Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

HEGEL, GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH

(1770–1831), leading nineteenth-century philosopher.

Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel was one of the most influential idealist philosophers of the nineteenth century. In German philosophical thought, Hegel was rivaled in his own times perhaps only by Immanuel Kant.

Hegel developed a sweeping spectrum of thought embracing metaphysics, epistemology, logic, historiography, science, art, politics, and society. One branch of his philosophy after his death was reworked and fashioned into an "algebra of revolution," as developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Russian Marxists and socialists, and later by Vladimir I. Lenin, the founder of Bolshevism.

For Hegel, reality, which progresses dynamically through a process, or phases, of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—his triadic concept of logic, inspired

by the philosophy of Heraclitus—is essentially spiritual. Ultimate, determinant reality, according to Hegel, is the absolute World Spirit (Weltgeist ). This spirit acts in triadic, dialectical fashion universally throughout world history. For Hegel, the state was the principal embodiment, or bearer, of this process.

Because of its occasional obscurity and complexity, Hegelianism as a social and political philosophy soon split into various, contrasting branches. The primary ones were the extremes widely known as Right and Left Hegelianism. There was also a middle, or moderate, form of Hegelianism that in some ways influenced English, Italian, American, and other branches of late-nineteenth-century idealism and pragmatism.

Right (or Old) Hegelianism regarded reality more or less passively, as indubitably rational. Whatever is real is rational, as seen in the status quo. Spirit, it alleged, develops on a grand, world scale via the inexorable, dialectical processes of history. Wherever this process leads must be logical since spirit is absolute and triadically law-bound. In the milieu of contrasting European politics of the nineteenth century, Right Hegelianism translated into reactionary endorsement of restorationism (restoring the old order following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars) or support for monarchist legitimacy.

By contrast, however, Left (or Young) Hegelianism, which influenced a number of thinkers, including Marx and Engels together with Russian Marxists and socialists, stressed the idea of grasping and understanding, even wielding, this law-bound process. It sought thereby to manipulate reality, above all, via society, politics, and the state. For revolutionaries, the revolutionary movement became such a handle, or weapon.

Hegel had taught that there was an ultimate reality and that it was spiritual. However, when the young, materialist-minded Marx, under the influence of such philosophers as Feuerbach, absorbed Hegel, he "turned Hegel upside down," to use his collaborator Friedrich Engels's apt phrase. While retaining Hegelian logic and the historical process of the triadic dialectic, Marx, later Engels, and still later Lenin, saw the process in purely nonspiritual, materialistic, historical, and socioeconomic terms. This became the ideology, or science, of historical materialism and dialectical materialism as embraced by the Russian Marxist George Plekhanov and, thence, by Lenin—but in an interpretation of the ideology different from Plekhanov's.

In the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin interpretation of Left Hegelianism, historical change, the motor of history as determined by the forces and processes within the given social and economic system, is law-bound and strictly predictable. As presented in historical materialism, the history of societies develops universally by stages—namely, from slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism, and finally to socialism, whose final stage is full-fledged communism.

Each stage, except the merged last two (socialism/communism), contains the seeds of its own destruction (or "contradictions") as the dialectical process of socioeconomic development spirals upward to the next historical stage. For instance, capitalism's antithesis is seen in the seeds of its own destruction together with the anticipation of the new synthesis of socialism/communism. Such seeds, said the Marxists, are capitalism's impoverishment of a majority of the exploited population, overproduction, unemployment, class struggle, economic collapse, and, inevitably, revolution.

Progressive elements of the former, capitalist order are then continued in new form in the final, socialist/communist phase. This assumes the form of industrialization, mass production, a just sociopolitical order (under a workers' dictatorship of the proletariat). In this formulation the Marxists developed the theory of base and superstructure. The base is the economic system; the superstructure are such facets of society as government, laws, religion, literature, and the arts. The superstructure both reflects and rationalizes the base.

Ultimately, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, state power, as described in the Marxist Critique of the Gotha Program, gradually withers away. The society is thence led into the final epoch of communism. In this final stage, a virtual millennium, there are no classes, no socioeconomic inequality, no oppression, no state, no law, no division of labor, but instead pure equality, communality, and universal happiness. Ironically, in contrast to Marx's formulation, the ultimate phase in Hegel's own interpretation of the dialectic in history was the Prussian state.

In Lenin's construction of Marxism, Hegelianism was given an extreme left interpretation. This is seen, among other places, in Lenin's "Philosophical Notebooks." In this work Lenin gives his own interpretation of Hegel. He indicates here and in other writings that absolute knowledge of the inevitable historical process is attainable—at least by those equipped to find it scientifically.

The leaders of the impending proletarian revolution, Lenin says in his 1903 work, What Is to Be Done?, become a select circle of intellectuals whose philosophy (derived from Marx and Hegel) equips them to assume exclusive Communist Party leadership of the given country. Lenin could imagine that such knowledge might allow a nation's (namely, Russia's) socioeconomic development to skip intermediate socioeconomic phases, or at least shorten them. In this way, the Russian Bolsheviks could lead the masses to the socialist/communist stage of development all but directly. This could be accomplished by reducing or suppressing the phase of bourgeois capitalism. (This Leninist interepretation of the dialectic has been criticized by other Marxists as running counter to Hegel's, and Marx's, own explanations of the dialectic.)

Thus, in Lenin's interpretation of Hegel and Marx, the dictatorship of the proletariat becomes the leader and teacher of society, the single indoctrinator whose absolute power (based on the people) saves the masses from the abuses of the contradictions of capitalist society, whether in rural or urban society, while guiding society to the final, communist phase.

See also: dialectical materialism; engels, friedrich; lenin, vladimir ilich; marxism

bibliography

Gregor, A. James. (1995). "A Survey of Marxism." In The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hegel, Georg Wilhem Friedrich. (1967). The Philosophy of Right. Oxford: Clarendon.

Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. (1962). Selected Works. 2 vols. Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub. House.

Possony, Stefan T. (1966). Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary. London: Allen & Unwin.

Tucker, Robert C. (1972). Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Weeks, Albert L. (1968). The First Bolshevik: A Political Biography of Peter Tkachev. New York: New York University Press.

Albert L. Weeks