strength to practise this ethic but this power cannot develop in a vacuum. People have to practise Less Self, More Other, rather like going to a gym to develop one’s muscles. My insight – and I hope the durable value of my book – was that a big, dense, diverse city was the place where people could practise and gradually strengthen this moral muscle.
Were Benjamin Constant alive today, I suspect that the phrase Less Self, More Other would resonate with him. Civil society as he conceived it should turn people outward, shaking them out of their own prejudices and habits as defining absolutes of how everyone should live. But his view was more complicated, wiser than this moral nostrum, at least as I have compacted it into four words. Constant’s civil society is to be a place in which people are both mutually engaged and disengaged, a city of solitudes as well as communities.
Constant perhaps learned this duality from his liaison with Madame de Staël, a writer he met in Paris in 1795 and with whom he fled to Switzerland when Napoleon banished her in 1802. Her novel of 1807, Corinne; or, Italy, a manifesto for women’s rights lightly disguised as a story, argued for the right of women to be freed from permanent obligations in marriage, for their freedom to conduct passing affairs, for their ‘inalienable right to privacy, that is, solitude’. Never monogamous, Constant practised what Madame de Staël preached – until he and his wife, Charlotte von Hardenberg, whom he married after Madame de Staël’s death, returned to Paris.
There, his writings extended de Staël’s erotic ethics to civil society more generally. He wanted a society that challenged communal conformity and collective propriety. Civil society should embrace differences in and fluctuations of behaviour, so that people could be set free, free to be themselves – alone. The unbridgeable distances, the necessary silences, between people who differ should be acknowledged and respected. That’s what makes civil society ‘civil’, and what a big, dense, diverse city – unlike a nosy village – makes possible.
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But we cannot talk about freedom without talking about power. And the city, while being an exemplary theatre for self-expression and social engagement, is also a site of complex networks of dominance.
In 1806 Napoleon captured the city of Jena, where Georg Friedrich Hegel had been teaching. The young philosopher fled, carrying a half-finished manuscript for The Phenomenology of the Spirit but little else; Napoleon the general terrified him. In later years, Hegel came to idolise Napoleon the emperor as a heroic figure and praised the code civil as a rational way to organise civil society – but that lay in the future, when Hegel had hardened in old age as an apostle of order.
The Phenomenology is an edgier book, one in which the author argues with himself. Its most famous chapter is on ‘Lordship and Bondage’ and perhaps the most famous sentence in this chapter declares that human beings are fulfilled ‘only in being acknowledged’ by others. That is, ‘a process of mutual recognition’ is necessary for each person to feel complete in their selfhood. This might seem no more than a philosophic version of the cliché declaring that no man is an island, but Hegel turns recognition into a deeper and darker issue.
How can people of unequal standing – lords and servants, master and slaves – practise mutual recognition? The servant has to obey the master, but to Hegel this is not enough. As Hegel observed in the French Revolution, if servants do not believe in their masters, eventually they will turn on the powerful. It is a radical proposition: In the long term, power depends on voluntary obedience by those who obey. Moreover, the long-term master wants to be thought legitimate, wants his servants (in Hegel’s time, always a ‘he’) to acknowledge that he has the right to rule them.
Relations between ‘lords’ and their ‘bondsmen’, as Hegel called superiors and subordinates, had become much more likely, he thought, in his contemporary world than in past societies. In the past, religious dictates or inherited privilege legitimated a master; the master did not have to do anything himself personally when the social order was designed by God. In a secular, tradition-hostile society, recognition of a bond across the gap of unequal standing becomes more fragile. Machiavelli had observed something similar in the upheavals of Renaissance city-states, but he thought the dilemma to be one of statecraft only, of how the ruler behaved so as to elicit voluntary obedience from his subjects. By Hegel’s time, the issue had become social as well as political.
Benjamin Constant, as Hegel’s contemporary, perceived that something beyond shared suffering entwined the Parisians of the 1820s. People in the city formed a civic molecule even as most no longer believed in the revolutionary slogan liberty, equality, fraternity and few longed for Napoleon’s escape from the island prison of St. Helena. What now was the social chemistry bonding people of very unequal standing? Something did so, but what it was Constant couldn’t say.
By focusing on the servant’s own need for recognition, Hegel tried to solve this problem. A list of ‘servants’ today might include women, gay and transgender people, immigrants, ethnic minorities – anyone who is not recognised as a peer by the master. Each of these servants, Hegel says, is engaged in a duel with the master to win acceptance, be it working women who fight for recognition of their right to equal pay, gay couples seeking to adopt who argue for their right to parent, immigrants who want it acknowledged that they are loyal citizens, or transgender people who must jump through medical establishment protocols to gain legal recognition of their gender identity. In all of these cases, Hegelian logic says that the master has set the terms of acceptance. This struggle for recognition bonds servants to their masters. Even if, as in the Napoleonic code, men or religions have equal legal rights under the law, the struggle for recognition goes on in civil society. See me! Acknowledge my presence! Do not treat me as invisible!
If the servant wants freedom – rather than recognition – then they must step outside of the master’s frame of reference. And this passage progresses in four steps: The servant is first stoic about his or her own suffering, then becomes sceptical about the master’s right to impose pain; a period of detachment ensues in which the underling feels both free of the master but unsure and unhappy about what he or she should do. Reasoning at last leads to the resolution of this unhappiness.
When thinking through the same question in reference to how one might live in the city, Immanuel Kant had promoted the notion of becoming ‘cosmopolitan’, which meant engaging with strangers in discussions of reasoning and rational action. This practising of intimate distancing allowed a level of engagement without submission. However, the young Hegel doubted this version of cosmopolitan life for good historical reasons. It was not possible to come together without some collective identity emerging. In the French Revolution, strangers in the Parisian streets had come together to hunt down ‘traitors’, ‘secret aristocrats’, and other deviants, drawing together in an unreasoned passion.
In the 1890s, following firsthand encounters with the Paris Commune, Gustave Le Bon made such collective irrationality the subject of his own studies and attempted to identify the identity of the crowd. This was later followed by the contrasting work of Elias Canetti and then Sigmund Freud. Each in their way made the observation that it’s easier to lose yourself when surrounded by people you don’t know. It appeared, therefore, that the anonymous city gave licence to irresponsibility.
Moreover, Hegel seems caught in a contradiction, because he has declared that recognition by others is necessary to feel fully human. The need for authority is not always a base impulse – children need to rely on adults to learn at school and soldiers must rely on the commands of other officers to survive in battle. Therefore, rules can guide and they can reassure. It’s more so a question of which kinds of rules don’t, and under what conditions can and should people challenge lordship.
Hegel’s way through the lordship-and-bondsman dilemma is to declare that ‘through work the bondsman [servant] becomes conscious of what he truly is’; through thinking about work in relation to himself, he can ‘discover that he has a mind
