In my judgement, Hegel is the one modern thinker who offers the most adequate theoretical framework for the reconciliation of our individualism and our communitarian needs. The multicultural ‘reconciliation’ of the left was imposed from above by hostile elites against the natural prejudices of European peoples, against their own ways of life, their own communities, and their own (rationally approved) in-group preferences. The communitarianism of Hegel, however, recognizes i) the substantial unity of the traditional family, ii) the private sphere of markets and the world of civil society, in which individuals enjoy ‘negative liberties’ (private freedoms) to pursue their own lifestyle, as well as iii) a state, which expresses the general will and constitutes the sphere in charge of ensuring the ‘social freedom’ of citizens, legislation and execution in accord with the ‘shared’ values of the community, and constitutional liberal principles. Hegel specifically set out to solve the problem of how the growth of individuals who had subjected all traditional collectivities to the judgements of critical reason could create public institutions and a nation state that would make possible the central value of private freedom while ensuring that the nation would express the collective identity of the people and would embody their general will, the national interest of the citizens as a group.
There is no space here to enter a long textual disquisition into Hegel’s political philosophy. Suffice it to say that Hegel’s basic argument is that freedom has both a ‘private,’ subjective or ‘libertarian’ component, and a public, objective or collective component. Classical liberalism today tends to be defined by conservatives as free markets, formal equality before the law, and private enjoyment of life’s goods. These private freedoms are known as ‘negative liberties’ in that they don’t require anything from the public other than laws guaranteeing the security of private contracts and associations. The collective social freedoms are identified by leftists today with ‘social rights,’ equality of opportunity, welfare provisions, and the removal of all ‘socially constructed’ differences between men and women and races. Getting to the true aims of Hegel is very difficult because politically correct academics have forced ideas onto him that portray his collectivism in socialistic terms, at the same time that they have suppressed his rationally reflected traditionalism and nationalism. They have put forth a Hegel that views ‘social rights’ as rights for greater equality, a Hegel that synthesizes the atomism of free markets and private rights, with a state that ensures social rights for everyone and promotes the ‘collective economic good’ of society.
It is true that Hegel argued (correctly) that being recognized as a citizen while living in abject poverty was a violation of individual self-expression, insomuch as this was a result of the actions of powerful citizens having complete freedom of contract without any social rights protecting workers in the form of state regulation of working conditions. But there is a lot more to Hegel’s concept of social freedom. When Hegel writes about a shared conception of the good, when he says that individuals enjoying their negative freedoms in the private sphere can be capable of embracing the social freedom of the state, meaning that they experience the ends of the state as integral to their own selfhood as modern rational citizens, he does not mean economic goods only; he means as well the cultural collective goods and sense of peoplehood (Volk) that can be guaranteed only by a national state. Hegel indeed appeals to the idea of national identity as the glue that can bind otherwise rational private citizens by virtue of their belonging, through birth and ethnicity, to a single culture.
Current interpreters of Hegel, notwithstanding the merits of their works in organizing and clarifying Hegel’s extremely difficult ideas, either rarely mention or willfully misread Hegel’s emphasis on national identity.103 Frederick Neuhouser, for example, argues that Hegel could not have appealed to a sense of national belonging ‘akin to bonds of brotherhood’ since such bonds would be rooted in a ‘pre-reflective attachment,’ which is supposedly inconsistent with a post-Enlightenment culture in which individuals accept only communitarian identities that are ‘consciously endorsed through a process of public reflection on the common good.’104 Since it is a pervasive inclination of our times to argue that Western nations must be based on values alone, and since the dominant interpretation of Hegel today is that he was a liberal socialist, academics have happily deluded themselves into believing that the act of consciously subjecting our laws, customs and beliefs to rational debate, seeking the approval of reason, automatically negates the actual biological realities of human bonding, ‘the bonds of nature.’105 But this is wishful thinking inconsistent with a free-thinking subject.
For starters, Neuhouser well knows that the ‘bonds of love’ that unite Western families are not purely ‘free’ and ‘rational’, even as the union of husband and wife was freely decided rather than coerced by unreflective customs. There is a strong natural bond between parents and children and between men and women as sexual beings who can reproduce children, not to mention the multiple customs that regulate the marriage ceremony and child-rearing. There is also, as Storey argues, a strong natural (but no longer pre-reflective) bond uniting people with the same historical ancestry, territorial roots, and language within one nation. This bond is consistent with a rationally free subject on two levels. Firstly, history teaches that those nations possessing a high degree of ethnic homogeneity, nations in which the ancestors of the present populace have lived for generations — England, France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark — were the ones with the strongest liberal traits, constitutions and institutions. Before immigration restrictions were eliminated starting in the 1960s, the very rationally oriented nation states of the West were reserved for people of similar ethnic and religious identities. Secondly, and contrary to our current juvenile misreading of Hegel, the subjection of ‘pre-reflective bonds’ to rational examination does not necessarily entail the cultural Marxist idea that everything is ‘socially constructed’ or that only ‘propositional values’ can be said to be acceptable as the uniting bonds of a nation. Thinking critically about ‘pre-reflective bonds’ means that these bonds can no longer be seen as unknowable, mysterious forces that control the affairs of men; it means that we now know their nature, that we can explain why individuals tend to be attached to people of their own ethnicity and historical lineage. It means that we have rationally explained studies about in-group attachments, biological dispositions, and genetic determinants.106
It means, finally, that we can see that leftist communitarians are deceivers, that the cosmopolitan universal values our current elites advocate are not rationally based, but have been concocted by rootless cosmopolitan academics and politicians engaged in the deliberate misreading of the great thinkers of the past to promote the insane idea that European ethnic identity is inherently violent and exclusionary, even though Europeans alone are responsible for modernity and even though there is now substantial evidence showing that humans are genetically inclined to prefer their own ethnic in-group and that diversity is coming with an incredible price in the form of systematic rapes, social disunity, suppression of rational debate, illiberal controls, and economic/environmental costs.
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Notes
[←1 ]
Hoppe, H. (2017). ‘Libertarianism and the Alt-Right. In Search of a Libertarian Strategy for Social Change’, speech delivered at the 12th annual meeting of the Property and Freedom Society in Bodrum, Turkey, on September 17, 2017; https://misesuk.org/2017/10/20/libertarianism-and-the-alt-right-hoppe-speech-2017/ (29/12/2017).
[←2 ]
See Duchesne, R. (2011). The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, Leiden: Brill.
[←3 ]
Sinha, S. P. (1993). Jurisprudence Legal Philosophy: In a Nutshell, St. Paul, Minn.: West Pub. Co., p. 8.
Sinha, S. P. (1995). ‘Non-Universality of Law’, ARSP: Archiv Für Rechts- Und Sozialphilosophie / Archives for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, 81(2), pp. 185–214.
[←5 ]
Duchesne, R. (2011). The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, Leiden: Brill. p. 270.
[←6 ]
Ibid., p. 10.
[←7 ]
Ober, J. (2015). The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, Princeton University Press, Preface xv.
[←8 ]
Sinha, S. P. (1993). Jurisprudence Legal Philosophy: In a Nutshell, St. Paul, Minn.: West Pub. Co., p. 8.
[←9 ]
Duchesne, R. (2011). The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, Leiden: Brill, p. 344.
[←10 ]
Ibid., p. 368.
[←11 ]
Ibid., pp. 372–373.
[←12 ]
Ibid., p. 380.
[←13 ]
Duchesne, R. (2011). The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, Leiden: Brill, pp. 450 & 452.
[←14 ]
Ibid., p. 342.
[←15 ]
The Near Eastern and non-Indo-European origin of the Etruscans, noted by Herodotus, has been well-attested by the genetic data. Nicholas Wade notes the largest studies of mtDNA indicate a Lydian, non-Indo-European origin, ‘closest to Palestinians and Syrians’; furthermore, the DNA of their cattle comport with these findings, also having their origin in the Near East. — Wade, N. (2007). ‘Origins of the Etruscans: Was Herodotus right?’ The New York Times; http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/health/03iht-snetrus.1.5127788.html (04/05/2016).
[←16 ]
Szmodis, J. (2011). ‘On Law, History and Philosophy’. Sectio Juridica et Politica, Miskolc, Tomus XXIX/1, pp. 119—140. (For greater detail on the direct descent of Roman Law from the Etruscan system see also Szmodis, J. (2005) ‘Reality of the Law: from the Etruscan Religion to the Postmodern Theories of Law’, Budapest: Kairosz.)
[←17 ]
Ibid.
[←18 ]
Leoni, B. (1991). Freedom and the Law, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Inc., p. 83.
[←19 ]
Hoppe, H. (2006). ‘The Idea of a Private Law Society’; https://mises.org/library/idea-private-law-society (29/11/2017).
[←20 ]
Peden, J. R. (2009). ‘Inflation and the Fall of the Roman Empire’; https://mises.org/library/inflation-and-fall-roman-empire (11/05/2016).
[←21 ]
Augustine. The City of God, Ch. 4, ‘How Like Kingdoms Without Justice are to Robberies’; http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120104.h
tm (17/11/2017).
[←22 ]
Van Dun, F. ‘Natural Law’; http://users.ugent.be/~frvandun/Texts/Logica/Natural
Law.htm (28/10/2017).
[←23 ]
Casey, G. (2012). Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State, Continuum International Publishing Group, pp. 42 & 98.
[←24 ]
Kern, F. (Tr. Chrimes S. B., 1968). Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages, London: Basil Blackwell, Intro. xix– xx.
[←25 ]
Hoppe, H. (2015). A Short History of Man: Progress and Decline, Alabama: Mises Institute, p. 110.
[←26 ]
Benson, B. L. (1990). The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State, Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, pp. 29-30.
[←27 ]
See Berman, H. J. (1983). Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, Harvard University Press.
[←28 ]
Duchesne, R. (2011). The Uniqueness of Western Civilization. Leiden: Brill, p. 275.
[←29 ]
For example, de Benoist, A. & Champetier, C. (2012). Manifesto for a European Renaissance, Arktos Media Ltd.