5. THE MAIN ILLNESS OF OUR GENERATION

German idealism is often denounced as ethereal and unconnected and as an inherently conservative reaction. In fact, it closely echoed political and economic developments, just as Romanticism reflected the Industrial Revolution, and it had both conservative and revolutionary incarnations and implications. Some groups believed they would prosper in the newly developing world of industrial capitalism while others feared they could only lose, and so some embraced change while others rejected it. The conflicts of class, status, and power were obvious, but the coalitions needed for competing sides to win were not so clear and the proffered solutions reflected this chaos.[118]

In Russia, it was clear one had to reject the autocracy as repressive, inefficient, and boorish. But it was not so evident what one could or should put in its place, so it was natural enough for Russian intellectuals to dip into the new wave of European philosophers, the German idealists ranging from Schiller to Fichte and ultimately to Hegel, for answers. Far from being an odd, irrational escape and leap of faith, it was a reasoned progression from familiar novels such as The Swiss Family Robinson and James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales to Schiller’s “William Tell,” eased by Beethoven’s use of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in his Ninth Symphony. From Romantic literature and music, it was rational and obvious to turn to the philosophy that underlay them.

There Bakunin and his colleagues discovered writers who spoke to the very issues of duty and freedom they faced in their daily lives. In the chaotic Europe of clashing classes, politics, and ethics, the moral ambiguity explored in works such as Schiller’s play Die Rauber (The Robbers) resonated powerfully among young intellectuals. In the play, the bad son deceives his elderly father into disowning his good son, then schemes to murder them both. Discovering there is no justice in society, the good son seeks liberty and passion in the life of an outlaw. Unlike Robin Hood, however, his band of scary men is not a force for justice and retribution, but for destruction and immorality, and the good son creates more harm and evil in the name of liberty than the bad son does in the name of greed. Indeed, the good son is ultimately responsible for the death of his father and his brother, ironically committing the same acts his evil brother had only planned. Thus Schiller illuminated the hopes and disillusionment of the French Revolution and suggested that the consequences of one’s actions might well be unpredictable but were nonetheless as important as one’s intentions. Such ethical uncertainty reflected the tumultuous world of the early nineteenth century, where it was not clear how to rid the world of evil without falling prey to evil oneself. The relevance of such insights was obvious and compelling in tsarist Russia as Bakunin and his generation sought real-world answers to real-world problems in German philosophy. So too was the observation that human existence was as much about conflict and change as it was harmony and stability.

The German idealists that Bakunin turned to were not obsessed with asserting that the idea, or the mind, constructed the real world. Nor were they pursing metaphysical questions of the “How many Hegels can dance on the head of a pin?” variety. They were asking important questions about the nature of reality and the mind, of the nature of political and ethical dilemmas. In fact, they took up practical questions as well as larger ones about the nature of reality. Above all they tried to create a coherent philosophy of progressive change. The rulers of German states and principalities, like Russian tsars, insisted that political change was evil. They had, after all, no reason to love the political ideas of France, with its revolution that had removed, quite literally, the head of state. German idealist philosophers, on the other hand, understood that change was inevitable and necessary for humanity to flourish, but were less convinced than Enlightenment philosophers that it could be easily and effectively implemented. Thinkers from Hegel to Alexander Bakunin had welcomed the French Revolution and the end of regal despotism, but quailed at the aftermath of brutal repression and war. If capitalism brought untold riches, it also created untold poverty, urban blight, and suffering. Like the Romantics before them, they sought to understand how a world that promised so much could deliver such betrayal.

Bakunin was particularly interested in the ideas of Johann Fichte. One of Fichte’s primary tasks was to attempt to reconcile the experience of free will with the observation that the world seemed to be determined. In his language, he sought to reconcile freedom with necessitv, to understand how humans who believed themselves to be free agents able to make meaningful moral choices could also be part of a material world in which laws of nature determined cause and effect. Contrary to popular belief, he did not maintain that human existence took place only in the mind or as a kind of spiritual existence, or that the “I,” the ego, the mind, created the objects that it observed. His starting point—”posit the I”—did not mean that only the mind existed but rather that one starts by asserting one’s self and that one should start by assuming one had freedom.

This assumption was not based on wishful thinking. There were two possible starting points for the philosopher: either pure freedom, sometimes called “selfhood,” or pure necessity, or “thinghood.” Either we could make choices as free beings or we were merely objects, completely subject to the laws of physics, chemistry, and the like. Idealism started with freedom; fatalism, or determinism, or, as Fichte called it, dogmatism, started with necessity. Neither position could effectively refute the other, but Fichte believed it was more useful to start by assuming freedom, for dogmatism could not explain consciousness or the belief that humans had real choice. A strict determinism, he argued, would have to make an unsupported leap from the world of things to the world of thought. Idealism, however, could explain our experience of the material world without making a similar jump of faith, and thus provided a firmer starting point.

So assume freedom. Whatever freedom might mean to the “I,” to the world of the mind, in fact, nothing happened in isolation. In practical terms—and Fichte insisted that practicality was crucial—humans existed in a real, physical, material, and limited world, not one of mind or spirit in which all things were possible. Thus there were limits to freedom. But humans could push those limits and could exercise agency within those limits to expand the boundaries. This was not done by mental gymnastics such as imagining oneself to be free or ignoring external reality. As he emphasized, “It is not possible purely by means of the will alone to modify things in accordance with our necessary concepts of how they should be.” It required action in the real world.

For Fichte, idealism was the operation of the intellect within certain laws in the real world, rather than fantasy or complete freedom, and he assumed that humans acted in the real world. We did not, however, have to accept the real world just as it was. That is, we could say, “This is how the world works at present, but it is not how it should work,” or, “This is how things are, but we can imagine a better world and should work to achieve it.” As Fichte put it, “Reality must be judged in accordance with ideals and must be modified by those who feel themselves able to do so.” The point of philosophy was not to escape the world but to “Act! Act! That is what we are here for.” One had to act responsibly and ethically, and the philosopher and the scholar, having benefited from society’s investment in their learning, owed a debt that could only be repaid by applying their education “for the benefit of society.”[119]

What did a better world look like? For Fichte, it was a world of freedom and equality. The two were not, in his vision, antithetical; each implied the other. For the desire to master others—inequality—was a sign of immaturity in both individuals and societies. Once one had “developed his own sense of freedom and spontaneity ... he would necessarily have to wish to be surrounded by other free beings like himself.”

Much of Fichte’s work dealt with ethics, which obviously assumes both a “real” existence and one in which one is in society, that is, with other humans. It is true that his attempt to base ethics on first principles sounds odd to many of us today. Yet it is apparent, even in a cynical, non-metaphysical world, that we do make some fundamental assumptions about reality and causation. It makes no sense, for example, to punish criminals unless we believe that they have some measure of free will. If their actions were determined, either by fate or God or by circumstance, punishing them is both irrational and unjust. If they could not have acted otherwise, if they had no choice, we are punishing them for something for which they are not responsible. The job of the philosopher, Fichte insisted, was to find the first principles upon which humans could make ethical decisions.

The effect of this philosophy on Bakunin’s generation is hard to overestimate. It did not turn them into navel-gazers but gave them a sophisticated framework to resolve both philosophical and practical questions. “Assume freedom”—what does that mean in the face of duty to family and state? German idealism gave these Russian thinkers the tools to think beyond the narrow boundaries defined by the tsar to consider how to give their lives meaning. It enabled them to contemplate a life, a society, a world, in which people could make free choices unbound by selfish authority. Fichte was right: there was no irrefutable starting point, one simply chose either freedom or necessity, and “the kind of philosophy one chooses depends on the kind of person one is.” Fine: Let the tsar choose his, and let us choose ours! One path led to repression, to narrowing the scope of human activity, the other to the expansion of freedom, and ultimately happiness. What sort of a mope would choose the former? Fichte had an answer for that, as well: the less developed, the immature, the fearful. Well, who wanted to be that?

Fichte held that the ideal was a world where “reason, rather than strength or cunning, will be universally recognized as the highest court of appeal,” where justice, not force, was the principle upon which decisions were made. It would be a world of freedom and equality, for while “man may employ mindless things as means for his ends,” it was wrong to “employ rational beings [even] as a means for their own ends.” This ideal pushed the boundaries of the tsar’s restrictions and those of Priamukhino, for it was wrong to use others. Indeed, the one “who considers himself to be a master of others is himself a slave,” or at least has a “slavish soul ... and will grovel on his knees before the first strong man who subjugates him.” Fichte had a point still applicable today; according to folklore, and to a dominatrix who once was a neighbor of mine, most of the customers of her profession are powerful men in business and politics who pay handsomely to be dominated.

Fichte penned some important political lessons as well, and if Bakunin was not particularly interested in them at first, their influence on his later thought is clear. Fichte asked why men were unequal, and found the answer in the inequality of classes. To be sure, he did not mean economic classes in the way Marx and Bakunin would later use the term, but in a more general sense, to mean something like the skills or vocation one followed. He insisted that class inequality was not natural, and could not be justified, whatever advantages this inequality provided to society. Every class was necessary and thus deserved respect; moreover, nearly everyone could learn from nearly anyone. Therefore all people should be educated equally and left free to choose their class, based on their abilities, skills, and preferences, rather than have their class position fixed by birth, tradition, or law. It was wrong for another to place one into a class, first because no one could know another’s talents well enough to make an intelligent choice, and second because “a member of society who is assigned to the wrong place in this manner is often totally lost for society.” But more importantly, it was wrong because it treated one as a means and not an end, as an object, rather than a human. As Fichte wrote, forcing one into a class meant that “we desired a member of society, and we produce a tool of society. We desired a free fellow worker on our great project, and we produce a coerced, passive instrument of the same ... we have killed the man within the person ... we have wronged him and we have wronged society.” By society, Fichte meant something rather different than did conservative philosophers. Society was not the same as the state or government. The state, he argued, was “only a means for establishing a perfect society.... The goal of all government is to make government superfluous.” As a nice statement of the anarchist vision, this is fairly succinct. Fichte insisted that humans should work toward and for a society in which reason, not force, mediated human interaction, where freedom and equality made possible the increased cultivation and development of humanity, to free humanity from the bonds of nature and greed and stupidity.

To his detractors who thought this was “muddled enthusiasm” or “romantic nonsense,” Fichte replied that such criticism showed only their complacency and lack of imagination. “Since you are unable to imagine a better state of affairs,” he pointed out, “everything really is good enough for you.” He had little patience for those who only carped; it was not sufficient simply to “stand there and complain about human corruption without lifting a finger to diminish it.” Fichte sided with those who were not blinded by their pursuit of wealth and favor, who instead felt pain when they saw “the imperfection, the corruption, and the misery of our fellow men.” The role of the scholar was not to order the impoverished and oppressed into freedom, as the French Revolution had done, but to foster “that strength to help themselves which men possess within themselves.”

Fichte’s popular lectures, which Bakunin translated and published in The Telescope, were hardly injunctions to contemplate one’s navel. They were a call to thoughtful, reasoned action, aimed not at selfish, narrow ends but at broader social improvement. In this way, Fichte sought to expand the vision of freedom and equality expounded by the Enlightenment but overshadowed by the Terror and empire and war and capitalism. And the message was of immediate practicality as well to those in the Russian empire who sought their own liberty and that of their compatriots.

From Fichte, Bakunin turned to Hegel. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel has the dubious honor of being even less understood than Bakunin. As Terry Pinkard notes in his biography, anyone who knows anything about Hegel knows that he believed that reality was spiritual, not material; that reality existed only in the mind and not as an exterior reality; that he celebrated a mystical notion of the “Absolute”; that change over time was based on the “dialectic” of thesis-antithesis-synthesis; and that he held up the authoritarian Prussian state as the desired and desirable end point of human history. Sadly for the storehouse of human knowledge, every one of these statements about Hegel is flat-out wrong, even though they have been repeated to generations of students from Hegel’s day to the present.[120] Considered an essential thinker by those trained in the Western European tradition, Hegel has often been ignored by Anglo-American philosophers. The sides of the modern debate are nicely characterized by the title of an article in the journal Historical Materialism: “Hegel: Mystic Dunce or Important Predecessor?”[121]

Hegel deserves some of the blame for the misinterpretations. His prose is ponderous and dank in the worst German tradition. By comparison, the contemporary Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson, who regularly wins well-deserved prizes for the worst writing in the academy, reads like John Grisham. Much of Hegel’s work has survived only in the form of his lecture notes and those taken by his students, and anyone who has ever sat through or given a lecture will be suspicious of their accuracy. Worse, Hegel had a speech impediment and a distinct Swabian regional accent, in Germany then roughly the equivalent of sounding like Jed Clampett, that made his lectures less intelligible. Reading him in translation puts another barrier between his thought and his audience. More importantly, Hegel was dealing with the large philosophical questions of the day as a professional philosopher and so was speaking in code to those who understood the jargon and the history of the debates and were highly motivated to pick their way through his work.

It is not, of course, necessary to be a Hegelian to be an anarchist. Bakunin later denied that his political ideas were influenced by Hegel, and indeed attacked Marx on the grounds that he had not moved far enough from Hegel. The anarchist Peter Kropotkin, who picked up where Bakunin left off, had no use for Hegel, and preferred to argue for anarchism on the basis of science, not philosophy. Others have held that liberalism itself, taken to its logical conclusions, leads to anarchism; still other anarchists have insisted that historical materialism, existentialism, mysticism, or postmodernism provide sufficient justification. It may be that all roads, or none, lead to anarchism, or that political theory and practice may be rooted in human experience in which formal philosophy plays but a small role. In any case, it is useful to examine Hegel briefly to see what Bakunin found interesting and useful in his work.

Born in Stuttgart in 1770, Hegel studied theology at the University of Tubingen with the plan of becoming a Lutheran pastor and was a contemporary and friend of Schelling’s. When the French Revolution broke out, he endorsed it enthusiastically and celebrated Bastille Day throughout his life. The successes of the Revolution and Napoleon were obvious enough: only after Napoleon’s invasions was serfdom done away with in parts of Europe, and the French legal code was a distinct improvement over the more personal and arbitrary tyranny of the lord. But Hegel denounced the Terror as grotesque excess, an example of freedom asserted as an abstract principle without regard to civil society and real people. Like many thinkers of the day, he was keenly aware of the possibility and need for sweeping reform and just as keenly aware that human intentions were rarely realized perfectly.

After graduation from university, he worked as a private tutor, a job for which he was not well suited, and soon took up the study of political economy, especially Adam Smith, and philosophy, especially Immanuel Kant. He moved to the university at Jena in 1801, where Fichte taught until his death in 1814, and where Schelling was making his reputation. The two friends soon feuded, in part because Schelling, five years Hegel’s junior, was a more popular teacher and writer. When the university was shut down in the aftermath of Napoleon’s Western European tour, Hegel taught high school in Nuremberg. In 1811, aged forty-one, he married a much younger woman, and in 1816, Hegel was made a professor of philosophy at Heidelberg; two years later, he signed with the University of Berlin, where he taught and wrote until his death, officially from cholera, but more likely from a chronic gastrointestinal ailment.[122]

In a “Germany” that consisted of over three hundred independent and often quarreling cities and principalities, the notion of a larger nation that could draw on the resources of an expanded area and population to resist the waves of invasion, war, and foreign occupation and get on with the business of business and civilization was as appealing to Hegel as it was to the Russian nobility. Like other romantic and idealist philosophers, Hegel sought meaning and harmony in the chaos of the period. Unlike Kant, Hegel disliked the notion that humans were always torn between reason and desire, and believed it was possible to reconcile the two. Unlike Schiller, who tried to resolve the dilemma through art, Hegel insisted that the way to avoid the dilemma was through philosophy. Again unlike Kant, Hegel believed that human nature was not fixed or static and that humanity changed and developed over time. So too did human societies, and Hegel believed that there was meaning and direction to this evolving history.

The idea that there could be, and could be shown to be, a path of historical development was not in itself new to Hegel, and has not vanished today. Many religions hold that life on earth is merely the preparation for life in the hereafter or rebirth and that humans should work toward this higher end. Writers such as Francis Fukuyama have concluded that the end purpose of human history is present-day capitalism. With better logic and rather more evidence, Calvin of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes holds that “History is a force ... Everything and everyone serves history’s single purpose ... to produce me, of course!”[123] More seriously, if with less clarity, Hegel held that history—change over time—was not random or accidental. Through studying the past, it was possible to understand its direction. History was not determined by strict “laws” of development the way the orbits of the planets were, but neither was human history haphazard or purposeless.

What was the direction, the purpose, the end, of history? For Hegel, “world history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”[124] Freedom, in turn, could be formal freedom, that is, freedom from restrictions, the ability to do what one wanted to do, but for Hegel, this was more complicated than it appeared. Such a definition rested on the concept of the free individual, but he pointed out that we made our choices from a limited number of options. Our freedom of choice was, to be sure, based on our will, but our very will, including the notion of free choice, was itself based on our society. Our choices were restricted by what was possible and permitted within that society. This freedom from restrictions, this freedom to choose, for Hegel, ultimately meant little more than the freedom to be swept along by current political and social forces. And these forces were hardly neutral or objective, for politics served interest groups, not “the people.”

Instead, he continued, real freedom was that the individual be free to judge and freely choose truth and morality. It was the development and expansion of this idea of individual freedom, based on reason, not on secular or religious authority, custom, tradition, legal codes, or social orthodoxy, that Hegel saw developing throughout human history. This idea, or spirit, of freedom was not a ghost or metaphysical construct, as many have claimed. It was, for Hegel, the expression of different peoples and cultures and could be shown to have developed and refined and expanded over time.

Turning to history to provide examples, Hegel argued that in societies such as China and India, only the ruler was free. One person had the power, the authority, and the right, to determine what people should do and what was moral. The ruler’s will mattered, and it was all that mattered. Ancient Persia saw the consciousness of freedom expand slightly, for while there was an emperor as in China and India, the emperor was expected to be bound not by his own will or desires, but by religious principles.

Ancient Greece extended the consciousness of freedom and actual freedom substantially, but even in the city-states such as Athens it was limited. First, whatever liberty citizens may have enjoyed rested on the labor of slaves. This was, according to Hegel, a matter of necessity, for the idea of freedom developed over time and was tied to the level of material, economic development. In societies of scarce resources, only some could be free, for others had to produce the means of existence that gave them the leisure time to contemplate and engage in civic society. In this way, Hegel argued that the development of the “spirit of freedom” was more than an exercise in logic; it was connected to the development of the real world, and the two influenced each other.

The freedom of the ancient Greeks was limited in another way. Freedom, for Hegel, required critical thought and free inquiry. Much of what appeared to be free activity in ancient Greece, such as the notion of duty to the city-state, was in fact custom, habit, and tradition. That is to say, it was accepted practice, based not on critical analysis and free choice, but on being taught and accepting ideas without question. Orthodoxy and community standards were, in Hegel’s view, a step beyond simply obeying the emperor, but fell far short of complete, real freedom.

Rome pushed the boundaries of freedom further. Unlike the Greek city-states, Rome was an empire. Empire by definition meant organizing different groups, polities, and cultures that are pushed by centrifugal force away from the center. To survive, the empire needed to impose discipline and rules based on principles—a legal code—rather than arbitrary rule. By limiting and codifying the power of the rulers, Rome developed further the idea of the individual and provided for formal recognition of the individual under the law. The individual, however, was in conflict with the needs of the state for conformity and obedience. This need for conformity saw philosophies such as stoicism develop, for they taught that the individual could observe outward conformity but look inward in resignation for development and fulfillment. This was rational when confronted with the power of Rome, but it did not resolve the tension between the needs of the individual and the needs of society.

Christianity was an attempt to resolve this tension by emphasizing the spiritual aspect of human beings. In Hegel’s view, humans were both material and spiritual beings, and only by developing both sides could humanity progress. Christianity, in stressing that Jesus Christ was both man and God, contained the empowering notion that humans were made in the image of God and thus had intrinsic value as individuals. Furthermore, Christianity developed the idea that the task of humanity was not just to achieve inward peace but to act in and on the world to change it. Finally, Christianity based morality on principles, especially the idea of love, and these principles were more than habit or custom, for they were developed through critical thought.

But Christianity was flawed and could only take the search for freedom so far. The Middle Ages saw the Catholic Church dominate individuals as the Church put itself between God and humanity. It demanded not critical acceptance of principles, but uncritical devotion to the teachings of the Church. The spiritual world that Christianity had opened was largely replaced by blind devotion to relics, icons, and ceremonies, to devotion to the forms but not the essence of the Christian message. The Reformation heralded the new dawn and Protestantism created a direct connection between the individual and God. It reinforced the original message of Christianity and reestablished the principle of conscious, rational, human activity in both the spiritual and the material worlds. With the Reformation, the chief human task became the reformation of the world in accordance with the principle of freedom, and thus Hegel insisted that it was not enough to understand the world; it was also necessary to act in it.

But how could individuals agree on what was to be done? How could anyone know what actions were in tune with the progressive expansion of freedom? According to Hegel, the answer lay in rational thought. States, governments, and economies should be based upon rational principles on which all could agree. But rationality itself was not enough, any more than was the simple consciousness of freedom. The French Revolution was an example of humans changing the world based on rational principles, but the subsequent terror was the result of the attempt to apply these principles from above on a people who were not yet ready for them. The principles of the French Revolution, however, remained, and could be built upon; thus Hegel’s celebration of Bastille Day every year. Furthermore, some formal principles of freedom remained in the French legal code and constitutions, and this again showed that humanity built on what went before, discarding those aspects that contradicted freedom and were no longer necessary. Just as slavery had been abolished when and where other productive relations had evolved, so too were political forms abandoned when they no longer expanded human freedom.

What was the next step in historical development? Hegel argued it was time to resolve the conflicts between the state and the individual and between self-interest and duty. Kant had argued that real freedom was to be free from natural impulse, instinct, and desire; one had to think to choose, and one should choose rationally and morally. For Kant, moral choices—for morality is above all about choices—meant to act according to the “categorical imperative”: roughly, to make those choices that could be extended to and made by all. In his words, “I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.” Put another way, moral choices were those made without individual, narrow, particular interests or desires; with these out of the way, the moral choice could be made.

Fair enough, Hegel agreed, but Kant gave us only the principle, not concrete examples. Kant assumed that all humans started at the same spot, that their ideas, desires, and logical processes were essentially the same, but Hegel argued that this was not the case. It is entirely possible to imagine, and to observe, cases where people have very different ideas about right and wrong, and it may be impossible to say who is correct. You might say that everyone has a right to property, and therefore theft is immoral. I respond that property itself is theft and thus no one has a right to it. For you, property is a moral principle; for me, it is wrong.[125] How can we possibly know what should be extended to a universal law, given that humans often disagree on fundamental issues?

Furthermore, Kant’s argument, stripped down, said that you were supposed to choose in accordance with the law of universal reason. So you didn’t really have a choice: you were supposed to do your duty because you were supposed to do your duty. So freedom meant doing your duty. Put more crudely, freedom meant doing what you were told to do. More subtly, it meant following your conscience, which was supposed to have the notion of duty built into it, but again, that meant ultimately doing your duty as defined by your society, which had educated you and shaped that conscience and thus could hardly be seen as universal. If Kant skated around this by insisting that conscience was more than a conditioned reflex, that it was the rational choice to accept the categorical imperative as the guide to our actions, this was an argument made with little reference to real people and real societies.

Finally, Hegel insisted that Kant left us with the premise that humans were inherently torn between desire and reason, between the individual and society, between satisfying the self and contributing to the collective. That meant humanity would always be in conflict. Kant’s solution, that we do our duty, Hegel argued, amounted to saying that we could be moral only if we suppressed our desires, which was hardly the way to develop freedom. If the concept of duty had been a step forward because it recognized a relationship between the individual and the community, the question now was how to incorporate human desire to increase human freedom while adopting principles for behavior without turning them into reflexes of habit and conformity.

History held some clues. Each generation benefited from the efforts of the previous, and though it was always possible to stumble and slide—the Middle Ages and the Terror were proof of that—even these mistakes helped humanity learn and advance. Rationality too progressed and spread throughout cultures, and these two tendencies combined with real changes in economies and politics to help ensure humanity moved forward over time. Thus slavery, though it still existed in Hegel’s day, as in ours, was no longer the preeminent economic relationship in the world, partly because humanity understood that it was wrong and partly because in an age of wage labor and industrialization, it was no longer necessary. Peter Singer gives a clear, contemporary example of the development of humanity in the Hegelian model. Imagine a small community, say a European town. The town develops slowly, without conscious planning, and so the streets are crooked and narrow, following creeks and paths, avoiding obstacles, essentially following nature. There is no need for sewers or garbage collection—the backyard and the vacant property are sufficient. As the town grows, the streets are crowded, inefficient, even dangerous, and waste disposal can no longer be a matter of dumping the chamber pot out the window. The community is too complicated to work effectively without planning and conscious development. Old buildings are torn down, wide, straight streets are laid out, ordinances replace customs, and mercifully, someone creates a sewer system.

But this new rational city presents new problems. The destruction of old neighborhoods robs areas of their vitality and their sense of community; people are now surrounded not by friends and family but by strangers. The new wide streets are nothing more than thoroughfares; no one stops for lunch and conversation and civic life alongside a major traffic intersection. The solutions to the old problems, imposed from above, have solved some problems but have created new ones. The new city doesn’t work as its planners hoped. But the way forward was obvious. Planners and city officials had to work with citizens to develop new ideas more sensitive to the needs of people rather than simple efficiency as viewed from the top. Much of the old city had worked well; the key to progress was to integrate the old and the new.[126]

If this sounds rather like a Civics 101 lecture on modern government, the ideas that governments were accountable to the people, that change was necessary and progressive, and that history could be propelled from below as well as from the top, were radical enough in Hegel’s time of absolutist rulers. We might also ask ourselves how accurately the civics lecture reflects the reality of politics today before we congratulate ourselves on reaching Hegel’s final stage of human development.

Since he was a historian, not a prophet, Hegel was sketchy on the details of humanity’s next step. He spoke of “organic communities,” for he understood that human needs and wants were shaped by the community; the key was to create communities that could think clearly and rise above narrow self-interest or class interest. Suspicious of parliamentary democracy, for it represented blocs of votes and interest groups rather than individuals, he suggested that a constitutional monarchy in which the monarch was subservient to the legislature might provide the right combination of access and efficiency. This argument put him in the vanguard of progressive reformers of the day. No anarchist, Hegel’s comments on the state sometimes strike us as totalitarian, especially when he writes about the “divine nature” of the state, an idea that taken literally opens the door to all kinds of state repression. But a more sensitive reading of Hegel shows that he understood clearly that any state was a creation of humans and thus was prone to errors, mistakes, and misinterpretations. He understood full well that “supreme executive power” could be misused. Furthermore, by the state, he meant not just the government with its legislature, police, and bureaucracy, but the community and culture that created such structures as were necessary to pursue an ethical life. He believed not in the rule of a dictator—rational or not—but in the rule of law, understood and agreed to by members of the community, not imposed upon them from above.

In Hegel’s view, the task of philosophy was not to teach what one ought to do in a specific circumstance or to divine what ought to happen. History, not a philosopher, would determine that. But philosophers could, Hegel believed, use rational thought to determine what was reasonable and necessary and to demonstrate what was in line with the historical development of freedom. This was summed up in his famous, and utterly confusing, statement, “What is rational is real, and what is real is rational.” Subsequent scholars have interpreted Hegel’s remark in contradictory ways. Some suggested it means that it is irrational to oppose whatever exists. Cast that way, Hegel could be used to support the most tyrannical state or economic system. All one could, and should, do was become reconciled with existing reality, for since it existed, it was real and therefore rational and in tune with the march of history. Others turned his phrase around to see it as a call for action, for whatever existed and could be shown to be irrational, such as serfdom, was not “real,” because it hindered historical development and should be torn down. Thus conservatives and reformers, reactionaries and revolutionaries, could all appeal to Hegel. His followers split into two camps, the Right Hegelians and the Left Hegelians, depending on their political views. In Russia, Belinsky temporarily moved to the right to adjust to his new job with the regime. Herzen, on the other hand, concluded that Hegel had discovered the “algebra of revolution.”

Bakunin has often been interpreted as taking a Right Hegelian position in 1838. This is based on the preface to Hegel’s Gymnasium Lectures that Bakunin published in the March 1838 issue of the Moscow Observer. The lectures were originally given by Hegel while he was head of the Nuremburg high school, laying out his ideas on education. For Hegel, education was the way to resolve the separation of the individual from the community, for it served both to critique and to develop a common culture and ethic. Bakunin and others had purged the editor of the Observer and put Belinsky in charge. In the first issue under the new editor, Bakunin called explicitly for a “reconciliation with reality,” and insisted that it was folly to “rebel against reality.” This appeared to be a call for his generation to get with the tsar’s program and support orthodoxy and conservatism. In fact, it signaled an end to the romantic engagement with ideas and art and represented his generation’s turn to realism, practical action, and resistance. As Bakunin put it in a letter to the Beyer sisters, “It is time to speak up.”[127] And so he did:

Who nowadays does not fancy himself a philosopher, who does not speak today with conviction on what truth is and on what truth constitutes? Everyone wants to have his own, personal, particular system; he who does not think in his own original way, in accordance with his own arbitrary feelings, does not possess an independent spirit, he is considered a colorless, insipid man; he who has not thought up his own little ideas, well then, he is not a genius, there is no profundity in him, and nowadays no matter where one turns, one encounters geniuses everywhere. And what have these so-called geniuses thought up, what have been the fruits of their profound little ideas and views, what have they advanced, what have they accomplished of real significance?[128]

Bakunin’s answer: “Noise, empty chatter—this is the only result of the awful, senseless anarchy of minds which constitutes the main illness of our new generation—a generation that is abstract, illusory, and foreign to any reality.” In an attack that could have been aimed at his earlier views as much as those he critiqued, he complained that until now—that is, until Russia took up Hegel—philosophy was synonymous with “abstraction, illusion, and the absence of any reality.” Thus the philosopher was alienated from the “natural and spiritual world.” This separation from the real world led the philosopher to falsely believe that only the individual mattered, that the philosopher was the judge of truth, and that therefore his ideas, not objective reality, were true. These beliefs, Bakunin continued, alienated the individual from reality and caused him to waste energy railing against a reality he could not, in fact, alter by an act of will. This sounds conservative, but the article was written in the double code familiar to Bakunin’s colleagues and comrades. Bakunin first encoded the article in Hegelian language and definitions and then recoded its controversial ideas in Aesopian language that used the rhetoric of patriotism, indirect metaphors, irony, and sarcasm to disguise the real message from the tsar’s censors. The real meaning, however, was plain to those in the know. A clever example of this is Bakunin’s critique of education in Russia. On the face of it, he critiqued the Russian education system because it “does not form a strong and real Russian man, devoted to the tsar and to his fatherland, but rather something mediocre, colorless, and without character.” Yet as Bakunin knew full well from his own experience, and as his friends and readers knew from theirs, the education system did indeed create loyal subjects; the real point of his text was that criticism, not slavish devotion, was true loyalty to the organic community. A state that did not cultivate the virtues of criticism and reason—and Russia patently did not—was not an organic, whole community but a divided one that cherished the wrong values. In Hegelian terms, the present Russian state was thus irrational and unreal. It was something to be criticized and prodded, not reconciled with.

For Bakunin had long attempted to reconcile himself with Russian reality, from his school days in St. Petersburg to his failed military career to his relations with his family. By 1838, however, he had concluded that Russian reality was awful and not worth reconciling with. His article represented a rupture with, not a reconciliation with, Russian reality. It was the first concrete step in his radical political thought, and may be viewed as a critical transition.

The article established Bakunin as the most important Russian Hegelian of the period and put him in the ranks of young Hegelians anywhere; according to Belinsky, it also helped put the Observer out of business, for it was hardly accessible to the general reader. For his part, Bakunin blamed Belinsky for the decline of the journal, but it may be that both were right. Nonetheless, to be the most important Hegelian meant much, for Hegel was now the fashion, and Bakunin would continue his exploration of the philosopher.

[118] Paul McLaughlin, in Mikhail Bakunin, has argued convincingly that many of Bakunin’s critics, including Isaiah Berlin, have completely misinterpreted Bakunin and the German idealists. His critique, much of which takes place in his extensive footnotes, is provocative and original, based on a close and nuanced reading of primary texts, and delivered with a scathing wit and accuracy. Brian Morris, in Bakunin: The Philosophy of Freedom, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1993, similarly argues that the Berlin school has got these philosophers about as wrong as possible.

[119] Johann Fichte, “Some Lectures Concerning the Vocation of the Scholar,” Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, Daniel Breazeale, trans., ed., Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988, page 150. The subsequent quotations are from this work.

[120] Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, page ix.

[121] Tony Smith, “Hegel: Mystic Dunce or Important Predecessor? A Reply to John Rosenthal,” Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, 10, no. 2 (2002), pages 191–206.

[122] Pinkard, page 659.

[123] Bill Watterson, Scientific Progress Goes (CBoink,”Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1991, page 27.

[124] G. W. F. Hegel, Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History, Robert S. Hartman, trans., New York: Macmillan, 1953, page 24. This volume is the introduction to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History.

[125] Peter Singer uses this example in Hegel: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pages 42–4. I have been guided by his interpretation in this section.

[126] Singer, pages 49–50.

[127] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Beyer sisters, 13 March 1838, cited in Del Giudice, page 240.

[128] Cited in Del Giudice, page 424. Where Del Giudice has translated genii as “genies,” I have translated it as “geniuses.” Unlike most of the work on Bakunin’s Hegelian period, Del Giudice’s thesis and her article, “Bakunin’s Preface to Hegel’s Gymnasium Lectures: The Problem of Alienation and the Reconciliation with Reality,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 16, no. 2 (1982), pages 161–89, are models of scholarly insight and integrity. I draw heavily upon her interpretation here. McLaughlin, Mikhail Bakunin, also follows Del Giudice.