The election of Obama led to jubilation in the streets in the US, and perhaps more importantly, abroad, something that has not occurred with any US election, perhaps ever. Something important happened. Does the German philosopher Hegel provide the clue?
In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, an American scholar proclaimed that History (with a capital H) had ended. Recently a pundit opined that the election of the first Black president was the fall of the Berlin Wall times 10. If so, then History must really be completely over.
The idea that History could end, or has ended, comes from Hegel, who, meditating at the scene of Napoleon's battle at Jena, concluded that the French Revolution had completed the march of History from tyranny and submission to democracy and freedom. Napoleon was spreading the ideals of that revolution across Europe, and those ideals, while only fitfully being realized in practice, were proving increasingly compelling, as ideas, to Europeans.
History had ended, Hegel claimed, because everyone agreed that liberal democratic freedom was the ultimate goal. Now it was just a matter of putting it into practice.
This practical matter has proven extremely difficult since 1806: what has followed are a bloody war to end slavery in the US, two major world wars, a Holocaust, nuclear warfare, multiple coups and revolutions, a painful decades-long struggle for civil rights in the American South, and a lengthy Cold War in which the actual existence of human life was in peril. After the Cold War, Hegel's intellectual followers finally saw a clear path to realizing the ideals of History, and thus he saw the practical end coming. Has Obama's election taken us leaps further along that road?
Some might object that the ongoing battles with terrorism and religious fundamentalism, whether the Christian version in the US or the Muslim version abroad, militate against this Hegelian optimism. But Hegel's view would be that resistance to History does not mean History is still alive, only that its ideals remain to be implemented. All will agree, he would claim, either now or very soon, that the principles of liberty and reason deserve to be accepted; it is only a matter of making them real.
So did Obama do it? Was Jesse Jackson crying because he was seeing, in person, the practical victory of the civil rights movement, the real-world happening of what, until now, we had only accepted in the private worlds of our minds?
Or, alternatively, did something more mundane happen? Obama, it might be argued, managed to convince 52% of Americans to vote for him, up from the 48% who voted for Kerry, mainly because Bush had made such a mess of things. Again, Hegel had an insight: he argued that history moves by extremes; first a certain view has to be taken to its fanatical end, producing misery and destruction, before its opposite could then follow, now informed by and mixed with its preceding enemy. That is how history proceeds, not by gradual peaceful evolution, but by violent shifts back and forth between extremes; and, importantly, those extremes influence each other, so that they are not purely opposites, but rather, through "the cunning of History," they become parts of each other. An example might be the nationalization of banks, a socialist idea, by a right-wing libertarian president.
On this view, Bush had to make a complete mess before Obama could be accepted. And, Hegel's prediction would be that what Obama achieves will include much that Bush would have done. Rather than a radical change from the past, the change Obama can deliver may be humbler and more piecemeal. Change it may be, but realistically, change in the world of history grows from what exists, and cannot be imported wholesale.
We cannot say for sure whether this historic event is one more chapter in the End of History, or whether it is a more mundane act in our political lives. It may even be both. History will tell.
