Reinhart Koselleck and the Critique of Hypocrisy in Right-Wing Politics

A short genealogy of the concept of 'critique'.

If you occasionally turn on the television (or, more accurately, are exposed to selected clips online), you might notice an interesting phenomenon. One of the favorite tools of right-wing commentators in their critique of left-wing figures is to focus on their hypocrisy. There are even individuals who build their careers around this approach. This is, of course, not a new development — but it seems possible to trace deeper roots for the tendency of left-wing critiques to be principled, while those from the right often take the form of limiting critiques, frequently targeting left-wing hypocrisy specifically. To understand this phenomenon — both the critique itself and the critique of hypocrisy — it might be helpful to revisit one of the more controversial intellectual figures of 20th-century Germany, who systematically employed such an approach.

Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006), a student of Karl Löwith, was one of the most severe critics of Enlightenment politics. In Germany, his account of the Enlightenment is often compared to that of today’s leading public intellectual in Germany, Jürgen Habermas. When it comes to the question of hypocrisy in modern politics, it seems to me that figures like Habermas are of little use, whereas someone like Koselleck is much more relevant. The reason is straightforward: Koselleck portrays the history of the Enlightenment as a history of political critique. Political critique, in turn, is the lifeblood of liberal and socialist thought. It is only natural that such a foundational concept for the political cultures of these two great ideologies would often be treated as ahistorical. In this sense, it is always worthwhile to turn to an opponent to see how such an element within these ideologies is not necessarily as ahistorical as it might wish to appear.

Koselleck writes his intellectual history with a sharp awareness of the political events that accompanied the birth of the concept of critique. His argument is that the concept of critique was born primarily within the framework of humanism — the critique of ancient texts is what a humanist is supposed to know how to do: to identify who wrote what, what constitutes a forgery, and what wisdom is embedded in the texts. This critique of ancient texts and manuscripts may seem, at first glance, to have no direct political implications. The humanist ostensibly limits themselves to the modest position of a scholar, a philologist, dealing with texts that, at most, have cultural significance. There is nothing more innocent than that.

However, in the 17th century, this scholar ventured into a far more contentious field: the critique of biblical texts.

Figures like Spinoza were no longer bound by orthodox faith in their pursuit of vigorous critique of the Bible. Even religious figures such as Richard Simon, in his Critical History of the Old Testament, employed biblical textual criticism for internal sectarian purposes. Simon, a Catholic, used critical—or philological—methods to demonstrate that another author (a Calvinist named Capellus) had failed to notice that the systematic application of critique to the Bible undermines Protestant loyalty to the principle of commitment to the sacred text. The solution to this, Simon argued, was straightforward: church tradition, which provides a framework for living a religious life anchored in a sacred but imperfect text. Unsurprisingly, both Simon and Capellus were cast out by their respective churches.

This led to the creation of an unlikely coalition in the 17th century: rationalist religious thinkers and humanists. Koselleck highlights the well-known example of Bodin and Hobbes. This coalition, united by a shared enemy—the church—and the justification of the state as a supra-religious authority, lasted roughly until the 18th century.

The scholar who first grasped the political significance of critique, however, was Pierre Bayle. He was also the first to articulate this conflict in terms that would dominate the 18th century: reason versus revelation. Bayle reshaped the concept of critique as we understand it today. He redefined reason itself as a process expressed through critique: an endless journey of self-revision, where contradictions are confronted with one another in an infinite process that strives to resolve ever more contradictions.

The mechanics of critique placed the scholar in a dual and paradoxical role: both prosecutor and defender. This dual role transforms the critic into someone who is not a party to the dispute, but a rational authority.

Yet this very role brought critique into conflict with another force that similarly claimed to transcend disputes and drew its legitimacy from its superiority over the religious divisions of citizens: the absolutist state. Critique, in essence, aspired to even greater power. Since the process of critique is endless, Bayle argued that the critic is bound only to the truth that will be revealed in the future. This commitment supersedes any practical obligations the critic might have in the present.

For such a quest for truth to function, it must assume absolute freedom. It must also assume the absolute authority of reason. Everyone is entirely free, yet wholly subject to the authority of reason.

Such a political structure did, in fact, arise—of sorts. The political entity in question was the Republic of Letters, a virtual republic which, according to Koselleck, would only impose its norms onto the political philosophy of the state itself a century later, with Rousseau.

But Bayle still played within the classical political arena, much like most participants in the Republic of Letters. For him, there was a certain limit to free inquiry—a political boundary: it had to be assumed that the existing political regime was justified. Reason governed the heart, but the body was to remain subject to the state. To achieve this distinction, Bayle effectively outlined a separation that would serve an important role until the early 19th century: the distinction between critique—scientific, aesthetic, religious—and satire or political intrigue. Only the former were legitimate, while the latter crossed the boundaries of the state and entered the political sphere at large. In this way, Bayle achieved, at least temporarily, an equilibrium that largely derived from Hobbes's political philosophy: reason, in the form of critique, confined its authority to the inner life of the soul in order to protect itself from the state's comprehensive authority over the body and action.

Voltaire, a little after Bayle, still utilized the distinction between critique and satire to claim legitimacy for his writings. While Voltaire was indeed an art and history critic, he was well aware that his critique had political implications, some of them immediate. For example, Voltaire's writings on religious history undoubtedly influenced contemporary perceptions of the state and the church. In the 18th century, the arenas began to shift. If we previously noted that humanists and religious rationalists forged a temporary alliance in the 17th century, by the 18th century, it became clear that critique was on one side, with the church and state on the other.

In the Republic of Letters, it was increasingly understood that critique could not avoid criticizing the state. Consequently, critics became actual political contenders on one hand while positioning themselves as judges of this struggle on the other. Koselleck notes, with a tone hard not to read as tinged with bitterness, "Of course, it is always possible to deny taking sides by claiming a superior air." Or, as Voltaire put it, "Critique is the tenth muse that came to rid the world of irrationality."

With Diderot, we encounter yet another fourfold distinction. In addition to the usual distinction, which typically demarcated the boundary between political discourse and critical discourse, Diderot began to speak of a distinction between the individual and the author. In this way, the abstraction of the critic from being a subject of the state, with a defined social background and specific political interests, was effectively completed. Or, as Diderot phrased it: "If, without being false, a person cannot write everything they do, then, without being inconsistent, the person also does not do everything they write."

The individual becomes a tool in the hands of critique, liberated from their concrete social context. If, in the 17th century, Locke spoke of moral censorship as something meant to express public opinion, in the 18th century, it seemed that the undisputed authority in the state was precisely the public sphere. The participants in this sphere, of course, were the critics, who had become political critics.

If we observed that Voltaire exhibited self-awareness about the fact that his critique stemmed from a specific political position that was not necessarily sovereign, this began to change toward the end of the 18th century. Voltaire, brimming with self-irony, acknowledged that his critique was political critique, even if it dressed itself in the guise of critique claiming apolitical neutrality. Voltaire lived to witness the generation of critics who started to take the neutral pretense with deadly seriousness: "There is not one among these critics who does not see themselves as a judge of the universe and its chief listener."

Accordingly, the Encyclopedists inform us that "the critic is a social leader who knows how to draw lines between truth and opinion, right and authority, duty and interest, virtue and fame." It is clear on which side of these dichotomies the critic stands. Hypocrisy makes its full appearance: power always implies corruption. Political power cannot be a source of inspiration for those who wield it—only a source of corruption.

At this point, Koselleck provides perhaps an enduring anecdote: at the height of the Enlightenment, a good monarch was considered worse than a bad one. The reason, of course, was that a good monarch prevented subjects from recognizing the fundamental injustice of the monarchical principle. The king, in principle, is a tyrant. By contrast, the critic is the judge—not the tyrant—of humanity. Naturally, after the revolution, critics, too, found themselves sent to the guillotine.

In 1781, it seemed that the transformation was complete. In the preface to Critique of Pure Reason, Kant subordinated both the church and the state to the authority—that is, the judgment—of the critic. Kant advanced the idea to its perfection, a notion still reverberating in contemporary liberal political philosophy forums. The critic operates according to public law, open to all. This distinguishes the critic from the church and the state, whose considerations, to be just, must also be open to public scrutiny. Kant essentially asks the state: "Surely you have nothing to hide; you are justified, after all." This is an indirect way of accusing the state of hypocrisy, of duplicity. As Koselleck put it, the critic became a covert tyrant who had lost all restraint. In 1954, he jested that a day would come when even the type of pants someone wears would be subject to public criticism. He was, of course, overly optimistic.

However, Koselleck's own strategy of pointing out the hypocrisy of the Enlightenment figures is problematic in two ways. First, there are specific historical reasons why, in modern democracies, voters do not act in accordance with their interests. There is a lack of a comprehensive theory for identifying and justifying private interests in the public sphere. Private interests, in this context, can include any interests that cannot be justified to the entire public but only to a specific reference group within it. Second, Koselleck's critique systematically focuses on the French and German Enlightenments for understandable reasons. Yet the Enlightenment has another side—Scottish. The Scottish Enlightenment does offer a theory of the common good and a sharper, more enduring distinction between the professional or critic and the politician. Correspondingly, it also proposes a theory of the public good that does not necessarily regress into interests that, in Enlightenment terms, would be perceived as private.

Modern heirs of Koselleck, therefore, face a dual problem: pointing out hypocrisy is not a policy. Often, it seems that exposing the hypocrisy of Enlightenment thinkers is a strategy aimed at avoiding the presentation of the critic's own principles or private interests from the right, suspecting they would not be well-received by the public. Second, and perhaps more importantly, even when a conscious understanding of private interests exists among these figures—certainly among the more journalistic ones—there is often no coherent conception of what the general good toward which the state should strive actually entails. The act of pointing out hypocrisy must itself meet a simple criterion: does it promote the general good? That is, is the principle enabling the exposure of hypocrisy itself just, or is it merely a tool for attacking private interests that are not my own?