Right Hegelians

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section does not cite its references or sources.
You can help Wikipedia by introducing appropriate citations.

The Right Hegelians, Old Hegelians, or the Hegelian Right, were followers of the German philosopher Hegel who took his philosophy in a politically and religiously conservative direction. They are typically contrasted with the Young Hegelians, who interpreted Hegel's political philosophy to support innovations in politics or religion.

Hegel's political philosophy could be read in liberal or conservative directions.

Hegel's historicism held that both ideas and nations could only be understood through understanding their history. Throughout his life, Hegel was moreover an orthodox member of the established Lutheran Church in Prussia. He devoted considerable attention to the Absolute, his term for the ground of being that was used in his philosophy to justify belief in God. In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel wrote that:

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. This substantial unity is an absolute unmoved end in itself, in which freedom comes into its supreme right. On the other hand this final end has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the State.

— Philosophy of Right, "The State", s. 258

The Hegelian right expanded on the support that could be found in these ideas for statism, establishment politics and orthodox religion. Hegel's historicism could be read to affirm the historical inevitablity and justification of current institutions; a nation was an Ideal, something that in Hegelian idealism existed above and over the people that constituted it. To argue for political change was to attack the Ideal of the national state. The Right Hegelians believed that advanced European societies as they existed in the first half of the nineteenth century, were the summit of all social development and the historical dialectic that had existed thus far. Moreover, most went on to praise the Prussian state itself, which enjoyed an extensive civil service system, good universities, industrialization, and high employment, as the acme of progress and the incarnation of the Zeitgeist.

Many of the members of the Hegelian right went on to have distinguished careers in public academia or the established church in Prussia. As a school, they were closely associated with the University of Berlin, and held many of the chairs of philosophy and theology there. Generally, the philosophers of the Hegelian right have been neglected; their fame, if not their reputations, have been eclipsed by the Young Hegelians including the later Bauer, and Karl Marx, Hegel's most famous disciple today. They left their mark chiefly in theology, where the historical methods they pioneered did not have the intended effect of bolstering the historical inevitability of the historical faith, but rather pioneered the introduction of higher criticism by showing the influence of the surrounding times and culture on the development of Christianity.

Philosophers firmly within the camp of the Hegelian right include: