The conceptual foundations of decision-making in a democracy

[p. 387]

Marx, Hegel and Democratic Decision Making.

Marx.

While Marxism has played a major role in shaping today's history, I found it unsuitable as a contributor to this book. The basic reason is that - in the form it has been presented to this day - if we attempt to translate it into statements of facts and logic, Marxism seems to contain elements which do not met the requirements of democratic argumentation for social decision-making in a democracy, yet are essential to its doctrine. The main culprits are the elements which he borrowed from Hegel, especially the notion of inevitability, of an ex ante teleology, and a misconception about the dynamics of nature: that the antithesis has to precede the synthesis. That provided the justification for his disciples to concentrate on exposing the shortcomings of the current social order without first making sure that whatever is to follow will be better.

That is not to belittle Marx. The fault lies with his disciples. Instead of applying his dynamics also to his theory and developing it, his disciples have turned him into an icon, a prophet, and his theory into a religion, a bible to be unconditionally accepted or rejected. Thus some very valuable concepts of his have gone down together with Marxism as a creed.

Marxism touches on three fields relevant to the subject of my book:

1)	Economics
2)	Sociology
3)	Philosophy

ad 1, ECONOMICS) The contribution of Marx to economics has been considerable. Unfortunately, it has been overshadowed by the conclusions which he and especially his disciples have drawn from it in combination with his less fortunate conclusions in the other two fields. He introduced dynamics into economics and defined the problems inherent in a capitalist economy: business cycles and exploitation. Below are two subjects of his economics which have connections with justice.

LABOUR AS THE SOURCE OF ALL WEALTH. Marx's contention that only labour can generate value derives from an objectivistic view of value and wealth. If we look at the material, objective side of the economy, we must admit that Marx is correct in stating that only human labour can add anything to whatever is available in nature for satisfying our needs. (Physical capital also does, but was itself generated by applying labour to whatever nature provided). If we want to distribute income according to the contribution which an individual makes to the availability of wealth, labour is the correct base to use. But besides the objectively measurable quantity, the contribution of labour also has another component, quality, which is a (subjective) value variable. Wealth is generated by the conjunction of both elements, so we must measure both in order to determine the value of labour. Marshall and the Vienna school developed the modern theory of value which is currently the best explanation we have of prices and value. Only a market economy can - in any reasonably objective way - generate prices (and thus income of factors of production) which reflects value. Therefore, however

[p. 388]

correct the point of departure of Marx may be, it cannot be translated into any a priori policy for income and its distribution.

‘VERELENDUNG’. Marx's expectation of ‘Verelendung’ and the concomitant division of the human population into a group of ever more indigent have-nots and ever richer haves has not come about. Partly because of mechanisms in a capitalistic economy of which Marx was not aware, and partly because an ever more democratic society enabled the ‘Proletariat’ to organise and thus to provide a countervailing power. Marx himself did generate a powerful stimulus to that development. That he did not foresee even the possibility of the success of labour must be attributed to his social and philosophical theories. The danger of a two-tier society however was very real in his time and it still is with us. Marx's ‘Verelendung’ may not be a historic necessity of capitalism. But the high level of unemployment of the eighties should enhance our awareness that the opportunity for all of us to participate in economic life and to obtain an income which induces us to support the current organisation of society is not a historic necessity either. Whichever way our society will go follows from the choices we make and the policies we develop on the basis of these choices. It is not Marx the economist who erred, but Marx the historic materialist.

ad 2) SOCIOLOGY. His sociology contains two major components, a historical-cultural one (historical materialism) and a socio-psychological one (alienation).

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM. We can deal quickly with historical materialism: it is simply wrong. Whatever importance the possession of the means of production may have, both history and our theory of information show that there are essential factors determining the organisation of society which cannot be explained exclusively in terms of possession of capital (physical or mental) unless one introduces totally ad hoc assumptions and interpretations. Marx's historical materialism is a prime example of a theory which has been thus immunised against refutation and which, both by Popper's and by my demarcation criterion, deserves to be banned from the field of scientific empirical inquiry.

ALIENATION. Alienation is a more interesting concept. When dealing with a just income distribution, I have implicitly touched on its economic aspects and those of justice. Alienation follows from the dissociation between the concrete product of an individual's labour and its fruits in terms of economic and psychological compensation. That is the enevitable consequence of an economy in which the production process has been broken down into functions and stages which are performed by different people owning different factors of production. Marx's notion of alienation has been extended by Marxist psychologists such as Laing to encompass a general dissociation between what a man ‘is’, his ‘real’ self, and what he is allowed to be in a capitalistic society (if I may state the subject in such general and unprofessional terms).

No-one who has the ability to take a detached look at our western consumer society can ignore the problem as imaginary and of secondary importance. One of the more terrifying phenomena of our intellectual landscape is people like Laing who reduce the problem to an economic system, and the cure to replacing democracy and its market economy by a society founded on Marxism. If we are ever to deal successfully with alienation, we must approach it with an open mind. My suggestion is that in its more general connotation alienation is part of the human condition generated by the

[p. 389]

analytical method of reflection, by reason, which requires us to impose a temporary ‘freeze’ on our holistic information processing and to forgo instant, ‘natural’, gratification in favour of future gain. In economic terms, alienation is the inevitable result of breaking down production processes in specialised parts and will occur in all modern societies, capitalistic or communistic.

Specific to today's capitalistic society is the alienation which affects our nature as a social being by its emphasis on just one measure of success: the possession of wealth. Our culture has disrupted the balance between the self-assertive and the integrative faces of man. It surreptitiously inserts the (self-assertive) possession and display of wealth into the integrative component and it over-emphasises and grossly exagerates the role of the self-assertive tendency (competition and capital) in the generation of wealth at the expense of the integrative one (cooperation and culture).

ad 3) PHILOSOPHY. That of Marx derives mainly from Hegel, on which I will briefly comment below. As said, I am convinced that much of what is controversial in Marx's economic and social theory finds its origin in the fascination which Hegel has exerted on him as on so many others.

Hegel.

1) HEGEL'S SPIRIT. I have not read Hegel himself, yet I feel justified to write about the subjects in my book without a working knowledge of Hegel's writings. Here is why. I have really tried to read Hegel. I have spent hours and hours pondering over his Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit and figuring out what I have read. Without success. As far as I can see, it consists of a series of assertions of the type ‘Spirit is this’ and ‘Spirit is that’. But nowhere does he state what kind of phenomenon he is referring to when using the word ‘Spirit’. I expected that his qualifications of ‘Spirit’ would elucidate the matter. But that is not so. If one reads ‘A is great, A is powerful, A is red, A is kind, A is intelligent etc.’ one still cannot decide to which element of reality the writer is referring. It might be a class, like elephants, gorillas, all men, all white men etc., or it might be a specific individual of a species. It might be a queen red ant.

Qualifications can help us to identify a subject if we assume that such a subject exists and can be pointed at. If so, we should start by those qualifications which help us most in pointing the attention of the reader to whatever we want to talk about. Specifically, Hegel should have told us right on the first page whether when talking about Spirit, he refers to:

-	the phenomenon of a thinking human being (if he intends to explain the human mind)
-	some general principle governing nature, like the laws of thermodynamics
-	some universal and undefinable spiritual entity of which all phenomena are an expression.

In fact he seems to refer to all three and to switch from one to the other as it suits him without telling us to which one he is referring. We can read Hegel both as:

-	assuming ‘Spirit’ and then showing us how it works,
-	arguing that to explain our mind and universe we require certain laws and methods (dialectic), and that applying them leads to his theory of ‘Spirit’.

[p. 390]

If we go the first route, I will just say that I do not share his belief in a ‘Spirit’ and that unless he can induce me to change my mind by taking the second route, i.e. by an adequate argumentation, his work is just irrelevant to the subject of my book. In democratic argumentation ‘Spirit’ has the status of a personal belief, of some kind of religion.

Hegel seems to pretend that he has taken the second route, that he has shown that any reasonable explanation of our existence requires his laws and his ‘Spirit’. If so, he has failed both in terms of methodology and in terms of actual conclusions.

On the basis of whatever synopsis of Hegel's ideas I have come across, I would say that he has merit in apprehending the dynamic nature of life and the predominance of the information process, but was mistaken in the nature of these categories. Given the state of science in his time, he certainly cannot be blamed for this. Specifically, the nature of the process of evolution could be called dialectic, but that dialectic process is different from Hegel's thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Someone so inclined could redefine dialectic to accommodate the modern theories of life.

His other misconceptions however render his system, even if thus improved, totally inadequate as a philosophical basis for a modern view of life and society. First, the phenomena which need additional concepts to those of physics and chemistry are all those, and only those, of the living world, while Hegel introduces his ‘Spirit’ as the underlying and unifying element of the whole universe, inert and living. Secondly, his concept of a dynamic universe is one of a closed system on the road to an end state which is already idealistically determined.

This last element of Hegel's philosophy is in total contradiction with modern physics and biology, and certainly with any working concept of democracy. Popper thus is correct in considering Hegel an enemy of democracy. Unfortunately Popper emphasises the wrong reason: Hegel's personality and his preference for an authoritarian state. A person might be totally right in some scientific or philosophical statements and yet take the wrong decision as soon as confronted with a practical problem. The most brilliant philosopher may be the lowliest scoundrel in his private and public actions. Probably Popper chose to attack Hegel from that angle because the other angle, Hegel's concept of ideas, of the ‘true’ nature of phenomena, comes too close for comfort to Popper's autonomous existence of world three objects.

The decisive reason for ignoring Hegel when presenting my theory is that his work is not (yet) available in a form permitting the exercise of critical reason and is not amenable to democratic argumentation as defined in Part Five. Let me quote from the book which has been recommended to me as an introduction to Hegel to overcome my professed inability to understand Hegel himself: ‘Hegel, a re-examination’ by J.N. Findlay.

‘It is characteristic of Hegel to object to stating his philosophical principles at the beginning: he refuses to rest his thought upon fixed assumptions or initial presuppositions. The principles of his philosophy must, he holds, emerge in its systematic development: they must be the outcome rather than his foundation.’

[p. 391]

‘Hegel's dislike of preliminary statements is to this extent justified: one could not hope to understand or assess the worth of his philosophical principles without seeing them at work in his system, without seeing Hegel applying them to materials as diverse as logical categories, natural forms, historical movements and philosophical systems.’ (Findlay, p. 34)

Refusing to state his principles at the beginning could be an acceptable way of presentation if these principles are the conclusions of the system and not its presuppositions. But Hegel refuses to state any initial proposition throughout his whole book. We must conclude that he has no initial propositions at all, which can be correct only for a purely analytic statement or system. Clearly his system is intended to be synthetic, but if so, it should be translatable into a system amenable to logical analysis, to axiomatisation. His presentation clearly does not meet that requirement; on the contrary, it seems to be designed to prohibit such axiomatisation.

The contention that we can only assess the worth of his principles by seeing them at work, would be acceptable if we understand by ‘worth’ the psychological satisfaction they might provide; that satisfaction might indeed be enhanced by immunising them against rational criticism based on logic and confrontation with facts. In that way his principles certainly were successful, as borne out by experience. Leninism as well as countless variations of Marxism have served the interests of their proponents extremely well. The common denominator of all translations of Hegelian philosophy into practice is that they are fundamentally undemocratic.

In the course of my quest I have sampled most kinds of cosmology and ways of thought. Also yoga and transcendental meditation. I found their techniques quite effective and still do some yoga exercises for my back, and some simple meditation if I need to relax. Such techniques are gradually becoming a standard means of official, scientific, clinical medicine because of their proven results.

But oriental healing and hygiene is only the practical by-product of a view of life which sees our worldly existence as a temporary bubble on the surface of a spiritual world. These metaphysical oriental cosmologies are not justified by any deductive system of thought, but by personal experience: if somebody practices the mental techniques prescribed by these systems (which go far beyond the above therapeutic purposes) to reach the ‘right’ state of mind, this spiritual world will become evident to him, he will see and experience it, and will not require further justifications.

The investment in time and effort required to reach that state presumes total commitment of the individual concerned. If correctly executed, the controlling function of critical reason must be switched off. It will become impossible for the individual to know whether his vision in that state of mind is something existing outside himself or just a certain mental state which is the inevitable result of the extreme conditioning to which he had to submit. Reading Hegel requires the same kind of total commitment; we are asked to switch off our faculty of critical reason. The reader submitting to that ordeal will be unable to know whether his final acceptance of Hegel's philosophy is due to the quality of that philosophy or to the brain-washing he had to undergo to become acquainted with it.

[p. 392]

Findlay summarises Hegel's arguments for his Spirit as the ‘truth’ of everything, as the principle of unity and universality. He points to:

‘the universalizing tendencies native to the human mind,... the rigorous inter-subjective canons of science, the impartial directives of morality, the detached appreciation of art and the “self-naughting” surrenders of mystical religion... To give the name of “Spirit” or the “spiritual” to this whole constant side of our mental life is to single out and tie together factors which deserve to be singled out and tied together.’ (p. 54 to 57)

What's in a name? If a definition is seen as purely functional, we can have no objection. I welcome any attempt to tie together the above mental phenomena. In fact, I have made a somewhat similar attempt in the analysis of life and information. I do object to the other connotations which Hegel's philosophy attaches to ‘Spirit’ and which do not follow from the above definition, namely that it has an existence which is independent from the minds which conceive or use the concept, that it describes by itself any property of the phenomena grouped under its name, that it justifies their unity or its extension to the whole universe.

Assuming he correctly interprets Hegel, the ex ante, teleological (and thus philosophically illegitimate according to Nicolai Hartman and a plethora of others) character of ‘Spirit’ as well as the implication of its autonomous existence is shown by the following quotations from Findlay:

‘If Spirit could launch itself or the world into being through a conscious process, the existence of that world would be gratuitous: Spirit would already enjoy the full reality and the full self-consciousness which it is the function of the world process to elicit.’ (p. 56)

‘Spirit, the principle of unity and universality, can only fully understand the world by regarding that world as being no more than the material for its own activity, as being opaque to such activity merely to the extent that such opacity is a necessary condition for the process of removing it, of rendering the world transparent.’ (p. 57)

All notions and phenomena which Spirit is presumed to elucidate can also be explained by the modern view of life, man, mind and the ex post functionality of the information process, without recourse to any metaphysical entity like ‘Spirit’. What is more, we can do so by using democratie and ‘scientific’ argumentation. Hegelians can remain Hegelians, but they cannot claim for their belief any authority in social decision-making.

Findlay ends the chapter on Spirit by writing:

‘Hegel thinks, however, that there is no other satisfactory way of viewing the world than the one just mentioned [as Spirit on the way to self-realisation, author], and that every other way of looking on that world must lead to pain or conflict or intellectual frustration, to the view in question. This doctrine we shall only be able to fully evaluate when we have discussed Hegel's dialectic method, in which the breakdown of alternative ways of looking at things will be exhibited. We must consider whether this method really does establish the primacy of the Spirit, or whether it does not rather presuppose it.’

[p. 393]

Not surprisingly, my conclusion is that it indeed presupposes Hegel's Spirit on its way to self-realisation and that accepting it as a proof is a petitio principii. Hegel's assertion that every other way of looking at the world must lead to the above calamities is empirically refuted by the existence of the undersigned who suffers from none of them.

2) DIALECTIC AND ANTINOMIES. Findlay introduces them as follows:

‘Exactly what is meant by calling his philosophy “dialectical” is, however, far from clear, nor whether it is a good or bad manner of philosophizing. The meaning and worth of the Hegelian dialectic is, in fact, teasingly obscure even to those who have studied Hegel longest and most sympathetically, who have brooded deeply over the discrepant accounts he gives of his method, and on the Protean tricks through which he operates it.’(p. 58)

True, even the efforts of Findlay did not result in a presentation out of which I could select quotations which can be used in a critical and rational argumentation. Clearly, Hegel justifies his theory mainly by pointing out the existence of certain elements in our experience of the world which could not be dealt with in a satisfactory way by the philosophies available in his time, and especially not by any deductive system claiming some degree of absoluteness, definitiveness.

Indeed, the experience of our world is one of constant change, of indeterminacy in time and space, of contradictions which appear to be not an accident or error, but an essential element of our empirical reality. Hegel noted, as I did, that the deductive method yields unequivocal results only to the extent that we ban any reality from its content. As I noted in the Part about life, the analytical method remains applicable to the reality of our life only if we eliminate any life from the model analysed. In short, he saw life as a process going in a certain direction but extended that perception to the whole universe. He saw phenomena which precluded an explanation which could be true for all these phenomena at the same time: the contradictions.

Scouring Findlay's rendering of the sea of Hegel's abstract and complex ‘philosophising’ for a concrete, specific statement which can provide a fulcrum for critical rational argumentation, yielded just one: ‘It is, however, in the Kantian antinomies that Hegel sees the most explicit modern expression of Dialectic. Kant is praised, not only for showing that our notions of time, space and causal dependence can be developed in contradictory ways, but in showing further that such contradictions are “essential and necessary”, that they do not spring from casual error or conceptual mistake as previous philosophers had supposed.’ (p. 65).

The basic difference between Kant and Hegel is that ‘Kant holds that these antinomies are merely afflictions of our Understanding’, while Hegel ‘sees no reason why “things' should not, just like Spirit and Reason, involve contradictions. He further criticizes Kant for confining his antinomies to a limited set of cosmological ideas: he should, on Hegel's view, have recognized their presence in objects of ALL types, and in all notions and ideas. Dialectic, says Hegel, is the principle of all the movement and of all the activity we find in reality... We know how all that is finite, instead of being stable and ultimate, is rather changeable and transitory: this is no other than the Dialectic of the finite whereby it, being implicitly other than itself, is driven beyond what it immediately is, and turns into its opposite”.’

[p. 394]

Some readers may have wondered why I did not mention Kant's antinomies in the chapter about paradoxes. The reason is that I saved them for this one. The antinomies concern three concepts:

1)	finite/infinite
2)	freedom
3)	God.

I will not deal with the notion of God, as it is irrelevant to social decision-making in a setting which explicitly and a priori excludes a theocracy. To the extent that Hegel identifies nis Spirit with God, it is a personal belief which must be kept out of social decision-making, and cannot serve as a basis for a democratie venture of science and justice.

ad 1) The first of Kant's antinomies states: we can make - by reasoning - just as good a case for considering the world infinite in time and space, as we can for considering it finite. More precisely, Kant deals with the questions whether the world has a beginning in time or not, and whether it has a boundary in space or not. As it cannot be both at the same time, and as the arguments for both are impeccable in their logic, we face a contradiction which cannot be imputed to mere ignorance.

Analysing Kant's argumentation, we find that it does not actually exposé a contradiction between two well-defined concepts. The contradiction is generated by the fact that we lack concepts to deal with the imaginary ‘facts’ to be explained by the statements. Specifically, we have no real concept to even intimate, let alone explain, how something can have arisen out of nothing for a very simple reason: it falls totally outside our world of experience except as a miracle. Similarly, we have no concept for representing whatever might lie outside the ultimate limits of our universe if it is finite. Yet such concepts are needed to even define what we are talking about in the antinomies presented by Kant.

The notion that we have such concepts is an illusion generated by the - erroneous - connotations we attach to the word infinity, namely that this purely abstract concept can represent something. In fact, we use the word precisely to state that we abstain from defining any specific and thus finite ‘thing’. The only content of infinite is ‘not finite’. The grandfather of all notions of infinity is the series of natural numbers, as expressed by the statement: every number has a successor. That statement has been recently challenged by philosophers of mathematics. Prior to that I had pointed out in my criticism of Popper's autonomous existence of world three objects that ‘infinity’ is incorrectly used if it is to refer to any reality. Its correct wording is that man has the capability to generate any ‘next’ number by applying the rules of name-giving and adding ‘one’ to the highest number available. This rule defines an open-ended process which ipso facto is without known limit and precludes the definition of any number as the largest possible. The correct answer to Kant's antinomy then is that infinity is not a property of reality, but an indication of our inability to define a limit.

Kant comes to a similar conclusion, namely that if we abstract from our real world of experience (which does not include its limits in time or space), we are left with a purely speculative Mundus intelligibilis which is nothing but ‘...der allgemeine Begriff einer Welt überhaupt, in

[p. 395]

welcher man von allen Bedingungen der Anschauung derselben abstrahiert, und in Ansehung dessen folglich gar kein synthetischer Satz, weder bejahend noch verneinend, möglich ist.’ (Kant 1975, p. 168/9)

That still leaves Kant with the problem of the origin and nature of the categories of space and time, and of the Idea of causality. Given the state of science in his time, he could only relegate them to the transcendental catch-all for those concepts which could not be dealt with by scientific method, namely metaphysics, to which he also relegated the Ideas of freedom, God and immortality. Kant was an honest man; if he was incapable of explaining something, he said so and did not try to hide it behind some high-faluting fabulations.

ad 2) We have dealt with the body of Kant's second antinomy, which concerns freedom, in the chapter about determinism versus free will (p. 375). We will here take a look at the way Kant presented it.

The world of senses and of understanding of that world, says Kant, is ruled by causality: each phenomenon, each event, any situation (Zustand) has its roots in a previous one and is determined by it. Freedom is defined by Kant as the capability to generate an event by itself, that capability having no causal relation determined by any law of nature to a previous event. Such freedom is a purely transcendental idea outside our world of experience, it is created by Reason. (Kant 1975, p 170).

All motivations, on the other hand, find their origin in the senses. Kant distinguishes between human ‘Sinnlichkeit’, where the motivations do not necessarily lead to a specific action, and the animal will in which they do. Man has the choice to act according to his animal motivations or according to other motivations. That choice is provided by Understanding while the alternative motivations are provided by Reason. Because Kant sees Reason as transcendental and thus independent of any subject and of our world of experience, it provides a source of possibly non-deterministic causes for events which thus escape the laws of causality ruling our world of experience.

Unless we accept such a transcendental ‘idea’ which provides man with action alternatives escaping the determinism of our world of experience, we are caught in the classical paradox. ‘Nature’, being subject to causality, can never be reconciled with a non-transcendental concept of freedom as absence of causality.

Obviously, the antinomy is implicit in Kant's definition of freedom. If we ‘free’ ourselves from the compulsion to identify freedom with the absence of causality, if we require freedom only in terms of freedom from interference by other human beings, the antinomy simply disappears, as well as the necessity of a transcendental Reason. In the previous chapter, ‘Determinism versus Free Will’, I have presented an explanation of this compulsion and why it is to be resisted.

Kant could not suspect that a theory of evolution would enable us to introduce the historical development of our personality in a way which is totally free from any a priori teleology or personal involvement by some God and yet preserves its uniqueness and which satisfies our need

[p. 396]

to feel that our decisions are indeed our own. The great merit of Kant is that he left his transcendental concepts totally open. He acknowledged that, being a priori to our world of experience, they cannot be apprehended by an information apparatus such as our Understanding which is aimed at that world of experience. His philosophy provides a program which can still be pursued today by adapting his concepts in a non ad-hoc way to our Understanding which currently is capable of explaining the phenomena which led to Kant's necessity of transcendental ideas.

That is precisely what we cannot do with the philosophy of Hegel. While Kant's is open-ended, Hegel's is a closed system. Kant says: what we cannot apprehend by Understanding, we must leave unspecified in terms of our world of experience. Hegel says that we must use as explanation a finite and singular alternative: Spirit and its negation.

Kant's work is mainly a critical analysis of the conscious human mind, its elements, methods and products. He has no eye for the dynamic aspects of the information process and of the world in general. He also fails to see human information processing as the highest level of a general information process at the root of all living systems.

Hegel's merit is to take account of the dynamic element of our world, and he correctly sees the information process at work also in animal life. But unfortunately he then extends it to all of the universe, also the inert one.

Today, we know of two fundamental dynamic processes at work, the second law of thermodynamics which is applicable to all processes and goes in one direction (towards the increase of entropy), and an opposite process at work within the living world (evolution). Any attempt to explain all systems by one universal set of laws equally applicable to each of them thus is bound to generate contradictions.

It might be interesting to analyse Hegel's dialectic as being the result of an obscure awareness of the dependence of life on a struggle against chaos and the diametrical opposition between the two directions of the living and the inert world. Having neither the theory of the exploding universe nor of the evolution of life at his disposition, we might understand how Hegel turned to the notion of a dialectic of opposites (thesis and antithesis, where the antithesis is not just any competing one, but the negative of the thesis). If so, the question is why by holding that everything is on the road to an ultimate and ‘real’ being which it already is, but which is yet ‘unrealised’, Hegel has closed his system without any philosophical necessity to do so.

For the problems at hand do not force such a choice on him. Kant, being in a similar situation, relegated the in-his-time-unexplainable to the realm of a transcendental which is totally inapprehensible by Understanding and thus provides no lock for closing the system. Being thus unspecified, his system can accommodate any later discovery which pulls the problems back into the realm of the explainable.

I had read Popper's ‘Open Society’ before attempting to tackle Hegel, and felt very uncomfortable with Popper's attack on Hegel's integrity and democratie pedigree. I can understand

[p. 397]

what motivated Popper. For the apology of Hegel of an authoritarian state seems to be an expression of the same streak in his character which led him to choose for a closed system, and to use the method of persuasion in preference to conviction in presenting his system.

Whatever the cause, these properties of Hegel's philosophy render it outdated in a time where the living world is seen as an open system and unsuitable as a base for democratie decision-making.