Can Kant be Politicised?

Politics was without a doubt immanent to Hegel’s philosophy. Any historical reader of European politics with an interest in philosophy might notice the directly political position that the memory of Hegel occupies in the shadow of Europe’s current political status. Hegel can, in fact, be located in multiple opposed ideologies that shaped modern Europe. Take, for example, Giovanni Gentile, the author of the Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals and praised by Benito Mussolini as one of the political-philosophical inspirations for Italian fascism. Gentile’s avowal of neo-Hegelianism led to the development of his own specific brand of Italian idealism. The lines towards the end of his Fascist Manifesto present the obscurely (vulgarly) Hegelian tone to Gentile’s dialectic of the State and the individual:

“This Fatherland, moreover, is a reconsecration of traditions and institutions that endure in civilization, in the flux and perpetuity of tradition. It is also a school for the subordination of the particular and inferior to the universal and immortal. It is respect for law and discipline. It is freedom, but freedom to be won through law, freedom established by renouncing all petty willfulness and wasteful, irrational ambition.”

The individual is by definition particular, and thus by definition inferior to the universal (the Fatherland) to which the individual is submitted in the name of tradition. This step is itself a complete denial of Hegel’s philosophy of the State, in which a particular is in fact able to reconstruct the universal (most notoriously in the forms of ‘substance as Subject’). Gentile’s reliance on Hegel may be misguided, but it does not detract from the immanently political meaning of Hegel’s idealism which has been continuously appropriated by political movements.

We may want to look at the way Lenin celebrates Hegel’s Logic as necessary for our understanding of Marx - an appropriation of Hegel which appears to directly contradict his use as a progenitor of Italian fascism. However a more interesting ‘stain’ of Hegel in modern Europe is seen in the figure which ties him to the idea of a common market, a multinational trade-system: Alexandre Kojève. Kojève was not only the philosopher who introduced a generation of French theorists to Hegel through his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (a disappointing work, which depicts Hegel as a straightforward thinker of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, as well as a teleology of history). He also held a role in the French economy ministry for over two decades