In their totality, The Federalist Papers are one of the most searching commentaries on the U.S. Constitution. The three authors began by taking the high ground—the ground of the epochal importance of the decision for or against the Constitution. Hamilton’s words in the first Federalist are moving and beautifuclass="underline"
It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.
The Papers go on in elegant, flowing, eighteenth-century style; they are a pleasure to read even if one were to disagree with them. But it would be hard to disagree. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay managed to define, as well as it has ever been defined, the American constitutional idea.
Of all the perils that beset, or seemed to the Federalists to beset, the new nation, that of faction (or, as we would say, party spirit or party strife) was the worst. The Founding Fathers knew well the turmoil that the spirit of party had produced not just in European nations during modern times, but also in Greece and Rome of old. They conceived the Constitution as a bulwark against faction, and indeed the Ninth and Tenth Federalist—especially the Tenth, by Madison—are among the most eloquent of all these papers in support of the Constitution. In fact, however, the Constitution provides no machinery with which to form a government, and it soon became evident that political parties would have to be formed, and then depended on, to provide candidates to fill the offices that the Constitution defined. Despite the eloquence of their plea for a nonfactional organization of the political infrastructure, party strife did have the effect, in the years following the establishment of the new government in 1789, of dividing the authors of The Federalist Papers. Hamilton and Madison, unfortunately, became political enemies, while John Jay abjured them both.
For a while, however, the three worked together to produce one of the small number of political books, and one of that very small list of works of any kind, that every American citizen ought to read.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH
HEGEL
1770–1831
The Philosophy of History
Reading Hegel, even just thinking about Hegel, leads one to propose grand, sweeping generalizations. Here are two.
The first I take from Henry Adams, who once observed pointedly that the “centuries” of history in the West have for a long time not truly begun at the years 1600, 1700, or 1800, but at a point approximately fifteen years after. Thus we should view European history as manifesting epochal changes in 1415 (the Battle of Agincourt), in 1515 (the meeting of Francis I, Charles V, and Henry VIII on the so-called Field of the Cloth of Gold), in the mid-teens of the seventeenth century (the murder of Henry IV, the accession of Louis XIII, and the rise of Richelieu), in 1715 (the death of the Sun King, Louis XIV), in 1815 (the Battle of Waterloo), and in 1914 (the beginning of World War I). It is a neat theory and fun to advance at a dinner party.
The second generalization is that, in the history of ideas, it is as important to ask where ideas come from as what they are and what they mean. Taking the above chronology as definitive, then, we can suggest that the important ideas of the sixteenth century (i.e., from 1515 to 1615) came from Italians; those of the seventeenth century (1615–1715) from Frenchmen; those of the eighteenth century (1715–1815) from Englishmen; and those of the nineteenth century, beginning with the Restoration of the European status quo after the final defeat of Napoleon and ending with the onset of the so-called Great War in 1914, from Germans. The nineteenth century is the German century par excellence.
It is thus not an accident that the high point of Hegel’s career and fame was attained in the year 1818, when he began to teach at the University of Berlin. Born in 1770, he was now forty-eight; but it had required that Napoleon be finally defeated and that the torch be handed from that world-historical figure to a succession of Germans for Hegel’s ideas to become widely recognized. For the next half century or so he was probably the world’s most famous and influential philosopher.
To remember that is also to be reminded of just how mixed up the nineteenth century was, in its thinking if not in its practical science and its industry. Hegel is essentially a crazy philosopher. It was a splendid craziness, however, and he will probably always have the ability to attract people’s minds and their loyalty.
Hegel’s basic philosophical method was to metaphysicize everything; that is, to detect in concrete reality the working of an Idea, of a Universal Mind. He was convinced that the world is rational and therefore intelligible to the human mind, which is also rational. But how to explain all the strange and unpredictable things that happen, and have happened since men first began to wonder if the world could be understood? Hegel realized that the larger the field of view, the grander the visionary sweep, the more likely it would be that a grand and sweeping generalization would apply. All change, all progress, he said, is produced by the conflict of great forces. A world-historical figure, nation, or event poses, as it were, a challenge, or thesis; this is naturally opposed by an antithesis; and the conflict is resolved, inevitably, on a higher plane, by a synthesis of the two forces. It is true enough that we sometimes see something like this happening in our own lives, and perhaps also in history. It does not seem necessary to conclude, however—as Hegel does—that this is the way the world absolutely and universally and inevitably works. But I do not want to cavil. It is a wonderful, ingenious, interesting theory. Maybe it is even correct.
One of the ideas that swept through men’s minds in the nineteenth century was that of the universality of Progress, which meant that history is moving, in general if not at every instant, always in the same direction, and one that is highly pleasing to mankind. Others besides Hegel had advanced this idea, which Hegel assumed without any question. His effort, in The Philosophy of History, was to reveal the manner of universal progress, not to prove that it occurred. His effort succeeded, in that he wrote a fascinating book. There are four great epochs of the world, which are at the same time phases of thought: he called them the Oriental world, the Greek world, the Roman world, and the German world. General progress is in the direction of consciousness of self, and of freedom; the ancient Oriental peoples, and the Greeks and Romans, had been only partly free; freedom had come into its own with the advent of Christianity, and had become dominant in the postmedieval world—the German world, as Hegel called it.
It is important to understand that freedom for Hegel is not the ordinary freedom that we mean when we say, for example, that we are not free if we are in prison. For Hegel, freedom consists in a willing compliance with the working in the world of the Idea, and as such freedom can sometimes entail woe to individuals. It is up to individuals, in fact, to join the fated march of the universal mind, which meant, in his time, he said, joining the nation as a wholly willing participant in its most fundamental, world-historical aims and goals. Freedom is only to be obtained, Hegel seems to say, in giving up one’s individual freedom for the sake of a joint or communal freedom, shared with other men and women who are advancing toward the same desired end.