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Hegel on the Revolution

For fanaticism wills only what is abstract, not what is articulated, so that whenever differences emerge, it finds them incompatible with its own indeterminacy and cancels them. This is why the people, during the French Revolution, destroyed once more the institutions they had themselves created, because all institutions are incompatible with the abstract self-consciousness of […]

For fanaticism wills only what is abstract, not what is articulated, so that whenever differences emerge, it finds them incompatible with its own indeterminacy and cancels them. This is why the people, during the French Revolution, destroyed once more the institutions they had themselves created, because all institutions are incompatible with the abstract self-consciousness of equality.

Consequently, when these abstractions were invested with power, they afforded the tremendous spectacle, for the first time we know of in human history, of the overthrow of all existing and given conditions within an actual major state and the revision of its constitution from first principles and purely in terms of thought; the intention beind this was to give it what was supposed to be a purely rational basis. On the other hand, since these were only abstractions divorced from the Idea, they turned the attempt into the most terrible and drastic event. ~ G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right

In attempts to rescue the reputation of Hegel from the lurid portrait painted by modern historians and political thinkers, who have cast him as an apologist for Prussian autocracy or proto-totalitarianism and always a statolater, recent Hegel scholars have sought to recover the liberal elements of Hegel’s thought to the extent that they have sought to emphasise his respect for the French Revolution as proof of his liberal attitudes. This is also an exaggeration, as the quotes above indicate. Philosophy of Right came during a later phase of his career (1821), and so may be said to represent the more complete maturation of Hegel’s thought.

Hegel’s hostility to abstraction suggests a kind of systematic philosophy that genuinely respects ideas, because of the great meaning and significance he attached to them as realities, rather than the truncated and distorted mockeries of ideas that abstractions and, by extension, ideologies are.

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