Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

IDEOLOGY: SECULARall readers are painfully aware, abstract enough. Yet it is, at leastinitially, far clearer that his abstractions are attempts to come to termswith society—bourgeois society; and indeed in his analysis of labour asthe fundamental factor in humanity ('man makes tools because he isa reasonable being, and this is the first expression of his Will', as hesaid in his lectures of 1805-6) 15 Hegel wielded, in an abstract manner,the same tools as the classical liberal economists, and incidentallyprovided one of the foundations for Marx.Nevertheless, from the very beginning German philosophy differedfrom classic liberalism in important respects, more notably in Hegelthan in Kant. In the first place it was deliberately idealist, rejectingthe materialism or empiricism of the classical tradition. In the secondplace, while the basic unit of Kant's philosophy is the individual—evenif in the form of the individual conscience—Hegel's starting-point is thecollective (i.e. the community), which he admittedly sees disintegratinginto individuals under the impact of historical development. Andindeed Hegel's famous dialectic, the theory of progress (in whateverfield) through the never-ending resolution of contradictions, may wellhave received its initial stimulus from this profound consciousness ofthe contradiction between individual and collective. Moreover, fromthe very beginning their position on the margins of the area of wholeheartedbourgeois-liberal advance, and perhaps their inability completelyto participate in it, made German thinkers much more awareof its limits and contradictions. No doubt it was inevitable, but did itnot bring huge losses as well as huge gains? Must it not in turn besuperseded?We therefore find classical, but especially Hegelian, philosophy runsoddly parallel with Rousseau's dilemma-ridden view of the world,though, unlike him, the philosophers made titanic efforts to includetheir contradictions in single, all-embracing, intellectually coherentsystems. (Rousseau, incidentally, had an immense emotional influenceon Immanuel Kant, who is said to have broken his invariable habit oftaking a regular afternoon constitutional only twice, once for the fallof the Bastille and once—for several days—for the reading of Entile.)In practice the disappointed philosophical revolutionaries faced theproblem of 'reconciliation' with reality, which in Hegel's case took theform, after years of hesitation—he remained in two minds aboutPrussia until after the fall of Napoleon and, like Goethe, took no interestin the wars of liberation—of an idealization of the Prussian state. Intheory the transitoriness of the historically doomed society was builtinto their philosophy. There was no absolute truth. The developmentof the historic process itself, which took place through the dialectic of251