Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) may well be the most influential
philosopher and political theorist Germany has produced, with the possible
exception ofKant. He follows in a European tradition influenced byRous-
seauand having important connections withPlatoand the Classical Greek
philosophers. His influence, though often of a tenuous nature, is undeniable
across an enormous range of modern social thought, but especially inMarx-
ism, even though he would not himself have been in any way a Marxist. No
one could reduce the subtleties of Hegel’s thought to a dictionary definition.
The only approach is to identify a few of his most influential ideas. To start, he
argued that human civilization was the story of intellectual and moral progress,
and that this was not accidental but the working out of a rational spirit in
human perception. This is one of the ways in which he influences Marxists,
who also believe in human progress, although they would attach much more
importance to material or technological change, while Hegel saw the real
source and description of progress as lying in our collective intellectual
development. Secondly, his detailed account of change and development,
the ‘dialectical argument’, has been taken over by Marxists (seedialectical
materialism), but also by many other schools of thought. The dialectic, to
Hegel, is the process in which any given social or intellectual state contains an
essential contradiction. This contradiction forces a conflict (of ideas to Hegel,
of interests to others). As a result we must see human history as a series of
conflicts where a ‘thesis’ (the original state or idea) conflicts with an ‘antithesis’
to produce a result, the ‘synthesis’. But the synthesis itself must contain an
internal contradiction, and on we go again. Although such ideas usually seem
extremely metaphysical, Hegel’s writing is often down-to-earth and illustra-
tive, and shows how useful a dialectical approach can be. In practical terms his
major importance is as a precursor ofMarx; but Marx radically changed
Hegel’s perspective, by taking material rather than intellectual matters to be
crucial. Hegel tended to believe that thestatewas the most important aspect of
politics, and much of his more directly political argument was concerned with
the development of the state. For Hegel the state, the way we organize our
politics and our systems of social coercion, demonstrated our degree of
rationality; so the state was the best measure of human progress. He raises so
many issues that most subsequent political theories can be related to his work.
Apart from Marxism, the most obvious is the work of another German social
thinker, of more vital relevance to mainstream academic thought, MaxWeber.
Hegemony
Hegemony, which essentially means the domination or rule of one actor over
others, is mainly a concept in international relations, used both by academics
Hegel