the basic sense of order which everyone possesses."
There is so much I want to say about this passage starting with the invocation of second nature, and ending with a formulation of a kind of "society effect"holding society together. Hegel's addition seems to have in some sense taken away what was asserted in the text, posting the stubbornness of habit rather than the progression of reason. As he points out, people do not see the institutions that make their existence possible. We do not see the way in which our health is produced by the inspection of food, by the promulgation of vaccines, and the monitoring of air and water. These things are invisible to us because they work. Sometimes in ways that we do not see, or even imagine.Our immediate consciousness is one in which we do not think about the quality of the food that we eat, or the air that we breathe, taking these things as given. As Marx wrote, the taste of the porridge tells us nothing about the conditions under which it is produced.
It is at this point that I depart with Hegel, and Marx, because we are living through a moment in which this immediate knowledge, knowledge which does grasp relations, dependency, and connections is being openly celebrated and disseminated. This is what Spinoza called the "first kind of knowledge," knowledge of the imagination. This is why I argue that we are living in the midst of a new episteme, one that does not try to overcome the limits and partiality of such individual perspectives, but one that makes these limits the new standard for knowledge, dismissing everything else as woke or crazy. The more ignorant people are of the real causes of things, the more they are susceptible to imagine all kinds of false causes, people can believe that it is the invisible hand of the market that keeps their lettuce parasite free, or the iron hand of ICE that keeps their pets safe from being eaten. As Deleuze and Guattari write with respect to the line about porridge, quoted above, "The product appears to be all the more specific, incredibly specific and readily describable, the more closely the theoretician relates it to ideal forms of causation, comprehension, or expression, rather than to the real process of production on which it depends." The less one knows about real causal conditions, the more one is prone to believe any other explanation. I have seen the screwworm blamed on immigrants, even the rise of measles blamed on immigrants, and Taco Bell has in effect become the scapegoat for the epidemic of diarrhea.
I do not want to make this about Trump but his particular skill is in obscuring the real connections of things and replacing them with imaginary ones.
Many people have begun to ask the question of how it is that we get out of this moment, and it seems to me that there is no way out of our current way of living without a transformation of our way of thinking. We can no longer trust, as Hegel did, that civil society would provide an education in its own limits. The habits, and second nature it creates are too powerful, especially as both are reinforced by social forces that provide us with all sorts of myths and illusions to attribute our misfortune to. To put it in terms that are both Taco Bell's and Spinoza's, in order to live más we need to think más.
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