Thinking the world: a comment on philosophy of history and globalization studies.

AuthorDorfman, Ben

It may be that the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel initiated the practice of philosophy of history between 1822 and 1831 when, in his lectures collected under the title The Philosophy of History (1837), he wrote that "philosophic history" amounted to more-or-less the "thoughtful contemplation" of world history on a global scale. (1) In essence, Hegel imagined world history as a singular process. As first developed in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), global development could be understood as the unfolding of "Spirit," which might be loosely understood as "mind" or "consciousness." This unfolding of "Spirit" happened dialectically; the mind engaged in constant self-reflection, and all concepts and human relations were fraught with inner tensions that demanded reconciliation. In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel chronicled the development of the different stages of consciousness in the context of the singular mind. In The Philosophy of History, however, "Spirit" became a matter of global culture, or "World-Spirit"--groups of individuals and events interacting with themselves and others at a world-historical level. These interactions, asserted Hegel, could then be comprehended on a global level by the individual standing at the most recent point in "Spirit's" development--the most developed of whom represented the "thoughtful" mind. (2)

Hegel's style of questioning what drove change on a "meta" or "global" scale and how that change should be understood has met various fates. Although the notion of a singular "Spiritual" development in world history was challenged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-most notably by historian Jacob Buckhardt, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and sociologist Max Weber--the idea that a larger scale of human development was the ultimate object of the best historical thinking nonetheless remained a central theme for human scientists of the period. (3) Hegelian-style philosophy of history received its most serious challenges after the Second World War. First, as thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School for Social Research (e.g., German philosophers and sociologists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno) have effectively pointed out, the Second World War seemed to represent the Hegelian dream of world comprehension turned on its head. Rather than the achievement of Hegel's cognitive "Absolute," or fully rational intake of the world as a whole, Frankfurt School thinkers asserted that the task of world comprehension lent itself to a "negative dialectics." (4) This meant the ability of reason and "Spirit" to become absolutist or totalitarian. In other words, full investment in the concepts of "reason" and "Spirit" themselves to an overweening sense of historical destiny and moral rectitude could become the basis of fascism and oppression instead of historical "improvement" and "liberation." (5)

Similarly, although generally rejecting the specific vocabulary of "negative dialectics," Hegelian philosophy of history also suffered attacks from French post-structuralism and the discourses of European and American "postmodernism." Posing themselves firmly against models of universal contemplation, figures such as philosopher/historian Michael Foucault maintained that by the second half of the twentieth century the search for a subject which is "transcendental to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout history" was over. (6) "Thoughtful contemplation" on a global scale, Foucault argued, should be replaced by the recognition of the violence, unpredictabilities, and disjunctures of the historical system. Foucault thus claimed the new vision of history to be concerned with what he termed the "regime of truth"--a connection between power and knowledge that included the production of history on a global scale as an artifact of "discourse" and the imagination, and the rejection of absolutes such as "Spirit," or even spin-off's such as Karl Marx's trans-historical "class," in determining social reality. (7)

There are two reasons for offering this thumbnail excursus on the history of philosophy of history. First, one might realize that despite his claims to undo the Hegelian task of world comprehension, Foucault himself may have perpetuated Hegel's undertaking by simply substituting the "regime of truth" for "World-Spirit" and "thoughtful contemplation." In other words, while Hegel advocated the possibility of comprehending history on a global scale as the product of the fact that history presented itself as the playing out of the "Spirit," Foucault suggested that the "regime of truth" was the new key to history. (8) This "regime" was truth "linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it." (9) This relation, argued Foucault, gave individuals within the "regime of truth" a certain access to its workings: instead of looking for the operations of "Spirit," one could now look for the decidedly less rational operations of "discipline," "regimentation," and "control" as specific modes of the exercise of power. History thus gained a new "meta" or "global" theme that revolved about games of political power and contests for control over knowledge not necessarily operating inside the boundaries of "rationality." (10)

The second reason for this opening excursus on the philosophy of history forms the central argument of this paper. That argument consists of two elements. First, upon entering a new century it is important to recognize that the heydays of French post-structuralism and European/American "postmodernism" are over three decades old. This might indicate a number of things: a space for new fashions in the human sciences, an aging of the figures who dominated intellectual history in the middle to late part of the twentieth century and, thus, perhaps a simple changing of the intellectual guard in Western history. In any case, the newness of post-structuralism and postmodernism are wearing off and that upon entering the twenty-first century we might be establishing new sets of intellectual signposts on which we inscribe our Zeitgeist, or the cultural themes of our age. (11) As post-structuralism and postmodernism may be giving way to other historical thematics, it may also be that the skepticism toward the Hegelian project central to the work of figures like Foucault may be giving way as well. (12) Stated plainly, philosophy of history in a more-or-less traditional, or Hegelian sense, might have found new life within human scientific discourse at the start of the twenty-first century through discourses on globalization and, specifically, the rise of "globalization studies."

Understanding this argument involves several elements. First, it should be noted that the term "globalization" is defined here as "the set of economic, environmental, technological, political, cultural and social processes" that "shrink distances through networks of connections" and "first connect and then integrate societies, transcending the traditional social structures they confront." Under this definition, globalization studies--as opposed to globalization as a historical phenomenon--is a field of academic study concerned with the varieties of inquiry that investigate economic, environmental, technological, political, cultural, and social processes that supposedly "transcend traditional social structures" and "shrink distances through networks of connections." Globalization studies also try to comprehend how such "social transcendences" and spatio-temporal "shrinkage" occurs. Indeed, one could argue that the point here is not so much the "shrinking" of time and space, or even the specific instances of social "transcendence," or what one might call "cross-border" forms of economics, environment, technology, politics, culture, or society. Rather, the point is the state of "cross-borderness," or what one might think of as "transnationality," "trans-culturality," "trans-politicality," and "trans-sociality" themselves. These are states of nationality, culturality, politicality, and sociality that can no longer be contained within traditional national, cultural, political, and social structures. Sociologist Roland Robertson, an important figure in the field of globalization studies, has identified this new state of global culture as "the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole"--the idea that, in thinking about the world, the "whole thing" should be (and increasingly is) thought of simultaneously. (13) Here one gains a specific example of the concurrent between globalization studies and Hegel-esque philosophy of history: history is a "world" affair and needs to be considered in such terms. (14)

At this juncture the keen reader will realize that there are several qualifications that might be brought to bear. These concern the definition of philosophy of history and globalization offered here. With regard to philosophy of history, it should be noted that it is not universally accepted that all of what is often referred to as philosophy of history is reducible to Hegel, or some variety of "Hegelianism." One could point to Marx, and Marx's conception of class, as a good example. Although it has become relatively commonplace in the discourses of post-structuralism and postmodernism to accord Marx Hegelian characteristics by way of his seeming insistence on "class" as some variety of historical "absolute," Marx himself did not necessarily see things this way. (15) As Marx made clear in texts such as The German Ideology (1845-46), putting class at the center of history was intended to reverse Hegelian discourses of "Spirit." This was because class was ultimately material: it was about production and its so-called "means and modes" (production's technologies and social relations) and the fact that these were "empirically verifiable." (16) "Spirit," observed Marx, was fully speculative in nature and amounted to little more than...

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