The Right Side of History

I. A Rider in Jena

On 13 October 1806, 220 years ago tomorrow, a 36-year-old lecturer in Jena wrote a letter to his friend Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer. French troops had occupied the town; the next day the battle of Jena and Auerstedt would shatter Prussia. The lecturer had just finished his first major work, the “Phenomenology of Spirit”. And he had seen Napoleon: “I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.”

The lecturer was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. That sentence contains his entire philosophy of history: history moves towards a goal, and some people are its instruments, whether they know it or not. Napoleon rode for the world-soul. He believed he was riding for France and for himself.

II. What Hegel Thought

Hegel’s most famous sentence on history reads: “The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.” First only one was free, the oriental despot. Then some were free, the citizens of Athens and Rome. In the end all are to be free. History is not a muddle but a path, and it has a direction.

It is driven by contradiction. Every order produces tensions on which it breaks, and from the break a higher order emerges. Incidentally, the familiar formula of thesis, antithesis and synthesis is not Hegel’s. He hardly used it. Others later put it in his mouth because it is easier to remember than what he actually wrote.

Then there is the “cunning of reason”. The great actors pursue their own passions and interests, and precisely thereby accomplish what history wants. Napoleon wanted an empire and brought Europe the civil code. And finally the sentence that earned Hegel the reputation of Prussian state philosopher: “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational.”

III. The Heirs Divide the Inheritance

Hardly had Hegel died of cholera in Berlin in 1831 when his pupils split into two camps. The Right Hegelians read the sentence on the rational and the actual this way: the existing state is rational and therefore to be preserved. The Left Hegelians read it the other way round: only what is rational deserves to be actual, so the irrational must go.

Karl Marx came from the second camp. He wrote that with Hegel dialectic stands on its head and must be turned right side up. Not spirit drives history, but the relations of production. The goal remained: a society in which all are free. In 1914, in Swiss exile, Lenin read Hegel’s “Logic” and noted that one cannot understand “Capital” without it, and that consequently no Marxist had understood Marx.

On the other side of the Russian Revolution, too, stood a Hegelian. Ivan Ilyin, the philosopher whose remains Putin had brought home from Switzerland in 2005, had written a major book on Hegel in 1918. We described his influence in “Die Gebeine aus Zollikon”. The Red and the White, Lenin and Ilyin, learned from the same teacher.

And a third strand leads to Paris. There, from 1933 to 1939, the Russian émigré Alexandre Kojève held a seminar on Hegel’s “Phenomenology” attended by a whole generation of French intellectuals, from Raymond Aron to Jacques Lacan. Kojève proclaimed that history had essentially ended with Napoleon. After the war he joined the French Ministry of Economic Affairs and helped build the European Economic Community. A Hegelian as one of the planners of the EEC: that may be the philosopher’s most underrated trace.

IV. The End of History That Did Not Come

From Kojève came the idea that Francis Fukuyama made famous in 1989 in an essay titled “The End of History?”. With the collapse of communism, Fukuyama argued, there was no longer any serious alternative to liberal democracy. Events would go on, but the contest of the great ideas had been decided.

Then came 11 September 2001, the financial crisis of 2008, Crimea in 2014, Ukraine in 2022, and a China that grew rich without becoming liberal. History had not ended. Fukuyama has been much mocked for this, often unfairly, since he had added a question mark his critics overlooked. But his error is instructive: he took Hegel’s goal to have been reached. Whoever believes he has arrived stops learning.

V. The Right Side of History

Hegel is most alive today in a figure of speech. Barack Obama liked to speak of being on the “right side of history”. Whoever opposed same-sex marriage or climate protection stood on the wrong side. In 2021 Xi Jinping declared that the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation had entered an “irreversible historical process”. And the Kremlin explains that Russia stands on the right side while the West is in decline.

All three say the same thing: history has a direction, and we know it. That is convenient, for whoever has history on his side no longer needs to argue why he is right. He only has to wait. Whoever disagrees is not mistaken, he is backward.

Karl Popper called this way of thinking “historicism” and wrote a book against it in 1957. He dedicated it to the memory of the countless people who fell victim to the fascist and communist belief in inexorable laws of historical destiny. Hegel was not responsible for that. But he supplied the sentence with which one can acquit oneself: history will tell.

VI. Where Hegel Is Right

Being merciless towards Hegel would be cheap, for he saw several things his critics overlook.

First: contradictions really do drive development. Every order produces the tensions through which it changes. Whoever wants to understand a society must look at its contradictions, not at its self-description.

Second: the “Phenomenology” contains the chapter on master and slave. People fight not only for bread but for recognition. In 2018 Fukuyama built his book on identity on this, explaining why grievance today often votes more strongly than the wallet. This insight is two hundred years old and more current than any poll.

Third: freedom needs institutions. Hegel understood that rights on paper are useless without families, associations, communities and institutions that carry them. He called this ethical life. The liberals who believed markets and elections were enough could have learned from him.

And fourth, Hegel himself warned against his heirs. Philosophy, he wrote, always comes too late. Like the owl of Minerva it takes flight only at dusk, when a form of life has already grown old. It can understand what has happened, not predict what will happen. Whoever invokes Hegel to know the future has not read him at the most important point.

VII. Control with a Fixed Set Point

In the language of control engineering Hegel’s history is a feedback loop. Contradiction is the deviation, crisis the correction. So far this is a learning system.

The flaw lies in the set point. With Hegel, and even more with his heirs, the goal is fixed in advance: the freedom of all, the classless society, the liberal world order, a resurgent Russia. A controller with a fixed set point can correct everything except the set point itself. Every deviation is read as “not yet”, never as a sign that the goal might be wrong. Whoever thinks like this cannot fail; he simply has not arrived yet.

An open control loop, as Popper wanted, knows no final goal. It only measures whether people are better or worse off, and corrects. That is less sublime than the world-soul on horseback, but it goes on learning even after it has been wrong.

VIII. The Owl and the Callers

Hegel’s owl flies at dusk. It understands when it is too late. In “Die ungehörten und vergessenen Rufer in der Wüste” we described the counterpart: the warners who come too early and are therefore not heard. Between them lies the day on which one ought to act, and on that day nobody knows for certain where history wants to go.

Napoleon did not die as the world-soul but as a prisoner on Saint Helena. History did not take him onto its side. It used him and discarded him, as Hegel himself described. That could have been a warning to his heirs.

History has no side. It only has people who invoke it so that they no longer have to argue.