Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society is a condensation of the earlier and larger Hegel. The first chapter outlines Hegel’s philosophy and is very admirably done in such a brief space. Taylor takes the Absolute and Geist to be references God (rather than, say, culture or collective consciousness or general will). On Taylor’s account Hegel must prove that everything can only be understood with reference to Geist and vice versa, which is the aim of the Logic by starting with ‘being’ as the most empty category and showing it is dialectically related to nothingness and so becoming. This then grounds the relation between identity and opposition in the speculative form of reasoning, where A is A and A is not A, and we proper understanding comes only from the movement between these positions, not from frozen predicative propositions. Taylor is skeptical of Hegel’s proof here but thinks that Hegel still frames questions much more productively than many others, especially as regards to freedom. His importance springs partly from his attempt to combine the Enlightenment emphasis on reason, with the Kantian call for radical freedom, and the Romantic protest against the Enlightenment for an integral wholeness (what Taylor calls ‘expressivism’). Current society does not wish to lose the gains from the Enlightenment but still feels the force of the Romantic critique, so that Hegel continues to speak to us.
Hegel’s political philosophy is neither conservative nor liberal. Hegel wants to include Sittlichkeit, existing cultural obligations, within political philosophy and culture/institutions but by exposing it to the demands of reason. By contrast, he thinks Kantian Moralität is vacuous and this was why the Jacobin Terror was so destructive, because it could only be against any determinate political form. This Sittlichkeit involves three things (p.93): 1) what is most important in human life can only be attained in relation to a community; 2) this community must not be partial but be self-sufficient – and so it must be at the level of a state; 3) the community/state is important for us because it expresses the Idea (which means something like our most articulate form of self-consciousness so far, perhaps vaguely like Herder’s national spirit idea, except Hegel can ward off the dangers of nationalism through a dialectical openness to the collapse of a historical formation at the recognition of its limits and contradiction).
Another of Hegel’s critiques of absolute freedom is that it requires homogeneity, massive decentralization, and it cannot allow for the majority to impose its will on the minority, it cannot allow for some sort of political differentiation (which is necessary in a community as big as the state). Thus ideals of equality and participation lead to homogenization, loose people from their communities but then cannot replace them as forms of identity (except by bad nationalism, say). Modern society needs some way to generate meaningful differentiation without pitting the different groups against one another but knitting them into a larger whole (similarities with de Tocqueville and Montesquieu).
Max Weber’s ‘Politics as a vocation’ begins with the famous claim that ‘a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Politics is the attempt to share or influence power, within or between states, which ultimately rests on this right to use violence. Legitimation of claims to the right to force rest on tradition, charisma or legality. Weber contrasts politicians, whose task is to be passionate and take personal responsibility, with civil servants, whose task is to impersonally execute orders as if they agreed with them, with lawyers, whose task is to make strong technical arguments for interested parties (irrespective of the strength of their moral argument).
Towards the end of the essay Weber discusses the politician’s need to have a ‘passionate devotion’ to a cause, where passionate means ‘matter-of-factness’. That is, the politician must have ‘distance’ from events and people and a ‘sense of proportion’ to be able to act always in the interest of the cause. The politician will only be able to keep going because of this devotion to a cause and from a sense of faith (or hope) because the results of political action are ‘regularly’ different from what was intended. This leads to a fascinating discussion of the relation between ethics and politics. Weber denies that they are unrelated but equally that the same ethical considerations obtain in politics as they do in ‘erotic, business, familial, and official relations’. Since politics has the unique means of ‘power backed up by violence’ it has a unique ethics. Weber contrasts two attitudes that he calls an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ and an ‘ethic of responsibiliity’. The former advocates actions according to its own lights but does not consider the consequences of those actions as relevant to moral guilt or innocence; the latter acts on the assumption that the actor must account for the ‘foreseeable’ consequences of her actions. For example, the responsible actor must take into account the ‘average deficiencies’ of people. (Weber identifies the ethics of ultimate ends with religion and the Sermon on the Mount but it sounds Kantian). Weber also claims that the use of bad means to bring about good ends is unavoidable and that no ethical system can decide when and to what extent which bad means justify which good ends (presumably with certainty rather than offering any guidance at all). At the end of the essay Weber suggests these two ethics are supplementary rather than mutually exclusive, which we could perhaps understand in terms of the tension between political interests and values.
Recent Comments