War and The Foundation of The State in Hegel's Political Philosophy

War and the Foundation of the State in Hegel's Political Philosophy
Author(s): Ido Geiger

Source: History of Philosophy Quarterly , Jul., 2003, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Jul., 2003), pp. 297-
317
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History of Philosophy Quarterly
Volume 20, Number 3, July 2003
WAR AND THE FOUNDATION OF THE

STATE IN HEGEL'S POLITICAL
PHILOSOPHY
Ido Geiger
War presents
accordingmoral thinking
to Thrasymachian withthere
realists, a three-way
is no moral choice. First,
question of war. Waging war requires no justification and in
curs no blame. When violent push comes to deadly shove it is
might that makes right. Second, according to just war thinking
broadly construed?far more intuitive and prevalent?war is an
evil and, for this reason, justified only as a most extreme mea
sure. Wars are morally justified only in certain dire circum
stances. Third, according to so-called idealists, war is wholesale
murder, a categorical evil never justified.
These very broadly defined views are often thought to exhaust
the possible answers to the philosophical question of war. None
is without a grave failing. The realist faces the political fact of
war with cold sobriety. But the price of this realism is the very
hope that inspires morality. If might makes right then the world
has no place for moral thinking and action. Just war thinking
acknowledges the horror of war and seeks to limit it. But it sur
renders the idea of absolute moral duty and good and thus
promises too little. For the idealist, moral values are absolute.
However, they do not?and perhaps never will?shape the world.
For the world the idealist addresses is only too clearly not this
world. The realist saves the facts and sacrifices all hope of moral
change. The idealist saves moral hope and sacrifices the possi
bility of real change. Just war thinking takes the middle ground;
it buys its realism at the price of too little hope. It accepts the
fact that wars will always be fought and expresses the hope that
one day only just wars will be fought. The middle position though
297

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298 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY
is as untenable as the two extremes. Unable to imagine a world

without war it is morally too acquiescent. Clearly, just wars can
only be fought against an unjust assailant.
This paper offers an interpretation of Hegel's view of war. It
shares the strengths and escapes the faults of the three posi
tions just sketched. Hegel explains the necessary place of war
in the ethical world. Yet he condemns it unequivocally. And he
does not destroy all hope of real moral change. Inextricably re
lated to the question of war in Hegel's thought?and, very
possibly, in moral philosophy generally?is the question of the
performative force of philosophy in the face of evil: What are
the duties of practical philosophy in a far from perfect world?
The first part of this paper presents the different answers given
to the question of the force of Hegel's political philosophy; and
it explains why this question is at stake in his discussion of war.
The second part presents the extant interpretations of this dis
cussion and the third critically assesses them. The fourth part
claims that Hegel thinks that it is in the destruction of war that
a shared way of ethical life, embodied in a state, might be
founded. The next part claims that he sees in the historical
events of his time?the French Revolution and the Napoleonic
Wars?the moment in which modern ethical life might be
founded. The conclusion suggests how this historically grounded
view might be generalized, by attending to the distinct force of
Hegel's political philosophy.
I. The Force of Hegel's Political Philosophy
The most general question asked of Hegel's political philosophy
by the stormy tradition of its reading is the question of its
performative force. What sort of act does Hegel's political phi
losophy constitute? It is a striking fact that Hegel's political
philosophy, and his view of war in particular, have been read as
paradigmatic examples of all three of the possible positions de
scribed above. On one view, expressed by Haym in the nineteenth
century and made popular in the twentieth century by Popper,
Hegel's realist philosophy hallows that which empirically exists.
The notorious claim of the Philosophy of Right "What is rational
is actual; and what is actual is rational" (PR Preface, p. 20)1
identifies what ought to be with what is and categorically de
nies philosophy any duty of political action. The realm of
philosophy is theory; and its one task is description. Accord
ing, however, to the idealist answer given by Marx, offering a

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WAR AND THE FOUNDATION OF THE STATE 299
description and an analysis true to political reality, and thus

laying bare the ills of the present, is the ultimate achievement
of Hegel's political philosophy. It reveals that the rational does
not yet exist. The rational thus must be made actual.2 Finally,
according to the view first articulated by some of his immediate
followers and now held by virtually all his students, the end of
Hegel's philosophy is to show what rational principles shape
present political reality. Consequently, though philosophical
exposition might imply that certain reforms are demanded by
practical principles already made actual, it is not its primary
end to make such prescriptions. Nor, more emphatically, is it
the end of philosophy to formulate abstract ideals of how the
world ought to be.
To comprehend what is is the task of philosophy, for what is is
reason. As far as the individual is concerned, each individual
is in any case a child of his time; thus philosophy, too, is its
own time comprehended in thoughts. It is just as foolish to
imagine that any philosophy can transcend its contemporary
world as that an individual can overleap his own time . . . (PR
Preface, pp. 21-22)
It is very often thought that this striking divergence of inter
pretations has already been explained away and that the last
view has been shown to be the right one. Hegel himself responded
directly to the charge that he identifies the rational with what
exists. He states, unequivocally, that actuality (Wirklichkeit),
in the sense he employs, is not just anything that happens to
exist but only what exists necessarily, what ought to be (EL
?6R).3 Closer observation of the facts he describes reveals that
many of the institutions attributed to the state in the Philoso
phy of Right did not exist in Prussia of 1820, the year the book
was published. Indeed, a significant number of them were to be
instituted by the reformers who lost power in the reactionary
turn of 1819 and were staunchly opposed by their successors.
Moreover, the book describes at length and starkly such evils of
the modern world as poverty. By no account does Hegel ever
suggest that poverty is rational. Quite the contrary. Hegel then
sees evil in the world he inhabits and offers no sweeping apol
ogy on its behalf. And, on the other hand, although Marx does
famously proclaim that the end of philosophy is to make the ra
tional actual?famously, he calls on us to change the world?he
holds that when philosophy steps down from heaven to change
the world it becomes worldly and acquires the faults it fights; in

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its military garb, it is philosophy no longer. Thus, turning to

action constitutes a decisive move beyond Hegel and philoso
phy. Indeed, Marx says that it is by actualizing Hegel's
philosophy that his own abolishes and transcends it.4
It would be premature, however, to pronounce the question of
the force of Hegel's political philosophy closed. Though the charge
that Hegel's philosophy hallows the empirically existent has been
discredited in scholarly circles, it nevertheless continues to ex
ert considerable influence. It does not merit being called a
reading of Hegel. And yet there is hardly a serious reader who
does not think that there are places where the positions he takes
or his silence are indefensible. And, on the other hand, the view
that his philosophy holds revolutionary promise is still expressed
by some of Hegel's best interpreters.5 Certainly, some most
memorable passages are hard to read any other way.
Above all, the question of the force of Hegel's political phi
losophy is still worth raising, because the view that philosophy
is concerned only with revealing the rationality of the existent,
and not with how the world ought to be, is fundamentally un
stable. Simply put, philosophy is concerned with the rational,
all of it, not only the part that now exists. But isn't describing
what ought to be?but is not?calling for change? In a world far
from perfectly rational, doesn't Hegel's claim that the rational
is actual mean that we have a duty to make the rational actual?
The answer usually given to this question is that Hegel's politi
cal philosophy is secondary within his system to his philosophy
of history; it is grounded in a determinism, world-historical,
eschatological or metaphysical.6 The claim that the rational is
actual is read, on this view, as the claim that the rational, of
necessity, becomes actual. But this answer is itself unstable. It
too is trapped between action for revolutionary change and in
defensible passivity in the face of evil. This is the question of
the end of philosophy in a far from perfect world.
The classical locus of this question in Hegel's political phi
losophy is the discussion of war and international relations.
Those who read him as a Thrasymachian realist about politics
will remind us that Hegel notoriously claims that there is an
ethical moment of war. Is Hegel justifying what is surely one of
the very worst evils of this world? Clearly, any discussion of the
force of Hegel's political philosophy must answer this charge.
War though is not only the most flagrant example of an existing
evil Hegel discusses. The discussion of war and international

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relations, in the Philosophy of Right, portrays Hegel's vision of

the highest stage in the development of political life. Why does
Hegel, like just war theory, promise us no more than a future
mutilated by war? Surely?the idealist in us all will finally cry?
this is an evil that desperately calls to change the world.
II. Hegel on War: The Interpretative and
Critical Literature
In his 1945 The Open Society and Its Enemies Karl Popper de
livered a diatribe against Hegel, which has since become a
customary point of departure for discussions of Hegel's views of
politics and, specifically, of war. Popper charges Hegel with be
ing a hired ideologue for Friedrich Wilhelm III and a central
influence on the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century,
left and right. Popper sees in Hegel's philosophy an "identifica
tion of the moral with the healthy, of ethics with political
hygiene, or of right with might" and a prescription of war as
"good in itself."7 He claims that Hegel's purportedly descriptive
stance towards the political sphere is in fact an insidious politi
cal stance. These virulent accusations are now all but universally
discredited. But they dictate interpretative questions we still
face: First, does Hegel's view of war have the force of a political
act or does it offer only theoretical knowledge, or, as the ques
tion is usually put, is Hegel's discussion of war prescriptive or
is it descriptive? Second, how can taking a merely descriptive
stance towards the evil of war be defended?
The answer given to the first question by virtually all inter
preters in the last five decades is that Hegel's writing on war
should be taken as descriptive. Hegel, in accord with his gen
eral philosophical method, is giving a philosophical account of
the historical-political fact of war. He is concerned with render
ing the actual rational. These interpreters begin their readings
then with the assumption that war, for Hegel, is rational.8
What then is the necessary ethical moment of war? How is
war rational? Hegel, it is suggested, makes two distinct claims
about war. The first presents his conception of international
relations. The second concerns the relation of individual citi
zens to their state. It expresses Hegel's idea of the political
identity of citizens of modern states.9
Hegel's first point about war is an explanation why the possi
bility of war is a necessary fact of the relations between sovereign

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states. Modern states are independent and self-governing and

the treaties they enter can legitimately be broken for reasons
which the states alone determine. For states, in principle, can
not accept the judgment of any higher authority without
relinquishing their sovereignty. And to surrender their sover
eignty is to lose their freedom. Therefore, the possibility of
violent conflicts is a necessary feature of modern international
relations between free states. The focal text for this claim is the
penultimate section of the Philosophy of Right, entitled Inter
national Law (PR ??330-340).
Hegel's second point explains what is the ethical moment of
war. In times of war citizens sacrifice their material possessions
and personal interests?ultimately their lives?and fight for the
higher values of their state. Periodical wars are essential for
the ethical vitality of a state, because a prolonged peace has the
price of social disintegration into the egotism of private inter
ests and exclusively commercial relations. It is only in war that
citizens identify not with the values of civil society but with the
higher ends of the political whole. The central text for this claim
is the External Sovereignty section of the Philosophy of Right
(PR ??321-329). Best known is the following passage:
It is a grave miscalculation if the state, when it requires this
sacrifice, is simply equated with civil society, and its ultimate
end is seen merely as the security of the life and property of
individuals [Individuen]. For this security cannot be achieved
by the sacrifice of what is supposed to be secured?on the con
trary.?The ethical moment of war is implicit in what was
stated above. For war should not be regarded as an absolute
evil [?bel] and as a purely external contingency whose cause
[Grund] is therefore itself contingent, whether this cause lies
in the passions of rulers of nations [V?lker], in injustices etc.,
or in anything else which is not as it should be. Whatever is
by nature contingent is subject to contingencies, and this fate
is therefore itself a necessity?just as, in all such cases, phi
losophy and the concept overcome the point of view of mere
contingency and recognize it as a semblance whose essence is
necessity. (PR ?324R)
According to the descriptive reading then Hegel explains why
wars are a fact of international relations and what is the ethical
value of war. But this reading insists that his stance towards
war is descriptive. It offers nothing but a theoretical understand
ing of war. More pointedly, it offers no way to preserve the higher
ethical values of the state without waging war. Is this claim

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acceptable? Can we reconcile ourselves to a future mutilated by

wars? It is a very telling fact?though hardly surprising?that
none of the readers most sympathetic to Hegel's position do.
Indeed, all the proponents of the descriptive reading end up dis
tancing themselves?in different ways and to different
degrees?from the position they attribute to Hegel. They all sug
gest that war is not the only way for citizens to identify with the
values of their state. Though they take Hegel to be engaged in
the project of explaining the rationality of the actual, in this
instance?war, they all finally pronounce their conviction that
war cannot be actual. Hegel fails to insist, as he does in the
Encyclopaedia, that not everything that exists, not every error
and evil, is actual.
The question arises why Hegel himself does not see an end to
war. The answer, implicit in all proponents of the descriptive
interpretation, is formulated very clearly by Peperzak: "The rea
son . . . probably lies in the factuality o? facts of which he gives
a description. If this is indeed the case, he may be accused of
philosophical descriptivism."10 The view that the performative
force of Hegel's political philosophy is descriptive is pronounced
indefensible when it comes to the discussion of war. The senti
ment which quite clearly moves all the proponents of the
descriptive interpretation is given voice by Westphal; very sig
nificantly, he ends his discussion of the matter by paraphrasing
Marx: "the time has come for understanding the world to be
come the guide for changing it."11
III. Objections to the Descriptive Reading

Apart from its very grave predictions, there are several decisive
problems with the descriptive reading, both conceptual and tex
tual. First, it just does not explain Hegel's scandalous claim that
there is an ethical moment of war. It holds that the ethical mo
ment of war is the identification of citizens with the higher values
of their state in times of violent conflict. The central tenet of
Hegel's conception of ethical life (Sittlichkeit), formulated as a
response to Kant's moral theory, is that values must be thought
of as embodied in the social and political institutions of the state;
as Hegel succinctly puts it, the "state is the actuality
[Wirklichkeit] of the ethical idea" (PR ?257). War is purportedly
the means through which individuals embrace these essential
values of the state. War then is not itself an ethical moment of
human life. It is the values of the state, not war, that are ethically

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necessary. War is at most the necessary means by which the

state and its values continue to exist; it is instrumental, not
ethical.12 The proponents of the descriptive reading, however,
all think that there are other ways actively to take on these es
sential political values.
Second, the descriptive reading assumes that the state em
bodies higher values than do the everyday lives of its individual
citizens. It is purportedly for the sake of these values that indi
viduals are willing to sacrifice their lives in war. But the state,
according to Hegel, does not embody higher values than the lives
of the individuals who inhabit it. The state is the highest ex
pression of human freedom, precisely because in it individuals
attain true freedom: The state or the actuality of the ethical
idea "has its immediate existence [Existenz] in custom and its
mediate existence in the self-consciousness of the individual [des
Einzelnen], in the individual's knowledge and activity" (PR ?257).
The highest values of the state are incarnate in the daily lives
of its members. And it is precisely this fact that makes the state
the actuality of the ethical idea or the embodiment of freedom.13
The claim that wars are fought for the higher values of the
state seems to be based, in large part, on the passage quoted
above, which states that when the state requires the sacrifice of
war it should not be equated with civil society (PR ?324R). This
however need not be read as saying that in war alone the state
should not be equated with civil society and its values. The state
should not be equated with civil society period. In war this fact
is evident.
This leads to the third and most dramatic point against the
descriptive reading. When we look again at Hegel's text we see
that the values of civil society are not the only values lost in
war. War is the destruction of all value. Hegel speaks of indi
viduals sacrificing their "own life and property, as well as their
opinions and all that naturally falls within the province of life"
(PR ?324). He defines life as "the comprehensive totality of ex
ternal activity" (PR ?70). And this broad sense is confirmed when
he speaks of a total war which threatens a state with destruc
tion and says that it is "wrenched away from its own internal
life" (PR ?326) and when he speaks of the nullification of the
"wider circles [Kreise] [of the state]" (PR ?323)?a reference to
the estates, which "embody in equal measure both the sense and
disposition of the state and government and the interests of par
ticular circles and individuals [Einzelnen]" (PR ?302). Hegel

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quite clearly refers to the destruction of all spheres of life en

compassed within the state. Furthermore, from the perspective
of international relations too war is described as the condition
in which states cease to recognize the actual life of the other state
(PR ?331), and thus to observe the treaties between them (PR ?333).
Hegel does not claim that in war private ends are sacrificed
for the sake of the higher, lasting ends of political communities.
He speaks of war as positing the "nullity" of values (PR ?323),
the "vanishing moment" of values (PR ?324) and of values being
"mortal and transient" (PR ?324R). He speaks of war as a "con
dition of rightlessness, violence [Gewalt] and contingency" (PR
?338).14 Like idealists about war, Hegel is claiming that war is
the demise of politics as the sphere of human value, both between
states and within the state. In war ethical life falls to a state of
nature and value ceases to shape the lives of people and states.
The crucial question then is this: If war is the demise of value,
how can there possibly be an ethical moment of war? Hegel's
answer is abstruse.
It is that aspect whereby the substance, as the state's abso
lute power over everything individual and particular, over life,
property and its rights, as over the wider circles, gives the
nullity [Nichtigkeit] of such things an existence [Dasein] and
makes it present to the consciousness. (PR ?323)15
In war, the condition of the destruction of all values, values are
given an existence and made present to consciousness. War is
not only the destruction of value but also the making or found
ing of value. The crucial, too brief explication of these claims is
the following:
It is necessary that the finite?such as property and life?
should be posited as contingent, because contingency is the
concept of the finite. On the one hand, this necessity assumes
the shape of a force of nature [Naturgewalt], and everything
finite is mortal and transient. But in the ethical essence, i.e.,
the state, nature is deprived of this force [Gewalt], and neces
sity is elevated to a work of freedom, to something ethical in
character. The transience of the finite now becomes a willed
evanescence, and the substantial negativity which underlies
it becomes the substantial individuality proper to the ethical
essence. (PR ?324R)16
The destruction of war is characterized as reducing ethical life
to a state of nature. It plunges states into an ethical void. War

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is also, paradoxically, constitutive of the ethical sphere. For in

it the very violence of war is deprived of its absolute power over
human existence by the foundation of a form of ethical life. The
interpretation of Hegel's discussion of war must answer then
the following question. What is the place of war in the making
or founding of ethical life? Or, more concretely, how is war re
lated to the founding of states?
IV. War and the Founding of States
This new look at his text suggests that Hegel views war as the
complete destruction of the realm of value. But he seems also to
claim that war is the moment in which new freedom is made
actual. He seems then to see war as a necessary pre-condition of
the appearance of states but emphatically not as part of their
standing ethical lives. Surprisingly perhaps, Hegel says repeat
edly and very explicitly that war is a condition of the emergence
of modern states.
Hegel describes the International Law section of the Philoso
phy of Right (PR ??330-340) as the stage in which the state
"actualizes [wirklich wird] and reveals itself through the rela
tionship between the particular national spirits" (PR ?33). It is
through the conflict between nations that states become actual.
Second, when Hegel discusses sovereignty he speaks of a situa
tion of crisis?clearly thinking of war?in which the ideality of
the state "attains its distinct actuality [Wirklichkeit] (see PR
?321 below)" (PR ?278R). He speaks of war as the moment in
which the sovereignty of the state and the values it embodies
first become actual and refers explicitly to the External Sover
eignty section (PR ??321-329). Third, the very last sentence of
the remark which precedes this section speaks of subjectivity
which is identical with the substantial will?precisely the sub
jectivity conscious of having actively taken on the values of the
state (see again, PR ?257)?and says that it "has not up till now
attained its right and its existence [Dasein]" (PR ?320R). Fi
nally, as we already began to see, this is precisely the perplexing
statement Hegel offers as an explanation of the claim that there
is an ethical moment of war. War reduces the lives of citizens
and the values they embody to a state of nature. But, it is also
the moment of the emergence or founding of ethical life. States
make their originary appearance in history and value attains
actuality through war.

19:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
Indeed, in his earlier texts too Hegel claims that war is a con
dition of the dissolution of the ethical realm, but also of founding
the state, or founding it anew. In his first prolonged discussion
of the matter in the Natural Law essay, referred to in the Phi
losophy of Right (see PR ?324R), Hegel says that war is the
condition in which "ethical totalities such as peoples take shape
and constitute themselves as individuals, thereby adopting an
individual stance in relation to [other] individual peoples."17 And,
in the Phenomenology of Spirit, war, on the one hand, is the
collapse of ethical spirit into "[merely] natural existence," but it
also "preserves and raises conscious self into freedom and its
own power" (PhS ?455); it raises "the law of the nether world to
the actuality [Wirklichkeit] of the light of day and to conscious
existence" (PhS ?463; see also, PhS ?475).18
Why does Hegel think that there is a necessary relation be
tween the destruction of the ethical realm in war and the
founding of the state? Surprisingly perhaps, this question leads
us to Hegel's analysis of the French Revolution and the Reign of
Terror in the Absolute Freedom and Terror section of the Phe
nomenology (PhS ??582-595). For Hegel, the French Revolution
is the first attempt to found modern ethical life. It affords "the
tremendous spectacle, for the first time we know of in human
history, of the overthrow of all existing and given conditions
within an actual major state and the revision of its constitution
from first principles and purely in terms of thought; the inten
tion behind this was to give it what was supposed to be a purely
rational basis" (PR ?258R). This attempt though is internally
related to "the most terrible and drastic event" (PR ?258R)?
the murderous violence of the Reign of Terror. Hegel's analysis
of the Revolution reveals that the attempt to found freedom is
necessarily related to the destruction of the state and the most
horrific violence.
Now the claim that Hegel's understanding of the Revolution
is important for unraveling the discussion of war must seem
puzzling. For though some wars resemble revolutions?for ex
ample, wars of political liberation?clearly not all do. It is
important however to see that Hegel is not concerned with the
causes of the collapse of the ethical order of the state or of the
relations between states. He is not therefore concerned with the
difference between revolution and war, but with the relation of
their destruction to the possibility of the foundation of a new
ethical order. Indeed, if violence necessarily accompanies the

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attempt to found such a new order?even where the rational foun

dation of the state is a widely-shared intention?all the more so
where it is not. As we will see in the next section, Hegel says
explicitly that his analysis of the Revolution and the Terror is
also an analysis of the Napoleonic Wars.
What then is the relation between the attempt to make free
dom or the rational actual and "the coldest and meanest of all
deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cab
bage or swallowing a mouthful of water" (PhS ?590)? In other
words, how are we to think of the action that first attempts to
make actual a way of life which is not yet actual? What is the fate
of the first attempt to found true freedom as a shared way of life?
Hegel thinks of the revolutionary individuals acting on the
call to found true freedom as abandoned to the most radical se
clusion, emphatically not because selfish interests or parochial
values drive different factions and individuals (PhS ?587), but
rather because the collapse of all the social and political institu
tions of the state is the collapse of all structures of acknowledg
ment or recognition (PhS ?588). Thus, to act in an ethical void?in
war or in revolution?is to act necessarily unacknowledged. For
Hegel though social acknowledgment is a necessary condition of
the ethical significance of actions. As we saw above, he holds
that the significance of ethical values resides in social practices.
Ethical values are not abstract injunctions that can live in our
minds alone; they are incarnate in practices and involve the
participation and recognition of other human beings and thereby
shape the lives people share. Only to the extent that they are
part of a shared way of life are ethical values actual. Thus, the
attempt to found freedom is doomed to pass unacknowledged,
because it is not itself part of a standing order of values and a
shared way of life. It is not itself actual.
Indeed, Hegel implicitly defines violence as the condition in
which the very value of a person or an act is denied acknowledg
ment (see Werke 4, 241-244; PR ??90-103).19 Within a
constituted sphere of values the act of an individual is violent
to the extent that it robs its victim of the power to act by not
recognizing an act and its agent as bearers of value. It tears a
person from the human fold and fractures the shared life which
binds a community together. But Hegel clearly views the vio
lence of war or revolution as an even more extreme form of
violence than those which occur within a constituted sphere of
value. For war and revolution are states in which the law loses

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its hold on the lives of people and no longer shapes their actual
world. The reign of value is overthrown and action is doomed to
oblivion. The extreme violence of revolution or war is the ethi
cal vacuum which crushes any action by denying it significance.
Their violence is the void in which any action necessarily goes
unrequited. It is the human world gone ethically deaf.
The claim that the founding act of the ethical realm neces
sarily passes violently unacknowledged finds confirmation in the
leading figure of Hegel's philosophy of history, the world-his
torical individual. It is world-historical individuals and their
legions who fulfill the revolutionary promise of freedom by
marching polities into their future. The world-historical indi
vidual is the founder of states. But the founding act is not rec
ognized as an epoch-making action; acknowledged action is
impossible within the ethical void of war (PR ?348). The life and
deeds of world-historical individuals and their troops suffer and
deal violence (PR ?350). They act unacknowledged and are de
stroyed by the ethical life which they blindly found. Unacknowl
edged action and violent, meaningless death are a necessary
condition of the foundation of the ethical.20
The ethical moment of war seems then to be the violent act of
founding the state. Hegel calls the French Revolution "the ac
tual revolution of the actual [die wirkliche Umw?lzung der
Wirklichkeity9 (PhS ?582). We might then preserve the paradox
of this usage and say that the foundation of the state is actual.
It is in this paradoxical sense that the act of making the ratio
nal actual is itself actual.
V. War and Revolution

There are two highly important and related questions which
these claims raise. First, is there any explicit textual support
for the suggestion that Hegel's view of war as the foundation of
the state is so closely related to his analysis of the French Revo
lution and the Terror? This line of questioning will lead us, in
this section, to Hegel's present and to the historical wars he has
most immediately in mind and will raise the question of how he
sees his own age. In the next section, we will turn to the important
questions of whether Hegel is right to generalize this historically
grounded view of war and of what this view might still mean to us
today. The latter, concluding question is no other than the opening
question of the performative force of Hegel's philosophy.

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What evidence is there that Hegel's discussion of the Revolu

tion and Terror is so closely connected to his view of war? Decisive
evidence is found in a letter Hegel writes only days after he learns
of Napoleon's abdication at Fontainbleau on April 6, 1814. In no
uncertain terms, Hegel claims that he predicted Napoleon's fall in
the Absolute Freedom and Terror section of the Phenomenology.
Great events have transpired about us. It is a frightful spec
tacle to see a great genius destroy himself. There is nothing
tragik?taton [more tragic]. . . .
I may pride myself, moreover, on having predicted this entire
revolution [Umw?lzung]. In my book [Phenomenology of Spirit],
which I completed the night before the battle of Jena, I said
on page 547: "Absolute freedom . . . passes over into another
land" (L April 29, 1814)21
Now, Hegel may or may not have foreseen Napoleon's end in
1806, but he certainly thinks he can claim that the Phenomenol
ogy passage predicts it.22 And he cannot be claiming to have
predicted only the geographical migration of the violent politi
cal conflict from France. For that move had transpired long before.
Moreover, Hegel claims to have predicted the specific outcome of
the conflict?Napoleon's fall?and not just its occurrence.
The only plausible reading of Hegel's claim is that he thinks
the Absolute Freedom and Terror section can be read as a dis
cussion of the Napoleonic wars and Napoleon's end.23 The import
of this is clear. The fate of Napoleon is inscribed in the analysis
of the Revolution. Hegel claims explicitly that he "predicted this
entire revolution [Umw?lzung]."
This remains his view in the Philosophy of Right. In its con
cluding section, entitled World History (PR ??341-360), the state
is described once again as emerging from the battle through
which freedom is raised "to actuality [Wirklichkeit] and self-con
scious rationality" (PR ?359): "the spiritual realm brings the
existence of its heaven down to earth in this world" (PR ?360).
This memorable phrase conjures again the image with which the
discussion of the Revolution is introduced in the Phenomenol
ogy: "heaven is transplanted to earth below" (PhS ?581).
Remarkably, in an 1808 letter, Hegel says that constitutional
reform can only be introduced into the states of the Confedera
tion of the Rhine "from heaven, i.e., from the will of the French
Emperor" (L February 11, 1808). The last historical moment
Hegel describes in the Philosophy of Right is the present. It is a

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present afflicted with war. And this war continues the French
Revolution. The task of founding freedom is the task of the
present. Freedom and peace lie in the future.
That Hegel views his lifetime as sunk in war is entirely ex
plicit in the concluding pages of the Lectures on the Philosophy
of History, extensively revised not long before his sudden death
in November 1831. This text is the last and most complete analy
sis Hegel bequeathed us of his political age. There he refers to
the period between the Revolution of 1789 and the July Revolu
tion of 1830 as "forty years of wars" (LPH 219).24 Hegel maps in
it the violent propagation of the ideas of the Revolution through
Europe by Napoleon's army. He thinks that the Napoleonic
Wars?with the one possible exception of Germany?ended in
the defeat of the idea of freedom, or, more precisely, that what
ever political advances the world has undergone, making freedom
actual is still a present task. Hegel defines the task of the times
as the foundation of freedom: "This collision, this crux, this prob
lem is what history now faces, and it must solve it at some time
in the future." (LPH 219).
This evidence serves not only as proof that Hegel views the
Napoleonic Wars as internally linked to the French Revolution.
It also confirms the dramatic shift of perspective in the inter
pretation of his view of war. Hegel does not see himself as
standing within a founded free state, trying to reconcile poster
ity to the rationality of war. War is the destruction of the ethical.
And his age is an age of war, a time which awaits the founda
tion of freedom. Strikingly, this last claim is rendered audible
by attending to Hegel's description of his times.
VI. The Question of Generalizing Hegel's Claims:

The Presence of War
Is it plausible to construct a general view of war as the founding
of the state based on an analysis of the French Revolution and
the Terror? It is one thing to claim that the Napoleonic Wars
were closely related to the Revolution. Terrible though they were,
by all accounts they were crucial events in the advent of modern
freedom. But what basis can Hegel possibly have for generaliz
ing this claim? He views the Revolution as involving a necessary
connection between the struggle for a radically new political
beginning and the terror of the comprehensive destruction of
the social and political institutions of the state. This connection

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might well hold true of other revolutions and of wars of political

liberation. But surely not all wars resemble revolutions. Revo
lution is an internal conflict within a state and its violence tears
the state apart. It seems therefore plausible to claim that revo
lutions do always threaten to topple the institutions of the state
and with them the edifice of ethical meaning. And their end is
of course the establishment of a new political order. But in war
two different lives are locked in deadly opposition. At stake is
the preservation of the political lives of the conflicting states.
War is in this sense conservative. Whereas revolution is . . . well,
revolutionary.
How can Hegel defend the claims that war is always the de
struction of ethical life and that the destruction of war is always
related to the struggle for a new political beginning? For Hegel,
it is a mistake to insist that ethical life is still standing intact
simply because the state's military lines of defense have not
fallen. In war, the state and its institutions still exists formally,
as does its formal right to be recognized by other states. But the
values that shape the lives of individuals in peace do not shape
their lives on the battlefield or the home front. This is what Hegel
means when he says that in an all out war the entire state is
"wrenched away from its own internal life" (PR ?326). To go into
action is already to have lost a life, for the ground of a shared
way of life has already collapsed under foot.
To say that war is the collapse of a shape of life is not to find
fault in that life?or value in the life that emerges from war. A
free state can be conquered in war. And a state which succeeds
in defending itself is not for this reason free. Hegel's analysis of
the Napoleonic Wars offers conclusive evidence for this last
claim. To say that a state and its international relations suffer
ethical destruction in war is to say that a particular way of life
is no longer lived. War demands "the surrender of personal ac
tuality [Wirklichkeit]" (PR ?328). The customs, laws and
institutions of the state, and most clearly its international rela
tions, no longer shape the lives of its citizens. There is an
unbreachable gap between the political ends of the state and
existence in war. Life stops in war. To be lived again it must be
made again. Or a different life must be made. And this choice
confronts both sides of an armed conflict.
The idea that the destruction of war requires founding the
state and its international relations anew explains how Hegel
can generalize from the case of the French Revolution and the

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Napoleonic Wars and suggest that in all wars there is a call for
the foundation of freedom. Wars are revolutionary because their
very destruction is the calling of a new beginning, even though
their cause is not the revolutionary intention of founding a new
ethical order. This new beginning can restore the order shat
tered by war. But, more often than not war will be the site of the
foundation of a new form of political existence, internally and
internationally. The very possibility of founding a radically new
form of life reveals that rebuilding the state and its interna
tional relations is itself a fundamentally new beginning. Both
the violent first birth of freedom within a state through revolu
tion and founding again a state torn apart by war are similar
because both are originary.
The question of the historical applicability of Hegel's view of
war deserves separate attention. It might, moreover, be possible
to extend his view and consider not only wars and the founda
tion of new states but also other radical political transformations.
In considering such transformations, it will be important to re
member that even when the names and borders of states have
not changed they do not always remain the same and that vio
lence has many forms. It is of great importance, however, to
understand that historical facts and analyses cannot offer a con
clusive argument for the universal truth of Hegel's view.
Historical examples might make the view seem more plausible
by describing the role of wars in the radical political changes of
our past or the collapse of a way of life concomitant with other
radical transformations. But they cannot reveal their role in our
present or future. Precisely because, for Hegel, war is the col
lapse of the structures of ethical meaning, it poses the impossibly
abstract task of founding a new world. And the idea that build
ing again a state thrown into war might be the ethical moment
of present or future wars is reassuring precisely because it prom
ises to demand no more than building again the political past.
Here, finally, we see unveiled the assumption behind the de
scriptive reading and our own resistance to Hegel's view. We
want to think of ourselves as living within a just, standing state,
in peace. And for this reason we take Hegel to predict and jus
tify wars in our future. But Hegel's political philosophy sounds
in the ethical destruction of war. He ends his political philoso
phy and his philosophy of history with a vision of human life
destroyed. In the presence of violence he speaks of a future not
yet founded.

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Does Hegel's view of war apply to our present? And is it de

scriptive only or does it also call for change? What finally is the
force of Hegel's political philosophy? In the all-too-famous for
mulation of his answer Hegel says the following:
A further word on the subject of issuing instructions on how
the world ought to be: philosophy, at any rate, always comes
too late to perform this function. As the thought of the world,
it appears only at a time when actuality [Wirklichkeit] has
gone through its formative process and attained its completed
state. This lesson of the concept is necessarily also apparent
from history, namely that it is only when actuality has reached
maturity that the ideal appears opposite the real and recon
structs this real world, which it has grasped in its substance,
in the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints
its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be
rejuvenated, but only be recognized [erkennen], by the grey in
grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only
with the onset of dusk. (PR Preface, p. 23)
Philosophy, Hegel clearly asserts, cannot issue instructions how
the world ought to be. Unlike Marx, he thinks philosophy can
not prescribe to the present a future it alone sees. But, it does
not merely describe its present either. To paint the gray of the
present in gray is not merely to describe the present. It is to
describe a shape of life grown old.25 Philosophy can be the origin
of political change. Indeed, the French Revolution "received its
first impulse from philosophy" (LPH 214). And, Hegel repeats
this general claim in the Philosophy of Right, immediately be
fore the infamous couplet proclaiming that the rational is actual
and the actual is rational. In these instances, philosophy, like
the world-historical individual, acts blindly, without "compre
hension of absolute truth" (LPH 214).26 And, as Hegel realizes,
in its blindness philosophy too can act against freedom.
At the very end of his Lectures on the History of Philosophy
Hegel addresses his students and attempts to give voice to the
call of philosophy to act for change.
When the mole within us burrows on, we have to heed its de
mand and give it actuality [Wirklichkeit]. ... I hope that this
history of philosophy shall sound for you a call to grasp the
spirit of the time, present in us naturally, and?each in his
own place?pull it out of its natural condition, i.e., seclusion
and lifelessness, and consciously bring it into the light of day.
(Werke 20, 461-462)27

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Can the calling of a new life be heard in Hegel's political phi

losophy?his painting-in-gray? The claim that war throws life
into an ethical void sounds the cry to found freedom. Despite
the fact that substantial ethical progress has been made since
Hegel's day, is it not still true today that the foundation of free
dom remains a present duty? The ethical moment of war is the
cry to make the rational actual. It sounds in war and wherever
freedom is lost or where it has not yet been founded. But this
cry is not a prescription made within a standing order of values.
As a universal injunction, it is utterly abstract, indeed empty;
it is empty precisely because it sounds where ethical life stands
in ruins or has not yet been built. Philosophy, in war, can pre
scribe no particular action. And, for just this reason, it seems to
offer theoretical knowledge only. But the truth of political phi
losophy, Hegel seems to say, will finally be told in action.
Tel-Aviv University
NOTES
For invaluable responses to earlier versions of this paper, I thank: Seyla

Benhabib, Stanley Cavell, Eli Friedlander, Karsten Harries, Eyal Peretz,
Henry Pickford, Ori Simchen, Steven Smith, Zvi Tauber, Allen Wood, the
referee for History of Philosophy Quarterly and its editor, Catherine Wilson.
1. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
2. K. Marx, "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right:
Introduction," in Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans. A. John
and J. O'Malley, ed. J. O'Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1970).
3. The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H.
S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991).
4. Marx, "Critique of Hegel's PR," p. 136. See also, S. Sayers, "The Ac
tual and the Rational," in Hegel and Modern Philosophy, ed. D. Lamb
(London: Croom Helm, 1987).
5. See J. Ritter, "Hegel und die franz?sische Revolution" in Metaphysik
und Politik: Studien zu Aristoteles und Hegel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969).
6. For the historical variant, see D. Henrich, "Einleitung des
Herausgebers: Vernunft in Verwirklichung" in Philosophie des Rechts: Die
Vorlesungen von 1819/1820, hrsg. D. Henrich (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983),

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pp. 13-17. For the eschatological variant, see E. L. Fackenheim, "On the
Actuality of the Rational and the Rationality of the Actual," in The Hegel
Myths and Legends, ed. J. Stewart (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern Univer
sity Press, 1996); A. T. Peperzak, Philosophy and Politics: A Commentary
on the Preface to Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff,
1987), pp. 92-103. For a reading in the terms of Hegel's logic or metaphys
ics, see Y. Yovel, "Hegel's Dictum that the Rational is Actual and the Actual
is Rational: Its Ontological Content and its Function in Discourse," in
Stewart, Hegel Myths.
7. K. R. Popper, The Open Society audits Enemies: The High Tide of Proph
ecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath (London: Routledge, 1945), p. 65.
8. See H. G. ten Bruggencate, "Hegel's Views on War," in Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 1 (1950); S. Avineri, "The Problem of War in Hegel's Thought,"
in Stewart, Hegel Myths; Hegel's Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1972), chap. 10; C. I. Smith, "Hegel on War,"
Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 26 (1965); D. P. Verene, "Hegel's Ac
count of War," in Stewart, Hegel Myths; P. Fuss, "Avineri's Hegel," in Journal
of the History of Philosophy, vol. 13 (1975); E. E. Harris, "Hegel's Theory of
Sovereignty, International Relations, and War," in Stewart, Hegel Myths;
S. B. Smith, "Hegel's Views on War, the State and International Relations"
in American Political Science Review, vol. 77 (1983); M. Westphal, "Dialec
tic and Intersubjectivity," The Owl of Minerva, vol. 16 (1984); W. S?nkel,
"Hegel und der Krieg," in Hegel-Jahrbuch 1988; S. Walt, "Hegel on War:
Another Look," in Stewart, Hegel Myths; K. Hutchings, "Perpetual War/
Perpetual Peace: Kant, Hegel and the End of History," in Bulletin of the
Hegel Society of Great Britain, vols. 23-24 (1991); A. Peperzak, "Hegel Con
tra Hegel in His Philosophy of Right: The Contradiction of International
Politics," Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 32 (1994); M. 0.
Hardimon, Hegel's Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation (Cam
bridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 230-236.
9. The two claims are explicitly distinguished by Verene, Fuss, Walt and
Hardimon.
10. Peperzak, "Hegel Contra Hegel," p. 259.
11. Westphal, "Dialectic and Intersubjectivity," p. 53.
12. See Walt, "Hegel on War," pp. 169-173; Smith, "Hegel's Views on
War," p. 631.
13. See A. W. Wood, Hegel's Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), pp. 209-218; F. Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel's
Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer
sity Press, 2000), chap. 3; A. Patten, Hegel's Idea of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999).
14. Translation modified.

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17. On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, on its Place in Prac
tical Philosophy, and its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Right in Political
Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), p. 140.
18. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford Uni
versity Press, 1977).
19. Werke, hrsg. E. Moldenhauer, K. M. Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp
Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 1986).
20. See Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, trans.
H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 85; Werke
12 310; Werke 18 512.
21. Hegel: The Letters, trans. C. Butler and C. Seiler (Bloomington: In
diana University Press, 1984). Translation modified.
22. But see L. W. Beck, "The Reformation, the Revolution, and the Res
toration in Hegel's Political Philosophy," Journal of the History of
Philosophy, vol. 14 (1976), p. 58; H. S. Harris, "Hegel and the French Revo
lution," Clio, vol. 7 (1977), pp. 13-14.
23. See J. Hyppolite, "The Significance of the French Revolution in
Hegel's Phenomenology," in Studies on Marx and Hegel, trans. J. O'Neill
(New York: Basic Books, 1969), pp. 58-59; M. N. Forster, Hegel's Idea of a
Phenomenology of Spirit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p.
483; T. Pinkard, Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cam
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 186.
24. Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1827-1831), in Political Writings.
25. See E. Weil, Hegel and the State, trans. M. A. Cohen (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1998), p. 114; Avineri, Hegel's Theory of the Modern State,
pp. 129-130; Peperzak, Philosophy and Politics, pp. 115-117.
26. See R. Bubner, "Hegel and the End of History," in Bulletin of the
Hegel Society of Great Britain, vols. 23-24 (1991), p. 20.
27. My translation.

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War and The Foundation of The State in Hegel's Political Philosophy

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