Today’s political discourse is rife with the prognosis that liberalism is in trouble, evidenced by the rise of anti-liberal and post-liberal thought, each of which maintains that a politics based on material self-interest is incapable of providing the meaning and nobility necessary for its own maintenance. Waller Newell’s Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger makes clear that this sentiment is not the exclusive preserve of the twenty-first century but is nearly as old as liberalism itself. Newell’s book provides an overview of a strain of thought he terms the German Philosophy of Freedom, which paradoxically both contributed to the rise of the liberal state (in the thought of Georg Friedrich Hegel) and reacted against the emergence of liberal politics (in the writings of Hegel’s successors). Tracing this school from its incipient beginnings in Rousseau’s thoughts through Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, Waller Newell posits that the unifying thread that holds these thinkers together is their commitment to restore a classical conception of human existence, one that is rooted in devotion to community and virtue in the face of the dreary utilitarianism of Enlightenment philosophy. Newell’s book presents a timely and brilliant analysis of the origins of the most trenchant critiques of liberalism raised today.
Newell points out that while each of the thinkers surveyed in the book looked to different representations of ancient Greek culture and politics for inspiration—for example, while Hegel looked to the Greeks of Periclean and democratic Athens, Nietzsche and Heidegger both looked to the Homeric age—each recognized that a straightforward return to classical antiquity was impossible. As Newell notes, these philosophers shared the belief that the triumph of modern physics, which shattered the belief in a unified, stable, and permanent cosmos, rendered any return impossible. In light of the Enlightenment “discovery” that the human mind has no intrinsic connection with the rest of nature, Waller Newell posits that the theorists of the Philosophy of Freedom view “the time-bound realm of historical change” as a new source of unity. By grounding human existence in history these thinkers sought to re-capture the Greek heritage and tradition of freedom.
Newell begins in Chapter One by exploring Rousseau’s critique of bourgeois life found in the First Discourse and Emile. Newell brings to the surface the way in which Rousseau saw bourgeois life as a “bastardized half-way house” between the authentic life of natural man and the authentic life of the citizen. As Newell rightly points out, Rousseau’s project is marked by an attempt to help humanity recover its natural authenticity by finding and drawing out various “approximations of the natural life in the civilized world,” through the austerity of the social contract and the General Will, the romantic sociality of family life, or the life of the solitary dreamer, who stands outside of society due to his natural and authentic existence. Newell provides a superb and succinct overview of Rousseau’s project, but our author’s most insightful observation—and this is key to Rousseau’s contribution to the German Philosophy of Freedom—is the divide Rousseau places between nature and freedom within man. While nature prescribes man’s instincts, man is free to choose whether to act on those instincts. As a result, for Rousseau, man’s freedom lies in the capacity of the will to resist nature. At bottom, man is characterized by a dualism that may be alleviated, but never resolved, by civil society.
In the second chapter, Newell explains the manner by which Hegel resolved this dualism in Rousseau’s thought by subsuming it within a greater whole of the “teleological progress of history.” Transposing human happiness and wholeness from the state of nature to history’s completion, Hegel resolves the dualism of freedom and nature—as well as the other dualisms that characterize Rousseau’s thought—through the dialectical progress of history. Newell provides an illuminating interpretation of the Phenomenology of Spirit that explores Hegel’s understanding of the intellectual and political situation of his time. He analyzes the political implications of Hegel’s historical dialectics, explaining how man’s alienation from nature and his “growing desire to master it through scientific knowledge” is, through the historical process, reconciled with his sense of “unity with [his] fellow human beings and nature,” culminating in an “organic communitarianism” premised on shared liberal rights. At the same time, Newell reminds us that Hegel’s historical dialectic is “outwardly violent”—indeed, Hegel famously describes history as a “slaughter-bench” of ambition and domination. On this basis, Newell suggests that Hegel means to remind us that man’s drive for “absolute freedom” will result in violence and terror. One is left wondering, therefore, whether Newell views Hegel’s historical dialectic as culminating in “organic communitarianism” or violence and terror. Perhaps Hegel’s thought manifests a dualism of its own.
In the remaining two thirds of the book, Newell turns to what he terms the “assaults on the Hegelian Middle” by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger. Each of these three thinkers believed Hegel’s historical dialecticism brought about a determinism that stripped human beings of their creative capacity, and each thought it necessary to “take back man’s creative powers” in different ways. Newell’s treatment of Marx is, comparatively, the shortest. However, despite its brevity, Newell’s succinct analysis brings to the fore the relevant themes that identify and clarify Marx’s contribution to the Philosophy of Freedom. He points out that Marx emphasized the capacity of human beings to master nature so that they might bring about “sheer collective freedom.” Through this process, the alienation brought about by capitalism would give way to a renewed sense of “species-being” or communality. In short, man’s creative capacity—whether by natural evolutionary forces or revolution—would bring about a transformation that would see the “withering away of political authority and inequality.”
The third and fourth chapters of Newell’s book are devoted to Nietzsche and Heidegger, respectively. In the third chapter, Newell shows that while Nietzsche’s philosophy is future-oriented, he nevertheless rejects Hegel’s progressiveegH account of history. In his synopsis and overview of The Birth of Tragedy, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life, and Beyond Good and Evil, Newell provides a vivid account of Nietzsche’s desire for a politics that goes beyond liberal rationalism to something altogether new. As Newell presents it, Nietzsche saw the Hegelian belief in the end of history as preventing man from embracing this new politics. This same theme is extended in Newell’s excellent chapter on Heidegger, which makes clear the extent to which Heidegger sought to bring man face-to-face with his temporality, so that he might be open to new (political) possibilities. Newell makes it clear that Heidegger’s radical philosophic project (particularly his early work) is inseparable from his politics and his ill-fated involvement with German National Socialism.
Overall, Newell has provided a masterful summary of the German Philosophy of Freedom and, in the process, clarified some very difficult texts. Newell vividly illustrates that after Hegel, the German Philosophy of Freedom has had a tendency towards immoderation that can result in terrible political violence. At the same time, he is sympathetic to the view that liberalism has not provided an entirely satisfactory account of human nature, psychology, and reason, and he delicately suggests that the Philosophy of Freedom is worthy of study not only because of its rich analysis of man’s passion for honor, glory, and civic spiritedness, but also because of its connection to high art and culture. Ultimately, Newell presents the Philosophy of Freedom as a dangerous quest for nobility in the face of a liberalism that at times tends towards ignoble or reductive consequences.
Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger
By Waller R. Newell
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022; 372pp
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