World Unity 35

    The German philosopher Hegel wrote the greatest work examining humanity’s progress towards the expression of the divine in history. In his Philosophy of History, he examines the progress in world history of what he calls “universal spirit”. This spirit expresses itself throughout history in a variety of finite forms among many peoples all of which fail to reveal the universal spirit absolutely. Each finite form of universal spirit is inevitably surpassed in a dialectical movement of history by a new finite form which reaches however a higher form. Hegel identifies the progress of the world towards universal spirit as progress towards freedom. The oriental world, he writes, knew only the freedom of one man, as the pharaoh in Egypt. The Greek and Roman world knew the freedom only of some men, since slavery was instituted. The Protestant Germanic states of Hegel’s time, the early nineteenth century, finally realize the freedom of all. “The essential being,” he wrote, “is the union of the subjective with the rational will: it is the moral whole, the state, which is that form of reality in which the individual has and enjoys his freedom”. Hegel was right that the European nation-state, set up by middle-class lawyers with laws protecting the riches of the middle class and exempting the rich from most taxes, was a historical development that granted at least the rich freedom. He did not know what might develop in the future beyond the European world of his time, but he did declare that “America is therefore the land of the future where in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the world’s history shall reveal itself.” According to American history, the nation-state is itself a burden that the world must get rid of if world history is to become unburdened. The true burden of America is to show the world that universal spirit reveals itself more fully in a union of states than in isolated nation-states. If the United States of America can transform itself to the United States of the World, universal spirit and universal freedom have a chance to become at last universal on our earth.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall