Is History Going Anywhere?

0:00Alright, I have a few copies in my paper, if anybody wants some, I can give them to you after the talk. My paper is an investigation into the question, is history going anywhere? It would take a lifetime of research and writing to even get close to a satisfactory answer. This paper has been a chapter in that grand exploration. Its scope focuses on the thought of Hegel and two of his more contemporary critics, Mises and Eric Vogelin. Everyone here is familiar with the work of Mises, but many of you may not be familiar with that of Vogelin. I won't talk about him much in this presentation, but for those of you interested in the philosophy of history, you might want to take a look at his writings, they might be beneficial. So why should we be interested in Hegel today, more than 150 years after his death? Although he still has some influence in the continental philosophical tradition, there is very little, if any, Hegelian influence in the Anglo-American or analytic tradition.

0:46Philosophers of science rarely cite Hegel, so why should people working in the social sciences worry too much about this figure in the history of philosophy? It seems to me that although Hegelianism has probably already seen its better days, there are still Hegelian ideas that influence those who work in the social sciences. Hegel's main idea regarding the philosophy of history is that world history is inexorably leading in a certain direction. He then sets about describing this progression toward his idea of freedom, but this of course means that all of history was determined and couldn't have happened differently. The force that drove all the great figures in history according to Hegel is the Weltgeist or the World Spirit. And we'll talk a little about Hegel's Geist more later, but for now I just want to describe some of the Hegelian influences in the contemporary social sciences. Hegel, along with Comte, in later Marx, established within the Western philosophical tradition the notion that society evolves or progresses in stages.

1:36This is important because just by virtue of the fact that one stage, with all of its abstractions and characteristics, is followed by another stage, with other characteristics and abstractions and so on, and so on. All of this presupposes that there is some direction toward which history or social development is aiming. This all means that there is some end state of affairs, the stage is up to that point, presumably served to progressively set up or bring about that end state. So whenever we hear thinkers talk about successive stages of historical or social development, a teleological conception of history is implicit in their analysis. Teleological Let's take Marxism as an example. In Marx's social theory, there's first predative communal societies, then feudal economic systems, and then pre-industrial economic development followed by capitalism and socialism, and finally the classless communist society. The material productive forces are what drives this development or progression. Each stage gets history closer to the goal. Hegel's philosophy of history is very similar. Marx was actually Hegelian

2:38in itself. While Hegel's universe is populated by ideas, Marx simply applied Hegel's philosophical system to a materialistic cosmos. For Marx, the final goal, the telos of history is the utopian communist state. For Hegel, the telos of history is his idea of freedom. The guy used to work through the stages of history to bring about this end, and Hegel and his follower Marx want to study history in the way that the scientist studies nature. They believe that they have found a theoretical framework necessary to make philosophical In the same way that the scientist looks at nature, the scientist seeks to apply a theoretical framework to natural phenomena. Hegel's philosopher-historian does the same thing with history. History is his phenomena to be studied. Furthermore, any sort of theory that describes stages of historical development, where one stage is followed by another until some end state is reached, such a system must necessarily describe the force that brings about the success of stages.

3:35I believe that the argument I make in this paper would apply to any such system. I chose to center my paper around Hegel's philosophy of history because his system is, in my view, the first systematic and philosophically robust teleological analysis of history and social development. Consequently, it has either directly or indirectly influenced every major teleological analysis of history and social development since. I'll try to illustrate how Hegel's system works by looking at a major world historical figure as Hegel does. He gives the example of Caesar. Some of what follows may sound strange, but we must keep in mind that Hegel thought Rome's transition from republic to empire was a crucial development in the advance of freedom. He says that before he took over the entire Roman Empire, Caesar was struggling to maintain his equality with the other leaders. About to lose his position, he resorted to fighting the others in the interest of maintaining his own position.

4:25By defeating the others, he came to be the sole leader of the whole empire, although the Constitution and the Republic's legal framework remained intact. What spurred him to action was not merely self-interest, but more importantly, an unconscious impulse toward a state of affairs predetermined to come about at that time. This is one of his quotes from the lectures on the philosophy of history. He says, such are all the great historical men, whose own particular aims involve those large issues which are the will of the world's spirit. Man is a means to the end of history. The spirit works through the actions of individuals, brought about by the passions to actualize its greater end. Man's passions spur into action, man's reason makes it possible to achieve the ends he chooses.

5:12In the Geist, the world spirit is the force, the principle that ties all of history together into a comprehensible and intelligible whole. Without the Geist, Hegel says that history would be unintelligible, we would not be able On the theoretical level, Hegel says that there are three basic stages that the Spirit passes through. In the first stage, where the Spirit is immersed in nature or the passions of man, it seems that the Spirit has no conception of himself. Only one is free, the ruler, emperor, or whatever, and all the others are subject to his rule. Ancient China is the example he uses to typify the stage. In the second stage, only a few are free. Ancient Greece and Persia are the examples he uses. In this stage, the principle of freedom is present in a few, but their freedom depends on the toil of others who aren't free.

6:02As he says, the spirit emerges into consciousness, but this emergence is impartial due to the spirit's close relationship to its previous naturalness or basicness. In the final stage, the spirit rises from the limitedness of the previous stage up to the rank of the universal. Hegel uses the Prussian state as an example. He thought his Prussian state was a culmination of all historical development since ancient China. This is a general form that the process takes. The job of the historian, according to Hegel, is to describe in these terms the progress in history. In other words, the facts of history, the historical phenomena, must conform to this basic scheme. So nobody's ready to leave yet? Even if we accept the Hegelian thesis that history is inexorably heading towards some final end, the idea of freedom, it can never be applied to materialist metaphysics or even the physical world as we apprehend around us.

6:56If we're going to be materialists, we can't apply any kind of a priori reasoning, including Hegel's dialectical logic to the material world around us. This is what Mises says on this topic. Hegel didn't contradict himself in applying the logical a priori to the interpretation of the universe, but it's different with a doctrine that indulges in naive realism, materialism and empiricism. Such a doctrine ought to have no use for a scheme of interpretation that is derived not from experience but from a priori reasoning. That's from theory and history. He continues, it's a gratuitous pastime to apply the terminology of logic to the phenomena of reality, propositions about phenomena, events and facts can be affirmed or negated, but not the phenomena, the events and the facts themselves. We are horribly mistaken if we think we can substitute the word negation for change.

7:42This is the mistake that Engels did in his, I think it's called Anti-During, in his book where he tried to apply the dialectical method to biology. I think I said it's an utter failure.

7:57Negation, indeed the entire dialectical method applies only to ideas and propositions about reality, not reality itself. It seems to me that for Hegel's system to work, we have to assume that all of our experiences, all the reality around us, these are all just ideas. This may not be a problem for Hegel, for as he stresses, the only real thing is a belgeist. But insofar as we think the physical material world We cannot use a dialectical method to explain phenomena we experience. Instead, we must use the methods of the sciences. In short, if we wish to cling to materialism, or metaphysical dualism, or anything like that, Hegel can tell us nothing about the end of history, or the means by which we will get there. We cannot apply the rules of logic and reasoning to phenomena themselves. Only ideas conform to those rules. Hegel's philosophy of history only works in a world constituted by ideas, not a world populated by material objects.

8:49In Mises's article, Sociology and History, first published in 1929, he criticizes the view that we can explain historical development or progress and make future predictions through a scheme or a law of stages type analysis. In other words, his argument is against a view that economic development progresses through historical stages. The import it has in our discussion about Hegel and the teleological view of history will become clear momentarily. The first I'll briefly outline Mises' argument. The model that Mises attacks is Carl Bucher's Theory of Stages, but Mises notes this theory is representative of a whole class of similar theories and that his criticism should apply to the rest of the members of this class. According to Bucher, history has progressed from the self-sufficient home economy, then to the town economy and finally to the modern industrial economy.

9:41These progressions came about through the principle of lengthening routes that the goods travel between producers and consumers. In other words, these stages come about through the dynamic functioning of the division of labor. By dynamic, I mean that Booker conceives of the division of labor as a law that progresses or expands throughout history. A dynamic interpretation claims that the lines of production lengthened over time is to claim that there will be more and more specialization in manufacturing, expanding distribution networks, etc. over the course of time just by virtue of the fact that time has progressed. A static interpretation of the division of labor, on the other hand, simply states that work performed under the division of labor tends to be more productive than isolated work. This static interpretation is what allows us, as Mises says, to make sense out of historical phenomena.

10:26We can look at some historical event like the shortening routes between producers and consumers in the late Roman Empire and understand that it came about because of a diminishing division of labor. These kinds of static laws or principles allow us to make sense out of the past, but they tell us nothing about the future other than the fact that we'll recognize future states of affairs as being explainable by these static principles. To use our example, we can't imagine a case, for the most part, where work in isolation will be more productive than work under a division of labor. Waiver. Mises writes accordingly, the realization of the higher productivity of work performed under the Division of Waiver places at our disposal the indispensable means for the construction of ideal types necessary for intellectual comprehension of this event. And for more on ideal types, I recommend that article, Sociology and History, by Mises. I think it's in the Epistemological Problems of Economics, but he sort of gives a nice little introduction

11:22The historian constructs these ideal types, for instance, the self-sufficient household economy, the town economy or the national economy, etc., because he just sees how the division of labor works. He can organize different patterns of historical phenomena according to a scale based on the intensification of division of labor. These ideal types are useful for intellectual comprehension and pedagogical purposes, but we must be careful in using them for other means. The decisive and fateful error lies not in their construction but in the attempt to connect them with a schema of stages and to base this schema on the law of the division of labor. He continues, This law makes only one statement about the objective result that can be attained through the Division of Labor. It does not say that the tendency toward further intensification of the Division of Labor is operative.

12:12In other words, we cannot say that one stage necessarily follows another and then base this progression on a static law like the Division of Labor. This law is not the kind of law that says something about an operative force. These kind of laws only say something about a class of phenomena that apply universally. The phenomena that fall into this class will be explained by that law. The confusion arises when we confuse a static law with a dynamic or an operative law. It's my claim that Hegel's idea of reason as guiding the realm of human events is another instance of this confusion. Like Bouquet, Hegel outlines what he understands to be stages in human development across history. These stages are the various empires going back in time to pre-historical China, as he calls it, and outside history because they were without freedom through the Persians and the Greeks in whom the idea of freedom first appeared and finally in the Germanic age where the end of history was approaching.

13:07Reason guides this entire process for Hegel. His idea of freedom is when we choose to do the right thing through the influence of nothing else but reason. For Hegel reason is the operative force through which the idea of freedom passed through the ages and eventually onto its own self-consciousness. But is the principle of reason really an operative force? I contend that it's not. The laws of reason tell us something about the way our minds work. When ideas conform to the laws of reason, we are able to make sense out of them. When ideas don't conform to these laws, they are unintelligible. We cannot comprehend a square circle that's green all over and red all over at the same time. But these laws were discovered and developed over time. As people learned to use them, they were able to make better sense out of the world. Science developed as a result. Perhaps another development due Due to the use of these laws was the emergence of freedom throughout Western Europe.

13:55We're able in the present to look back at these moments and perhaps even assign to them ideal typical names as Hegel does. It certainly helps us to categorize errors in history according to common qualities across societies. And again, we are only able to do this because we recognize certain ideas like freedom, reason, etc. to be homogeneous across time and society. For this reason, we don't include the past deeds of, say, a particular herd of buffalo in our history. Those ideas don't apply. The ideas like reason and freedom and stuff don't apply to such a group. But we have no reason to think that these ideas are operative in history. The laws of reason are not the kind of laws that can be operative. They are static. If the emergence of freedom indeed comes about when man applies the rule of reason to his actions, then freedom will wane when man forgets the rule of reason. At the end of the day, Hegel wants to study history as we study the

14:45and Natural Sciences. He wants to apply a theoretical framework to the subject matter of history. My view, and I believe it's the Austrian view, is that history is only the collection of human events, phenomena, et cetera, that conform to all the fractiological laws. Those events and phenomena could have been different, and in that case, they would have also conformed to the law, to the fractiological laws. But economic laws, or any other kind of laws that govern human action, don't determine human history. They certainly eliminate some otherwise logical possibilities. For example, we can eliminate the possibility that raising the minimum wage will causally increase employment. In this limited sense, the future will look like the past, but economic laws or any other laws governing human action no more determine the future than they determine the past and the present. Those are all my remarks for right now, so I'll hand it over. Thanks.