Hegelianism and the politics of contingency

This chapter examines the writings of the Young Hegelians as part of a long discursive lineage, and it claims that their works are organized around an intentional reconstruction of the constitutive motifs of the philosophical and political history of European societies. Central to this argument is the claim that political theory is interlaced with processes of social formation and political consolidation in European societies, and that it has the social function of providing semantic terms - that is, vocabularies and conceptual categories - in which societies can examine, explain, and stabilize the resources of political power which they contain. In this respect, the works of the Young Hegelians describe a deep semantic caesura in the history of European societies and European political philosophy, as, in their critique of theologico-political person-alism, they mark and articulate that theoretical juncture in which societies confronted metaphysical accounts of their power as irremediably paradoxical and unsustainable, and sought to reconstruct their political self-analyses on non-metaphysical foundations. In addition, the theories of the Young Hegelians show a high degree of self-reflexivity regarding theory's societal role. They mark the evolutionary moment at which theory began consciously to understand society's reliance on its semantic fabric, and to organize its conceptual apparatus and objectives around this knowledge. The arguments of this chapter are founded in three preconditions. First, the chapter claims that the beginnings of modern European political thought (with anticipations in the late medieval period) were marked by a dramatic experience of the contingency of political power and that, from this point on, political theory has had fundamentally to do with the confrontation and the organization of political contingency. Theory's first encounter with political contingency occurred in late medieval Europe, and it coincided with the abandonment of Scholastic political perspectives. These outlooks had defined God as a spon-taneous rational-volitional personality, and they had argued that God, in exercising his own freedom, institutes laws of rational freedom in the world, which form the perennial legal substructure of the legitimate body politic. 1 In the transition from medieval to early modern Europe, however, these ideas became precarious and untenable, and they were insufficiently refined for the rapidly changing legal and political functions of European society. Through this transition, laws were increasingly required that could be applied in fluid and iterable fashion, and law, as its own positive guarantor, was expected to explain its validity without recourse to points of metaphysical regress outside itself. The first emergence of modern Europe, therefore, was marked by a need for law that could authorize itself, and law's contingent ability to found law became the central element of worldly organization. 2 In the course of this transition, then, the realm of human politics also lost its support in the rational personality of the divinity, and it lost its source of legitimacy in absolutely authenticated laws. Politics consequently began theoretically to reflect on itself and its contingency, and political theory gradually assumed the function that it allowed politics, or society more generally, to formulate positive foundations for the legitimization of political power,3 and so to bring positive conceptual and temporal security into the otherwise contingent realm of political facts. This originary experience of political contingency is always in the memory of political theory: political theory is endlessly attentive to society's awareness of the contingency of its political forms, and it endlessly seeks to provide iterable principles to stabilize and conceal this contingency. Second, this chapter also argues that, throughout the early evolutionary history of political theory, the theoretical stabilization of political contingency occurred through a process of subtle dislocation. This was a process in which the originary form of God's rational personality, guaranteeing rational freedom in the state under divine-natural law, was par-asitically transposed onto new conceptual structures, whose function was to provide self-reflected positive foundations for society's politics. For example, the early modern concept of the sovereign territorial state was at one level a wholly positive form, emerging in the contingent and exceptional space left vacant through the abandonment of political Scholasticism. However, the sovereign state explained itself as a positive actor by absorbing earlier metaphysical concepts into its own structure and, thus, by internalizing God's rational/volitional personality as its own rational/volitional personality.4 Later, in the Enlightenment, the original authority of God's rational personality was reconstructed as a condition of legal personality in the state: in the Enlightenment, theory began to argue that the state is legitimate, not merely where it acts as a sovereign, but where it acts in compliance with its own internally necessary legal structure. This theoretical adjustment is exemplified by the view of the state as a person under rationally self-imposed laws proposed by Leibniz and Christian Wolff.5 Similarly, Kant also accounted for the legitimate state as a person under freely but necessarily deduced laws.6 Kant saw the state as the central institution in an existential condition in which the human being accepts as its own the functions of rationallegal authorship and self-causality once, in Scholasticism, imputed to God,7 and the state obtains its legitimacy from the "pure source of the concept of law," which human minds deduce as rationally self-causing agents.8 In other contexts, theorists of the later Enlightenment also employed the construct of the legal person under Roman law, a uniquely flexible and iterable instrument for positivizing the foundations of civil law and state power, to establish, under conditions of increasingly recognized contingency, the premises of the state's legal personality.9 In these alternating principles underlying the course of theoretical formation in European politics, we can identify a semantic process, which is often called secularization.10 This means that through the transition from medieval to modern Europe, political theory shaped itself and its conceptual structure around the problem of contingency, and it recognized, functionally, that its objective was to provide templates for the exercise of power that were wholly positive and without invariable or external foundation. In this process, however, theory also learned to account for the legitimacy of the state by reviving or relocating pre positive forms, and by employing these as a paradoxical reference to authorize the state's power, even in its contingency. Political theory, on this account, initially emerged as a semantic fabric of conceptual or paradoxical displacement, using a conventional store of concepts to provide support for sociopolitical forms and to harden these against the knowledge of their own contingency. Throughout the history of European political thought, in fact, it has been the objective of theory to provide an account of the state's legislative authority beyond which there is no necessary regress, and to show how the state, even in its positive contingency, can act, or describe itself as acting, as a rationally necessary order of norms.11 In this, the originary idea of God's personality as a source of rational freedom enacted in human law has repeatedly pre structured subsequent theoretical constructs and made itself available as a primary semantic reference for sustaining state power. The third claim in this chapter is that in the course of its evolution political theory has become increasingly knowledgeable about its semantic or paradoxical functions. The history of political thought is marked by repeated incursions of self-reflexivity, in which theory has observed both its tasks of social displacement and the paradoxical formulae that it uses to fulfill this task. This is quite apparent in the Enlightenment. For example, Kant's account of the legitimate state as a state that founds itself in its own originary act of rationally free self-causality, spontaneously generating laws that all people recognize as the necessary terms of their freedom, might already be viewed as a knowing reflection on the fact that theory's function is, if necessary by paradoxical means, to institute points of ultimate regress for society, so that a society can stabilize potential experiences of its contingency around reliable points of ascription. © 2011 by Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.