Photo by Matt Johnson | CC BY 2.0
The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus taught that “all is flux” — that “nothing stays still,” and therefore that “no one can step in the same river twice.”
The political philosophers of Greco-Roman antiquity understood this to be a metaphysical claim without political implications. That has remained the consensus view to this day.
To be sure, more than two thousand years after Heraclitus, philosophers working within the tradition of “classical German philosophy” did develop philosophical positions that evince a certain affinity with what Heraclitus seems to have had in mind, and that do resonate politically. The connection, however, was indirect.
Hegel’s philosophy is, by far, the most important and influential example. As an inveterate systematizer, and a political and legal philosopher of the first order, he joined notions associated with politics, conceived abstractly, with aspects of Heraclitean metaphysics, understood loosely.
But Hegel and his followers were interested mainly in elucidating history’s structure and direction, and in the “dialectical” structure of the real. What they had to say about political notions and institutions was partly shaped by those abstruse philosophical concerns. But it too was largely free standing.
Hegelian ideas influenced Karl Marx’s thinking, but, in many respects, Marxist theory broke away from its Hegelian roots. This was especially true on matters of…