Gopal Balakrishnan

The state evolved from an autonomous instrument of aristocratic power into a constitutional form representing competing class interests. Eventually, it became simply an arena where class struggle unfolded openly. According to this historical framework, the culmination of these tensions would determine whether society would move toward communal reconstruction or regress into new forms of domination. Read the complete exposition here.

Even before the defeats of the revolutions of 1848, they recognized that the mutually advantageous arrangements between the middle class and an old regime which it sought to reform to its specifications, would make a bourgeois revolution in Germany dependent upon wider political upheavals across Europe- more specifically another revolutionary breakthrough in France bringing a European and perhaps world war in tow. This would be a recapitulation of the sequence that unfolded from 1789 to 1814, but on a far more developed world market basis, one which would put a nascent international proletariat into contention. The backwardness of the continent in comparison to England led liberal and conservative parties to support economic demands that were the opposite of the ones upheld by their counterparts across the channel. In Prussia as well as in France, the liberal opposition was protectionist, while in this period, the conservative establishment was pro-free trade. It might seem to follow t...

Political economy had supplanted philosophy and theology as the primary object of critique. Presupposing an equilibrium of supply and demand, economists sought to explain the economy-wide pattern of relative prices-exchange values-by the same law which governed the class distribution of revenues between landlords, capitalists, and wage laborers. Following Engels, Marx concluded that they were unable to provide a coherent account of the inter-relationship between the economic oppositions within which their theories revolved- cost/price, supply/demand, labor/capital, etc.- because they could not grasp the historically specific dynamic of development that stemmed from the social relations that imposed exchange dependency on producers. In all its variants, the discourse of the wealth of nations presupposed private property in the exchange value form and therefore the distribution of revenues into wages, profit, and rent. Marx noted that it did not, however, explain private property’s histo...

While in their own idiosyncratic way, some Young Hegelians briefly came to see themselves as Jacobins, the view that Germany was a belated nation condemned to undergo a derivative, ‘catch-up’ revolution was an anathema to them. One could say that they were patriots of a coming two-fold Franco-German republic. While they scorned the mythical Gothic past of the Romantics, they nonetheless all partook in a discourse of national exceptionalism according to which the current generation of German radicals was called upon to make penance for their country’s infamous role in defeating the French Revolution. On this point of honor, they would show their mettle by appropriating and working out the final consequences of the latest advances of Western European thought. The German critique of religious consciousness had adopted the old Voltairean motto écrasez l’infâme and was now eager to expand the war on theology to its political and social corollaries. But repeating the passage from Enlightenme...

The development of Hegel’s later philosophy of law must be situated in the context of Prussia’s ‘revolution from above’. After a crushing defeat at Jena in 1806, a group of loyalist officers and bureaucrats initiated a project of sweeping administrative reforms, establishing a new military order, a new university system, an opening for modernist currents in Protestant theology, and beginning the transformation of Junker squires into capitalist landlords. Little more than a decade later, Hegel was inducted into a loose coterie of reformist officials that included Wilhelm von Humboldt and Carl von Clausewitz. In the era of reform, Prussia acquired an enigmatic, dual nature as a self-modernizing old regime, and Hegel’s Philosophy of Right offered philosophical rationales for this German Sonderweg. The project of state-promoted modernization continued after victory over Napoleon, but came to confront ever more determined opposition from two quarters: romantic nationalists who had expected ...

  The Right-Wing Backlash to Mass Democracy In the tumultuous European aftermath of the First World War, the breakthroughs of mass democracy confronted a right-wing backlash that came to adopt anti-status quo pretensions historically identified with the left. The spectacle of industrial warfare was felt to have possessed a higher world-historical significance, cruelly travestied by post-war upsurges of subaltern classes demanding social reforms bordering on Revolution. The Culture of Heroic Resistance In post-war Italy and Germany, the armed exploits of demobilized veterans and patriotic volunteers offered a bonding experience of collective violence, celebrated in a discourse of heroic resistance to governments of national humiliation. Spengler’s assessment of this outcome expressed the exasperation felt by men of property and education: ‘The Labour leader won the War. That which in every country is called the Labour Party and the trade union, but is in reality the trade union of ...