by Serena Cho

Richard Bourke is a Professor of the History of Political Thought at the University of Cambridge. His research interests include the political ideas of the Enlightenment, its aftermath, and political theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Serena Cho spoke to Bourke about his latest book, Hegel’s World Revolutions (Princeton UP, 2023), where he contextualizes Hegel’s political thought and recounts its later reception, particularly in the twentieth century.

Serena Cho: My first question concerns your portrayal of Kant and his understanding of revolutions. Specifically, I was wondering if you could elaborate on whether Kant held divergent views concerning scientific, moral, and political revolutions. You explain that “the idea of a transformative thought leading to a sudden break is fundamental” to the first Critique (50). Kant identified breakthroughs in logic, mathematics and natural science—such as the work of Copernicus—as successful intellectual reorientations preceding his own work. But did Kant consider such Copernican revolutions to be possible—and if so, desirable—in the sphere of morality or politics? I should also note that, even if moral and political knowledge can be revolutionized in such a manner, the question of whether such a breakthrough is feasible in practice is a separate matter.

Richard Bourke: As an intellectual historian, I was very interested in this theme, because it is very striking that a new thought can change the whole world, as did the invention of Euclidian geometry or the Copernican revolution. The notion that thought can have a significant impact on the world has become so unfashionable since the 1960s, whereas it should be common sense that a revolution in thought is going to have a transformative impact on understanding and therefore behavior.

But your point is about whether this is transferable to the realm of morals and politics. In relation to morals, yes, Kant seems to operate with a radical conversion model. For example, he saw Christianity as having been such a moment of radical revolution. A man appeared on earth (the “God-man,” Jesus Christ), and his doctrines completely transformed prevailing systems of moral belief. That is, he developed a completely new understanding concerning the relationship between virtue and happiness. Whereas pre-Christian religions mostly sought to reinforce morality as a way of placating the gods and thereby securing happiness, the figure of Jesus embodied the idea of acting virtuously for the sake of virtue rather than happiness. He inaugurated this revolutionary insight. For Kant, a quasi-Copernican switch in morality was possible, and it had happened. At the same time, Kant was aware that the Christian revolution—whilst introducing a new moral worldview—did not succeed. Christ’s moral mission was corrupted in the process of building a church, and Christians reverted to pleasing the deity. Even Protestants, who later brought another revolutionary insight, reverted to proving their faith rather than practicing virtue for its own sake.

And then there is a question of political revolutions, including the French Revolution, which Kant obviously lived through. What we should say is that Kant was in favor of intellectual revolutions—the Copernican one, the Christian one, the Protestant one, and even the French Revolution as an intellectual event. Kant celebrated the new system of values brought by the French revolutionaries, such as general accountability of power and basic egalitarianism. But he thought the French Revolution backfired, just as Hegel did.

It is possible to compare scientific, moral, and political revolutions, because they all involve intellectual transformation. But in the scientific realm, revolutions had immediate traction and were more successful. But in the moral and political realm, it is a shakier story. Kant did not have a great explanation for these failures. In the end, the whole of Kantianism, in addition to offering an epistemology designed to justify empirical science, also became a system of neo-Christian belief in its practical capacity. For Kant, it was a matter of rational faith (Vernuftglaube) that virtue-based ethics and politics should ultimately prevail. (And by the way, the whole of Rawls is based on the insight that it is rational to credit such a faith.

Kant had a philosophy of morals, but he lacked a philosophy of history to account for the development of moral and political life. I think one of the things that motivated Hegel was the need to think more systematically about the nature and causes of revolutionary failures.

SC: Yes, I think it is difficult to grasp Kant’s views about political progress, in part because his enthusiasm for intellectual upheavals is not always accompanied by a satisfactory account of how they bring about change in the practical world. On the one hand, Kant espoused the ideals of the French Revolution and held immense hope for this world-historical event. On the other hand, like Hobbes, he considered sovereignty to be necessarily absolute, and he repudiated traditional theories of resistance as incoherent. Moreover, he rejected palingenesis in favor of metamorphosis as a framework for historical progress. In his engagement with Herder, Kant criticized the idea of palingenesis because building a new society from the dissolution of the old one—such as its public laws—is incoherent. Michael Sonenscher discusses this in his recent book After Kant and claims that, for Kant, the French Revolution was an instantiation of palingenesis and all the problems he associated with this concept.

RB: I suppose the problem could be framed in this way. Kant was in favor of enlightenment—or using reason as a criterion for judging experience—in the realm of science, morals, or politics. But he then had to reconcile intellectual revolution with institutions of power. He did not have to think this through in a complex way in the case of Galileo or Euclid, because revolutions in science had a fair wind. Galileo had to recant, and we could imagine a universe in which he never prevailed. But it so happened that the conditions favored this scientific revolution.

But in the case of revolutionary ideas in the realm of morals and politics, the conditions did not allow for their immediate implementation, and it was necessary to make them compatible with the duty of obedience toward the state. Ultimately, Kant believes in obedience with hope for enlightenment.

SC: The way that Kant justifies this hope has perplexed me. I wonder about the extent to which his belief in progress was empirically or historically substantiated. In the 1784 essay “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” Kant states that, to solve the problem of sovereignty, there not only has to be “a correct conception of the nature of a possible constitution” but also “a good will prepared to accept the findings.” As noted in the Metaphysics of Morals, France only became a “true republic” because of the “mistaken judgment” of Louis XVI, who inadvertently “allowed [him]self to be represented” in a united body of citizens. How might civil progress take place in other states, such as Prussia under Friedrich Wilhelm II? Does Kant offer any historical or empirical basis for this belief in progress beyond the “good will” of rulers and subjects, which may or may not have existed during his time?

RB: To understand how Kant justifies his vision of progress, we need to look at his theory of belief—what justifies belief, and how practical beliefs are different from empirical beliefs and metaphysical beliefs. I think Kant’s position is as follows. He cannot bear the idea of pure historical chance; if history is pure chance, there is no good reason to act in accordance with a normatively prescribed set of behaviors, as they might be counterproductive. In other words, morality would not be rational, if one cannot plausibly believe that the highest good will ultimately be instantiated. You would need to show him that it is irrational to believe that a normative order might prevail, and you cannot prove that; therefore, you have good reasons for believing that it will.

I think Hegel also had a big problem with this. He considered worldly experience to be relevant to the formation of beliefs about the future. If there is backsliding all the time, what good reasons do we have to believe that a normatively preferable order will prevail? Therefore, he developed a philosophy of history; he used actual empirical data to show that there has already been a moral transformation. In a way, Hegel sees Kant as presenting us with a secular version of Christianity—a belief in the final solution at the end of time. Hegel addresses this in a section in The Phenomenology of Spirit, called “Die moralische Weltanschauung,” where he offers a skeptical review of Kant’s postulates, such as the belief that there will be more progress. There seems to be something more empirical and worldly about Hegel’s thought, or so he thought.

SC: My next question relates to this Hegelian response to Kant’s understanding of history. In Chapter 3, you note that “from a Hegelian perspective, the post-Idealist tradition represented by Nietzsche and Heidegger was an exercise in seeking to ‘overleap’ (überspringen) the world” (80). To what extent do you also consider Kant vulnerable to this charge?

RB: The phrase “overleaping” comes from Hegel’s discussion of Jesus. Jesus overleaped the reality in which his doctrine had to operate. Christians might want to live in a small community of twelve, but they began under the Roman Empire, which was a vast state. So, there is a kind of otherworldly denial of the prevailing conditions of existence.

Concerning Kant, Hegel would say that he had an insufficiently grounded faith in somehow finally overcoming the adverse context of the world. It is more an attitude of blind faith than of overleaping. Of course, Kant would say that his faith is not blind but rational. But from the Hegelian point of view, he places excessive faith in how the world might be, with insufficient attention to how it is actually constituted and how this organization might yield a normative order. Hegel’s critique of Plato in the preface to the Philosophy of Right can also be applied to Kantianism. Kant’s understanding of the rational is not anchored to the actual in any way.

I have sympathy for the Hegelian critique of Kantian moral theory for these reasons, but my issue with Nietzsche and Heidegger is a bit different. Kant had a rational faith in a chiliastic vision of the universe, or the final redemption of virtue. In a way, Heidegger and Nietzsche could be seen as superstitious declinists. Things have gotten worse and worse, since the advent of Christianity for Nietzsche, and since Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, for Heidegger. One can agree or disagree about whether these events led to epochal changes and whether these changes were all for the worse. Separate from that issue, I also think that, for Nietzsche and Heidegger, the time between the supposed start of decline and the present is so empty. There is a great vacuous sameness about their histories of ideas. For Heidegger, Descartes is a repetition of the problem in Plato, and Hegel is another repetition of the problem in Descartes. I consider Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality to present a richer tableau, but even so, there is not a lot of historical analysis of causal sequences.

That is how I see these different philosophies of history. I believe we need to think more about the philosophy of history for exactly these reasons. Historians just do empirical collection now, and political philosophers delegate the endeavor to historians. But since the Enlightenment, with Hume, Smith, Diderot, Kant, and Hegel, there was an appreciation that political theory must be a philosophical and historical endeavor. I think it would be a good thing to revive these questions again.

SC: Speaking of various philosophies of history, Hegel seems to have understood world history as a series of revolutions that brought humanity closer to freedom, even though each of them failed to immediately and independently deliver what it promised. In particular, your book details Hegel’s view of the French Revolution. He appreciated the symbolic meaning of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, but he condemned the methods used to advance these rights. As you explain, Hegel saw the Jacobin terror not as a perversion of initial revolutionary aspirations but as “an integral product of the original idealism” (119). The revolutionaries had failed to align the insurgent moral energy with existing institutions and norms in social life. In a similar vein, Hegel also criticized the Christian flight into the void as well as the purity of Rousseauean and Kantian projects.

Given this context, how did Hegel think that political reform should be carried out to address the problems he identified with modern society, such as inequality and atomization? What are some examples of the reform movements he supported, and how did these align the emerging moral and political consciousness with existing norms and institutions? Did he think that all revolutions inevitably resort to abstractions, rely on empty moralizing, and result in a flight into the void?

RB: Let me first say that my starting point was Hegel’s views on the French Revolution. There is a book called Hegel und die französische Revolution (1957) by a German political philosopher Joachim Ritter. He was interested in what he considered to be Hegel’s modernist beliefs, rather than retrograde or reactionary ones. Even after 1945, there was a conservative, anti-modernist strain of German thought, which presumed that everything had declined since 1789. Ritter thought this denial of history on the part of conservative reactionaries was counterproductive. He believed that one had to accept the modern world, and his model for this disposition was Hegel. Therefore, Hegel became a celebrant of the French Revolution.

This is all fine and good except for one problem: Hegel had a far more complicated view of the French Revolution. Ritter drew a very large conclusion from a few enthusiastic phrases, and all literature on Hegel and the French Revolution since has followed him. But Hegel was critical not only of Jacobins and the Girondins, but also of the deal struck between the crown and the parliament in 1789. For Hegel, what is absolutely crucial is the proper coordination of powers. But the National Assembly and Louis XVI had not organized how exactly to divide the decision-making powers between the executive and legislative powers. As early as July 1789, the parliament had begun to execute laws in practice. Hegel saw a fundamental problem from day one. For him, the story of the French Revolution was a story of a collision between the various powers of government, and he considered it a failed reform program. Hegel was an extremely interesting skeptic and interpreter of the French Revolution, but modern commentaries seem to have forgotten all of that complexity.

At the same time, we should not lose sight of the fact that Hegel, too, was a critic of the inherited order of the world, most immediately feudalism, and he supported clear-sighted reform programs that sought to overcome this legacy. Hegel was from Württemberg, and as Charles James Fox said in the House of Commons in the 1790s, it had the closest constitution to Britain in Europe. Württemberg had a duke rather than the crown, a legislative assembly, and an administrative body. During Hegel’s lifetime, Württemberg’s constitution had become more authoritarian, because the duke ended up with a lot of power. Hegel was in favor of reforming it, but not in the way of aristocratic reformists, who sought to reduce the power of the duke and raise the power of the representative assembly. He was more in favor of a general representation of the population rather than an aristocratic representation.

It is possible to criticize the specifics of Hegel’s constitutional arrangements, but his plan was certainly reformist—it was based on the plausible synergy between the actual and the rational. Württemberg already had a representative assembly. Even in Prussia, which was an absolute monarchy at the time, instituting a representative assembly had been argued for and supported by many reform-minded ministers. This arrangement was not a pipe dream but a plausible actuality. This plan was certainly different from what the French did—instead of building on existing structures to see what might have been available after the revolutionary “sunrise,” they treated this sunrise as a dawn in which everything had to be reinvented. Their radical abolitionism led them to dismantle all levers of control, and they eventually descended into the enthusiastic and fanatical virtue politics of Robespierrism.

SC: Would it be fair to read your reconstruction of Hegel’s thought—including his philosophy of history and assessment of the French Revolution—and infer that it reflects your own views about the place of revolution and reform in politics more generally?

RB: I’m writing a historical book on Hegel, which obviously has political and philosophical implications. I do mention Charles Taylor in the conclusion of my book, and I am with him in thinking that a celebration of contentless freedom is a problematic political vision. But does that lead to the idea that the South African revolution for self-liberation is unacceptable? No. Does that lead to the idea that the American Revolution is unacceptable? No.

Still, I do think it is interesting to think about the failures of revolutions. But my book is also equally about successful revolutions, like the scientific revolution, the emergence of modern constitutionalism, and the abandonment of ancient forms of despotism. Hegel is all about revolutionary transformations, but his vision recognizes the danger of downward spiraling political catastrophes that call themselves revolutions. I agree with him on this point. A good example is 1917, which, in the name of revolutionary ideology, constructed a totalitarian state. There have been many failed revolutions. What is interesting about Hegel is that he tries to offer a diagnosis for them, but that does not make him opposed to transformational values that might improve the world.

SC: I also want to discuss how a proper understanding of history might orientate political judgment—a theme that connects many of your scholarly works. As you demonstrate in this book, the verdict of Hegel’s historical investigation was that we had arrived at a consummate moment, wherein each of us is free by virtue of our humanity. Accordingly, you write that Hegel believed “political judgment could best orientate itself by refusing to go backwards” (xv). In explaining Hegel’s understanding of philosophy and its relationship with history, you similarly emphasize the indispensability of historical understanding for political judgment.

I was wondering if you could elaborate on the precise ways in which rational principles and historical knowledge inform one another and ultimately contribute to exercising good political judgment. Does historical understanding aid judgment by preventing the individual from reviving outdated ideas and advocating their implementation in the present context? Or does historical consciousness guide judgment in a deeper, more fundamental way?

RB: Historical knowledge allows us to consider past thinkers in their context and ourselves in our own context. The key question, then, is, what the relationship is between their context and our context. This is a matter of historical judgment. It is, at the same time, a matter of political judgment. It allows us to identify where we are using tools from past ideas and clarify our proximity or distance from those contexts.

I think political theory can provide historical diagnoses in this manner. We can improve our diagnosis of the present moment by refining our historical judgment. A political theorist reviews and diagnoses the possibilities of the present based on a reconstruction of how we got to the present. But one should remain open to different possibilities for future trajectories, instead of issuing empty normative prescriptions.

For example, in 1819, there was a real question as to whether it is more progressive to have a single assembly or a bicameral assembly. To understand this problem better, one needs to know how the landed aristocracy was formed, how the various organs of government evolved, how the system of representation developed, and how the administrative class of officials was transformed over time. In this way, historical understanding can give us an orientation when we are wrestling with live questions that necessitate political judgment.

My own view is that a political theorist in a university should not be a campaigner who says that there is only one way forward. One’s work does not have to be prescriptive, because that is for the voting booth. But we can nonetheless get a lot out of rich historical analysis, which orientates political judgment.

SC: In lieu of discussing the task of a political theorist, you write in the book that “among other things, political theory is a study of how values become superannuated” (193). For Hegel, too, it was crucial to acknowledge that “modern consciousness would never trade its emancipation for superannuated forms of enthralment” (xv).

Could political theory equally be a study of how certain values and concepts persist throughout history? Although it may be problematic to simply adopt entire historical templates as a source for moral judgment on contemporary issues (278), a historian of political thought could instead show how a particular concept or framework has persisted in people’s political imaginations over time. In this case, he or she might argue that this tool—which we previously did not register to be at our disposal—would be useful for navigating our present predicaments. Could a genealogy constructed in this manner serve not only diagnostic but also prescriptive ends?

RB: As to whether political theorists can make use of an enduring value as much as they might argue for the disavowal of a superannuated value, my answer is yes, of course they could. I think we should be interested in continuities and discontinuities. But I think it is particularly important to underline the extent to which certain norms are connected to a past context and have no meaning outside of that context. For example, there have been attempts to recover the Greek theory of citizenship. The context of that idea is that you cannot be a Metic, a woman, or a slave to be a Greek citizen. No one wants that model, so we should not start carving out a corner of that model for our own context. Our concepts of citizenship and freedom have been richly transformed since then. I am of course interested in the legacies of the Greek idea of citizenship via a complex process of descent to the seventeenth century and beyond; it is a valuable area of study. But we must be interested in two processes at the same time—the areas of continuity and discontinuity—and weigh those in our judgment.

These historical investigations have implications for whether political theory can be diagnostic or prescriptive. I concede that there is a fine line between diagnosis and prescription. I suppose all I wanted to say is that we should be interested in grounding our political judgment in historical complexity, rather than being anxious to cash in our abstract normative prescriptions.

SC: Great. As my last question, I wanted to ask about the lessons you are drawing from Hegel’s approach to philosophy and history. You caution against recuperating and reimplementing bygone political ideas, but I also understand you to be suggesting that modern scholars have much to learn from Hegel’s method of studying politics. “The first lesson to be derived from Hegel’s thought,” you write, is that “although modern politics is grounded on the value of consciousness, public life cannot be sustained by appeal to moral judgment alone” (215). You also demonstrate that Hegel’s treatment of Plato—“as part of our context, but not identical with our context”—was an exemplary way of conducting philosophical history (204). Hegel not only examined Plato’s specific context but also illuminated the relationship (particularly the divergences) between Plato’s situation and his own. As you said, this approach contrasted with that of Strauss, Arendt, Voeglin, and Wolin, who studied the ancients to advocate the recuperation of lost value.

Do certain methods for engaging with the past and doing philosophy remain perpetually relevant and valuable? Or do these approaches become superannuated the way that ideas and concepts do? Insofar as Hegel’s conceptions of philosophy and history are predicated on other aspects of his thought, such as his phenomenology and epistemology, can his method be transposed to our context, despite us no longer sharing such commitments?

One might also argue that particular approaches to philosophy and history are more likely to yield certain values and ideas. For example, Hegel’s appreciation for historical explanations that focus on the character of consciousness led him to a particular understanding of modernity, and his disdain for abstract moralism was closely related to his skepticism toward radical and revolutionary attempts to overleap history. Should we worry, then, that recovering a particular approach to philosophical and historical scholarship may be more similar to resuscitating certain values, conceptual frameworks, or ideas than we had previously thought?

RB: It is problematic to advocate a revival of Homeric values or Athenian concepts, when these ideas are connected holistically to other sets of values that we repudiate. Of course, I accept that bits of Hegel are bygone. For example, he thought women could not be philosophers, and I do not accept that. But I do not know how tenaciously militant a view of his that was. Hegel also did not want a mass electorate; does that mean that the whole of his constitutionalism is bygone? These are complex questions, and they are precisely what I am interested in. How might something be living if it was part of what is now a cadaver?

You are right to say that what I think is salvageable and enduring in Hegel is his structure of thought. He treated political theory as a historical and philosophical enterprise. Hegel is the person who supremely tried to reconcile historicity and normativity. I think he tried to incorporate historical contingency into political theory without dismantling the possibility of philosophical normativity. I consider this to be an enduring and valuable part of Hegel’s project. As for whether this also has to be bygone, one might say that the post-1945 division of intellectual labor in the university makes it increasingly difficult to juggle these two enterprises.

I also think that there is a difference between resurrecting values and resurrecting methods of inquiry. Certain methods of inquiry, like alchemy, are clearly superannuated. Other ones, like the humanities and social sciences, are not, and the last person who tried to practice both humanistic and social scientific forms of inquiry probably was Hegel. I think that the alternative to having this as a possibility is a case of despair, and I would not want to give into that.

Serena Cho is a PhD student studying the history of political thought and political theory at Yale University. She is interested in the relationship between the aesthetic and the political.

Edited by Artur Banaszewski

Featured Image: Franz Kugler, Hegel in front of his students at the lectern, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.