Theological Origins of Modernity

the contradictions of enlightenment 283
away from the liberal cause to Romantic nationalism (and in the twentieth
century to Fascism and Nazism). His more radical followers, by contrast,
were pulled toward populism or nihilism (Cherneshevsky, Pisarev), anarchism
(Bakunin), and revolutionary socialism or communism (Marx,
Engels). Almost all of these more radical Hegelians rejected Hegel’s notion
that rational freedom required a reconciliation with nature and an
acceptance of existing social, economic, and political institutions, arguing
that history was a teleological process that could end only with the
realization of absolute freedom for all of humanity. Indeed, they believed
that they could scientifi cally demonstrate that such a goal was inevitable.
As a result, they were convinced that the pursuit of such a liberation was a
moral imperative and that those like Hegel who argued for a more limited
notion of freedom were merely quietists or bourgeois ideologists seeking
to maintain the status quo. Th ey thus turned to a more a more radical view
of freedom that envisaged the ultimate liberation of all human beings. In
place of the existing order they imagined a world in which everyone would
be able to do whatever they wished, to “hunt in the morning, fi sh in the
aft ernoon, and be a critical critic in the evening.” However, such universal
freedom and prosperity could only be achieved if nature were completely
mastered. To achieve this goal, they believed it would thus be necessary to
free human productive forces by means of a revolutionary overthrow of
the existing social and political order. In this way the artifi cial constraints
on the productive power of technology would be removed, a superabundance
created, and all want eliminated. Radical Hegelians thus abandoned
Hegel’s notion that humanity had already attained its historical goal,
which in their minds was near but which could only be attained through
one last apocalyptic act of violence. In this way, these radicals returned to
the millennarian politics that Hegel had sought to constrain. In doing so,
however, they also returned to the same Enlightenment optimism about
human progress that had characterized earlier historical thinking and that
had played such an important role in the extremism of the Revolution.
Th e view of history as progress was severely shaken by the cataclysmic
events of the fi rst half of the twentieth century, the World Wars, the
Great Depression, the rise of totalitarianism, and the Holocaust. What
had gone wrong? Modernity, which had seemed on the verge of providing
universal security, liberating human beings from all forms of oppression,
and producing an unprecedented human thriving, had in fact ended in
a barbarism almost unknown in previous human experience. Th e tools
that had been universally regarded as the source of human fl ourishing had
been the source of unparalleled human destruction. And fi nally, the poli-