In “White Psychodrama” (2023, Journal of Political Philosophy), Liam Kofi Bright self-consciously echoing Rawls’ Hegel hopes that “philosophy could reconcile us to our social world and each other.” (p. 198; Bright cites Rawls in his first footnote.) As Rawls emphasizes, by ‘reconciliation’ Hegel does not mean mere resignation. Rather, (and now I quote Rawls), “reconciliation means that we have come to see our social world as a form of life in political and social institutions that realizes our essence—that is, the basis of our dignity as persons who are free. It will “thereby appear justified to free thinking.”” (Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. by Barbara Herman, p. 331)
Rawls goes on to offer an example of this (and it is one in which Hegel is de facto critical of Kant):
So the form of the modern state, which in its political and social institutions expresses the freedom of persons, is not fully actual until its citizens understand how and why they are free in it. The work of political philosophy is to help them to understand that. It looks not to a world that ought to be that lies beyond the world…but to a world before their eyes that actualizes their freedom. (Lectures, p. 332)
Reconciliation so understood is a species of public enlightenment about the nature of political reality. It’s perhaps not so easy to see the difference between political philosophy as an instrument of enlightenment or civics education and as an instrument of propaganda. Be that as it may, and crucially, we must not dwell on an ideal world — written like Socrates’ kallipolis in the stars — but “what we need to do is to become reconciled to the real social world by gaining insight into its true nature as rational; to gain this insight, we need a philosophical account of that world, and eventually a philosophical conception of the world as a whole, including a philosophy of history.” (Lectures, p. 334)
Rawls sums up his own treatment of Hegel as follows:
Thus to be reconciled to our social world is not to think everything is just fine and everyone is happy. A reasonable social world is not a utopia. That is naïve and foolish: there is no such world and there cannot be. Contingency and accident, misfortune, and bad luck are necessary elements of the world, and social institutions, no matter how rationally designed, cannot correct for them. However, a rational social order can provide for freedom and makes it possible for citizens to realize their freedoms. Their freedom can be guaranteed, and for Hegel freedom is the greatest good. Happiness cannot be guaranteed, though freedom furthers it by enabling us to achieve it, provided that we are fortunate and lead our lives wisely. (Lectures p. 336; emphasis in original)
Somewhat oddly, despite citing Rawls and repeatedly endorsing the ideal of ‘reconciliation,’ (p. 198, p. 199, p. 211, p.217), this Rawlsian understanding of Hegel’s account of reconciliation is not what Bright wishes to pursue. In fact, Bright proposes a different project:
To make the social world worthy of reconciliation is a project in (ahh) world-making. Later in the paper, Bright makes this explicit: what he seems to be proposing is “far-reaching modifications in the basic economic structure;” (213-214). The aim is to establish “republican freedom.” While he cites Pettit, what Bright means by this is left unclear. But Bright provides a hint. For here Bright also cites the work of my colleague Lillian Cicerchia, who argues in the cited paper, “working people have consistently de-mystified this social process and fought back time and again” against the way markets prevent such freedom.
In particular, it seems that by citing Cicerchia here, Bright wishes to argue for a notion of freedom in which structural domination by global markets is impossible. And the means to get there is (echoing Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò) the “provision of resources and technology to counteract the ecological and political effects of climate change. This is a form of climate reparations.” (215) We have moved quietly from Hegel to an ecological Marxism, and a world that ought to be.
To be sure, at a general level all of this kind of fits with Bright’s own idea that “Social and political philosophy can then play a dual role of identifying points at which our social order will throw up obstacles to attaining a coherent and reconcilable view of one's life, and suggesting means by which these obstacles can be removed.” (199) But there is a non-trivial difference between suggesting what obstacles can be removed and active world-making.
I don’t mean to suggest this re-ordering of the social world is necessarily a violent revolutionary project (perhaps the change is gradual, democratic, and peaceful, after all), but it requires collective world-reordering. In the framework of Rawls’ version of Hegel, this call to make the world worthy of reconciliation would be justified if and only if the present world is incapable of providing for freedom and (to paraphrase Rawls) makes it impossible for citizens to realize their freedoms.
This is not what Bright establishes (perhaps that’s impossible in an academic journal article). Between his introduction of the Hegelian ideal of reconciliation and his own call to make the world worthy of such reconciliation, Bright has the following paragraph (which I quote in full):
From the Hegelian position, it’s not sufficient to say that the world seems disjointed or that no perspective seems possible in which all agents’ “actions and situation can be made intelligible to themselves and others.” (198) Absent engaging in the positive Hegelian project that establishes the reasonableness of our order, and seeing that systematically fails, we need a kind of negative existence proof. Now I am the first to admit that the rules of the Hegelian game are a bit opaque here. My own use of ‘propaganda’ above throws sufficient shade on the Hegelian project that inficates I doubt we should be engaged in it. But Bright seems to slide rather quickly from a world that seems disjointed to an impossibility of realizing freedom.
Before I conclude, nothing I have said undermines Bright’s analysis of the persistence of contemporary culture wars and the three archetypal characters, that is, “stylized representations of typical responses” to our disjointed “status quo” he famously sketched for us. For Bright a “society “is disjointed when it “just does not make sense to itself,” that is, “its own ideology [is] out of whack with the plain facts of its own existence.” (202)
Now, even if I am right in what I am about to say, I don’t wish to deny the wisdom and judiciousness of Bright’s concluding council to “cease investing our psychic energy in the white bourgeoisie's culture war. It will never get better, and only makes us worse.” (217) Yet, in so far as one finds Bright’s analysis of the roots and nature of the culture wars compelling (and I do find this very compelling), one may well be tempted to suggest that this is sufficient evidence that Hegelian reconciliation is impossible. I suspect, in fact, that for Bright the fact that there is (let’s stipulate he is right about this) a “material reality of strict hierarchy” (204) that is itself persistently racial/ethnic in character in the context of an egalitarian ideology is sufficient to foreclose the possibility of realizing freedom.
But this strikes me as a mistake. The culture wars are “the pastime of the chattering classes.” (199) In particular, this — and Bright cites social scientific evidence — has “been a phenomenon only among wealthier and more politically engaged voters.” (203) While this pastime has non-trivial consequences in virtue of the social and material capital of those involved and the way this is amplified through the media and political institutions it is fundamentally not a serious pastime.
One bit of evidence for the culture wars being a fundamentally unserious pastime, is that it is not responsive to reasons, but as Bright shows it involves a kind of permanent acting out. In fact, in the language of republicanism to which Bright (not me) adheres, the culture wars is properly best understood as a sign of corruption of the public sphere. As regular readers know, I adhere to a kind of platonic skepticism about the role of reason in public life which concedes that this state of affairs is inevitable in a society in which a class can have the luxury to allow itself to be distracted by its own psychodramas. It is to be lamented, of course, that our social elites are so uninterested in pursuing wisdom; but in that respect ours is an ordinary age.
That is, it is to be conceded that the culture wars are far from a substantively rational activity. But that’s not to say its true nature is irrational. I offer two thoughts (in a kind of soft-Marxist terminology that is not my preferred rhetoric): first, as Bright notes the culture wars have a schematic quality to them. They have two sides and they are occupied by distinct types. That is to say, while irresolvable the culture wars tend to be tractable.
Second, as Bright notes the culture wars are “symbolic and political conflicts” (p. 199) among propertied elites who need a distraction from mere endless accumulation. That is to say, the culture wars are a kind of play-act conflict that can be readily contained without undermining class solidarity among the propertied and an Ivy education. They are, thus, conducive to social stability and such stability is necessary to realizing freedom. If you want, you can use this as an axiomatic foundation to engage in a project of Hegelian reconciliation.
In Bright's "How I Am a Marxist" post at https://sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2023/10/how-i-am-marxist.html he has a section on "alienation and flourishing", commenting on the notion of flourishing that "Typically Marxists think of this as one in which we can throw ourselves wholeheartedly into (often shared) projects that we value and genuinely identify with our activities, feeling a sense of connection to both the process and output of our work -- that it expresses our genuine desires, reflects our will, and is what we would want to have spent our time upon." It seems to be a common perspective on the left to think of human flourishing in terms similar to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where "higher" needs like creative activity in artistic and intellectual spheres depend to large degree on freedom from worrying too much about more "basic" needs like food and shelter and health care. From this perspective, spreading such flourishing as widely as possible requires restructuring society so that there are no longer large classes of people who have to spend most of their time on rote manual labor in order to avoid the threat of starvation, homelessness etc. And achieving the widespread freedom to spend time on such higher pursuits may require a society with forms of production technology and organization of production and distribution very different from contemporary society.
This sort of idea is central in classical Marxism, as in Engels' paraphrase of Hegel in chapter XI of Anti-Duhring that "freedom is the recognition of necessity" and that such freedom is "necessarily a product of historical development", where Engels would have been referring to the development of the means and mode of production in particular; or Marx's comment at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/hist-mat/capital/vol3-ch48.htm that "In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite."
I suppose a main reason the classical Marxist vision seems outdated to many with left-wing sympathies is that although Marx and Engels avoided saying too much about how communism would work, it's fairly clear from various incidental comments that they did think a planned economy could provide for everyone's material needs far more efficiently than capitalism, but 20th century experiments with planned economies suggested they don't work so well (and Marx and Engels had not considered the basic computational difficulties of fully planned economies like those discussed by Cosma Shalizi at https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/ ). But there is also the distinct idea that dramatic advances in automated production technology might be critical to providing everyone with the freedom to spend a lot of time on more creative pursuits, found in some non-Marxist socialists (Oscar Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism", Murray Bookchin's "Towards a Liberatory Technology" in his book Post-Scarcity Anarchism), liberals (Keyne's "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren"), and the occasional heterodox Marxists (see the third from last page of Huey Newton's piece at http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/Huey_P_Newton/pdf/Huey.pdf , or Mark Fisher's thoughts on highly automated "luxury communism" in his piece in the book Futures & Fictions from Repeater Books). Marx himself sort of hinted at such an idea in the "fragment on machines" from his Grundrisse although he didn't develop the idea. And of course it's not an uncommon idea among futurists and science fiction writers that we might someday have a "post-scarcity" society where fully automated manufacturing machines are either compact enough that each household or small community can have their own (like some visions of nanotechnology, or the replicators in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek: The Next Generation which were probably inspired by Arthur C. Clarke's discussion of a such a hypothetical device in his 1962 book Profiles of the Future, with the notable comment that "A society based on the Replicator would be so completely different from ours that the present debate between Capitalism and Communism would become quite meaningless"), or larger automated manufacturing facilities which could be operated by governments as a kind of public utility.
With advances in the functionality of robots and 3D printing it seems to me not so implausible that within the next century or two we could automate all the rote manual labor involved in mass production, so a sort of flexible automated production on demand economy, with public ownership of at least some significant fraction of the production machinery, might become possible even if planned economies are unworkable. Perhaps future generations will come to think of Marx as broadly correct in his views on the "realm of freedom" only being widely attainable once technology has developed sufficiently to let our lives become relatively independent of the "realm of necessity", even if major aspects of his vision of the path to get there turned out to be wrong in many ways. (Also, since you have occasionally posted thoughts on science fiction books, I'd love it if you would someday consider writing something on the politics of various works of "post-scarcity" science fiction along these lines, like Star Trek, or Iain Bank's Culture series, or Cory Doctorow's "Walkaway")