The rise of modern philosophy a new history of western philosophy volume 3 (new history of western philosophy) ( PDFDrive ) (1) 317

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY disliked the idea of a world-state, because it would take away the opportunity for war, which was a necessary stage in the dialectic of history War, for him, was not just a necessary evil, but had a positive value as a reminder of the contingent nature of Wnite existence It was ‘the condition in which we have to take seriously the vanity of temporal goods and things’ (PR, 324) Accordingly, Hegel attacked Kant’s quest for perpetual peace The future of humanity, Hegel predicted, lay neither in Germany nor in a united world, but rather in America, ‘where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the world’s history shall reveal itself ’—perhaps in a great continental struggle between North and South The history of Germany for a century and more after Hegel’s death brought upon his political philosophy a barrage of obloquy His gloriWcation of the state as an end in itself, his belief in the cosmic role of the German people, and his positive evaluation of warfare can hardly avoid a share of the responsibility for the two World Wars that disWgured the twentieth century It is true that the Prussian model that he commended was a constitutional monarchy, and that the nationalism he preached was at some remove from the totalitarian racism of the Nazis Nonetheless, his philosophical career, like Rousseau’s, is a reminder of the disastrous consequences that can Xow from Xawed metaphysics One can believe that the state has an intrinsic value of its own only if we think of it as in some way personal, and indeed a higher form of person than an ordinary human individual And one can rationally believe this only if one accepts some version of Hegel’s metaphysical doctrine that there is a world-spirit whose life is lived through the interplay between the folk-spirits that animate the nation-states For those who are interested in the history of philosophy for the sake of the light it can cast on contemporary concerns, the period from Machiavelli to Hegel is the heyday of political philosophy The political institutions of the ancient and medieval world are too distant from our own for the reXections upon them of ancient and medieval philosophers to have much to oVer to contemporary political philosophy On the other hand, as we shall see in the next volume, the political evaluations of the great philosophers of the nineteenth century owe as much to the nascent disciplines of economics and sociology as they to the conceptual concerns that remain as the abiding core of pure political philosophy 302