What Might Hegel Think Is Crucially Missing in Our Civic Culture?

• In Event: Community and Cohesion in German Political Thought

Abstract

I try to initiate reflection on how Hegel’s political philosophizing might bear on the massive political problem of our time: today’s crisis of liberal constitutional democracy. On all sides we hear and feel that our liberal constitutional democracies confront an “ideological” or “educational” challenge: a need to elaborate better the normative grounds, the arguments, for the superior choice-worthiness of liberal democratic constitutionalism. But on all sides there is the awareness that we are not meeting this challenge—that our public philosophers and public philosophies are failing us. In his lectures late in life on the philosophy of world-history and on the philosophy of religion Hegel expresses most concretely his perspective on the challenges facing political and social life in what he characterizes as the “last stage of world-history.” His animadversions have two related but distinct foci: on one hand, the political power of majorities voting as “atomized” individuals; on the other hand, the irrationality and/or the weakness of the religious consciousness discernible even within the historically most advanced populations. We are unlikely to discover any clear immediate prescriptions; we may instead only come to understand better how distant we have become from Hegel’s vision of a truly rational civic culture. Indeed, we may only learn that our crisis is even more grave because more profound than we previously supposed. But precisely thereby, we may be provoked to educative, self-critical reflection, as we listen to an alien sage’s suggestions of forgotten and obscured but deep sources and dimensions of today’s crisis of liberal democracy. By the same token, to be sure, we may come to judge Hegel’s political vision as having been way too idealistic.

Author

• Thomas L. Pangle, University of Texas at Austin