World Unity 41

    In Hegel’s great work, The Philosophy Of History, the German philosopher not only claims that world history has a divine purpose but also that the divine development going on is perfectly rational. Absolute Spirit expresses itself throughout history in a variety of forms. The universal aim of spirit at work in history is human freedom. The oriental world knew only the freedom of one man, as for example the pharaoh in Egypt. The Greek and Roman world knew only the freedom 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,” Hegel 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.” Since Hegel’s time, states in Europe providing a form for the realization of their citizens’ freedom have also been forced tragically to provide armies as a vehicle for their citizens to kill citizens from foreign states in grand battles and two world wars. The history of Europe after Hegel showed clearly that if Absolute Spirit was going to produce human freedom it would have to take some form other than the European nation-state. Hegel  looked beyond the political realities of his time to America. He suggested that the full burden of history’s march towards humanity’s freedom could not be born by Europe alone. “America is therefore the land of the future,” he wrote in The Philosophy Of History, “where in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the world’s history will reveal itself.” American political experience agrees completely with Hegel’s notion that only the state can be the form where freedom can and should be exercised. But American experience also proves that the freedom of all individuals can not be exercised fully in a state that possesses full national sovereignty. A fully sovereign state always puts full power and full freedom in the hands of a minority of its citizens. Such power can be reduced and spread around throughout a population to free all citizens only if the political power of a state is not absolute. A state can be “the moral whole” and “that form of reality in which the individual has and enjoys his freedom” without being a fully sovereign state if it can become a member state of a just union of states with a central government  with the legal power clearly stated in a Constitution to force states to support freedom for all their citizens. The American Federal Government has already lightened history’s burden by assuming some of the sovereign power of 50 states but it has not lessened their sovereign power to govern themselves democratically and provide for their citizens a moral whole where they can live freely.
Daniel McNeill 

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