One of the endearing features of Wilkie Collins's novel The Moonstone is the way the author pokes gentle fun at his hero Franklin Blake, who has the disadvantage of a continental education. Steeped in German philosophy, Blake baffles his English friends by distinguishing between the "objective" and "subjective" aspects of problems, and complains of a "curious want of system" in the English mind.
A Victorian novelist's dismissal of German philosophy as "foreign gibberish" would be mildly amusing but for the fact that cultural prejudices are nearly as pronounced today as in the 1860s. I should know because I once shared these prejudices. Like many English students of philosophy, I readily accepted that Immanuel Kant deserves his status as a great moral philosopher. But I lapped up criticism of the idealist philosophers that Collins ridiculed.
I was naive enough to trust the harsh assessments of Hegel offered by such liberal luminaries as Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper. In The Open Society and its Enemies, Popper dismisses Hegel as a Prussian clown who brought about a debasement of reason in Germany. He derides his conception of the state as a "despicable perversion" of everything that is decent. And he describes him as the "missing link" between Plato and modern totalitarianism. Assuming Popper to be right, I struck Hegel off my list. Why bother with somebody whose doctrines were responsible for much of the misery of the 20th century?
Yet I had made the mistake of relying on secondary sources. On this subject, Popper and Russell cannot be trusted. When I began to read continental philosophy and sociology, I discovered that nearly every serious thinker regards Hegel as a crucial point of reference. They don't always agree with him, but they all respect him. Could they all be wrong? There was no alternative but to read Hegel and find out for myself.
I won't pretend this was an entirely pleasant experience. Few in the history of ideas have expressed themselves in so convoluted a fashion. His difficulty with words is puzzling because he did not spend his life closeted in an ivory tower. He was for some years the headmaster of a grammar school. After Napoleon seized Jena in 1806 and he lost his academic post, he even-and the thought makes one giddy-edited a newspaper. If Hegel's editorials were anything like his books, he must have strained the patience even of a German audience.
Yet although Hegel is often hard to read-I wouldn't wish his Science of Logic on anyone-Popper's totalitarian fiend turns out to be pure invention. Nobody who reads Hegel with an open mind is likely to doubt either his intelligence or his goodwill. And this is especially true of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, his principal work of political philosophy. Market liberals dislike it because it exposes their own doctrines as shallow.
So why did Hegel have such a big impact on me, and why do I regard him as relevant for the 21st century? I was impressed, first, by his emphasis on humans as thinking beings rather than physical organisms. To the degree that we are thinking beings, Hegel says, we have to consider ourselves as part of a larger whole and not as neatly individuated. He calls this mental whole Geist, or Spirit, and tries to work out the rules by which it develops through time.
The concept of Geist infuriated thinkers such as Popper because they thought he was referring to a supra-human entity that pulls the strings of history and controls the destiny of individuals. They thus saw Geist as a threat to personal freedom. But Hegel didn't regard Geist as something that stands apart from, or above, human individuals. He saw it rather as the forms of thought that are realised in human minds, and he argued that Geist has to take a certain form if human beings are to enjoy the freedoms that so exercise liberals. Hegel didn't want to suppress or deny personal freedoms; he just had a more complex notion of what they really involve than many Anglo-Saxons.
Hegel's views are relevant today because the individualism that he criticised-that promoted by British empiricist philosophers such as Locke, Hume and Smith-is again in fashion. Hegel admired the Enlightenment thinkers, but he found them guilty of over-simplification. Why? Because they focused too much on the individual and failed to grasp the importance of the social structures (which Hegel saw as an aspect of Geist) that made their pursuit of personal happiness possible.
What Hegel does better than most philosophers is explain how individuals are linked together and why it is important to commit oneself to the pursuit of the general or common good. Thinkers like Locke, Hume and Smith make inspiring reading for entrepreneurs: they reinforce the belief that the individual is justified in pursuing his own happiness with only cursory regard for others. Hegel, by contrast, makes inspiring reading for civil servants and, if their heart is in the right place, for politicians. There is no activity that is more important, he implies, than that of creating and sustaining the structures within which individuals can pursue their personal happiness. Or to use his language, the pursuit of the "universal" (what concerns everyone) is always a more rewarding and sublime experience than the pursuit of the "particular" (what concerns only one's self).
