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The French Revolutionary Roots of Political Modernity in Hegel's Philosophy, or the Enlightenment at Dusk

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Robert Wokler
Robert Wokler*
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
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Abstract

Readers of Auguste Comte's Cours de Philosophie positive which began to appear just before Hegel's death might well have imagined, from the work's title, that they were about to confront an interpretation of Hegel's philosophical system. If Hegel himself had assembled his writings as systematically as his doctrines, that collective title would probably have embraced their meaning with greater accuracy than any other. The positivity of Comte's philosophy was of course strikingly different from Hegel's and was in a crucial sense meant to supplant it, replacing it with a genuinely scientific understanding of society, just as metaphysics had earlier overturned theology. Over the past hundred and fifty years or so, Comte's positive philosophy – which he also termed sociology – has in its various formulations by his disciples come to encapsulate the proper agenda of the human sciences for a post-metaphysical, post-Hegelian, age.

Type
Hegel and the Enlightenment
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 18 , Issue 1: number 35 , Spring/Summer 1997 , pp. 71 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 1997

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References

1 Hegel, , Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed Bonsiepen, Wolfgang and Heede, Reinhard, in Hegel, , Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1968–), IX 268 Google Scholar; Phenomenology of Spirit, trans Miller, A V (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), § 489, p 298 Google Scholar.

2 Hegel, , Phänomenologie des Geistes, Gesammelte Werke IX 283–4Google Scholar; Phenomenology of Spirit. §522, pp 317-18.

3 Hegel, , Phänomenologie des Geistes, Gesammelle Werke IX 295–6Google Scholar; Phenomenology of Spirit, § 545, pp 331-2.

4 These remarks on Hegel's incorporation of Goethe's reading of Diderot in the Phänomenologie owe much to two more extensive treatments of the subject: Hulbert's, James ‘Diderot in the Text of Hegel: A Question of Intertextuality’, in Studies in Romanticism 22 (1983), pp 267–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Schmidt, James, ‘The Fool's Truth: Diderot, Goethe, and Hegel’, in the Journal of the History of Ideas (forthcoming)Google Scholar.

5 d'Alembert, , ‘De la liberté de la musique’, in the 1759 edition of his Mélanges de littérature, d'histoire, et de philosophie, reprinted in Denise Launay, (ed), La Querelle des Bouffons (Geneva: Minkoff, 1973), III.2217Google Scholar.

6 Morgan, Lady Sydney (Owenson, Sydney), France (London, 1817), II vii 127–8Google Scholar.

7 Rousseau, Confessions, Livre VIII, in Rousseau, , Oeuvres complètes, ed Gagnebin, Bernard, Raymond, Marcel, et al (Paris: Gallimard, Editions de la Pléiade, 1959–1995), I.384Google Scholar. For a fuller treatment of this subject, see my ‘ La Querelle des Bouffons and the Italian Liberation of France: A Study of Revolutionary Foreplay’, in Studies in the Eighteenth Century VI, special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life, 11 n.s. 1 (1987), pp 94–116 Google Scholar.

8 See especially Hegel's introductory remarks on ‘The Barbarian Migrations and the German People’ in the Philosophie der Geschichte, and §§ 187, 194 and 343 and his addition to § 153 in the Philosophie des Rechts. For a more comprehensive treatment of Hegel's reading of Rousseau than can be pursued here, see my ‘Hegel's Rousseau: The General Will and Civil Society’, in Deutscher Idealismus (papers presented at a symposium on German Idealism in November 1991)Google Scholar, Arachne 7 (1993), pp 7–45 Google Scholar. Other detailed accounts of the subject can be found in Fulda, Hans Friedrich and Horstmann, Rolf-Peter, Rousseau, die Revolution und der junge Hegel (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991)Google Scholar, and in Méthais, Pierre, ‘Contrat et volonté générale selon Hegel et Rousseau, in Jacques d'Hondt, Hegel et le siècle des Lumières (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974)Google Scholar.

9 See Hegel, , Philosophie des Rechts: Die Vorlesung von 1819/20 in einer Nachschrift, ed Henrich, D (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), pp 212–13Google Scholar.

10 Hegel, , Sämtliche Werke, ed Lasson, G and Hoffmeister, J (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1920–1960), IX 921 Google Scholar.

11 See Hegel, , Jenaer Systementwürfe III, ed Trede, Johann Heinrich and Horstmann, Rolf-Peter, in Hegel, , Gesammelte Werke, VIII 258–60Google Scholar.

12 See Hegel, , Über die englische Reformbill, first published in the Allgemeine preußische Staatzeitung, in Hegel, , Politische Schriften, afterword by Habermas, J (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), pp 306-7 and 310 Google Scholar.

13 See the Phänomenologie des Geistes, Gesammelte Werke, IX.316–20Google Scholar; Phenomenology of Spirit, §§ 584, 585, 588 and 590, pp 356-9.

14 Phänomenologie des Geistes, Gesammelte Werke IX.320 Google Scholar; Phenomenology of Spirit, §590, p 360.

15 See the Phänomenologie des Geistes, Gesammelte Werke, IX.321–2Google Scholar; Phenomenology of Spirit, §§ 592 and 594, pp 361-2.

16 Hegel, , Jenaer Systementwürfe III, Gesammelte Werke, VIII.262 Google Scholar.

17 By a vote of 491 to 90.

18 It must be noted that in this passage of Die englische Reformbill Hegel refers, not to Sieyès' role in establishing the National Assembly in 1789, but to his authorship of the constitution of the year VIII, which he drafted as provisional consul a decade later, following the bloodless coup d'état of the eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte that marked the transition of France's revolutionary government from the Directoire to the Consulat. As First Consul, Bonaparte altered Sieyès' scheme to suit his own advantage and ambition.

19 Most accounts of the early development of this political discourse of modernity of course do not focus upon Hegel's interpretation of it in his Phänomenologie des Geistes. For historical treatments of the revolutionary assemblies and debates in which the principles which I have considered here were articulated and transformed, see especially Gueniffey, Patrice, ‘Les assemblées et la représentation’, in Lucas, Colin (ed), The Political Culture of the French Revolution, forming vol. 2 of François Furet et al, The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, 1789-848 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987–1989), pp 233–57Google Scholar; and Jaume, Lucien, Le Discours jacobin et la démocratie (Paris: Fayard, 1989)Google Scholar. For notable treatments of Sieyès' contribution in particular, see especially Forsyth, Murray, Reason and Revolution: The Political Thought of the Abbé Sieyès (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Bredin, Jean-Denis, Sieyès: La clé de la Revolution française (Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1988)Google Scholar; Baker, Keith, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hont, Istvan, ‘The Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind: “Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State” in Historical Perspective’, in Political Studies (1994)Google Scholar, special issue on Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State! (ed) Dunn, John, pp 166–231 Google Scholar.

20 For more general accounts of Hegel's interpretation of the conceptual origins of the French Revolution, particularly with regard to the Enlightenment, see Ferry, Luc, ‘Hegel’, in Furet, and Ozouf, Mona, Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), pp 974–7Google Scholar; Hinchman, Lewis, Hegel's Critique of the Enlightenment (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1984), pp 141–54Google Scholar; and Ritter, Joachim, Hegel und die französiche Revolution (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1965)Google Scholar.

21 On Hegel's interpretation of civil society and its distinction from the state, see especially Riedel, , Bürgerliche Gesellschaft und Staat bei Hegel (Neuweid: Luchterhand, 1970)Google Scholar; Pelczynski, Zbigniew ( ed ), The State and Civil Society: Studies in Hegel's Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; and Waszek, , The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel's Account of ‘Civil Society’ (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 By which Rousseau of course meant just the citizenry, or the whole of the electorate eligible to serve public office. As opposed to sovereignty, which must be exercised directly by the people and from which no one could be excluded, government, he argued, was inescapably representative and therefore could never be democratic.

23 The concluding section of this paper is adapted from two other essays currently in press or preparation: ‘The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary Birth Pangs of Modernity’, in Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook 20 (1996)Google Scholar, and ‘Contextualizing Hegel's Phenomenology of the French Revolution and the Terror’, in Political Theory.