From the Left - Progressive Dogmatisms
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Progressive forces, too, can reproduce fascist patterns - often in the name of the best intentions:
Prohibitions on thought and speech in the name of tolerance:
- “No tolerance for intolerance” - without self-application
- Cancel culture and social ostracism instead of argumentation
- Language policing and trigger warnings taken to absurdity
- Negated: recognition (opponents are deemed unworthy of discourse), dialectical movement (no mediation between different perspectives)
Identity politics as a new racial logic:
- Reducing people to group membership
- “Standpoint epistemology” - the thesis that only those affected can have knowledge of their own oppression and therefore only those affected may speak
- Moral hierarchy based on victim status
- Negated: recognition (not everyone is recognized as a rational being), self-application (one’s own prejudices go unexamined)
Moral absolutism:
- Division into “the good” and “the evil”
- Guilt by association and collective punishment
- No forgiveness, no rehabilitation possible
- Negated: sublation (no reconciliation), recognition (mistakes turn people into non-persons)
”Good dictatorship” fantasies:
- “For the climate, we need an eco-dictatorship”
- “For social justice, we need a strong state”
- The end justifies the means
- Negated: all foundational operations, in the name of a higher purpose
The danger is especially insidious because the concerns are legitimate: climate protection is necessary, social justice matters, discrimination must be fought. But the methods can become fascist - and then one arrives not at the good, but at its opposite.