Hegel, Stalin and Genocide

A fundamental question in ethics and politics is this: who has the authority to say which human goals/aims/ends are worth pursuing? As it turns out, the way we answer this question can affect the future in profound and even horrific ways.

Classical liberal notions of "freedom" assume that an individual is ultimately the arbiter of this question.  Ultimately, I am free if I can pursue my ends, and while my ends may be subject to many kinds of internal criticism, ultimately I am the one who says whether I ought to pursue them.  No-one else has the right to say, unequivocally, that my final values are mistaken.

Hegel was the first major critic of this classical-liberal notion of freedom.  Were he alive today, he might simply continue this critique by pointing to modern advertising, and to the bizarre desires that advertising can instill in us.  Surely, he would say, freedom cannot consist in simply pursuing one's ends, because those ends can be of questionable authenticity.  After seeing the hamburger commercial, I do not freely rush out to buy the hamburger.  Rather, I seem to be in the grips of corporate control.  No matter how strongly I feel the desire, it remains a problematic one.

However, Hegel didn't just level this critique, for without a positive conception of freedom, the critique would be empty.  Rather, his story is one in which human cultures progressively ascend to greater and greater levels of rationality, and this, ultimately, is how freedom manifests itself in the world. For Hegel, many of the cultures of his day were unfortunately "stalled" in this respect.  In particular, he pointed to the Orient and to various slavic nations in Europe who had, for various reasons, not properly moved towards the establishment of an enlightened democratic state.

This line of thinking should now be making perceptive readers nervous.  Here is his ideological successor, Engels, writing in 1848 in a journal that Marx edited:

"Among all the large and small nations of Austria, only three standard-bearers of progress took an active part in history, and still retain their vitality - the Germans, the Poles and the Magyars. Hence they are now revolutionary... All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm. For that reason they are now counter-revolutionary...

The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward...

The chief mission of all other races and peoples, large and small, is to perish in the revolutionary holocaust."

It is no mere coincidence that betwen 1921 and 1947, millions upon millions of innocent people were brutally murdered, tortured, and starved to death by Stalinist Russia. We are insufficiently attentive to the fact that Stalin's barbarism dwarfed Hitler's in many respects, and we ought to be puzzled about the fact that public displays of the swastika are now forbidden while the CCCP's hammer-and-sickle is a fetishized fashion symbol. As much as many on the far left would love to ignore this, the logic of Hegelian anti-liberalism points the way to this result.

I am not suggesting that Hegel's political position entails the actions of Stalin.  No doubt there were falsifications and distortions at each successive stage. But we cannot ignore the sorts of positions that begin to arise when we deny individuals the ultimate authority over the value of their own ends or their ways of life.  For we must then divide the world into those who live correctly and those who do not, those with the right values and those with the wrong ones. When this is combined with a progressive view of history, according to which it is the destiny of mankind to reach preferred, "higher" stages of development, it becomes an imperative for "right-thinking" individuals (those with access to the theory and thus to the "correct" view of human life) to move this process along.

Modern liberalism, with its emphasis on negative freedom, its rejection of teleology and religion, and its general fondness for capitalism as a mode of production, has been consistently subjected to withering criticism from modern Marxists, from environmentalists, from communitarians, from anyone and everyone who sees a "malaise" in this form of modernity.  It may well be that this form of society is itself fatally flawed in some way.  However, it must be said that Liberalism's foundational idea, that individuals must be allowed to define their own ways of life, is perhaps our greatest political defense against the totalitarian massacres of the 20th century.  Modern liberal-capitalist life contains many evils.  Those evils are utterly insignificant next to the terror visited on the world by the 20th-century descendents of Hegel. 

 

 Holodomor Victim, Ukraine, 1933