The search for historical meaning: Hegel and the postwar right.

The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar Right

THE MAIN argument of this extremelyinteresting book is that "hegelian concepts shaped the historical attitudes and cultural judgments of prominent postwar conservatives, who because of their concern for personal freedom as a political and ontological value denounced Hegel and ascribed their own Hegelian ideas to less offensive sources." The author shoots with no blunderbuss. He makes it very plain that for the purposes of his study he is ignoring, on the one hand, acknowledged Hegelians who have had little influence on the development of contemporary conservatism and, on the other hand, conservatives, however prominent, in whom Hegelian ideas have played no part. The last includes such conservative luminaries as Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., and Richard Weaver.

The major conservatives Gottfriedconsiders for their Hegelian roots and cast of mind are Eric Voegelin, Frank Meyer, Karl Wittfogel, Will Herberg, and James Burnham. These names belong without question in the first rank of those conservatives who became prominent in American thought beginning in the late 1940s. All but Voegelin, it must be emphasized, had been Marxists for substantial parts of their lives, and their own absorption of Hegel was chiefly through Marx, who, in the preface to the second edition of Capital, ascribes to Hegel much of his own theory of value, his use of the dialectic in his methodology, and, not least, his conception of history as a unilinear, necessary, and purposive flow in time.

Gottfried tells us that each of theseconservatives, Voegelin included, was reluctant, even unwilling, to concede a strain of Hegel in his own thinking--especially the thinking that followed his conversion from Marxism to conservatism. Although, as Gottfried points out, Hegelianism has very respectable roots in america, going back to 1866 and the founding of the St. Louis Philosophical Society, the truth is that Hegel was chiefly important in the American intellectual circles of the 1920s and after simply as a forerunner or pillar to Marx.

Nor did the situation change appreciablyafter the war. At the same time that the conservative efforescence was beginning, so was a Hegel revival; a revival, it must be emphasized, featuring a new and radicalized Hegel. American intellectuals' introduction, in the late 1940s, to the Marx of the Paris essays--the "humanist" Marx--and the constantly growing popularity of such Marxians as the Hungarian Lukacs and the Italian Gramsci almost inevitably brought, before long, a profound interest in Hegel--not Hegel as the German conservative he was, but Hegel as a radical in his inmost being. Whereas in the 1930s Sidney Hook's From Hegel to Marx bespoke the general view of the matter, by the late 1950s books and articles were appearing on the Left with themes and sometimes title like From Marx to Hegel. The meaning was clear. The revolution's best chance lay in an ever more strongly cultural/intellectual thrust into bourgeois society, and for this, not only the humanist Marx but also the profoundly, inextricably humanist Hegel would serve as guiding spirits.

The New Left's emphasis in the Sixtieswas thus overwhelmingly on radical culture, language, myth, and, perhaps above all, consciousness. Banished was the crude economism of the 1930s; also the flamboyant association with organized labor. The Marxism--and Hegelianism--of the postwar West has been very much a phenomenon of the humanities and of those social-science disciplines like sociology, political science, and especially anthropology where linkage with the humanities is close. This in no way implies a weaker Left in the universities: far from it. The radical message is conveyed more powerfully through channels Gramsci would gladly endorse--deconstruction, structuralism, and the like--than through those more primitive channels of the 1930s.

Paul Gottfried's star conservatives ofthe postwar era thus had some reason for their disinclination to advertise Hegel as an appreciable influence on their thinking. Given the torturing and twisting of Hegel by the New Left in this period, from the aristocratic conservative he so plainly was into a guru of Gramscian and Korschian Left heresies, there was no greater desire to admit a Hegelian than a Marxian aspect to the thinking they represented after the war.

Gottfried's principal touchstone forthe detection of Hegelian influence is what he calls historicism; to wit, the envisioning of past, present, and future as seamlessly linked in a unilinear, inexorable, and necessary flow of humanity through time. In the nineteenth century, "progress" was the favored term for such a process. The great objective of Saint-Simon, Comte, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, and many another social philosopher was to determine once and for all "the law of progress."

But in the realm of philosophy--i.e.,metaphysics, ontology, and ethics--Hegel was without question the supreme presence of the nineteenth century. His influence could be found almost everywhere, even in the Midwestern United States, even in the making of John Dewey's American pragmatism. Gottfried is correct in seeing the principle of interdependent development in Hegel as the pivot on which his larger philosophy rested. All things, including opposites, interpenetrate, said Hegel, and there has been no want since of minds to concur.

Gottfried proves his case, I believe,in ascribing Hegelianism with its "historicist" base to the conservatives he deals with in this book. Once a Hegelian, always a Hegelian, is probably the best summary. And Voegelin, never a Marxist, absorbed osmotically in his education the Hegel that is part of Order and History and its majestic rendering of the Western tradition from Judea to the modern West. Voegelin's great enterprise is in the mold of Hegel--only better, in this reviewer's opinion.

But it is actually less Hegel thatGottfried is ultimately concerned with than the use of the past, of history, and of development in the formation of a conservative philosophy. There are, after all, conservatives of consequence who, in effect, disdain history and our links with the past. Gottfried gives them short shrift, however, so far as their survival in modern thought is concerned. From his point of view, and mine, if conservative philosophy doesn't have what T. S. Eliot called the "usable past" as its inner force--if it, also in Eliot's phrasing, "disowns the past"--then it is hard to see how conservatism can avoid being ground into dust by liberals and radicals in a single pincer movement. Gottfried does not think that simple devotion to government-as-virtue and to the great books of the classical world will accomplish much. His criticisms of both the Straussians and the neoconservatives in this respect are acute. The ties between the conservatism that first Burke, then Hegel, founded and the Straussian canon are, Gottfried thinks, tenuous at best.

So, as it has happened, are the tiesbetween the component forces of Reagan Conservatism. Some of us wrote five years ago that this purported conservatism wouldn't hold together even on the surface for more than a year or two; and it hasn't. How could it have, formed as it was of such discordant and intrinsically unruly forces as evangelicalism, populism, libertarianism, Far Right power ambitions, and political moralistics, not to forget neoconservatism in some measure? The few traditional conservatives in the mix were bound to become disoriented, as they mostly have.

Gottfried is aware of all this. Hisfinal chapter, "A Conservative Farewell to History," is superb; it could stand alone as an essay on the present age. He looks out on the Vanity Fair that is contemporary American culture, a compound of abstract expressionism, deconstruction, narcissism, radical and emasculating feminism, ascendant homosexuality, all snugged into the cash nexus, and, looking, doesn't buckle or falter. This chapter-essay is remarkably unsentimental, and stands, together with the chapters preceding, as the best and most provocative treatment of postwar American conservatism yet written.