1.0 Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
Every individual is a child of his time. It is not easy for one to escape the influence of his epoch or contemporary world. Hegel himself is not innocent of this. His historical judgments and moral evaluations were in fact as much conditioned by time, place and personality, as those of other philosophers.
However, in virtue of the nature and scope of our topic, this portion will rather concentrate more on the de facto German political condition which presented itself glaringly before Hegel and to which his political thought was nothing but a reaction.
Hegel made a comprehensive and scholarly case study of his native German state and discovered the multiple ills that overwhelmed it. He lamented that people considered private property and interest to be indeed common to all society so as to justify their selfish ends[1].
He also saw the pseudo-democratic spirit that shrouded the state which he thought would engender more threat to freedom than ever. In effect, he wished to eradicate all these. He wanted to substitute them with a magnificent theory of power vested upon the state and the monarch.
From his experiences of the French Revolution, Hegel deplored the consequences of the Revolution. He even tagged it a ‘glorious dawn,’ but he also meant that at the inception of the revolutionary wars, Germany was not free from the revolutionary armies’ invasion. The invasion came up when Hegel was twenty-one.
On another note, Germany was infested with a myriad of petty despotisms that were loosely linked together as the Holy Roman Empire under the leadership of Francis I of Austria. Marcus enumerating this noted that:
The Reich[2] consisted of Austria and Prussia, the prince Electors, 94 ecclesiastical and secular princes, 103 barons, 40 prelates, and 51 Reich towns, in sum it consisted of nearly 300 territories.[3]
Under this heteronomy of despotisms, Germany found it extremely hard to subsume their personal whims under a united national spirit. There was rather an evidence of porosity, individualism and weakness. In view of this Hegel as one of the contributors to the development of the German state made this elegant remark;
Without law and justice, without protection from arbitrary taxation, uncertain of the lives of our sons and our freedom and our rights, the existence of the despotic power, our existence lacking unity and a national spirit… This is the status quo of our nation.[4]
Therefore, this was a period when people believed strongly in the divine right of kings even though they could not reach out for laws and justice. This means that rationality was conspicuously lacking and this manifested itself in the introduction of arbitrary taxations and insecurity. However, everyone yearned for the German reunification, which has for long eluded her even after the revolutionary wars during which Austria and Prussia were vanquished.
At this time when the French power was incumbent, Germany experienced much reformation. In Prussia, for instance, Von Stein, a liberal, was appointed chief adviser to the king, and he immediately abolished serfdom and reorganized the system of government. Following him was Von Hardenberg, who promised to give Prussia a representative constitution; but these hopes were obliterated completely after Napoleon’s defeat.
On his own part, Frederick William III, the Prussian king lost interest in reform, and after years of delay, in 1823 he set up only provincial ‘estates’ which engaged only in advice, and in any case were completely dominated by land owners.
Moreover, in 1819, at a meeting at Carlsbad, all the German states agreed to censor repressive measures against those who advocated revolutionary ideas. After observing all these, Hegel viewed that Germany has had a real genetically political cankerworm. He instantly detected these national defects of German character as ‘provincialism’ and ‘particularism,’ which, he said, are the causes of the empire’s weakness.
He also observed that Germany, viewed from the cultural point of view, was a nation but it had not understood what it meant to subjugate parts to whole which was essential to (the) a national government. The central government, he noted, was weak because its power flowed from its parts. Even the existing constitution reflected nothing but an explicit subterfuge for weakness.
Thus, there was total individualism among the people and sheer sectionalism among corporations, estates, guilds and even religious sects. For this reason then Hegel identified this German particularism with an anarchical love of freedom which misconceived liberty as an absence of discipline and authority[5]. And this he contrasted with “true freedom”, which is to be found only within the bounds of a national state. Freedom as Hegel understood it had nothing to do with the individualism of English and French political thought but it was rather a quality reflected upon the individual by the national power of self-determination.
In effect, Hegel saw Germany as revolving around what he termed the’ civil society’ with no greater aim than collective protection of its industrial property. He aimed at elevating Germany from its political and social trash to an organic natural state, the divine idea in the universe. Following his diagnosis of Germany’s weakness Hegel defined the state as a group which collectively protects its property. Its only essential powers are civil and military establishment sufficient to this end.[6]
1.2 Statement of the Problem
One of the caricatured presentations of Africa in Western thought is the Hegelian metaphysics, which aims to give a philosophical foundation of a universal history of mankind. Despite the fact that Hegelian thought has a social and epistemological root in European history and Western philosophy, his conceptualization has claimed a universal validity to finally result in a racially motivated and wrongly interpreted image of Africa.
This paper is formulated with the assumption that in addition to critically challenging the Afro- pessimism which the Hegelian thought directly propounds there is also a need, as an African researcher, to raise the question of methodology and representation of one’s specific history and social process. In this sense, this paper has a philosophical significance in problematizing issues related to ontology and epistemology in social sciences, particularly in the analysis of the state, ethnicity and ethnic politics as historical as well as contingent dynamics.
1.3 Objective of the Study
The specific objective is to show, from an anthropological perspective, how the Hegelian conception of the state, which is an integral part of his metaphysics, fails to account for the specific state forms and process and therefore finally lead to a Eurocentric (Kebede 2003) perspective, which is consistent with Hegel’s own imagining of Africa. Obviously, this is not a novel enterprise.
1.4 Significance of the Study
For this reason, the primary significance of the paper is more to show how, until recently the very idea of the state has been conceptualized, by both local historians as well as foreign interpreters, in terms of a Eurocentric notion of the state, which can best be exemplified by Hegel’s thought. By exploring the specific case through Hegel’s idea of the state, the aim is therefore to argue that state forms and process cannot be understood well by conceiving the state as an independent institutional category, with its own coherence, logic and organic unity beyond and above society – concepts central to Hegelian philosophy.
1.5 Methodology
This study will be qualitative in nature making use of secondary data. The study will adopt the doctrinal research methodology which involves the review of scholars, and works of previous authors on the subject matter while identifying the gaps and proffering solutions where necessary. This is the best fit for a critique of this nature in order to identify the weak nesses and amplify the strengths for better revision and policy implications.
1.6 Scope of Study
The study focuses on the Critique of the State as a Community of Persons in Hegel.
1.7 Limitations of the Study
During the course of this study, many things militated against its completion, some of which are:
- Time Constraint: The time frame given to accomplish this project was very short due to school academic calendar and it was carried out under pressure which made the researcher not to implement some necessary features.
- Research material: availability of research material is a major setback to the scope of the study.
- Frequent power failure: This made the researcher append more money on fuel to ensure sustainable power.
- Financial Constraint: Insufficient fund tends to impede the efficiency of the researcher in sourcing for the relevant materials, literature or information and in the process of data collection (internet).
