This question has to be answered with an emphatic “Not really, but…”, and both parts of that answer — the “not really” as much as the “but” — need evidence of their own. For two different things travel under the word “racism”. One is the assertion of a natural determination, according to which these human beings cannot be otherwise and therefore different rules apply to them; the other is the sweeping condemnation of a people as a whole. It is the first that has proved devastating, because it rules out change and thereby supplies the justification. The “not really” concerns it; the “but” concerns the second. Without that separation one gets nowhere.
Not really
No, not in the sense of a philosophically grounded, essentialist racism that declared certain peoples as such to be necessarily inferior. The fundamental principle of Hegel’s entire philosophy is precisely the opposite: spirit is universal, its essence is freedom, and every determination is only a stage in a process of development. Hegel draws this conclusion explicitly, and he does so at the very place where he might most easily have avoided it — a few lines before he reports the skull measurements of his day:
“No ground for the entitlement or non-entitlement of human beings to freedom and to dominion can be drawn from descent. The human being is rational in himself; therein lies the possibility of the equality of right of all human beings — the nullity of a rigid distinction between entitled and rightless kinds of human being.” (Enc. § 393 Add.)
Nor does he deny the capacity for development. In the same passage he writes that “the capacity for culture is not to be denied them”, and he points to Haiti, where “a state on Christian principles” had been formed. In the lectures he presents the same material: Africans showed themselves “on the whole very active”, many had become clergymen in Brazil, under Portuguese rule they had “great ease in becoming free” — and explicitly: “[Africans] do indeed educate themselves into European culture.”
This bears on the best-known evidence for the opposite view. What is usually quoted is the sentence: “This condition is capable of no development and no culture, and as we see them today, so they have always been.” It comes from the edition by Gans and Karl Hegel. It does not appear in the transcripts of the courses of 1822/23, 1824/25, 1826/27 and 1830/31 that the critical edition prints — nor in Hegel’s own surviving manuscript sheets on world history, which cover only the introduction and contain nothing on Africa. The only remaining source would be the course of 1828/29, for which no edited transcripts are available. Karl Hegel’s own transcript of the last lecture course, on which that edition rests, has at this point: “as we now know them, so their condition has been at all times.” In the earliest course it says that these peoples had “not yet emerged”, and “not yet” is, in Hegel, a word for a stage, which he uses of the Greeks as he uses it of childhood.
The difference is what matters. What the transcripts assert is a claim about the past: that the condition has so far always been thus. What they do not assert is that it will always remain thus, nor that change is impossible. The first claim, as a statement about the history of a continent, is false and rests on bad sources. The second — the fixity that makes racism racism — is not to be found in Hegel; he denies it.
But
In his works, and above all in the lectures on the philosophy of world history and in the Encyclopaedia, there are passages, especially on Africa, which by today’s standards must count not merely as problematic but as objectively racist and untenable. In the printed text he writes of the Idea of freedom: “Whole parts of the world, Africa and the Orient, have never had this Idea and do not have it yet” (Enc. § 482 Rem.). In the world history the exclusion from history altogether follows: “it is no historical part of the world”. And in the Anthropology there are characterisations that cannot be called anything but demeaning — there is talk of a “nation of children”, and of there being “nothing in this character that resonates with the human”.
The cause of this contradiction lies neither in Hegel’s personality nor in the philosophical principle, but in the latter’s mistaken application by Hegel himself. How this could come about can be stated precisely.
1. The problem: the concept and the empirical
Hegel’s philosophy is a philosophy of development and of spirit. It develops the necessary stages of spirit out of the philosophical concept. But in order to grasp actuality, it must find these logical stages again as shapes in the empirical world; the philosopher must, as Hegel puts it, “look about in language and in representations” for where the concept has taken shape.
It is exactly at this seam that a risk lies which is inherent in the procedure — and it is the exact counterpart of the risk to which the empiricist is exposed. Whoever merely collects and orders misses essence and connection; that is Hegel’s standing reproach to empiricism. Whoever proceeds from the concept falls into the opposite danger: that the necessity of the concept becomes a licence to declare some shape one has come across to be the actualisation of a stage, instead of first examining whether it is. Both errors have the same root. In both cases one spares oneself the labour of letting the object develop itself — the one by remaining at the surface, the other by leaping over it.
This risk was by no means hidden from Hegel. The Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit is, over long stretches, a polemic against nothing else: against the “tabular understanding” that lays a ready-made schema over the material; against the skeleton “with little labels stuck on”; against the grocer’s shop with its “attached labels”, which has “left out or concealed the living essence of the matter”. Positively, Hegel formulates the requirement thus:
“Science may organise itself only through the proper life of the concept; in it, the determinateness which is externally stuck onto existence out of the schema is the self-moving soul of the fulfilled content.”
He even has an explicit doctrine of where the assignment must stop. In the philosophy of nature he says that nature does not sustain the concept in its execution, and that a limit for philosophy itself follows from this:
“That impotence of nature sets limits to philosophy, and it is the most improper thing to demand of the concept that it should comprehend such contingencies and, as it has been called, construct or deduce them. … Traces of the determination of the concept can indeed be pursued into the most particular, but this will not let itself be exhausted by them.” (Enc. § 250 Rem.)
The safeguard, then, existed. The reproach is therefore not that Hegel shared the standards of his time — he fell short of his own.
2. The error: the premature assignment
The empirical basis of his time concerning foreign cultures was catastrophic. Hegel’s knowledge of Africa and of the indigenous peoples of America came from the reports of missionaries and explorers who were themselves shaped by the deepest prejudices; the racial doctrine he reports in the Anthropology is Blumenbach’s craniology. This deeply defective empirical material Hegel incautiously took for the actuality of the matter itself. Scholarship goes further and charges that he did not merely take his sources over uncritically but selected them deliberately and sharpened them in the retelling. He assigned, prematurely and to that extent unscientifically, a logical stage of development — spirit in its immediate naturalness — to an entire continent, and thereby excluded these peoples, against his own principle, from the dialectic of world history.
The pressure to make such an assignment at all comes from the architecture. World history is laid out as a sequence of stages in the consciousness of freedom: “the Orient knew and knows only that One is free; the Greek and Roman world, that Some are free; the Germanic world knows that All are free.” Such a sequence needs a beginning against which it marks itself off, and that place calls to be occupied. Alternatives were lacking: around 1830 there was neither any conception of the depth of human history nor a prehistoric archaeology that could have offered anything else. The only available candidates for “peoples without history” were contemporaries.
One is tempted to supply the lack after the fact, and the thought lies close at hand: if Hegel had known of early humans standing at a less developed stage, he would have assigned that stage to them, and the assignment would have turned out differently. Understandable as the thought is, it repeats the error instead of healing it. It holds fast to the assumption that the place must be occupied by an actual population, and merely shifts who occupies it. Moreover, Hegel expressly rejected the temporal reading of his sequence of stages: it is, he says, “a clumsy representation” to regard the transition of one form of nature into a higher one “as an externally actual production, which, however, in order to make it clearer, has been placed back into the darkness of the past” (Enc. § 249 Rem.). The rescue thus equips him with a presupposition he refused.
The way out lay closer at hand, namely in his own system. With the state of nature Hegel proceeds exactly rightly: he treats it as a mere determination of thought and refuses to locate it anywhere; the representation that the human being lived freely in such a condition he calls an “untrue opinion” (§ 194 Rem.). The stage of not-yet-thinking spirit could have been treated in the same way: as a conceptual limit before all history, occupied by no known people. Hegel does this with the state of nature — and does not do it here.
This also explains why the error does not appear everywhere one might expect it. It appears where the system demands shapes for stages: in the Anthropology and in world history. In the Philosophy of Right, where it does not, the error does not appear.
3. The counsel of slowness
One passage is usually cited as the real scandal: Hegel advises that slavery be abolished gradually rather than suddenly. It requires close reading, because it is something other than it first appears.
To begin with, it is neither racially grounded nor a late lapse. It already stands in the lecture on the philosophy of right of 1822/23, in the Second Part, in the doctrine of the consequences of action, as the counterpart to Robespierre, who taught that the consequences of an action are to be despised: “As one feared terrible consequences from sudden abolition, one sought slower means. The principle is right, but it belongs to a concrete condition … Slaves who have never been free stand in need of an education. … The opposite means acting foolishly and unlawfully.” It is the same figure of thought with which Hegel judges the Terror and with which he says, in § 274, that “to wish to give a people a constitution a priori — even one more or less rational in its content — is a fancy that overlooks precisely the moment through which a constitution becomes more than a mere thing of thought.”
An argument can be built from this that is by no means cynical. It runs: freedom that is merely decreed has no existence; it would be externally present and would, as the Addition to § 274 puts it, have “no meaning and no value”. The enslaved are, after all, there, and there are no institutions to receive them — neither in Africa, from which they were carried off, nor in America, where they would stand without land, law or protection. Hence, so the argument goes, education towards freedom can for the time being take place only within the existing relation. Even Hegel’s most famous figure seems to speak for this: in lordship and bondage the bondsman gains his self-consciousness precisely within the relation, through fear and labour, and not by being released.
A good deal stands against this, however, and all of it comes from Hegel.
Lordship and bondage describes how consciousness moves; it is not an instruction to masters. What emerges there is the untenability of the relation and the unfreedom of the lord, not a reason for prolonging it.
The education at issue takes place, according to Hegel’s own note to § 57, in institutions — the forming towards freedom itself, he writes there, is the state — and the relation of slavery is precisely the one relation that withholds this. § 66 expressly lists slavery among the “examples of the alienation of personality” and declares the right to personality imprescriptible. But an imprescriptible right is precisely one that does not lapse through not being exercised — it does not wait for the right moment.
For the not-yet-mature will Hegel has, moreover, a model of his own, and it reverses the direction of the argument. “Children have the right to be nourished and brought up out of the family’s common resources” (§ 174): immaturity thus grounds the duty of the one who can remedy it, and not his title to let it continue. And: “Children are in themselves free, and their life is the immediate existence solely of this freedom” — they therefore belong as things neither to others nor to their parents (§ 175). The Addition even transfers the model to peoples under “paternal governments”, where human beings are “not regarded as independent and of age” — and it does so as a reproach; in the same context it says that “the most unethical relation of all is the relation of slavery of children”.
Above all, however, Hegel met the same argument elsewhere and rejected it. In the debate on the civil rights of the Jews his contemporaries urged that they were not integrated and that their separateness disqualified them. His answer was that the outcry “has failed to see that they are, first and foremost, human beings”; the separateness held against them would, had the exclusion continued, “rather have been maintained, and would rightly have become the guilt and reproach of the excluding state” (§ 270 Rem.). The defect one holds against the excluded is the consequence of the exclusion — and there Hegel draws the conclusion of granting the rights rather than deferring them.
What remains open to objection after this is narrower than is usually claimed. Not the caution as such: it was the position of the reformers in 1830, and the British emancipation of 1833 likewise provided for a transitional period. Two things are open to objection — that Hegel applies the principle to a case in which his own § 66 blocks it, and that in the last lecture course he adds a turn of phrase that concerns only the Africans: the slave trade, he says, has brought “more humanity among the [Africans], in that they now no longer murder their prisoners but sell them”; one transcript sharpens this to “a means of education for them”. There, and only there, does a general consideration about tempo become a sentence about these human beings.
4. What this means for reading the Philosophy of Right
It would be a great mistake to reject the whole system with the label of racism. Three reasons speak against it.
The Philosophy of Right is universalist. The work rests on Abstract Right, which accords every human being the status of a person; the central demand reads: “be a person and respect others as persons” (§ 36). And the standard is stated expressly: “The human being counts, thus, because he is a human being, not because he is a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, German, Italian, and so on” (§ 209 Rem.). That is the opposite of racism.
The method is the instrument of criticism. Dialectic, the unfolding of the concept and the doctrine of recognition are the best instruments we have for criticising every form of essentialism. The Phenomenology shows that the lord who does not recognise the bondsman remains unfree himself.
Criticism of Hegel must be carried out with Hegel. One has to apply his own method to his own prejudices and to separate the philosopher’s faulty application of the concept from the universality of the concept itself. That Hegel judges sharply is not the problem; a philosophy that may no longer name defects has ceased to ask after truth. What is decisive is the conclusion drawn from a defect — and § 270 shows that Hegel knew this.
5. The risk in history: Binder and Larenz
Whoever takes the premature assignment for an academic problem should look at what became of it. The neo-Hegelian philosophy of right of the 1930s — Julius Binder and his pupil Karl Larenz — took exactly this step: it declared the prevailing notions of Volk and Volksgemeinschaft to be the actualisation of the Hegelian concept, instead of examining them against it. In 1935 Larenz drew the conclusion:
“Only he who is a member of the Volk is a member of the legal community; a member of the Volk is he who is of German blood.”
The individual, he wrote, has rights and duties “not as an individual, as a human being as such …, but as a member of the national community”.
This is the literal inversion of § 209 Rem. What Hegel describes there as an achievement of culture — that the human being counts because he is a human being, and not because he is a German — is here struck out and replaced by its opposite, and that in Hegel’s name. The procedure is the same as in the African case, only with the sign reversed: there a given condition is taken for the stage not yet reached, here a given condition is taken for the stage attained. In both cases the examination against the concept is dispensed with.
Nothing follows from this against Hegel, but everything follows for a particular way of reading him. The antidote stands in his own text: the warning against the determinateness that is “externally stuck onto existence out of the schema”, and the insight that actuality can also fail to meet its own concept — which is why, for Hegel, a bad state is an untrue state.
Conclusion
Hegel’s texts are also a document of the limits of their time. The error, however, lies not in the principle but in an application against which Hegel himself provided the means. Whoever reads him acquires them along the way.
Sources
Published by Hegel: Encyclopaedia § 249 Rem., § 250 Rem., § 393, § 482 Rem.; Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface; Philosophy of Right § 36, § 57 Rem., § 66, § 174, § 175, § 194 Rem., § 209 Rem., § 270 Rem., § 274 Rem.
Compiled from the literary remains: Encyclopaedia § 393 Addition (Boumann); Additions to Philosophy of Right § 57, § 174, § 274 (Gans).
Lectures, collated against the critical edition: GW 26,2 (transcript Hotho 1822/23, on the abolition of slavery); GW 26,3 (transcript Griesheim 1824/25: utility is no ground of right); GW 27,1–27,4, the passage on the tempo of manumission at GW 27,4, pp. 1229 f. The sentence “This condition is capable of no development and no culture…” is found only in TWA 12, p. 128. Hegel’s own manuscript sheets on world history: GW 18, pp. 119–213 (introductions of 1822–1828 and 1830/31) — without any characterisation of Africa.
On the debate about Hegel’s racism: Joseph McCarney, Hegel’s racism? A response to Bernasconi, and Robert Bernasconi, Hegel’s racism: A reply to McCarney, both in: Radical Philosophy 119 (2003).
Neo-Hegelianism: Karl Larenz, Rechtsperson und subjektives Recht, in: Georg Dahm et al. (eds.), Grundfragen der neuen Rechtswissenschaft, Berlin 1935, p. 241.