Self-Transcendence or Happiness?
Hegel vs. Hobbes and Locke on the Foundations of Liberalism
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According to Francis Fukuyama, the founding thinkers of liberalism are divided on the value we assign to the pursuit of glory or recognition.
For Hobbes and Locke, the pursuit of recognition is at odds with the needs of a liberal society, for it sends people into conflict and zero-sum quarrels. If people just focused on their economic needs and put their egos aside the world would be a more habitable place. Competition for status is “why we can’t have all the nice things.” While pursuing self-interest is fine, chasing social validation is an over-step, for it involves putting myself above others. While aristocrats of previous ages were animated by battles for prestige, modern liberals must keep to themselves, must be content with their forty acres and a mule. Glory is vainglory.
For Hegel, by contrast, the struggle for recognition is a feature, not a bug, of the human condition. Liberal democracy emerges as the form of government and culture best suited to meet the basic human need to be socially validated. Liberal democracy—in theory—lets people compete for glory while also ensuring that everyone comes out a winner, or in Hegel’s language, “a master.” The pursuit of glory is the engine that moves history forward. But since glory is inherently conflictual, inherently about winners and losers, liberalism can’t involve the abolition of it, only the domestication of it.
The distinction between Locke and Hobbes, on the one hand, and Hegel, on the other, clarifies a core tension in the liberal value of equality. For Locke and Hobbes, equality just means we are all equally entitled to be left alone to pursue self interest. For Hegel, equality means we are all equally glorious. But the pursuit of excellence is fundamentally inegalitarian. Not everyone can be an Olympic athlete, a CEO, an award winning filmmaker.
Does the fact that everyone has a formal right to vote really equalize the dignity of cashier as compared to the customer? The contemporary backlash against meritocracy from both the left and the right suggests that the struggle for recognition is far from over.
Tyler Cowen (I think) suggests most op-eds be read as saying, “Give this group more status; give this group less status.” In short, most public debate centers not around questions of primarily material value, but rather social value. If self-esteem is a function of how society values us, then we can’t expect people to read self-help books and attend new age seminars about loving oneself (or accepting God’s love for us) and walk away with greater self love. There is a basic sense in which ego is real and needy. But to the extent that status is zero sum, it seems strange to call the redistribution of status a matter of justice. As we can never say with consensus who deserves status, perhaps we should just be transparent about why we think certain things should be valued. But to think that we are doing so in the name of equality may be more ideological and self-serving than we are ready to admit.
While Locke was happy to give us the right to pursue happiness, Hegel knew that we would be condemned to unhappiness so long as we were either pure winners or pure losers of the struggle for recognition. He also knew that there is more to life than the pursuit of happiness. Only in Hegel’s version of liberalism, for better and for worse, is there room for the right to “self-transcendence,” even if it makes me and others around me unhappy.
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