The Philosophy of Conservatism
 | Roger Scruton, Ph.D. Reading: Hegel, Philosophy of Right. One of the enduring questions of political philosophy concerns the foundation of political obligation. We have obligations that hold the body politic in place: for instance, we are obliged to obey the law, to defend our country (but what is a ‘country’?), to uphold the fundamental institutions of our society and to refrain from subversion. What grounds these obligations, and to what thing or person are they owed? It seems reasonable to say that they are owed to the state, until we ask what a state is, when the only answer seems to be ‘a community organized politically’, i.e. organized by shared political obligations. Do we then owe these things to each other? But then who are we, and where are the boundaries at which our obligations expire? Liberal thinkers have tended to look for an answer to those questions in theories of the social contract. We imagine people assembled to decide on their future: how should they be governed, and under what code of law? They then agree on a contract, to accept some particular structure of law and government provided others accept it too. The resulting order is founded in a mutual promise, whereby each person undertakes to obey the law and conform to the basic expectations, on condition that all others do likewise. The obligations thereby created are owed by each person to the whole of his fellows: they are not obligations to the state but obligations arising from a contract among members of society. There
are two deep problems with that view. First, it assumes one thing that it ought
to be proving: namely a condition of mutual dependence. The theory of the
social contract begins from a thought-experiment, in which a group of people
gather together to decide on their common future. But if they are in a position
to decide on their common future, it is because they already have one: because
they recognize their mutual togetherness and reciprocal dependence, which makes
it incumbent upon them to settle how they might be governed under a common
jurisdiction in a common territory. Otherwise how do they determine who is to
be a beneficiary of the contract and who is excluded? In short, the social
contract requires a relation of membership, and one, moreover, which makes it
plausible for the individual members to conceive the relation between them in
contractual terms. Theorists of the social contract write, in the manner of
John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, as
though it presupposes only the first-person singular of free rational choice.
In fact it presupposes a first-person plural, in which the burdens of belonging
have already been assumed. Even if we accept a social-contract theory of
political order, therefore, we must offer another account of the pre-political
order on which it depends. And that pre-political order will be fraught with
obligations – non-contractual obligations, which will be as much in need of a
foundation as the obligations that hold the political sphere in place. The
second deep problem concerns the rational choosers themselves. The social
contract presupposes a collection of people capable of binding themselves by
the obligations of a promise: and a promise of a very sophisticated kind, to
conform to institutions and to obey laws. How did they acquire those
capacities, and the rational understanding needed to exercise them? Built into
the concepts of promising, legality, institution and obligation is a deep
history of social interaction, which is not accidentally connected with the
condition towards which it leads. In effect, by supposing that you could found
political obligation on a promise the
social contract theory is already supposing a community of people bound by
shared moral, political and legal understandings. Outside political society
there is no such thing as a contract. Hegel’s
approach. Hegel’s thinking is rooted in post-Kantian
philosophy, and is notorious both for its ambitious scope and its
self-confident fallacies. In order to
understand his approach to politics we need to focus on two features of his
thinking: first his particular way of answering the question ‘what is x?’ in
terms of a dialectical story, which reads like a story of x’s origins; secondly
his ‘layered’ view of the human person. Hegel’s ‘dialectic’ is really a way of
using temporal metaphors to spell out a logical argument. Logical relations
appear in Hegel as processes, since
for him the ‘unfolding’ of a concept is also the growth of spirit (Geist) into self-awareness. It achieves
this self-awareness in us; but it is greater than us, and in its final, fully
realized form, as Idea, comprehends the whole of the universe. Hegel’s
philosophy plots the evolution of the ‘concept’ of being towards that final
God-like condition. The evolution is not a temporal one: temporal order is
itself to be explained in terms of the order of concepts, which is eternal. But
we can spell it out in temporal terms, speaking of the ‘unfolding’ of a
concept, by way of revealing the many archeological layers, so to speak, which
lie buried within its final ‘realized’ form. Hegel believes that concept-application
exhibits a peculiar triadic structure, which he calls the ‘dialectic’ (from
Kant’s Dialectic, in the Critique of Pure
Reason). All thought involves the application of a concept, and the first
‘version’ (or ‘moment’) of any concept is abstract.
In trying to grasp reality, I begin by applying some abstract conception to it:
such as ‘object’ or ‘thing’. I then acquire a more ‘determinate’ grasp, by
understanding the inadequacies of this abstract conception; and so arrive at a
more ‘determinate’ idea. But this determinate idea wars with the abstract idea,
with which it is, in a certain sense, in contradiction. Out of this conflict a
new concept is born, one which is ‘truer’ than the first, both in making finer
discriminations, and in presenting a more complete picture of reality. Hegel
puts the point thus: 1. First moment: a concept is applied, but
it is abstract, ‘immediate’ and therefore without concrete sense. 2. Second moment: the abstract concept is
negated, or limited, by the attempt to apply it to a real ‘object’. It becomes
‘divided against itself’. 3. The conflict between the abstract and
the negated onception is resolved by an intellectual ‘transcendence’ (Aufhebung), to a ‘truer’ conception that
embodies both, and which is more determinate or concrete. As
an idealist, Hegel believed that the structure of the dialectic (which is the
fundamental structure of thought) is also mirrored in objective reality.
Everything in our world achieves reality by passing from an ‘abstract and
immediate’ condition to a fully determinate and realized condition, which shows
what it truly is. This is true of the
individual; it is true too of society. And perhaps the most important
contribution of the Hegelian method to political thought lies in this
insistence that we become what we
truly are, through realizing
ourselves, and that this process of self-realization involves conflicts and
their overcoming. The same is true too of institutions. And in the last
analsysis, the self-realization of the free individual and the perfection of
the institutions that contain him are not two processes but one. Master
and Slave. Hegel describes the process of
self-realization in his Phenomenology of
Spirit, which lays the foundations for a comprehensive theory of how the
individual achieves self-consciousness, autonomy and freedom in the world of
others. The political details are added later in The Philosophy of Right. It
is useful to look at Hegel’s argument concerning master and slave in the Phenomenology. Hegel envisages spirit on
its venture from abstract immediacy (knowing nothing, wanting everything)
towards self-determination (Selbstbestimmung,
a word with many overtones). The venture takes the form of the dialectic,
oppositions constantly transcended, as spirit rises to ever higher levels, each
level incorporating the reality of the one before. At one point Hegel confronts
the problem of desire: which must be desire for
something, and which therefore ‘posits’ its object as independent of itself.
This fatal step is like the ‘fall’, as described in Genesis. In pursuing the object of desire the self opens itself to
opposition, and is soon engaged in that ‘life and death’ struggle with the
other through which we come to understand the world as something independent of
our own will – something inherently resistant to our demands on it. The outcome
of this struggle is the mastery of one party over the other: the one who
prefers life to honour becomes slave to the one who his prepared to sacrifice
his life for honour’s sake. The
master now has power to extort labour from the slave, and so satisfy his
appetites without the expenditure of will. With leisure, however, comes the
atrophy of the will: the world ceases to be understood as a resistant object,
against which the subject must act and in terms of which he must strive to
define himself. Leisure collapses into lassitude; the otherness of the world
becomes veiled, and the subject loses his self-definition, lacking the
essential contrast with which to focus his will. He sinks back into inertia,
and his ‘freedom’ turns into a kind of hallucination. The master can acquire no
sense of the value of what he desires through observing the activity of his
slave. For the slave, in his master’s eyes, is merely a means, who has no end
of his own. (Here we see a reminiscence of Schiller’s argument about play.) The
situation of the slave is quite different, Although his will is chained, it is
not destroyed. He remains active towards the world, and while acting at the
command of his master, he nevertheless bestows his labour on objects and
realizes his identity through them. He makes the world in his own image, even
if not for his own use. Hence he differentiates himself from its otherness and
discovers his identity through labour. Although treated as a means, he is able
to develop a clear conception of his ends and the will to make those ends his
own. His inner freedom intensifies in proportion to the master’s lassitude,
until such a time as he rises up and enslaves the master, only to suffer the
master’s fate. This
dialectical opposition is ‘overcome’ (aufgehoben)
only when master and slave rise above the instrumental view of each other, and
learn to treat each other as ends in themselves: the Kantian categorical
imperative is a resolution of conflict at this pre-autonomous level. By obeying
it the parties emerge into the world of autonomous choice, learning to respect
each other as fellow members of a public sphere of responsibility. That
argument is more a parable than a piece of logical thinking; its infuence over
19th century thought is without compare, though who knows exactly
what it means? It points however to an interesting perspective on the problems
of political order. On the Hegelian view, there is no such thing as the
autonomous agent able to make fundamental life-choices and existing outside the
society to which he opts to belong. The autonomous agent emerges from a history of ‘self-determination’, whereby he acquires
his freedom and self-consciousness. And this history inescapably binds him in
obligations, institutional practices, and forms of life through which his
autonomy is ‘actualized’. The subject becomes a free subject only by realizing
himself in institutions. This is the process of Ent?usserung – the ‘making outer’ of what can become conscious of
itself only when it finds itself in objective form. If
you take that idea seriously, Hegel thought, then you will see that the liberal
conceptions of both the individual and the state are non-starters. Political
archeology. The Hegelian parables, about ‘moments of
consciousness’, all have a single form: the abstract and immediate is opposed
to the determinate and mediated, and the opposition between the two compels a
transcendence to a higher level of consciousness in which that opposition is
overcome. But this new consciousness is itself a partial one, which has its own
internal conflict of the same kind. In
the realm of institutions the same story can be told. Again, don’t think of
this as a history of institutions. It
is a kind of analysis, showing the concealed structure within them, the
different layers of organization which are presupposed in the final order of
things. Thus Hegel thinks that ‘ethical life’ (Sittlichkeit) is itself a resolution of a deep opposition between
the demands of abstract right (the abstract system which conveys the a priori
laws of rational choice) and morality (the concrete duties of civil life, as
these emerge from my immersion in a given community). And Sittlichkeit in turn has its ‘moments’, which follow the logic of
the dialectic, and which are the hidden layers within institutions. Hegel
himself cautions against the temporal reading of his dialectical parables. Here
is a quotation from the Encyclopedia,
addition to section 408. (The Encyclopedia
was Hegel’s (unfinished) attempt in later life to bring his entire system
together.):
The
need for tripartite divisions – immediate (abstract), determinate (divided),
leading to a transcendence into a higher unity – is internal to Hegel’s system,
and we just have to accept that, and see what light he can cast, in spite of
it, on the internal logic of institutions. In particular, what light can he
cast on political obligation? A likely result of Hegel’s theory will be that
political obligation arises at several levels, has different foundations at
each level, and is in every case not prior to, but constituted by, the
institutions through which it is expressed. This is what we find. There
is also an important dramatic
dimension to the dialectic. Everything begins, for Hegel, from a kind of
primordial unity, a oneness with itself which, because it is ‘abstract’,
involves no knowledge of itself. It then divides from itself, becomes objective
to itself, outside itself, alienated, precisely in order that it should be
known to itself. But in this ‘alienated’ form it is divided against itself,
like mankind after the fall. The Aufhebung
comes when the opposition is overcome in a higher unity, a unity conscious of
itself as such, which is also a kind of redemption or homecoming from the fall.
The use of religious language here is not accidental. That drama comes from
Fichte, and was inherited from Hegel by Marx, who gave it another application
(in purely ‘material’ terms), but who retained some of its religious
significance. How seriously should we take this kind of thing now? Is it just
poetry, or does it have a bearing on the world as it is? Family. The dialectic requires Hegel to discover a
threefold division with political order, corresponding to the three ‘moments’
through which every concept unfolds. This sometimes looks arbitrary, but here
it is extremely fruitful, since it leads to the recognition of three very
important truths: that obligations within the family are of a different kind
from those in civil society; that there is a real distinction between civil
society and state; and that obligations to the state are not to be understood
as the obligations of civil society are understood, as freely contracted. Hegel’s
target is not merely the contractual vision of the state, as proposed by
liberal theory, but also the instrumental view of the state, and of human
institutions generally, as this was gaining influence in The
sphere of the family is the sphere of ‘primary relations’, as the sociologists
describe them, or ‘attachment’ as the psychologists tend to put it. For Hegel
it is the sphere of piety – the pietas
of the Romans, which was symbolized in the penates
or household gods. What he meant by this was a kind of unchosen obligation – an
obligation that arrives as a destiny, which is implicated in the very being of
the person on whose shoulders it falls. You do not undertake obligations of this kind, as you undertake the
obligations of a promise. (Cf Searle’s argument about ‘is’ and ‘ought’.) You
are born into them. They are ‘immediate’ in the very real sense that they are
not founded on any process of thinking or active engagement. They have a sacred
(or ‘sacral’) character, as is well brought out in the Greek tragedies (to
which Hegel often refers, especially in his great analysis of the Antigone in the Phenomenology and elsewhere.) And this sacral character is
contained in marriage itself, which Hegel describes as a ‘substantial tie’,
which begins in a contract, but is the foundation of non-contractual
obligations that cannot be spelled out as ‘terms’. (This may not be true of
marriage today: but that is because marriage today is, for the Hegelian, a
different kind of relation, which only accidentally bears the same name.) The
point of Hegel’s analysis of the family is to show that the autonomous
individual comes into the world already encumbered by obligations of a
non-contractual kind. If we value autonomy, therefore, we must give credence to
the non-contractual obligation as one of its preconditions. Moreover, the
family offers a perfect picture of the primal innocence from which all
dialectical processes begin, and also of the ‘fall’ into alienation to which
they inevitably lead. This fall comes about as the adolescent separates himself
from the family and strives to define himself in opposition to it, by asserting
his freedom, repudiating those unchosen obligations of kinship in favour of the
freely chosen obligations that bind stranger to stranger in the larger world.
Thus is born the sphere of ‘civil society’. Civil
Society. The family is a sphere of primal unity;
civil society a sphere of separation and striving. This is the sphere of the
individual, who has moved out of the protection afforded by the home and is
freely contracting the ties of friendship and commerce that will mark his path
through this sphere of strangers. Hegel takes the same kind of view of civil
society as Adam Smith. It is not the object of a contract, but the by-product
of local contracts and consensual arrangements, whereby people achieve by
negotiation what they could never achieve by force. It is the product of the
‘invisible hand’, and its fundamental ingredient is private property. Hegel
gives various arguments at various stages for a right of private property, most
of them downstream from Locke’s original idea of the ‘mixing of labour’. For
Hegel private property is a fundamental part of the Selbstbestimmung of the individual – the way in which he gives
objective form to his claims as an individual,
precisely by imprinting his individuality on objects, and so including them in
the sphere of the self – as mine. The
details here are fascinating, and even if the arguments aren’t water-tight,
they have a poetic persuasiveness that caused Marx to spend a lifetime in
opposing them. ‘Civil
society’ is b?rgerliche Gesellschaft
in German, a phrase that could also be translated as ‘bourgeois society’,
though that now has quite different implications. Hegel is thinking rather of
the Roman idea of civility, which is the virtue of the citizen, the free being
who arrranges his place in the world by his free undertakings. From these free
undertakings emerge the ‘corporations’ which form the back-bone of civil
society and endow it with its distinctive ethos. Law
emerges spontaneously from civil society, as the instrument whereby agreements
are upheld, the consensual order defended, and the corporations protected from
invasion by private interests. Yet the law requires the state as legislator and
enforcer, so that the sphere of civil society inevitably ‘over-reaches’ itself,
and is aufgehoben in the sphere of
the state. State. Although civil society is a sphere of
contract, it is not founded on a contract. Rather, it is the arena of
spontaneous institution-building, in which obligations are undertaken not to
itself but to its members (hence the ‘invisible hand’). Still less is it true
to say that the state is founded on a
social contract. Just as marriage and the family cannot be construed in
contractual terms, so is it ‘equally
far from the truth to ground the nature of the State on the contractual
relation, whether the State is supposed to be a contract of one with all, or of
all with the monarch and the government the intrusion of this contractual
relation, and of relationships concerning private property generally, into the
relation between the individual and the State, has been productive of the
greatest confusion in both constitutional law and public life.’ (Philosophy of Right, section 75.) Hegel
sees political obligation, therefore, as fundamentally non-contractual – a
recuperation at the self-conscious level of the pietas that binds the family. Our obligations to the state are not
founded in a contractual relation between us and it, or in a concption of its
utility. The state is not a means to our personal ambitions, but an end in
itself. In fact it is a person, in both the legal sense (see the class on law),
and in the moral sense. It has agency, will, answerability, identity through
time. It forms plans, entertains reasons – which may be good or bad – and takes
responsibility for its actions. The state is a person in its completed or realized form. Hegel describes the
personal states as ‘the actuality of the ethical idea’ (section 257). By this
he means that it both embodies and upholds the ideal of free personal
existence, which is in turn the realization of the individual through ethical
life. (In the modern world, there are states which are impersonal, as in the
Soviet system, i.e. which are unaccountable and without real agency of their
own. These are deviant (unrealized) examples. And they illustrate what Hegel is
getting at: for the state to realize itself as a person and for the citizen to
realize himself as a free individual are not two processes but one. The
unfreedom of the Soviet subject is one with the impersonality of the Soviet
state.) What
are the rights of the state and what are its duties? It has the right of
obedience, and also the right to punish, the right to demand the ultimate
sacrifice in its own defence and so on. But it has serious deuties too,
including that of looking after the welfare of its citizens – Hegel was an
early defender of the welfare state, since his non-contractual view of
political obligation led to his seeing the state as assuming some of the duties of the family.
State and civil society must be distingushed: if they are confused then we begin to think of the ‘interest of the individuals as the ultimate end of their association’, in which case membership of the state comes to seem like something optional. (Section 258.) In other words, the state loses its character as an end in itself and becomes a disposable means. This way of thinking loosens the ties of political obligtion, exposes the state to subversion, and replaces the ties of citizenship and sovereignty with relations of interest – the ‘market state’ as Philip Bobbitt has described it (The Shield of Achilles). Bobbitt tells us that humanity is evolving inexorably in the direction of the market state, in which the bond between citizen and state is conceived not as a hereditary obligation like that of family or tribe, but as a freely chosen contract, in which the state is expected to deliver benefits (security, prosperity, and other secular goods) in return for obedience. There is an element of truth in this - which is that, when people believe that this is so, it becomes so. But the mass of mankind doesn’t believe it. Ordinary people live by unchosen loyalties, and Hegel’s view is that only when these are lifted from the ‘abstract’ sphere of family and tribe, to the self-conscious decision-making sphere of the state, do they offer protection to individual freedom, and permit civil society to grow beneath their roof. There is something very persuasive here, but how exactly should it be phrased?
The The dialectic tells us that both family and civil society are contained within the state and realized through it. Without the state neither can achieve fruition, so as to become what they truly are. The state emerges from the organic life of family and civil society in something like the way the rational self emerges from the life of a human being. It is the decision-making, law-imposing, right and duty-bearing part of the arrangement; without it the order of society is in some way merely accidental, without consciousness of itself, exposed to predations from private interest. The state is rightly treated as an end in itself, since it is a person, bound by and with the benefit of the categorical imperative which tells us to treat rational beings always as ends in themselves. (That is a striking thought!) Although it might be shaped by a constitution, this constitution ‘should not be regarded as something made, even though it has come into being in time. It must be treated rather as something simply existent in and by itself, as divine therefore, and constant, and so as exalted above the sphere of things that are made’. (Section 273.) That echoes thoughts of De Maistre, and is again a very striking claim. Hegel is exhorting us not to meddle in the identity, continuity or origins of the state, to see it always as something ‘given’, with the same given-ness as human life. It is founded on loyalties which are also ‘given’, and which would dissolve if ever we thought of them as contracted for (in the manner of Bobbitt). Hegel was not a democrat, although he advocated representative government, meaning government answerable to the citizens. Always he tries to rewrite the relationship between state and citizen as a form of inter-personal relationship, in which each grants the autonomy of the other. This is an extremely fruitful idea. He has been accused of deifying the state; his defenders would say that he humanizes it, by bringing it into the sphere of inter-personal relations. Pre-political
order. Even if we reject the details of Hegel’s theory, one of its themes is of lasting importance to us, and that is the theme of pre-political order. If it is true that political obligation is non-contractual, and depends on unchosen loyalties that arise independently of the instruments of government, then what kind of pre-political order best serves the needs of a modern state? Hegel can be seen as attempting an answer to that question, and proposing the nation state – i.e. the state founded in a sense of nationhood – as his solution to the problem of modern politics. The nation state emerged in Europe as a perceived solution to the religious wars that had blighted the continent in the wake of the Reformation; it offered a political order in which religion would be discounted in favour of a shared attachment to the soil. But its foundation lies deeper than the needs of seventeenth-century government. All the ways in which people come to define their identity in terms of the place where they belong have a part to play in cementing the sense of nationhood. For example, the common law of the Anglo-Saxons, in which laws emerge from the resolution of local conflicts, rather than being imposed by the sovereign, has had a large part to play in fostering the English (and subsequently American) sense that the law is the common property of all who reside within its jurisdiction rather than the creation of priests, bureaucrats or kings. A shared language and shared curriculum have a similar effect in making familiarity, proximity and day-to-day custom into sources of common loyalty. The essential thing about nations is that they grow from below, through habits of free association among neighbours, and result in loyalties that are firmly attached to a place and its history, rather than to a religion, a dynasty, a family or a tribe. A
nation state is a form of customary order, the by-product of human
neighbourliness, shaped by an ‘invisible hand’ from the countless agreements
between people who speak the same language and live side by side. It results
from compromises established after many conflicts, and expresses the slowly
forming agreement among neighbours both to grant each other space and to
protect that space as common territory. It depends on localised customs and a
shared routine of tolerance. Its law is territorial rather than religious and invokes no source of authority
higher than the In upholding the nation state we are expressly discounting religion as the source of pre-political loyalty. We are affirming territory and the secular law in the place of all obligations of a tribal, familial or religious kind. And many conservatives therefore agree with Hegel, in seeing the nation state as the necessary precondition of a free society (a society which would also be ‘the actuality of the ethical idea’). |