Hegel’s World Revolutions, by Richard Bourke, Princeton University Press, 344 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0691250182
Is human history ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’ or rather a heroic story of the inevitable unfolding of human progress? Apart from professional optimists like Steven Pinker, most of us might feel on safer ground with Macbeth’s verdict. The less sanguine view of our past as one damned thing after another is more readily compatible with the currently lamentable state of the world. At the time of writing this piece (early January 2025) it is yet to be announced by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists how close to midnight we currently are on the Doomsday clock. In January of last year the board members of the Bulletin, which includes no less than eight Nobel scientists, judged that we are as close as 90 seconds to self-destruction. The following trends were cited to justify their unnervingly bleak diagnosis of our situation:
The war in Ukraine and the widespread and growing reliance on nuclear weapons increase the risk of nuclear escalation. China, Russia and the United States are all spending huge sums to expand or modernise their nuclear arsenals, adding to the ever-present danger of nuclear war through mistake or miscalculation. In 2023, Earth experienced its hottest year on record, and massive floods, wildfires and other climate-related disasters affected millions of people around the world. Meanwhile, rapid and worrisome developments in the life sciences and other disruptive technologies accelerated, while governments made only feeble efforts to control them. (https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/)
The Bulletin assures us that ‘the world can be made safer. The Clock can move away from midnight.’ Fair enough, but any honest reckoning with global events in the last twelve months must conclude that the only credible direction the Clock can move is forward and ever closer to our annihilation.
How quickly humanity’s fortunes can change. It seems like only the day before yesterday that we convinced ourselves of having reached history’s glorious culmination following the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it communism, and the triumph of Western liberal democracy and its inseparable ally, capitalism. Back then it seemed all that was left to do was iron out the remaining creases in our own infallible political economy and export it to those parts of the planet which had yet to see the neoliberal light.
In those halcyon days the Doomsday Clock was set a full seventeen minutes shy of midnight – the members of the Bulletin board joyously declared in 1991 that the revised setting ‘reflects our optimism that we are entering a new era’. Such shallow sunniness proved short-lived however. By the noughties the clock had to be drastically reset following the outbreak of ‘the second nuclear age’ and the belated realisation that our planet is heating up due to our own activities. While things fluctuated a little in the late noughties the clock has drawn consistently nearer to midnight since 2010. One is left asking how close must we get to Armageddon before the Doomsday Bulletin fulfils the aim of one of its founding editors, Eugene Rabinowitch, to finally ‘frighten men into rationality’.
The likelihood that we might be frightened into rationality is looking slimmer by the day. Moreover, there is increasing evidence that we may well have passed the point of no return and are already baked into a nightmare of our own making in which the planet will become uninhabitable, and soon. And that’s assuming we don’t blow ourselves up in thermonuclear smithereens before the ‘natural’ end of our days.
A sobering prospect and one which suggests human history will end in agony rather than neo-liberal ecstasy. But let’s imagine for a moment we have not yet passed the point of no return, and that we convince ourselves of the need to radically change our ways for the good of humanity and the rest of Mother Earth. What does humanity look like when it is frightened into rationality? How would we think and behave in such changed circumstances? All the late Eugene Rabinowitch had to say on the matter was that the Bulletin’s clock ‘is intended to reflect basic changes in the level of continuous danger in which mankind lives in the nuclear age, and will continue living, until society adjusts its basic attitudes and institutions’. That may well be true, but would human society need to undergo a revolution before being prepared to accept and implement these requisite adjustments? And what form would such a revolution have to take? Would it require a clean and violent departure from the status quo or, alternatively, an approach that builds a necessarily radical solution based on the more progressive aspects of our current regime(s)? Is such a global transformation even imaginatively possible, let alone politically and economically feasible? These are hardly idle questions in our currently drastic predicament.
There was a time when philosophers produced answers to such large and important questions. Today the vast majority of them don’t take any professional interest in politics while those that do pursue the subject in a way that would appear bizarre to their more capacious and engaged predecessors. Most contemporary academic philosophers tend to focus on a specific branch of the subject, such as the philosophy of mind or the philosophy of language, or on a certain philosopher or school of philosophy, as for example Wittgenstein or existentialism. The idea that philosophy is one integral whole has fallen victim to the professionalisation of the subject as an academic discipline, which means that its practitioners spend their careers studying more and more about less and less. This pattern may have proved pragmatically successful for the business of the university but its effect on philosophy can hardly be viewed as a happy one, even among those of us who don’t entirely buy the idea of some lost golden age when philosophy enjoyed the power to change the world.
One of the great long-dead philosophers who emphatically did see philosophy as one and sought to address the defining questions of his day was the German thinker Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Unlike his philosophical predecessors, Hegel argued that history provides the key to answering the riddle of our existence. Before Hegel, philosophers tended to regard humanity as fundamentally unchanging even if they disagreed about what makes human beings tick. Hegel came up with the revolutionary view that not only has human nature transformed radically and irreversibly over time but that this change happens in a particular way and, most strikingly of all, forms part of an underlying and profound purpose. The idea that history is ‘a tale told by an idiot’ was, therefore, anathema to Hegel. He felt there is a discernible and coherent pattern to human history and that it is leading inevitably and progressively via a dialectical process to a final and ultimately happy destination. ‘The history of the world’, he famously declared, ‘is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.’
Today, there is a tendency to adopt a Jekyll and Hyde attitude to Hegel’s view of human history. His idea that we are historically conditioned all the way down is quite widely regarded as insightful but his notion that we have been (and presumably still are) travelling ineluctably towards full and free consciousness or Spirit (Geist) is generally dismissed as ludicrous – though politicians are not averse to invoking the Hegelian-like notion of the arc of history when it suits their agenda. The main problem with this prevailing impression of Hegel is that it stops us being curious about his ideas, which are immeasurably more nuanced and instructive than the caricature implies. And that brings us to the work under review, Hegel’s World Revolutions by Richard Bourke.
Bourke enjoys an international reputation as an intellectual historian. Since graduating from University College Dublin and the University of Cambridge, he has held teaching appointments and fellowships at several prestigious academic institutions in Europe and the US and is the current holder of the chair in the history of political thought at the University of Cambridge. During this time he has produced a steady stream of publications, including his own monographs Romantic Discourse and Political Modernity (1993), Peace in Ireland (2013), his seminal Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (2015) as well as a series of books co-edited with other eminent scholars on an a broad range of topics and themes from popular sovereignty and political judgement to modern Irish history and the political thought of the Irish revolution. At this stage in his career a new book by Bourke must count as something of an intellectual event, and particularly when the subject of his latest offering is a thinker as ambitious and influential as Hegel.
Anyone who takes on Hegel knows they have their work cut out. He is among the most complex, capacious and ambitious philosophers in the history of Western thought. And unlike other comparable figures in that tradition, such as Plato, Descartes or Hume, his style of writing can be notoriously difficult – indeed one of the more striking aspects of the book is the contrast between Bourke’s consistently clear, exact and clipped style and the frequently obscure, vague and stentorian prose of his subject. As the title of Bourke’s book signals, it is not a synoptic or comprehensive study of Hegel’s thought. Rather it is primarily concerned with the historicism and political philosophy of the nineteenth century thinker and even then in a quite defined way.
Bourke indicates in the book’s preface that his goal is threefold: to explain Hegel’s notion of world revolutions, especially the French Revolution, within the context of his time; secondly, to provide a more discriminating picture of Hegel’s understanding of the historical backdrop of modern European history from which the 1789 world revolution arose; and, finally, to consider the sharply mixed reception of Hegel’s thought in the twentieth century, before confronting the knotty question of the applicability of past political ideas to present concerns.
One of the more intriguing aspects of this preface is its opening reference to an alleged malaise afflicting contemporary culture, and especially the academy. Describing this sickness as ‘a posture of suspicion’ that dismisses reason as controlling hubris, freedom as domination, and liberal democracy as an ally of imperialism, Bourke regards the phenomenon as culturally noxious and intellectually unfounded, since it denies the genuine and hard-won accomplishments of human history. More interestingly, he asserts that Hegel is the first thinker to help us to see through the spuriousness of this kind of wholesale rejection of Enlightenment values. This is a topic I shall return to in greater detail below as I think these early remarks prefigure something important about Bourke’s evolving conception of the role and authority an intellectual historian can and should assume.
The central focus of the opening two-thirds of the book is Hegel’s philosophy of history, or perhaps more accurately his attempt to provide an authentically historical history of philosophy. This is hardly virgin territory, but what makes Bourke’s treatment original and instructive is that he exposes the superficiality of conventional accounts of the topic. Rather than seeing the onward march of human history as fundamentally seamless, he highlights the fact that Hegel understood history as a far more complex and stumbling affair, in which the path to progress often has to endure going one step forward and four steps back before it eventually accomplishes a net gain. A truer picture of the Hegelian historical dialectic from thesis via antithesis through to synthesis is, therefore, more in the spirit of ‘try again, fail again, fail better’.
Bourke finds this pattern noteworthy for a number of reasons but mostly because it offers a vital corrective to the tendency which indulges the illusion that genuine epochal transformation requires an immediate and complete departure from the one which preceded it. This may seem a distinctly elementary point but it’s quite remarkable how often we allow ourselves to become subject to the myth of starting afresh, which has not infrequently caused untold human suffering. Bourke shows that a close reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of History reveals a far more ambivalent and balanced historical sense which offers a potent antidote not just to the myth of the fresh start but to those who, like Nietzsche and Foucault, adopt an unduly dismissive (or, in Pinker’s case, triumphant) view of our current norms and ideals.
What’s especially striking about Bourke’s treatment is how he widens the familiar frame by examining Hegel’s account of ‘world revolutions’ that preceded the paradigmatic one of the French Revolution. What emerges is a highly erudite and persuasive elucidation and clarification of Hegel’s view of human history that progresses along the lines of a game of snakes and ladders rather than like an elevator that only goes up. One of the more vital lessons from Bourke’s detailed work of exegesis is a recognition of the indispensability of continuity as much as change in the historical process. Indeed the first third of his book brings this important and enduring insight to vivid life by showing how Hegel himself could never have accomplished the intellectual breakthroughs he did without standing on the shoulders of his great predecessor Kant. The detailed and cogent case that Bourke puts forward to show how Hegel had to wrestle with Kant’s epistemological and ethical outlook before he could proceed with formulating his own distinctive and revolutionary world view is one of the most arresting sections in what is a truly impressive work.
Returning to the matter of Bourke’s view of the purpose of his chosen field of study, he addresses this question in the closing section of the book by asking whether intellectual history should adhere to ‘revivalism’ (seeking to resuscitate past ideas) or ‘historicism’ (accepting the pastness of the past). His account of the recent history of the academic study of intellectual history and its major players is characteristically assured even if it can occasionally give the false impression that the only place where worthwhile intellectual history happens is Cambridge (and its outposts).
What are the key takeaways from Bourke’s assessment of the current state of the discipline? There are roughly two major points that he is keen to make. The first is that the tendency of the founders of the so-called Cambridge school of the history of ideas to assume the role of the moralist by reviving outmoded ideas for present purposes is problematic since it betrays their original and valid historicist impulses. Bourke judges that John Pocock, Quentin Skinner and John Dunn exhibited more wisdom when they focused exclusively on reconstructing the historical identity of past thinkers and their thoughts and left ‘the historical past to the past’. His second and related point is that one of the chief reasons why intellectual historians (and to an extent political theorists) are better off resisting revivalism is because their truer vocation is as diagnosticians rather than moralists. Bourke’s firm preference for adopting a ‘diagnostic’ (as distinct from a ‘prescriptive’) approach is that:
It helps us understand the character of political structures as products of earlier constellations of forces. It spurs us to pick apart distinct formations as well as to identify continuities across time. Its first duty is to avoid confusion between these two dimensions. Viewed from this angle, the most important task of contextualization is to highlight the diversity of contexts, not least their lack of homogenous synchronicity. We do not study Hegel to confound his circumstances with our own, but precisely to evaluate discrepancies between past and present. The process might reveal correlations and affinities, or equally it might bring out disparities. As Hegel argued at the beginning of the Science of Logic, there is no merit in cleaving ‘to forms of an earlier culture.’
Strong stuff! But is he right? I’m not so sure. At least one major problem with Bourke’s bold assertion about the purpose of intellectual history is its historicist purism, maybe even fundamentalism. It’s far from clear why we should think that past ideas that are appropriately updated and adjusted cannot be used for present purposes. Of course, one can appreciate why Hegel believed it was unwise to try to recuperate or adhere to outmoded ideas since crucially he believed that history was on a progressive march forward leading us inexorably to perfect freedom. But given that Hegel’s teleological view of history has long ceased to be (or never was) credible, surely this affects how we might regard the relationship between the past and the present. Indeed one wonders if Hegel would have been prepared to accept Bourke’s austere view of the uses of history if he himself had lost faith in his own historical inevitabilism.
There is no need to believe in the myth that we can turn the clock back to insist that there are aspects of our past, even the very distant past of the ancient world, that may be worth reviving. In our current existential condition we need all the help we can muster to stop or at least delay that other clock getting any closer to midnight.
1/2/2025
Johnny Lyons lives in Dublin.
