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Hegel and Fascism

Henry Mead

In his 1945 work The Open Society and its Enemies, Karl Popper famously attacked what he saw as the intellectual roots of fascism. Tracing a lineage from Plato to its modern progenitors, he asserted that ‘Hegel’s hysterical historicism was the fertiliser from which totalitarianism was grown’.1 Popper’s chapter on “Hegel and the New Tribalism” includes a long list of charges, questioning Hegel’s motives as an employee of the Prussian State, his style and knowing use of ‘imbecile fancies’, and his contributions to what Popper termed “historicism”, nationalism, and finally to modern totalitarianism.

Popper, historicism and Hegel’s critics

For Popper, the term “historicism” referred to the notion of a fixed path running through history, a pattern predetermined that would progress inexorably to a telos. In his view, Hegel had inherited the Platonic fixation on forms via the immanent essentialism of Aristotle. In his phenomenology, his elision of subject and object, and contraries of all sorts, involved a dangerous absolution of all moral or epistemological distinction. According to Popper, the theodicy presented in Hegel’s philosophy of history was ruthless in its optimism, relegating suffering and moral evil to necessary way-stations on a path towards the absolute.

In Popper’s account, Hegel’s “historicism” combines the Aristotelean notion of entelechy with the German Romantic nationalism of Herder and Fichte; one of its results, in a later generation, was fascism. In this view, the myth of the nation was justification of the emergent state, an embodiment of the absolute that naturally requires enemies and warfare in its formation. Aggressive actions were exempt, in their providential status, from moral censure. Such processes, moreover, were precipitated by certain Great Men, also above morality in their unknowing enactment of historical will, and worthy of celebration for their heroic life and exploits. Popper sceptically recounts Hegel’s plan of history culminating, following periods of Oriental despotism and Classical democracy, in the “German Age”. With the Reformation at the threshold, modernity finds its apogee in Prussian statism. As Bertrand Russell wrote, also in 1945, ‘It is odd that a process which is represented as cosmic should all have taken place on our planet, and most of it near the Mediterranean’.2 Popper was, however, less ironic than condemnatory: in Popper’s opinion, Hegel’s idea of the state as the manifestation of the Absolute spirit subordinated individuals within civil society to its will and authority. All these aspects seemed to Popper to lay the foundations of modern totalitarianism.

Such an attack by the Austrian-born Popper had a great influence in the English-speaking world, consolidated by similar commentaries by Russell and Isaiah Berlin; for many in Britain and America, Hegel’s reputation after World War II was at its lowest ebb.3 It is worth noting, however, that attacks on Hegel on ideological grounds began well before this nadir—as Kirk Willis has shown, foreboding commentaries regarding the geopolitical outcomes of Hegel’s thought are traceable back into the 19th century. As early as 1838, the British and Foreign Review described Prussian ministers as being ‘filled with Hegelian casuistry’; comments in the intellectual press on Hegel’s conservatism continued through the 1840s and 50s.4 Bismarck’s expansionist policies cemented this wariness: a piece in the Contemporary Review of 1899, for example, noted that Bismarck merely ‘carried out the general ideas of one of the greatest philosophers of the counter-Revolution—Hegel’.5

Intimations of militarism came to a head during the Great War: by 1915, the reaction in Britain led to the forced resignation of the Lord Chancellor, Richard Burdon Haldane, an Idealist philosopher, owing to suspicions over his “Germanophilia”.6 Baron von Hugel’s The German Soul (1916) linked Hegelianism with the ‘barbarous excesses of the German mentality now at work’,7 as did John Dewey, in German Philosophy and Politics (1916). George Santayana went further in Egotism in German Philosophy (1915), which blamed the “egoism” of German thought from Kant onwards for German aggression: ‘a spirit of uncompromising self-assertion and metaphysical conceit which the German nation is now reducing to action’.8 In 1917, Leonard Hobhouse identified Hegel’s ‘metaphysical theory of the state’ for state militarism as a direct cause of the Great War.9

Neo-Hegelianism and its fascist influence

The history of fascism begins in the same period. While the philosophical pre-history of Nazism owes much to the German intellectual context, there is no doubt that Hegelianism also contributed to the first, non-German forms of Fascism, perhaps most conspicuously in the adaptation of Idealism in Italy, notably by Giovanni Gentile. Gentile managed to connect Hegel to Mussolini’s project within a new system he named “actualism”. By emphasising the corporative element in Hegel’s Philosophy of the Right (1821), Gentile could provide a rationale for Mussolini’s state and leadership. As recounted by A. James Gregor, ‘Gentile’s Actualism gave every appearance of being capable of providing a synthesizing philosophical rationale for emerging Fascism’. By 1918, Gentile could foresee:

a revolutionary “new state” that would be the expression of the “fully rational and concrete” national will of Italians in their collectivity. In that “revolutionary state,” politics and morality, parochial and national interests, would combine in such a fashion that individuals would fully identify themselves with its actions. That new state would be a spiritual reality in which all would find their place.10

There was then a neo-Hegelian lineage leading into the new ideological category of “Fascism”; not just for Gentile, but for various intellectuals of Mussolini’s Italy, adaptations of Hegel provided a logic for the reconciliation of the individual, the industrial communities, and the state under Fascist rule. As Gregor goes on, ‘the community—as the state—that served as the grounds of individuation for the individual was not a construction that was inter homines, between members of the community, but an immanent reality that arose out of members themselves. It was interiore homine…The community was understood to be at the core of the individual’.11 Italian fascism thus provided a practicable model for a totalitarian regime based on a Hegelian tradition as the Nazi movement reached its maturity in the 1930s.

And yet between his death and the present day, with a notable peak among the British Idealists the late 19th century, Hegel’s works have been cited frequently by progressive thinkers in Britain and across Europe.12 Benedetto Croce, who developed his neo-Hegelianism in collaboration with Gentile, rejected his friend’s fascist ideology in the 1920s. Then, of course, there was the burgeoning Marxist movement, in which Hegel’s legacy took a radically different form.

The Germanophobic reaction to Idealism were clearly of its time: the French generation that attended Alexandre Kojeve’s lectures on Hegel in the 1930s led the shift to a new existential reading; and Walter Kaufmann’s comprehensive defence of Hegel against Popper’s charges in The Hegel Myth and its Method (1959) marked the changing tide of opinion.13 In Britain, Charles Taylor, Berlin’s student, presented a major study that would shape post-war readings of Hegel and dispel the cruder charges of earlier writers; and by 1989 Francis Fukuyama had made Kojeve’s account the basis of his pronouncement of a post-Cold War “End of History”. Despite these developments, necessarily foreshortened here, the earlier suspicions of Anglophone readers remain noteworthy. The tensions and overlaps between forms of liberal, socialist, and fascist teleology are clear in the legacy of Hegelianism up to the present day.

Dr Henry Mead is a Senior Fellow at CARR and research fellow at the University of Tallinn. Research for this chapter was supported by a European Research Council Starting Grant (TAU17149) “Between the Times: Embattled Temporalities and Political Imagination in Interwar Europe”.

1 Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol II. The High Tide of Prophecy, Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath (London: Routledge, 1945), 270.

2 Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London: George Allen, 1946), 735.

3 See Isaiah Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” (1953), in Liberty, the Collected Essays of Isaiah Berlin, ed. H. Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

4 Kirk Willis, “The Introduction and Critical Reception of Hegelian Thought in Britain 1830-1900”, Victorian Studies 32 no. 1 (1988): 87-111, 103-4.

5 Willis, “Introduction,” 104.

6 Andrew Vincent, “German Philosophy and British Public Policy: Richard Burdon Haldane in Theory and Practice”, Journal of the History of Ideas 68 no. 1 (2007): 157-179.

7 Willis, “Introduction”, 8.

8 Willis, “Introduction”, 7.

9 Leonard Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State (London: George Allen, 1918).

10 A. James Gregor, Mussolini’s Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 86.

11 Gregor, Mussolini’s Intellectuals, 114.

12 See Lisa Herzog, ed., Hegel’s Thought in Europe: Currents, Crosscurrents and Undercurrents (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

13 Walter Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism: Studies in Poetry, Religion, and Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), 88-119.

The ‘Silent Majority’: Populist Cliché or Warning?

Aristotle Kallis

In the run-up to the EU referendum in Britain in June 2016, at a time when the Remain vote was apparently enjoying a modest but clear advantage, one of the numerous opinion polls focused on public attitudes to immigration and on how this might affect the popular vote.1 When asked to assess immigrants’ contribution to British economy, responses were split evenly between those acknowledging immigrants’ contribution to the economy and those questioning it. Yet very strong affirmative majorities were recorded by the same poll in response to questions about Britain being “overcrowded”, about the need to “significantly” restrict immigration through tighter border controls, to limit migrants’ access to public services, and so on. When interviewees were asked to identify the one issue that could sway their vote in the referendum, respondents singled out immigration by a spectacular margin. Unfortunately, we know too well how this played out.

As the history of opinion polling shows, such social majorities can however be mercurial and hard to gauge. Societies typically host a wide spectrum of views on any given issue and, while it may be relatively easier to talk of “extremes”, the mainstream-as-majority view is often very hard to ascertain or deduce.2 Opinion polls go some way towards capturing the mood of society in a more focused, issue-specific format but they can also be misleading: their results hinge on the way the question is framed, the moment when or the medium through which it is asked, and the group that is sampled. Such parameters may all skew the findings,3 in some cases deliberately or as in most cases unintentionally. Thus, to talk of “social majorities”—or the general will of a population—is very often a wishful projection or and educated guess with a very limited shelf life indeed.

Part of the problem is that social majorities do not always have a voice or a desire to speak loudly enough to be captured by the radar of public mood. Noisy minorities4 can easily skew impressions as much as boisterous leaders claiming that they bespeak the “real” majority view.

Meanwhile, the existence of social taboos about the public expression of particular views in any society may lead to tactical form of public self-censorship—a divergence between the private and publicly expressed views of the individual. ‘Regimes of truth’, Foucault perceptively argued,5 always produce ‘subjugated knowledges’—views and voices that have been de-legitimised and suppressed by a hegemonic discourse seeking to regulate knowledge and therefore public discourse itself.

When Nixon, for example, invoked the “silent majority” as the source of his popular mandate6 and Vice President Agnew spoke of a small “liberal elite” as the exclusive source of “truth” in their contemporary America,7 the elected presidential duo effectively questioned all sorts of orthodoxies about the country’s “mainstream” society. The trope of the “silent majority” lay claim to a social majority that has been ignored, misrepresented by biased media, effectively silenced, and forgotten. It sounds anti-elitist and liberating, mixing lofty principles such as freedom and democracy with the call for radical change. For decades it and its various by-products like the “real people” and so on8 have become the discursive staple of right-wing populists across the world,9 uniting the language of very different figures such as Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen and, more recently, the Tea Party and of course Donald Trump.10 It has also become a favourite electoral stratagem for mainstream political campaigns, such as Vote Leave for the 2016 EU membership referendum in the UK or a series of elections in the 2000s fought by Nicolas Sarkozy as either incumbent or aspiring president.

The populist “silent majority” trope has been repeatedly exposed as a cynical misnomer11 and disparaged by mainstream media and academic research.12 It may be exactly that of course. Populist forces have rarely reached the status of expressing the views of an enduring social majority. It is also easy to mistake noise for public support, although this is an argument that cuts both ways. However, those who take solace in arguing that populists are propelled by angry—and thus vocal—minorities may be drawing a false sense of security from this comforting illusion. Flimsy electoral results cannot be treated as the sole or most authentic expression of public political views. Voter dealignment from mainstream parties is typically, and misleadingly, lagging behind attitudinal shifts with regard to key political and social issues. In other words, majorities can be, and very often are, less politically progressive or socially/culturally conformist than either their voting behaviour or public opinions may suggest or indicate.

Here’s the thing: the social “mainstream” is a far, far broader patchwork canopy than liberal and/or progressive opinion can comfortably profess. Mainstream acceptability is delineated by widely shared thresholds of acceptability on either side. Like taboos, these thresholds entail particular attitudinal and behavioural jumps that mark the boundaries of political legitimacy and “truth”. It is against these categorical extremes, Uwe Backes argued, that any “majority society” reflects its supposed normality.13 Yet, relative silence or lack of voting majorities is not sufficient assurance of robust adherence to the mainstream, let alone of positive or moderate approval for its lofty normative declarations. Supported by rooted and robust Foucauldian “regimes of truth”, as argued above, normative mainstream discourses are powerful enough projections to effectively conceal opposition and drown out public expressions of resentment. Whether, however, relative silence can be taken as tacit or passive approval is another matter.

To take a recent example, polls conducted during the Black Lives Matter mobilisation in the US in 2020 have encouragingly revealed significant increases in public support against institutionalised racism.14 Yet, they also typically show ongoing opposition to taking down symbols of the country’s imperialist and segregationist past. Supporting anti-racism when asked does not mean actively opposing racism.15 Protests, especially when they turn violent, can be divisive, pitting ideological support against the (always powerful) “law-and-order” agenda. To declare support for racism publicly remains a very strong taboo; but to invoke “public order”16 or national identity as under threat by such protests is also a powerful existential tool that adds that all-important conditional “but” to potential declarations of support for a cause.

The search for a political “mainstream” is messy, often self-contradictory, fickle, and difficult to access in sufficiently high resolution. It is more reflective of a continuum of more or less acceptable views than of a stable positive majority. For a politician or movement to claim unique and/or privileged access on the supposed “real” mainstream’s behalf is duplicitous hyperbole. But to trust either election results or opinion polls as the more accurate trace of “mainstream” pulse is to put just a bit too much faith on the question asked as well as on the validity of the answers publicly given. The populist claim to give voice to silent majorities is more akin to a call for public insurrection by supposed underdogs against certain existing social and political taboos– and a promise of long-overdue redress.17 Seen from this perspective, it may be easier to comprehend why the populist trope has worked to shock electoral effect too often in recent years; and why it is a mistake to simply brush it aside as a misnomer or as a loud, manipulative social media fad. It is also just a bit closer to an uncomfortable truth that we may wish to admit and act upon: the “mainstream” as a bundle of diverse social majorities (or in electoral parlance, “voting coalitions”) is generally less progressive and more erratic than often assumed.18 Populists may not be supported by “silent majorities”, but their transgressive arguments speak to, legitimise, and then normalise a number of “subjugated knowledges” that have the power to transform the complexion of the “mainstream”.19

Dr Aristotle Kallis is a Senior Fellow at CARR and professor of modern and contemporary history at Keele University.

1 “Recent Polls on Immigration, Public Opinion & Voting: MW 361”, Migration Watch UK, last modified April 7, 2016, https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/briefing-paper/361/recent-polls-on-immigration

2 Aristotle Kallis, “When Fascism Became Mainstream: The Challenge of Extremism in Times of Crisis”, Fascism 4 no. 1 (2015): 1–24.

3 Roch Dunin-Wasowicz, “Long read | Are opinion polls biased towards Leave?”, LSE Blogs, October 29, 2019, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2019/10/29/long-read-are-opinion-polls-pro-leave-biased/

4 Lars Rensmann, “The Noisy Counter-Revolution: Understanding the Cultural Conditions and Dynamics of Populist Politics in Europe in the Digital Age”, Politics and Governance 5 no. 4 (2017): 123-35.

5 Daniele Lorenzini, “What is a ‘Regime of Truth’?”, Le Foucaldien 1 no. 1 (2015), 1.

6 Sarah Thelen, “Mobilizing a Majority: Nixon's ‘Silent Majority’ Speech and the Domestic Debate over Vietnam”, Journal of American Studies 51 no. 3 (2017): 887–914.

7 Jerald Podair, Zach Messitte and Charles Holden, “The Man Who Pioneered Trumpism”, Washington Post, November 15, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/11/15/man-who-pioneered-trumpism/.

8 John Keane, “We the People: The Charms and Contradictions of Populism”, The Conversation, November 2, 2016, https://theconversation.com/we-the-people-the-charms-and-contradictions-of-populism-63769.

9 Desirée Schmuck and Michael Hameleers, “Closer to the People: A Comparative Content Analysis of Populist Communication on Social Networking Sites in Pre- and Post-Election Periods”, Information, Communication & Society 23 no. 10 (2020): 1531-48.

10 Mark Mardell, “The Netherlands’ Populist Moment?”, BBC News, February 13, 2017, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-38956740; Megan Galbreath, “An Analysis of Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen”, Harvard International Review 38 no. 3 (2017): 7-9.

11 Harry Enten, “Silent Majorities Are a Misnomer”, CNN, June 6, 2020, https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/06/politics/trump-silent-majority-analysis/index.html.

12 Cas Mudde, “Populists Aren’t a Silent Majority—They’re Just a Loud Minority”, Guardian, September 6, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/06/populists-silent-majority-loud-minority.

13 Uwe Backes, “Meaning and Forms of Political Extremism in Past and Present”, Central European Political Studies Review IX no. 4 (2007): 242-62.

14 “Poll Shows Strong Public Support for BLM Protests”, Hope not Hate, June 26, 2020, https://www.hopenothate.org.uk/2020/06/26/poll-shows-strong-public-support-for-blm-protests/.

15 David Smith, “Nine Out of 10 Americans Say Racism and Police Brutality Are Problems, Poll Finds”, Guardian, July 8, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/08/americans-racism-police-brutality-problems-poll.

16 Charles M Blow, “‘Law and Order’ for ‘Blacks and Hippies’”, New York Times, June 21, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/opinion/trump-police-reform.html.

17 Ruth Wodak, The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean (London: SAGE, 2015), Ch. 1.

18 Francesco Duina, “The Uncomfortable Truths About Populism”, LSE Blogs, June 5, 2020, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2020/06/05/the-uncomfortable-truths-about-populism/.

19 Julian Göpffarth, “Why We Shouldn’t Call the Far Right an Unpopular Minority”, Fair Observer, September 14, 2018, https://www.fairobserver.com/region/europe/far-right-populist-parties-sweden-democrats-afd-europe-politics-news-analysis-19001/.