As the discipline of philosophy begins to come to terms with its entanglements in histories of colonialism, Eurocentrism and white supremacy, there is an increasing demand for scholarship that rigorously interrogates what these histories mean for the practice of philosophy today. With Hegel and Empire, M. A. R. Habib asks some of the important questions that emerge in this regard, in so far as they relate to Hegel's philosophy and the legacy of Hegelian dialectics. In this sense it is, on paper, a welcome contribution to a growing literature which uses insights from critical race, post- and de-colonial studies to rewrite the history of philosophy. However, and unfortunately, the book also represents a missed opportunity for a relevant intervention into this academic field since it fails to construct a compelling account of the possible relations between Hegel's philosophy, the conceptions of empire and imperialism which we might find therein, and the realities and consequences of modern imperial domination and colonial exploitation.
This could be excused if the primary purpose was to act as an introductory volume on Hegel and Eurocentrism and as a guide to further readings within post-Hegelian literature on this topic. Such is indeed the format indicated by the outline of the book since chapters which contain readings of Hegel's writings (first and foremost the master–slave dialectic but also passages from the the lectures on the philosophy of world history, art and religion, including the infamous loose manuscript sheets on the geographic base of historical determinations) are paired with short summary chapters which delineate select responses from what might broadly be described as a ‘critical tradition’. What the strategy of fusing readings succeeds with, is to introduce the central and decisive question concerning the degree to which Eurocentrism can be conceived of as engrained within Hegel's philosophy as a whole. The reader gets an introduction to (a) Susan Buck-Morss's and Andrew Cole's respective ‘historical’ interpretations of the master–slave dialectic (in Buck-Morss's Hegel, Haiti and Universal History 2009 and Cole's The Birth of Theory (2014)), (b) Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952), and (c) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's commentary on Hegel's engagement with the Bhagavad Gita (from A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 1999). All these readings are moreover presented in the spirit of demonstrating that while Hegel's thought ‘archetypically embodies certain Eurocentric traits’, it is also possible to find within his very writings the conceptual tools to move towards a ‘more global vision’ (viii).
While they are clear in expression, these expositions rarely enter into detailed analysis or delineate the reception history of Hegelian thought within critical theory (broadly construed). There is, moreover, a slight equivocation at play, since what Habib shows is that Hegelian conceptions of self and other, of social recognition and the construction of identity and difference have been operative even within the writings of some of those who have been known to be highly critical of Hegel's distorted and often derogatory portrayals of ‘non-Western’ cultures. This is what the shift marked in the subheading—from ‘postcolonialism’ to ‘globalism’—is meant to signify in relation to readings of Hegel. But, while this demonstrates a continuity of Hegelian concepts within postcolonial frameworks and thus helps to overcome perceptions of a disciplinary ‘trench-war’ between postcolonial studies and philosophy, it also leaves open the issue of what precisely a non-Eurocentric global vison involves.
On the question of Hegel's Eurocentrism, Habib initially follows Teshale Tibebu's 2011 Hegel and the Third World: The Making of Eurocentrism in World History, and comes out strongly against the ‘child of his age’ reading of Hegel. This is a position which considers the racist parts of the philosophy of Subjective Spirit and the highly Eurocentric propositions in the philosophy of world history to be primarily an expression of general cultural sentiments in early 19th-century Germany and that, as such, they can be isolated from the core philosophical content and simply disregarded. Instead, the claim of Hegel and Empire is that Hegel's Eurocentrism is fundamentally grounded in the very structure of the dialectic, a structure described as imperial. This is the most interesting and, sadly, most problematic part of the book. As one of several bold but ultimately inadequately elaborated propositions concerning the character of Hegelian dialectics, it hinges on the assumption, stated but never fully developed, that dialectical thought is structurally synonymous with ‘the movement of capitalist society’ (78). According to Habib, both are intrinsically expansive and imperialist, negating whatever is immediately given and progressively conquering the world beyond it, absorbing it into its own self (6f.).
This is not to claim that one cannot argue that the dialectic of consciousness is intrinsically expansive, in as much as it describes an onto-logical movement whereby whatever is given in its apparent immediacy is negated and ultimately integrated into a more expanded conception of subjectivity. In this sense, one might view the dialectical process as reducing all otherness to merely an anticipation of a new self-conception. However, even if this is the case, the heavy emphasis on a self-other relation as one of possession and appropriation only works as smoothly as Habib would like it to because he underplays the significance of self-dispossession which also is inscribed in the heart of the dialectical movement in question. For Hegel, no forms of subjectivity are immediate, essential and pre-given. Therefore, becoming ‘one-self’ also implies becoming ‘other’, in becoming estranged and strange to oneself, i.e., in becoming alienated. While this movement involves the overcoming of what initially seems external, the overcoming of self is equally important, and this aspect significantly complicates the way in which the dialectic can be described as possessively expansive.
Moreover, to claim that the movement of the dialectic, as it is described in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Science of Logic and the Encyclopaedia alike and in an equal manner, maps neatly onto the essential movement of capitalist modernity and that therefore imperialism is ‘sanctioned by the authority of the Absolute Idea’ (7) requires more in the way of justification than what we are given. It is true that there are striking similarities and analogical conceptual developments in the way Hegel describes the overcoming of otherness in epistemological, ontological, political and transnational registers—though not in the case of international relations since the overcoming of difference in these instances fall short of a proper relation. But, without more textual grounding, it is hard to begin assessing precisely what the significances of these analogies are. Hegel and Empire does not significantly enter into any of the intricacies that arise here and, rather than elaborating on the historical and philosophical complexities of the claim that the logic of capital moves analogously to that of the dialectic, this claim is simply repeated at several points without being analysed in its full scope. This, ultimately, compromises the core proposition of the book. It is therefore likely to leave its readers wanting more, especially because the concerns to which it answers—about epistemic injustice and its connection to social and economic inequality—urgently require philosophical responses.
Many of these problems also extend to the way in which the concept of globalization is introduced into the analysis, as the book aligns the totality of the Hegelian system with the totality of the capitalist market. That precisely Hegel's Eurocentrism may have left inhibiting marks on those conceptualizations of globalization that centre ideas of ‘development’ is a well-taken point, but if the present work further presupposes that one significant component in any endeavour to comprehend and define globalization must be an account of how economic markets have an expansive and integrationist drive, one might wonder if Hegel really is the best thinker of this drive?
Habib's point is that the process of globalizing is embodied ‘in the very structure of his dialectic’ in its ‘totalising movement’ (4). However, can the total and the global really be established as conceptual equivalents without a number of important mediations? The concept of totality at the level of the system of the sciences arguably differs from those modes of totalization that a later critical tradition finds to be characteristic of socio-economic expansionism. It is in this context that the lack of any proper conceptualization of empire and imperialism, either within Hegel's writings or more generally, becomes especially grave since it could have provided the link missing between the different analogical modes considered by Habib. While the book offers an interpretation of Hegel's views on non-European others, it is striking that, given the title Hegel and Empire, the book neither provides a working definition of imperialism nor a concept of empire. The presupposition of the imperial within the book means that there is no explicit account of how Hegel himself treats political categories such as ‘empire’ and ‘emperor’ while further failing to provide an external definition through which we might then critically assess his writings.
Where does this leave the political impetus of the book and its capacity to intervene in contemporary critical theories? To illustrate the plasticity of concepts in general and political concepts in particular, Habib argues that ‘[w]e will view “woman” as wife, daughter, mother. But we can also open up this concept toward other possible relations—with education, ambition, professionalism, independence’ (5). According to Habib, ‘we can then arrive at a more comprehensive definition of “woman”—as correlative with emotion and intellect, as able to embrace both private and public spheres’ (5f.). But, is this all we can aim for?
Feminist philosophers, such as Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990/1999), have long argued for far more compelling accounts of gendered subjectivity that necessarily (and rightly) complicate and disturb the overly simple and quite ideological notion of ‘woman’ that Habib seems to employ. Likewise, the analogy between this philosophical concept of ‘woman’ and that of ‘the non-European “other”’ that follows is equally problematic. While it critiques the structural role of otherness within Hegelian dialectics, Hegel and Empire also falls into the trap of aligning all marginal identities and systemic forms of oppression without considering these in their specificities, as it primarily addresses ‘the Other’ in terms of its structural necessity within Hegelian dialectics at the level of the idea of exclusion as such. For this reason, the claims concerning the importance of recognizing intersectional oppression risk being and remaining superficial. The most striking example of this is the manner in which the place and oppression of women is aligned with that of the non-European ‘other’, without further complicating either the concept of ‘woman’, that of ‘Europe’ or of the non-European ‘other’ or of any of their possible intersections. If race, class and gender are invoked without being further classified and without being intersectionally explained, then a properly critical analysis will not be possible.
A final impression of Hegel and Empire is that it backtracks from its initial claims, to the extent that the intention to challenge the European philosophical canon falls short. Considering that so much emphasis is put on the assumption that the dialectic is an imperialist mode of thought, it comes as somewhat of a surprise when the ultimately redemptive conclusion to the book turns out to be the balanced assessment that Hegel's dialectic has emerged as a dialectic of appropriation and as a dialectic of recognition. It is accordingly both a tool of imperial oppression as well as the emancipatory solution to such oppression. Arguably, the history of the reception of Hegel's thought amply testifies to the importance it has had to emancipatory thinkers, but the question here is if there really is a uniform and continuous conception of ‘dialectics’ at stake for each and every one of these thinkers. Recent work, such as George Ciccariello-Maher's Decolonizing Dialectics (2016) tends instead to emphasize different and conflictual conceptions of dialectics, and the importance precisely of which of these we rely on in our critical work. Without such a pluralization, the claim that imperialism is not accidental or peripheral in Hegel's system but engrained within it pushes the reader to ask, ‘Why we don't simply abandon Hegel? Why not seek our philosophical tools elsewhere?’
But should there be a straightforward answer to this question? As the book rightly suggests, in either case, as Adorno famously put it, we all have to deal with Hegel's legacy. If, as stated in the epilogue, the author's position is that Hegel's dialectic is problematic but useful, it might have been more productive to start from that position and to go into depth as to how this is the case. This would have been helpful in particular because the sources and many articles the book draws on present an impressive array of nuanced, decisive and compelling takes on this problem and on how one might go about constructing an answer to it.
