Hegel’s World Revolutions

by Richard Bourke

A new account of the relevance of Hegel’s ideas for today’s world, countering the postwar anti-Hegel "insurgency"

G.W.F. Hegel was widely seen as the greatest philosopher of his age. Ever since, his work has shaped debates about issues as varied as religion, aesthetics and metaphysics. His most lasting contribution was his vision of history and politics. In Hegel’s World Revolutions , Richard Bourke returns to Hegel’s original arguments, clarifying their true import and illuminating their relevance to contemporary society. Bourke shows that central to Hegel’s thought was his anatomy of the modern world. On the one hand he claimed that modernity was a deliverance from subjection, but on the other he saw it as having unleashed the spirit of critical reflection. Bourke explores this predicament in terms of a series of world revolutions that Hegel believed had ushered in the rise of civil society and the emergence of the constitutional state.

Bourke interprets Hegel’s thought, with particular reference to his philosophy of history, placing it in the context of his own time. He then recounts the reception of Hegel’s political ideas, largely over the course of the twentieth century. Countering the postwar revolt against Hegel, Bourke argues that his disparagement by major philosophers has impoverished our approach to history and politics alike. Challenging the condescension of leading thinkers―from Heidegger and Popper to Lévi-Strauss and Foucault―the book revises prevailing views of the relationship between historical ideas and present circumstances.

Genres: Philosophy, History

344 pages, Hardcover

Published October 31, 2023

About the author

Richard Bourke took his first degree at University College Dublin and completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge. He is currently Professor in the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary College, University of London.

Reviews

[vanessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Richard Bourke in his Hegel's World Revolutions formulates two discernible commitments. The first one is programmatic. According to Bourke, in the aftermath of the post-WW2 besmirchment of Hegel as the thinker of the authoritarian right by the ostensible "intellectuals/philosophers" Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin, Hegel's political thought per se has been largely understudied. With the resurgence in the interest in Hegel's metaphysics and epistemology, Bourke wishes to capsize the decline of the 19C German behemoth as a political thinker. Second, Bourke's commitment is also political. It is an argument against "radicalism." (Is it really 1968? Just look around the lovely old Cambridge where the formidable and irresponsible student radicals surely lurk behind every corner!)

And the latter commitment is underpinned by the central argument of the book. From the French Revolution onwards, Bourke argues, the modern world has witnessed numerous "failed revolutions." Following the dictum that "the actual contains the possible", any political upheaval based on "ideal arrangements justified in abstraction from practical affairs", in Bourke's interpretation of Hegel, must necessarily lead to failure and bloodshed. However, this perennial problem of politics on how to imagine and enact a better world from the inescapable ruins, fallenness and corruption of the old one is surely more complex. Moreover, as the wonderful and ever-incisive Lea Ypi asked during the book's launch at the PTIH Seminar in Cambridge, if we were to follow Bourke's argument how does one explain away the notorious ambiguity of Hegel's attitude towards the French Revolution? How does one explain away his membership of the Jacobin club in Tübingen? Bourke did not answer.

There are other problems I had with the work. To name a few:
1) The second half of Bourke's book was a history of the intellectual reception of Hegel. From the get-go, Bourke makes the controversial announcement that he will ignore the foundational impact of the Hegelian system on Marx and the tradition of post-Hegelian left-wing political thought. While, obviously, a justified authoritative decision, Bourke failed to recognise the extent to which his argument would have been—or rather must have been—different had he decided otherwise.
2) Bourke attempted to exonerate Hegel's Euro-centrism and explain away his explicit disdain for the "oriental world”. How do you explain away the language of racialised essentialism, however pervasive in the 1820s, through recourse to the thesis of world-historical development? Well, you do not. And you do not have to. In other words, this seemed a very strange hill to die on.
3) Finally, my peeve: Hegel and teleology. In Chapter 8 while discussing Leo Strauss's reception of Hegel, Bourke argues that Hegel had discarded both progressive philosophies of history based on "blind faith", and the contemporary “decline of the West” reactionary theories as teleological. Furthermore, in his project, as per Bourke, Hegel sought to refrain from teleology as he did not want to leave the direction of history “to credulity”. Nevertheless, Bourke proceeds with highlighting Hegel's oft-quoted preface to the Phenomenology, where he had posited that the purpose, or the telos, of history could be found at its end, ie “exclusively in its result”. This seems contradictory. While Bourke rejects the common—and I agree—superficial interpretation of Hegel as hubristic and politically complacent (ie the view that Hegel argued that contemporary Prussia marked the proverbial "end of history"), he maintains that for Hegel, the actualisation of freedom in subjectivity unified with the constitutional state in objectivity was the purpose of historical development. Why is Hegel, then, not a teleological thinker? Is the dialectic not teleological because it is immanently "rational"? It just does not seem intellectually plausible to assert that "A" is not a non-actual abstraction because it is based on "A"'s internal self-sustaining logic.

To balance my review, I enjoyed reading the book, particularly the first half, where Bourke presented a compelling argument on reading Hegel as a contra-Kant neo-Kantian.

Finally, for a much better review of the book than my ramblings, look at this Terry Eagleton piece: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n...

[JR Roach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stimulating and accessible account of the fundamentals of Hegel's conceptualizations of world history and political philosophy that overturns some key misconceptions of Hegel's relationship with 1789. The application of Hegel to postwar developments in political philosophy and intellectual history is immensely rewarding.

[Adam S. Rust · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first 2/3 of this book is a great intellectual dissection of Hegel's philosophy of historical change and how it related to his philosophy of politics. The last 1/3 is some major academic navel gazing without any clear point. The first part is really great though.

[Mr T · Rating 3 out of 5]

I struggle with this kind of history, but it does show the unity of Hegel's political thought over his lifetime.