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Hegel Was Wrong About the Civil Service
Did you know that, back in the day, Hegel wrote in his Philosophy of Right that society needed a good civil service? Here’s how Jerry Z. Muller tells it in The Mind in the Market:
In Hegel’s view, an essential counterweight and complement too the forces of the market is the civil service. For in a society where most people, most of the time, have in mind the particular interests of themselves, their families, or their professional associations, it is essential that there be a group devoted to the general interest of society.
Muller writes that Hegel said that civil service was not to be a job, but a vocation.
No kidding, Georgie. No worries, but since your time we have had a double-blind social science experiment testing the operations of a civil service against the general interest of society. And the result is pretty clear. Civil servants are only interested in feathering their nest, inventing new programs to require the hiring of battalions of new civil servants, managing special interests for mutual benefit, and arranging magnificent salaries and pensions for themselves. Other than that, they are idiots, and they Make Things Worse.
But we shouldn’t be too hard on Hegel. His dad was a civil servant, and I am sure that, at the time, it seemed that good middle-class civil servants would do a better job of running the country than courtiers in silk breeches or mad revolutionaries. Just as in 1882 our Progressives just knew that a civil service would be better than the corruptoin of the “spoils system.” But as it turned out, civil servants are quite happy to bankrupt the state they work for, as long as they get their paychecks. That’s what we have been testing in all our blue states recently, in another double-blind social science experiment.
However, according to Muller, in the rest of The Philosophy of Right Hegel amplifies what Adam Smith wrote about in The Wealth of Nations. Wow, I never knew that. Why didn’t I know that, experts? Seems to me that you aren’t doing your jobs!
Anyway, I realized that I needed to get a copy of The Philosophy of Right. Muller says
For Hegel, the great challenge of the modern world is not only to provide us with a sense of individuality and subjectivity, but also to link us to a series of institutions with which we identify and which give us a sense of belonging to a reliable world.
And Hegel saw this as requiring a combination of “familial, economic, and political institutions” of which we are a part.
So it’s interesting that Hegel is trying to figure out how to make the emerging market economy work. Whereas the next in line, Marx, wanted to burn it all down. Again, Muller has a useful view of this. Marx’s father was a a lawyer high up in the elite in Trier. So he came from an old-style city of the guilds and the rigid social and political relationships of cities in the pre-industrial era. And Marx, as a young journalist in the 1840s, was reporting on the collapse of the old cottage industry of “putting out” and hand-loom weavers. So to Marx, the industrial revolution was obliterating the lives of ordinary people — just to enrich the capitalists. And he interpreted Adam Smith’s economics to prove that this was how the market system worked. It always led to the immiseration of the workers. Of course, by the time that Marx got Das Kapital to the printers the industrial revolution was on the upswing and the workers’ wages were increasing too. So, no worries, Chuck.
Hegel got it wrong on the civil service. Marx and Engels got it wrong on the immiseration of the workers, and our own beloved liberals got it wrong on the welfare state.
Because, dear liberals, as Charles Murray has shown — see my “Misunderstanding Charles Murray” from ten years ago — your programs to fight a War on Poverty have actually made things worse. And in Coming Apart Murray showed that, in the lower class, the men don’t work much and the women don’t marry much. Whereas the educated class is having a grand old time with satisfying careers and merger marriages.
And you did it, liberals.
| Mon, 30 Mar 2026 22:42:10 GMT |
Preparing for the Ultimate Mental Health Crisis
What I worry about is what happens if President Trump wins the trifecta. First, he’s defanged Venezuelan dictator Maduro.
Next up, the Castro regime in Cuba. We can tell it’s in desperate trouble because it needed CODEPINK founder Medea Benjamin to do a media circus bringing badly needed aid to Cuba.
Finally there’s the Iranian regime. There’s a couple of X posts on Instapundit this afternoon with video of anti-regime forces shooting at regime SUVs. Is it true? Who knows. But if it is then we have anti-regime activists complete with automatic rifles and camo gear going for the pristine SUVs of the Iranian regime. Experts are puzzled. Where did the activists get their guns and where did they get their camo? You think maybe the Israelis sent it in a drone?
Do you realize what it means if Trump pulls all this off?
Experts agree that if Trump wins the trifecta, on Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, the United States would immediately be plunged into a mental health funding crisis without parallel in modern history as all our liberal friends descend upon mental health service centers all over the nation to get treatment for their terminal Trump Derangement Syndrome. And whatabout the employees of NGOs currently executing the agenda of USAID abroad? Who will provide mental health services for them? It may be that Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell will need to increase the money supply by 40% like he did during World War COVID.
Yes, it may very well be that World War TDS will be a bigger threat to society than World War COVID and World War Climate. Put together.
Of course maybe it will all turn out OK and the current failed state of the educated class will struggle on for decades. Maybe a rogue judge will send Maduro back to Venezuela. Maybe the CODEPINK emergency supplies will rescue the Castro regime from its spiral dive. And maybe the X-videos of armed insurrection in Iran are all fake.
And maybe the Democrats will fool Majority Leader Thune into defunding ICE. And maybe some rogue judge will halt Trump’s emergency relief to unpaid TSA employees. And maybe Judge Boasberg will be put on the Supreme Court in 2029. And maybe the Newsom Supreme Court will decide that the First Amendment permits men to take selfies in the women’s bathroom. And maybe the Ninth Circuit will decide that Antifa activists are exempt from the criminal law.
Who knows how it will all end up?
But I think that, whatever happens, President Trump is a different creature than all the usual suspects that have occupied the White House in recent decades. They were all creatures of The System, and they all conducted their political careers under the protection of The System. When they made a speech or announced a policy or appeared for a negotiation they were prepped and backed up and rehearsed by The System.
But Donald Trump is different, because his entire life has been lived “in the arena.” Making deals, negotiating with everything at stake, going through bankruptcy. A life lived “in the arena” is completely different from a life lived “in The System.”
And he has not just lived in the arena but been thrust naked into the arena and pursued by all the king’s horses and men of The System and its lawfare operatives.
Still, during March Madness, we can all hope for the Trump Trifecta. No harm in hoping.
| Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:48:39 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
If you bend the arc of history, you do not get justice, but injustice.
Liberals: a bunch of people insisting people who look different need saving — Derek Hunter
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Mircea Eliade and the Primitive
