The question, perhaps: Note on Hegelianism

Note on Hegel and systems of oppression

I found Gillian Rose's argument, in her marvellous short book Hegel contra Sociology, that most sociological theory is Kantian to be rather compelling. For an even damning account at least of Durkheim and thus the French school of sociology (including Levi-Strauss? or even Althusser and Foucault in at least some readings of them?), see the late Zygmunt Bauman's marvellous book Modernity and the Holocaust. In a different register, it is depressing to suppose that the differences between German and French theory helped legitimate, if not cause, World War I. In Bauman's account, sociology owed much of its importance in the fin-de-siècle period to the fact that it is rather obviously an ideology of state bureaucracy. Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Negri (who may be influenced by the fact that Hegelianism was in a way the official state philosophy of Fascism, in the person of the theory of Giovanni Gentile) thinks that is true of Hegel, a claim I'm not presently in a position to opine on, but you could draw an argument about that from his idea of Geist as explained by people like Pinkard, since the whole idea seems to be of a discourse that becomes completely transparent because all claims become explicit and can be criticized, instead of there being the conditions of a sociology that would explain social rules, norms, discourses, and practices in a way inaccessible to themselves. But if there were such a discourse, or way of relating oneself to and speaking it, it would obviously favor a class of professional managers and intellectuals assimilated to it -- which arguably is what Stalinism was, or would have been, at its best.)

What Bauman shows with regard to Durkheim is that grounding moral norms in social institutions leaves us unable to critically explain the 20th century's worst forms of barbarism and evil. Does Hegel have the answer? Maybe that is the question. Whether Hegel gives us a way of explaining everything strikes me as a less fruitful question, in light precisely of the above. Hegelians especially of the right Hegelian variety are fond of saying this or that theoretical position is already accounted for by Hegel, whose system enables the apt player to win every game. But if that were true, so what? The logic of justification is part of that of power and technology. Hegel loses on that measure even he wins.

I think when I was a student at Berkeley I encountered enough administrative personnel who were perhaps at least tacit Hegelians. They were more often female than male, whether or not that means anything (it was also the heyday of feminism, and being male increased one’s liability to be accused of what today are called “micro-aggressions,” that is, a hermeneutically ferreted out presumptive latency of a dissident or disaffected reaction that those exercising power could find sufficiently challenging that they would label it a (virtual, or imagined) '“violence”). They were distinguished by their belief that any practice is justified once it is explained. It will be explained as meeting some need or necessity. What else does bureaucracy do? If it meets even the needs of the managed and not just the discursive pleasures of the managers, even on terms the managed themselves are drive to articulate, you still just have the empty nihilism or worse of a communicative capitalism. These functionaries were usually incredulous at my own lack of satisfaction at what they would rule on. Then their only recourse is to label the disaffected person 'violent'.

And this is not an alternative to our world, but a rather good image of it and what's lousy about it. Judges and doctors, who rule on other people's liberty or sanctions applied to them, speak such a discourse, and it really may be able to comprehend everything on its own plane, as a reflection onto its mapping, so to speak, but that is small comfort to the people subjected to these discourses, quite privatively, as the point of prisons is always in part to subject bodies to painfully restricted experiences of space and time, as the underside of the discourses, so to speak, experienced from a different point of view that is normally not understood or experienced by the person who judges and decides on this sort of thing.