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ROMANTIC POLITICAL
PHILOSOPHY
Craig Vincent Mitchell, PhD
Associate Professor of Philosophy, Politics and
Economics
Criswell College
The French
Revolution
GWF
Hegel
Marx and
Engels
MAJOR DEVELOPMENTS IN
ROMANTIC POLITICAL THOUGHT

He wrote The Social Contract in 1762

His utopian vision included the people
meeting regularly in assemblies

The people would abjure individualism
and would act in accordance with the
General Will

The General Will outlawed all privilege
and inequality

He wanted to transform all sphere of
human relationships, including the social,
personal and cultural

His view of the state resembled Marxist
ideals
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: 1789-1799

The Jacobins were a left- wing, revolutionary political club

The Jacobins were closely related to the sans- culottes (the
common people of the lower class)

They established a revolutionary dictatorship, led by Robespierre

They also established a reign of terror, which targeted
monarchists, traitors and agitators
THE JACOBINS

The old social order, known as the Ancien Regime included

First estate- the clergy

Second estate- the aristocracy

Third estate- the rest of society

The Ancien Regime collapsed and was replaced by the break
with tradition

All men were declared to be legally equal

Christianity was replaced by the goddess “Reason”
THE NEW SOCIAL ORDER
Socialism
Francois-Noel
Babeuf
Comte Henri
de Saint
Simon
RADICAL THINKERS
Charles
Fourier

Leader of the first communist
movement

He gathered around him a small
circle of followers known as the
Societé des égaux, soon merged
with the rump of the Jacobin Club,
who met at the Panthéon; and in
November 1795 he was reported by
the police to be openly preaching
"insurrection, revolt and the
Constitution of 1793".
FRANCOIS-NOEL BABEUF

He created a political and economic
ideology known as industrialism that
claimed that the needs of an industrial
class that he also referred to as the
working class needed to be recognized
and fulfilled to have an effective society
and an efficient economy.

Saint-Simon's conception of this class
included all people engaged in
productive work that contributed to
society, that included businesspeople,
managers, scientists, bankers, along with
manual labourers amongst others.[
COMTE HENRI DE SAINT SIMON

Saint-Simon stressed the need for recognition of the merit of the
individual and the need for hierarchy of merit in society and in the
economy, such as society having hierarchical merit-based
organizations of managers and scientists to be the decision-makers
in government. He strongly criticized any expansion of government
intervention into the economy beyond ensuring no hindrances to
productive work and reducing idleness in society, regarding
intervention beyond these as intruding into the economy.

This ideology soon inspired and influenced utopian socialism

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels identifying Saint-Simon as an
inspiration to their ideas and identifying him among the utopian
socialists.
COMTE HENRI DE SAINT SIMON

He believed that a society that
cooperated would see an immense
improvement in their productivity
levels. Workers would be
recompensed for their labors
according to their contribution.
Fourier saw such cooperation
occurring in communities he called
"phalanxes," based around
structures called Phalanstères or
"grand hotels."
CHARLES FOURIER
French
Revolution
GWF
Hegel
PART II
Marx and
Engels

a German philosopher who was a
major figure in German idealism. His
historicist and idealist account of
reality revolutionized European
philosophy and served as an
important precursor to Continental
philosophy, Marxism and historism.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL

Hegel's thinking can be understood as a constructive
development within the broad tradition that includes Plato and
Immanuel Kant. To this list one could add Meister Eckhart,
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Plotinus,, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
What all these thinkers share, which distinguishes them from
materialists like Epicurus, the Stoics, and Thomas Hobbes, and
from empiricists like David Hume, is that they regard freedom or
self-determination both as real and as having important
ontological implications, for soul or mind or divinity. This focus on
freedom is what generates Plato's view of the soul as having a
higher or fuller kind of reality than inanimate objects possess.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL

Spirit (Geist)- Infinite life which unites all finite things from within

Nature- a precondition of human consciousness, it provides the
sphere of the objective. The Absolute expresses itself in objectivity
through Nature.

Absolute- necessarily expresses itself as Spirit, as selfconsciousness, in and through the human mind. It is the subject
matter of philosophy, which is reality as a whole. It is self- thinking
Thought
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL

Hegel believes that philosophy stops short of religion and is
subordinate to it.

Christ is just a moral teacher

God is self- thinking Thought which is the telos or end that draws
the world as its final cause

The whole process of reality is a teleological movement towards
the actualization of self- thinking Thought, which is the telos or
end of the universe
HEGEL ON GOD

Hegel wanted to show that the claim of sense certainty to be
knowledge par excellence is a bogus claim

Phenomenology has three parts

Consciousness- of an object as a sensible thing

Self- consciousness- involves social consciousness

Reason- is the synthesis of objectivity and subjectivity
GWF HEGEL
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE SPIRIT

The Family-, the first moment in the ethical substance is the
immediate natural ethical substance. It is one person whose will is
expressed in the common property of the family. The members of
the family are united by the bond of love

Civil Society- The second moment in the ethical substance. It is a
plurality of individuals united in a form of economic organization
for the achievement of their own ends. It involves classes,
specialization of labor and corporations

The State- The third moment in the ethical substance, which
involves the political constitution and government.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL:
ETHICS

The family represents the moment of universality in the sense of
undifferentiated unity.

Civil Society represents the moment of particularity

The State represents the unity of the universal and the particular.
In the State self- consciousness has risen to the level of universal
self- consciousness. The State is an organic unity. It is a concrete
universal, existing in and through particulars which are distinct
and one at the same time. It is the self- conscious ethical
substance and is the actuality of the rational will. It is the highest
expression of objective Spirit. Rights are established and
maintained as the expression of the universal rational will.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL:
ETHICS
Left Hegelians

Hegelians did not believe that
Hegelianism was compatible with
Christianity.

These eventually became more
atheistic in their outlook

The biblical scholar, David Friedrich
Strauss was a left Hegelian

Ludwig Feuerbach also fell into this
group
Right Hegelians

The right Hegelians believed that
Hegelianism was compatible with
Christianity

Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz
was a student of both Hegel and
Schleiermacher

Ludwig Michelet identified Hegel’s
triad with the members of the Trinity
THE YOUNG HEGELIANS
Feuerbach was an atheist, materialist
He was also a Left Hegelian
He wrote The Essence of Christianity
He also wrote, The Essence of Religion
He believed that religion is an important
stage in human development
The primary object of religion is Nature
He believed that politics must become
our religion
LUDWIG FEUERBACH
French
Revolution
GWF
Hegel
PART III
Marx and
Engels
Karl Marx
Frederick Engels
SCIENTIFIC COMMUNISM
Goals of Communism
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to
public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a
national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
ROMANTIC POLITICAL ECONOMY
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of
the state.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the
bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil
generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for
agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition
of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution
of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s
factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial
production, etc
ROMANTIC POLITICAL ECONOMY:
COMMUNIST GOALS CONTINUED
Socialism
Fascism
Communism
ROMANTIC POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES
Fascism


Communism
National socialism
Fascism borrowed theories and
terminology from socialism but
replaced socialism's focus on class
conflict with a focus on conflict
between nations and races. Fascists
advocate a mixed economy, with the
principal goal of achieving autarky to
secure national self-sufficiency and
independence through protectionist
and interventionist economic policies

Worldwide socialism

is a socioeconomic system structured
upon the common ownership of the
means of production and characterized
by the absence of social classes, money,
and the state; as well as a social, political
and economic ideology and movement
that aims to establish this social order.

Communism includes a variety of schools
of thought, which broadly include
Marxism, anarchism and the political
ideologies grouped around both.
VARIETIES OF SOCIALISM

The Frankfurt School is a school of social
theory and philosophy at the Goethe
University in Frankfurt, Germany. The
school initially formed during the interwar
period in Germany and consisted of
dissidents who were at home neither in the
existent capitalist, fascist nor communist
systems that had formed during the
interwar period. Meanwhile, many of
these theorists believed that traditional
theory could not adequately explain the
turbulent and unexpected development
of capitalist societies in the twentieth
century. Critical of both capitalism and
Soviet socialism, their writings pointed to
the possibility of an alternative path to
social development
THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL