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PHILOSOPHY

Talkin' about a Revolution

Johnny Lyons February 2025
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Talkin' about a Revolution

Hegel's World Revolutions, by Richard Bourke, Princeton University
Press, 344 pp, PS25, ISBN: 978-0691250182

Is human history 'a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing' or rather a heroic story of the inevitable
unfolding of human progress? Apart from professional optimists like
Steven Pinker, most of us might feel on safer ground with Macbeth's
verdict. The less sanguine view of our past as one damned thing after
another is more readily compatible with the currently lamentable
state of the world. At the time of writing this piece (early January
2025) it is yet to be announced by the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists how close to midnight we currently are on the Doomsday
clock. In January of last year the board members of the Bulletin,
which includes no less than eight Nobel scientists, judged that we
are as close as 90 seconds to self-destruction. The following trends
were cited to justify their unnervingly bleak diagnosis of our
situation:

The war in Ukraine and the widespread and growing reliance on nuclear
weapons increase the risk of nuclear escalation. China, Russia and
the United States are all spending huge sums to expand or modernise
their nuclear arsenals, adding to the ever-present danger of nuclear
war through mistake or miscalculation. In 2023, Earth experienced its
hottest year on record, and massive floods, wildfires and other
climate-related disasters affected millions of people around the
world. Meanwhile, rapid and worrisome developments in the life
sciences and other disruptive technologies accelerated, while
governments made only feeble efforts to control them. (https://
thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/)

The Bulletin assures us that 'the world can be made safer. The Clock
can move away from midnight.' Fair enough, but any honest reckoning
with global events in the last twelve months must conclude that the
only credible direction the Clock can move is forward and ever closer
to our annihilation.

How quickly humanity's fortunes can change. It seems like only the
day before yesterday that we convinced ourselves of having reached
history's glorious culmination following the collapse of the Soviet
Union and with it communism, and the triumph of Western liberal
democracy and its inseparable ally, capitalism. Back then it seemed
all that was left to do was iron out the remaining creases in our own
infallible political economy and export it to those parts of the
planet which had yet to see the neoliberal light.

In those halcyon days the Doomsday Clock was set a full seventeen
minutes shy of midnight - the members of the Bulletin board joyously
declared in 1991 that the revised setting 'reflects our optimism that
we are entering a new era'. Such shallow sunniness proved short-lived
however. By the noughties the clock had to be drastically reset
following the outbreak of 'the second nuclear age' and the belated
realisation that our planet is heating up due to our own activities.
While things fluctuated a little in the late noughties the clock has
drawn consistently nearer to midnight since 2010. One is left asking
how close must we get to Armageddon before the Doomsday Bulletin
fulfils the aim of one of its founding editors, Eugene Rabinowitch,
to finally 'frighten men into rationality'.

The likelihood that we might be frightened into rationality is
looking slimmer by the day. Moreover, there is increasing evidence
that we may well have passed the point of no return and are already
baked into a nightmare of our own making in which the planet will
become uninhabitable, and soon. And that's assuming we don't blow
ourselves up in thermonuclear smithereens before the 'natural' end of
our days.

A sobering prospect and one which suggests human history will end in
agony rather than neo-liberal ecstasy. But let's imagine for a moment
we have not yet passed the point of no return, and that we convince
ourselves of the need to radically change our ways for the good of
humanity and the rest of Mother Earth. What does humanity look like
when it is frightened into rationality? How would we think and behave
in such changed circumstances? All the late Eugene Rabinowitch had to
say on the matter was that the Bulletin's clock 'is intended to
reflect basic changes in the level of continuous danger in which
mankind lives in the nuclear age, and will continue living, until
society adjusts its basic attitudes and institutions'. That may well
be true, but would human society need to undergo a revolution before
being  prepared to accept and implement these requisite adjustments?
And what form would such a revolution have to take? Would it require
a clean and violent departure from the status quo or, alternatively,
an approach that builds a necessarily radical solution based on the
more progressive aspects of our current regime(s)? Is such a global
transformation even imaginatively possible, let alone politically and
economically feasible? These are hardly idle questions in our
currently drastic predicament.

There was a time when philosophers produced answers to such large and
important questions. Today the vast majority of them don't take any
professional interest in politics while those that do pursue the
subject in a way that would appear bizarre to their more capacious
and engaged predecessors. Most contemporary academic philosophers
tend to focus on a specific  branch of the subject, such as the
philosophy of mind or the philosophy of language, or on a certain
philosopher or school of philosophy, as for example Wittgenstein or
existentialism. The idea that philosophy is one integral whole has
fallen victim to the professionalisation of the subject as an
academic discipline, which means that its practitioners spend their
careers studying more and more about less and less. This pattern may
have proved pragmatically successful for the business of the
university but its effect on philosophy can hardly be viewed as a
happy one, even among those of us who don't entirely buy the idea of
some lost golden age when philosophy enjoyed the power to change the
world.

One of the great long-dead philosophers who emphatically did see
philosophy as one and sought to address the defining questions of his
day was the German thinker Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Unlike his
philosophical predecessors, Hegel argued that history provides the
key to answering the riddle of our existence. Before Hegel,
philosophers tended to regard humanity as fundamentally unchanging
even if they disagreed about what makes human beings tick. Hegel came
up with the revolutionary view that not only has human nature 
transformed radically and irreversibly over time but that this change
happens in a particular way and, most strikingly of all, forms part
of an underlying and profound purpose. The idea that history is 'a
tale told by an idiot' was, therefore, anathema to Hegel. He felt
there is a discernible and coherent pattern to human history and that
it is leading inevitably and progressively via a dialectical process
to a final and ultimately happy destination. 'The history of the
world', he famously declared, 'is none other than the progress of the
consciousness of freedom.'

Today, there is a tendency to adopt a Jekyll and Hyde attitude to
Hegel's view of human history. His idea that we are historically
conditioned all the way down is quite widely regarded as insightful
but his notion that we have been (and presumably still are)
travelling ineluctably towards full and free consciousness or Spirit
(Geist) is generally dismissed as ludicrous - though politicians are
not averse to invoking the Hegelian-like notion of the arc of history
when it suits their agenda. The main problem with this prevailing
impression of Hegel is that it stops us being curious about his
ideas, which are immeasurably more nuanced and instructive than the
caricature implies. And that brings us to the work under review,
Hegel's World Revolutions by Richard Bourke.

Bourke enjoys an international reputation as an intellectual
historian. Since graduating from University College Dublin and the
University of Cambridge, he has held teaching appointments and
fellowships at several prestigious academic institutions in Europe
and the US and is the current holder of the chair in the history of
political thought at the University of Cambridge. During this time he
has produced a steady stream of publications, including his own
monographs Romantic Discourse and Political Modernity (1993), Peace
in Ireland (2013), his seminal Empire and Revolution: The Political
Life of Edmund Burke (2015) as well as a series of books co-edited
with other eminent scholars on an a broad range of topics and themes
from popular sovereignty and political judgement to modern Irish
history and the political thought of the Irish revolution. At this
stage in his career a new book by Bourke must count as something of
an intellectual event, and particularly when the subject of his
latest offering is a thinker as ambitious and influential as Hegel.

Anyone who takes on Hegel knows they have their work cut out. He is
among the most complex, capacious and ambitious philosophers in the
history of Western thought. And unlike other comparable figures in
that tradition, such as Plato, Descartes or Hume, his style of
writing can be notoriously difficult - indeed one of the more
striking aspects of the book is the contrast between Bourke's
consistently clear, exact and clipped style and the frequently
obscure, vague and stentorian prose of his subject. As the title of
Bourke's book signals, it is not a synoptic or comprehensive study of
Hegel's thought. Rather it is primarily concerned with the
historicism and political philosophy of the nineteenth century
thinker and even then in a quite defined way.

Bourke indicates in the book's preface that his goal is threefold: to
explain Hegel's notion of world revolutions, especially the French
Revolution, within the context of his time; secondly, to provide a
more discriminating picture of Hegel's understanding of the
historical backdrop of modern European history from which the 1789
world revolution arose; and, finally, to consider the sharply mixed
reception of Hegel's thought in the twentieth century, before
confronting the knotty question of the applicability of past
political ideas to present concerns.

One of the more intriguing aspects of this preface is its opening
reference to an alleged malaise afflicting contemporary culture, and
especially the academy. Describing this sickness as 'a posture of
suspicion' that dismisses reason as controlling hubris, freedom as
domination, and liberal democracy as an ally of imperialism, Bourke
regards the phenomenon as culturally noxious and intellectually
unfounded, since it denies the genuine and hard-won accomplishments
of human history. More interestingly, he asserts that Hegel is the
first thinker to help us to see through the spuriousness of this kind
of wholesale rejection of Enlightenment values. This is a topic I
shall return to in greater detail below as I think these early
remarks prefigure something important about Bourke's evolving
conception of the role and authority an intellectual historian can
and should assume.

The central focus of the opening two-thirds of the book is Hegel's
philosophy of history, or perhaps more accurately his attempt to
provide an authentically historical history of philosophy. This is
hardly virgin territory, but what makes Bourke's treatment original
and instructive is that he exposes the superficiality of conventional
accounts of the topic. Rather than seeing the onward march of human
history as fundamentally seamless, he highlights the fact that Hegel
understood history as a far more complex and stumbling affair, in
which the path to progress often has to endure going one step forward
and four steps back before it eventually accomplishes a net gain. A
truer picture of the Hegelian historical dialectic from thesis via
antithesis through to synthesis is, therefore, more in the spirit of
'try again, fail again, fail better'.

Bourke finds this pattern noteworthy for a number of reasons but
mostly because it offers a vital corrective to the tendency which
indulges the illusion that genuine epochal transformation requires an
immediate and complete departure from the one which preceded it. This
may seem a distinctly elementary point but it's quite remarkable how
often we allow ourselves to become subject to the myth of starting
afresh, which has not infrequently caused untold human suffering.
Bourke shows that a close reading of Hegel's Philosophy of History
reveals a far more ambivalent and balanced historical sense which
offers a potent antidote not just to the myth of the fresh start but
to those who, like Nietzsche and Foucault, adopt an unduly dismissive
(or, in Pinker's case, triumphant) view of our current norms and
ideals.

What's especially striking about Bourke's treatment is how he widens
the familiar frame by examining Hegel's account of 'world
revolutions' that preceded the paradigmatic one of the French
Revolution. What emerges is a highly erudite and persuasive
elucidation and clarification of Hegel's view of human history that
progresses along the lines of a game of snakes and ladders rather
than like an elevator that only goes up. One of the more vital
lessons from Bourke's detailed work of exegesis is a recognition of
the indispensability of continuity as much as change in the
historical process. Indeed the first third of his book brings this
important and enduring insight to vivid life by showing how Hegel
himself could never have accomplished the intellectual breakthroughs
he did without standing on the shoulders of his great predecessor
Kant. The detailed and cogent case that Bourke puts forward to show
how Hegel had to wrestle with Kant's epistemological and ethical
outlook before he could proceed with formulating his own distinctive
and revolutionary world view is one of the most arresting sections in
what is a truly impressive work.

Returning to the matter of Bourke's view of the purpose of his chosen
field of study, he addresses this question in the closing section of
the book by asking whether intellectual history should adhere to
'revivalism' (seeking to resuscitate past ideas) or 'historicism'
(accepting the pastness of the past). His account of the recent
history of the academic study of intellectual history and its major
players is characteristically assured even if it can occasionally
give the false impression that the only place where worthwhile
intellectual history happens is Cambridge (and its outposts).

What are the key takeaways from Bourke's assessment of the current
state of the discipline? There are roughly two major points that he
is keen to make. The first is that the tendency of the founders of
the so-called Cambridge school of the history of ideas to assume the
role of the moralist by reviving outmoded ideas for present purposes
is problematic since it betrays their original and valid historicist
impulses. Bourke judges that John Pocock, Quentin Skinner and John
Dunn exhibited more wisdom when they focused exclusively on
reconstructing the historical identity of past thinkers and their
thoughts and left 'the historical past to the past'. His second and
related point is that one of the chief reasons why intellectual
historians (and to an extent political theorists) are better off
resisting revivalism is because their truer vocation is as
diagnosticians rather than moralists. Bourke's firm preference for
adopting a 'diagnostic' (as distinct from a 'prescriptive') approach
is that:

It helps us understand the character of political structures as
products of earlier constellations of forces. It spurs us to pick
apart distinct formations as well as to identify continuities across
time. Its first duty is to avoid confusion between these two
dimensions. Viewed from this angle, the most important task of
contextualization is to highlight the diversity of contexts, not
least their lack of homogenous synchronicity. We do not study Hegel
to confound his circumstances with our own, but precisely to evaluate
discrepancies between past and present. The process might reveal
correlations and affinities,  or equally it might bring out
disparities. As Hegel argued at the beginning of the Science of Logic
, there is no merit in cleaving 'to forms of an earlier culture.'

Strong stuff! But is he right? I'm not so sure. At least one major
problem with Bourke's bold assertion about the purpose of
intellectual history is its historicist purism, maybe even
fundamentalism. It's far from clear why we should think that past
ideas that are appropriately updated and adjusted cannot be used for
present purposes. Of course, one can appreciate why Hegel believed it
was unwise to try to recuperate or adhere to outmoded ideas since
crucially he believed that history was on a progressive march forward
leading us inexorably to perfect freedom. But given that Hegel's
teleological view of history has long ceased to be (or never was)
credible, surely this affects how we might regard the relationship
between the past and the present. Indeed one wonders if Hegel would
have been prepared to accept Bourke's austere view of the uses of
history if he himself had lost faith in his own historical
inevitabilism.

There is no need to believe in the myth that we can turn the clock
back to insist that there are aspects of our past, even the very
distant past of the ancient world, that may be worth reviving. In our
current existential condition we need all the help we can muster to
stop or at least delay that other clock getting any closer to
midnight.

1/2/2025

Johnny Lyons lives in Dublin.

X

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