The Historical School: From Friedrich List to the Social Market Economy. Zemfira Nazarova

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      – Eastern society (everyone is a slave);

      – the Greco-Roman world (individuals gain freedom);

      – the Germanic-Christian world (all are free)24.

      Having been realized in history as freedom, the Absolute Idea at the stage of Absolute Spirit now returns to itself in the process of self-discovery, revealing itself in another triad: art, religion, and philosophy.

      «The Germanic spirit is the spirit of the new world,» Hegel notes in the fourth part of the Philosophy of History, «whose aim is the realization of absolute truth as the infinite self-determination of freedom, that freedom whose content is its very absolute form. The purpose of the Germanic peoples is to be the bearers of the Christian principle… the Germanics began by spilling over like a stream, flooding the world and subduing the decrepit and internally rotted states of civilized peoples. It was only then that their development began, brought about by contact with alien culture, alien religion, polity and legislation. They were formed by assimilating and overcoming the alien, and their history is rather a process of deepening into themselves and relating to themselves»25.

      «The Germanic nation was characterized by a sense of natural wholeness in itself, and we may,» Hegel notes, «call this feeling Gemuth (soul)…Germanic peoples have the capacity to be bearers of a higher principle of spirit. «In Germany, freedom has been the banner until modern times, and even the alliance of sovereigns, with Frederick II at its head, arose out of love of freedom,» Hegel believed.26

      Let us return to the Philosophy of Law, in which Hegel outlines his understanding of the ideal state. His economic ideal is neither detailed regulation of economic life nor strictly centralized closed natural production. In the Philosophy of Right, strict state control is associated with the primitive state of society. However, he does not exclude that «the different interests of producers and consumers may clash with each other, and although in general the correct relation between them is established by itself, their reconciliation also requires regulation consciously undertaken by an authority above them both»27. And these functions he assigns to police supervision. He notes that «the police should take care of street lighting, the construction and maintenance of bridges, the establishment of firm prices for everyday necessities, as well as the health of individuals. And there are two main prevailing opinions here. Some argue that the police should supervise everything, while others argue that the police should not determine anything here, since everyone will be guided in his activities by the needs of others. The individual, of course, should enjoy the right to earn his bread in one way or another, but, on the other hand, the public also has the right to want what they need to be properly supplied. Both parties must be satisfied, and freedom of trade must not be of such a kind as to jeopardize the common good»28. Hegel believed that without state intervention, a tendency toward self-destruction could prevail. In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel declares constitutional monarchy to be the highest and most perfect form of government. It is quite characteristic that Hegel considered members of the government and public officials as that part of society in which «the developed mind and legal consciousness of the whole mass of the people» were concentrated. He notes «the middle class, to which belong government officials, is the center of state consciousness and the most outstanding education. It is therefore its main pillar of legitimacy and intelligence»29. Hegel thus entrusts bureaucrats with the task of renewing society.

      November 14, 1831, an epidemic of cholera cut short Hegel’s life. He left his life at the height of the authority of the philosophy he had created, on the basis of which a whole school of Hegelians emerged.

      Many academic sources note that Hegel’s doctrine is the highest achievement of dialectics of German classical idealism of his time, is characterized by the breadth and depth of content, the importance and diversity of the problems put forward – it is a widely developed system of categories, the laws of which he deduces from their interactions. However, the focus of Hegel’s philosophy is the dialectic of human history. This great idealist, who believed that development is a characteristic of the activity of the spirit, contributed to the formation of the historical school of law and the historical school of political economy in Germany. It was his philosophical concept that formed the basis for the formation of the methodology of these schools.

      The merit of Hegel is that he was the first to see the connection between philosophy and political economy. The entire subsequent history of economic science confirms that the methodological basis of economic disciplines is the philosophy of economics (the culture of thinking of the economist). It should be noted that in recent years in our country the taste for studying the history of economic doctrines, the works of outstanding economists is lost…

      Paradoxically, but for two hundred years Hegel’s philosophy has been the subject of controversy and struggle of the most diverse opposing sides. Hegel’s inheritance was divided especially zealously in Russia, where it was considered «theirs» by both Slavophiles and Westerners, both Reds and Whites. Karl Marx, having absorbed Hegel’s ideas, developed his own doctrine, which is still a subject of discussion among politicians and scientists. However, neither politicians nor postmodernists have managed to appropriate his legacy in its entirety.

      Adam Muller and political economy romanticism

      On the wave of disillusionment with the consequences of the French Revolution – the Jacobin dictatorship and Bonapartism – Romanticism was formed, preaching the growth of national civic consciousness. Identification of romanticism national identity, in contrast to the Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, contributes to the emergence of the ideology of bourgeois nationalism, with particular force manifested in European countries deprived of statehood – Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary. Among the great romantics of these countries, suffice it to name: German writer, composer and artist Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776—1822), composer and conductor Carl Maria von Weber (1786—1826), composer and conductor Richard Wagner (1813—1883), Austrian composer Franz Peter Schubert (1797—1828), Italian composers Vincenzo Bellini (1801—1835) and Giuseppe Verdi (1813—1901), virtuoso violinist and composer Nicolo Paganini, French composer Louis Hector Berlioz (1803—1869), Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798—1855), Hungarian poet and revolutionary Sándor Petőfi (1823—1849), and Hungarian-German composer and virtuoso pianist Franz Liszt (1811—1886). They no longer felt obliged to write only on commission; it was a bold gesture, reflecting the spirit of a new time – the time of «Romanticism’.

      In art, Romanticism replaced classicism in the 20-30-ies of the XIX century and, as noted by researchers, had two sources: the first, the liberation movement of the people against feudalism and national oppression and the second, the disappointment of the broad social circles of the results of the revolutions of the XVIII century, which in turn, determined the formation of two currents. In one direction, criticism of capitalism was, as a rule, one-sided in nature, noticed only its shadow sides, ignored the progressive that brought the victory of the new system, created illusory ideals that represent an apologia of the medieval past (Novalis, Zhukovsky). Another direction had a progressive, revolutionary orientation, expressing the protest of broad circles of society, both against the bourgeois and feudal system of social organization, against political reaction (Byron, Shelley, Hugo, Sand, Mickiewicz, Petefi, Ryleev, Delacroix, Brullov, Chopin, Berlioz, Liszt). Aesthetic ideals of this direction of romanticism also often had a utopian character, and the images were characterized by ambivalence, internal tragedy, they still СКАЧАТЬ