For the philosopher Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, everything is “geist”, which could be translated as either mind or spirit. So everything is either mindful, spiritual or mental, depending on your preferred translation. He calls institutions “objective spirit”. This is because ideas are only “subjective” when they are stuck in people’s heads or in books.
Once those ideas are realised, for example, in forms of governments and social institutions, they become objectified and take on a concrete reality, rather than being mere mental abstractions. That is the historical process. In fact, for Hegel, it is the meaning of history itself.
Hegel fans have long argued about whether such historical processes are progressive in one direction until we achieve heaven on Earth, or if they are reversible (for example, returning to barbarism) and go in cycles. The young Francis Fukuyama belonged to the first school when he famously proclaimed Western democracy and free-market capitalism as marking “the end of history”. We now know how absurd that was. Most Hegel scholars argue for historical cycles or reversibility.
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How does a historical process work in reverse? It starts with the foundational ideas that give birth to institutions being challenged by an antithesis. That embryonic opposition might still be subjective, if rebellious – in other words, remaining at the stage of mere criticism and complaint. For example, disaffected and deprived citizens of individual European states might grumble about tyrannical bureaucrats in Brussels, like teenagers helplessly badmouthing their parents, but they can do little about it.
But those opposing ideas could evolve to take on concrete realities, such as when people consolidate voting blocs and form political parties to take on entrenched but decaying powers. Suppose they vote for their own versions of Brexit.
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It is now conceivable that the foundational idea of the European Union – the pre-eminent postmodern superstate – is being undermined. It starts with more people realising that European unity carries deadly costs that could exceed the benefits to ordinary Europeans.