The Concept of the Social: Scepticism, Idleness and Utopia by Malcolm Bull

Author:Malcolm Bull [Bull, Malcolm]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: philosophy, Political, political science, History & Theory, essays
ISBN: 9781844672936
Google: ELVCEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2021-11-15T23:25:47.643950+00:00

In practice, this involves the ‘consciousness that my interest, both substantive and particular, is contained and preserved in another’s (i.e. in the state’s) interest and end’.10 This is the essence of patriotism, but it is also simultaneously the ground of the rationality of the state, for ‘the state is absolutely rational inasmuch as it is the actuality of the substantial will which it possesses in the particular self-consciousness once that consciousness has been raised to consciousness of its universality’.11

Hegel’s theory of the state acknowledges that there is frequently a disjunction between the aggregated outcomes of our individual actions, and the objectives for which we collectively strive. He describes the collective product of civil society, brought about through ‘the complex interdependence of each on all’ as a sort of general intellect which ‘presents itself to each as the universal permanent capital which gives each the opportunity, by the exercise of his education and skill, to draw a share from it’.12 However, he is clear that this is not the same as the general will, as expressed in a social contract. So, instead of wills being united by their own volition, the invisible hand creates a unity which is then consciously willed. In effect, the state is the ‘general intellect’ become conscious of itself as the general will. By this means, the arbitrariness of the general will is steadied by the rationality of the invisible hand, and the spontaneous order of society is infused with the patriotism of the state.

Spinoza had opened up the possibility that there might be a source of political unity distinct from that of the will. Hegel, aware that this potentially creates a problem of agency in complex societies, brings them back together again. In so doing, he offers the first theory of the modern state. Hegel’s state is, as Bosanquet described it, ‘society armed with force’, the invisible hand clenched into an iron fist.

Shopping and bombing

If the significance of Hegel’s theory of the state now appears largely forgotten, it is the result of the concerted campaign against it in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1917, L. T. Hobhouse, reading Hegel in his Highgate garden, was interrupted by the sounds of a German bombing raid. Picking up his book again, he realized that he had ‘just witnessed the visible and tangible outcome of a false and wicked doctrine, the foundations of which lay, as I believe, in the book before me … the Hegelian theory of the god-state’.13

In fact, Hobhouse was responding not so much to Hegel himself as to Bosanquet, whose Philosophical Theory of the State recast the Hegelian theory in terms derived from only one of Hegel’s sources, Rousseau. Insensible to the workings of the invisible hand, but conscious that Hegel had neglected Rousseau’s distinction between the ‘general will’ and the ‘will of all’, Bosanquet offered an account of the state in which the ‘real will’ embodies rationality and so becomes the will for the common good, while the will of all remains the sum of private impulses and interests.

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