Interpreting Hegel and the Right Wing

Hegel, among many accomplishments, is largely more obscured by his successors in the wake of modern political philosophy of the 19th century. It is not that he lacked any major framework, he certainly laid a great foundation, but— if his name be mentioned at all in Politics— it is beside the twentieth century giant which is Marx— or more broadly, the Young Hegelians. (I won’t go any further on the Young Hegelians, other than to lightly motion at them as the primary political marker on history that we may think of if we ever pair Hegel and Politics in common discourse).

So, if Marx turned Hegel’s dialectic “right side up,” it really begs the question of how Hegel was handled by the Right Wing— that is, the other end of the spectrum to Marx. Reasonably enough, we must first begin with understanding what the Left and Right wing even are, for if we simply throw these terms around without understanding them, we will really get nowhere. The Left wing is easy enough to define for our purposes, as we will generally line it up with the revolutionary fervour of the French Revolution, a tossing aside of the order of things. It is essential to the left wing that class distinctions be tossed out— in other words, capitalism— just as the French had properly disposed of feudalism. In fact, the seedlings of anarchist and socialist thought were beginning to form here. If this was the Left wing, then, we can see the Right Wing as the reactionary, those who sought to try to maintain an old order of things. However, as time went on, the Right took on a more quasi-revolutionary nature— which, as we will see, are borrowed from Hegel’s historicism of dynamism— as it heralded ideas previously known within the Left Wing, like nationalism and the like, which will be central to our genealogy. It is here where we land at a very, extremely broad outline of the two ends.

So if Hegel was, as we know, a man who had a nuanced relationship with the French revolutionary fervour, praising its heralding of reason and the seeing it as larger revealing of the Idea which, similar to Marx’s teleology of communism, was central to his ideas of his Reason, then how was he in any way appealing to the reactionary, and somewhat anti-Revolutionary philosopher? For this, we begin with Taine.

Taine, for all his greatness, had one primary motivating flaw which contributed to his later obscurity. From Taine we can see the earliest major forms of modern anti French Revolutionary thought— in The French Right, J.S. McClelland introduces Taine briefly,

“Taine is on the edge. He is an irrationalist, but not an anti-rationalist. He recognizes the value of reason, but also sees its limitations.” (p. 23). McClelland, J. S., and John Frears. The French Right: (From De Maistre to Maurras). Cape, 1970.

Now, hold onto this little epitaph of sorts, as we turn to Hegel. Hegel, veered from the sense of reason and man found in the Revolution. He focused heavily on history— broadly, he considered all human activity to be the sum of history, or defined by their history. As such, to understand the character of an epoch, a people, you must understand and acknowledge its history. This is the first break from the French Left radicalist view of people as a sum of their interactions— the famous tabula rasa. In this manner, Hegel had already begun a theory of societies which was based on its history, rejecting an idea of a blank slate individualistic, or atomistic theory of person. To Hegel, his Reason was something grasped by a continuation of history and becoming, not by individuals. The primary point of his philosophy of history was, however, its tendency toward a teleology based upon the Geist, which guided toward a process of the Idea (his Reason) revealing itself through the process. To Hegel, the guiding force— Geist— served to move the revelation of the Idea— through the becoming.

In Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, delivered in the University of Berlin, he said,

“[it is] our belief, that Reason governs the world, and has consequently governed its history.” (Introduction, Section III Philosophical History, p. 26) Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831, and John Sibree. Lectures On the Philosophy of History. London: G. Bell and sons, 1881.

Thus, we turn back to Taine and his hostility toward rationality. Taine’s hostility toward reason drew him to a distinction of two reasons, which he called the raison raisonnante and the raison qui s’ignore. The first reason is our most familiar reason, that which operates according to logic and seeks to be as refined as mathematical models. The second, however, is not reason at all in the way we understand— McClelland again offers us a valuable insight into its nature,

“The raison qui s’ignore is not reason at all in the first sense, at least not in Taine or Burke. It refers to wisdom, the accumulated wisdom of the ages which is slowly deposited in institutions. The philosopher has access to it, but the method of access differs from the method used in the first kind of reasoning in that it does not involve deduction from premises but an empathetic research into history, geography, literature and myth. The forces with which the philosopher may have to deal if he is to find out what it is may be unconscious.” (p. 23). McClelland, J. S., and John Frears. The French Right: (From De Maistre to Maurras). Cape, 1970.

This bears a striking resemblance to our Hegelian philosophy of history, his raison qui s’ignore appears to be quite similar to Hegel’s understanding of the Idea. Taine’s relationship to Hegel is of no surprise, as he, very early on, showed an attraction toward Hegel’s metaphysics. He only disdained its approach to rationalism.

In Maurice Barres’ novel Les Deracines, a major theme permeates the entirety— to Barres, there is no self-deduced system of relationships like morality or the State or society. There is no conscious rationality which arrives at these, like Taine’s raison raisonnante. To Barres, such is absurd. For him, these are the result of a certain kind of determinism which he labels nationalism. And to him, nationalism is the raison qui s’ignore. Or, more precisely, the myth of nationalism, which I’ll return to. Barres’ determinism, guided by his formulation of the raison qui s’ignore, arrives at how the history of a nation informs its present circumstances. Barres then gives us the very radical notion that all systems can be only properly found in the history of a people, and not be self-deduced through some logic or rationality, as the French revolutionaries attempted, when they organised the State and society.

Back to understanding this new conception of the Idea, and the Geist, and such, we ask what exactly is it, in this new framework, with and to what does it lead if not Hegel’s Idea, in its precise sense? We return to Marx; I made the rather controversial connection that Marx’s assertion that communism is a logical unfolding of the contradictions of capitalism— and thus that the contradictions of capitalism are explained through their roles in the advent of communism— and is a teleology similar to that of Hegel’s Geist. Though admittedly dubious, in Marx and Teleology by Sean Sayer, he notes,

“According to Althusser, these Hegelian formulae [present in the Grundrisse Notebook I, page 158, Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Penguin Books, 1973.] and Marx’s humanism are unavoidably teleological. They are cases of what Althusser calls the philosophy of “origin and end,” for they presume the notion of a “subject” present at the outset and continuing through- out, which embodies the end. The process of development is then the realization of an end that has been operative in the subject from the beginning.” (p. 46) Sayers, Sean. “Marx and teleology.” Science & Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis, vol. 83, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 37–63, https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2019.83.1.37.

The purpose of this comparison is that it’ll explain how Sorel, by reorienting this notion of the “subject”, was driven to his myth. Sorel, a marxist, or at least intimately aligned with Marxism, felt that the myth was the force which drove history forward while itself being revealed in the process of history.

“Sorel is specific in his advocacy of myth, but in Maurras and Barrés there is an implied use of myth. For Barrés, the real France of the provincial graveyards is a mythology; it may not have existed in the past, but it points the way to action in the present.” (p. 33) McClelland, J. S., and John Frears. The French Right: (From De Maistre to Maurras). Cape, 1970.

In this way, Hegel’s conception of societies as entities which were defined by their histories, larger than the individual interactions which made it up, and partook in a teleological relationship with some metaphysical Geist and the Idea, was foundational in the romantic nationalism of the Action Française and broader Far Right thinking.

Barres, in his work De Hegel aux cantines du Nord, in Chapter One, offers a pretty succinct and strong support for a genealogy of Hegel in this regard,

“It is well known that according to Hegel’s admirable dialectic, the Idea cannot be manifested in a particular fact or individual. The Idea is immanent only in a succession of phenomena moving towards the infinite… we now know how to follow the historical development of the nations; we now understand what has gone before; and more, we respect that development… and that the truth of a thing consists in its place in the total scheme of things.” (p. 22) Barrès, Maurice. De Hegel Aux Cantines Du Nord. E. Sansot et Cie , 1904.

For Barres, who we will label a proto-fascist, he is that primary fountain of intellect for which the fascist gets his intoxicated romantic sense of nationalism, and this revolutionary Idea of the Nation— which truly is mere myth, it does not matter if such a France or Germany ever existed, only that it exists in myth and in the people. You’ll hear fascists and fascist rhetoric follow with an idea of “revitalising the Nation.” Usually it comes with a deeply nostalgic sense for that old, ancient Great Nation. Such a thing does not exist, but is what guides forth. Such ideas of palingenesis are very well documented by historians of fascism; Barres writes for us in his Scenes et Doctrines du Nationalisme, connecting his Nation to the Idea,

“Our thoughts are not the products of our own individual intelligence; they are the physiological translations of primeval physiological dispositions.” (p. 17) Barrès, Maurice, 1862-1923. Scènes Et Doctrines Du Nationalisme. Paris: Émile-Paul, 1902.

By this he means that the thoughts of the nation are themselves— through the process of history— the primeval Nation revealing itself in history, in the creation of the Nation, in the creation of the people. The truth of Nation consists in its place in the total scheme of the development of the Nation. Immanent in the succession of history, and informing its development. Again, the Nation is the Idea, and its Geist, its consciousness and force.

Integral to the Right Wing was the preservation of the Nation, which, in practicality, was the status quo, or what it was mythicised to be. Hegel’s preface to the Philosophy of the Right was integral in the rationale:

“What is rational is real; And what is real is rational.” (p. xxvii) Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831, and Samuel Walters Dyde. Hegel's Philosophy of Right. London: G. Bell and sons, 1896.

This is expressed in subtlety by Barres’ notion of the raison qui s’ignore in the real ancestors, the dead.

“After the long, hard work of foraging, after a subtle and profound search, I found the gushing source in my little garden… Thus it seems to me that the individual is bound to all his dead ancestors by the efforts and sacrifices of individuals in the past.” (p. 11) Barrès, Maurice, 1862-1923. Scènes Et Doctrines Du Nationalisme. Paris: Émile-Paul, 1902.

We focused a great deal on Barres, and this is for good reason: Barres takes Hegel and plants us into a nationalism and sense of history which follows by the Nation into the Nation— to him, the nebulous of France as an ought-to-be, and as how-it-was. Barres’ sensibilities were no obscure ideas to the French nationalists of the twentieth century, and he was a strong ideological undercurrent of his contemporary thinkers such as Charles Maurras, who later would be a significant figure of the Nouvelle Droite. The Nouvelle Droite, would become the fountain source of all the Far Right since then, and its ideology survives and thrives in the fringes of radicalism on the Right, the extremes, the Far. Though Hegel as a source of ideology is no longer praised nor considered, Hegel was integral to the development of the very particular doctrines of the Far Right, and Fascism.

I will finish off the marginalia with Barres’ notes on Philosophy,