Terrorism - The Dark Side of 1968

Kai Froeb2026

This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.

The Movement of the Whole - From Protest to Violence

Terrorism is the dark shadow of 1968. If peaceful protest fails, if reforms fail to materialize, if the system reacts repressively - is violence then legitimate? Small minorities in Germany (RAF), Italy (Brigate Rosse), the USA (Weather Underground), Japan (Japanese Red Army) answer this question with yes - and plunge themselves and the movement into catastrophe.

The logic of escalation:

  1. Protest (peaceful) -> is ignored
  2. Militant actions (property damage) -> are answered repressively
  3. Armed struggle (attacks on persons) -> becomes “war”
  4. Terror (arbitrary violence) -> becomes self-destruction

This escalation is not accidental, but follows a logic that Hegel had already described - as a warning.

Hegel’s Verdict Against Terrorism - The Kotzebue Murder (1819)

On March 23, 1819, the theology student Karl Ludwig Sand stabs the writer August von Kotzebue to death in Mannheim. Sand is a member of the Burschenschaften - radical nationalist student fraternities fighting for a united, free Germany. Kotzebue is considered a traitor - he is suspected of spying for the Russian Tsar, he mocks the national movement in his plays.

Sand kills Kotzebue out of political conviction - as “tyrannicide,” as an act of liberation. On the way to the scaffold he cries out: “Long live free Germany!” He becomes a martyr of the movement - poems are written about him, his portrait sells thousands of copies.[1]

Hegel’s reaction: Hegel is appalled. In his lectures on the philosophy of right (1819/20) and in the preface to the Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), he condemns the murder sharply - without naming Sand, but unmistakably referring to him.[2]

The systematic critique: First: arbitrariness instead of right. Sand acts from subjective conviction - he believes he is right. But subjective certainty is no legitimation for murder. If everyone who feels they are in the right may kill, what rules is not freedom but anarchy. Right must be objectified - in laws, procedures, institutions. Whoever bypasses these substitutes arbitrariness for right.[3]

Second: abstraction instead of concretion. Sand kills for an idea - the “free Germany.” But this idea is abstract - it has no concrete shape, no institutions, no realization. Kotzebue is no “tyrant” (no wielder of power), but a private person - a writer. Killing him changes nothing about the political conditions. It is symbolic violence - it expresses a conviction, but does not change reality.[4]

Third: romantic subjectivism. Hegel sees in Sand (and the Burschenschaften) a political romanticism - the elevation of subjective feelings (enthusiasm, outrage, hatred) to a political principle. But politics cannot be based on feelings - it needs institutions that function independently of subjective moods. The romantic terrorist believes he is making history through his act - but he only makes martyrs (himself) and victims (the murdered), not a new order.[5]

Fourth: the professors as arsonists. Hegel criticizes not only Sand, but the professors (especially Jakob Friedrich Fries in Jena) who preach radicalism to the students. They talk of freedom, fatherland, resistance against tyranny - but thereby drive naive young people into crime. They are agitators who themselves take no risks, but send others to their death. Hegel calls this “an ethics of conviction” (Gesinnungsethik) - responsibility only for intentions, not for consequences.[6]

The consequence: after the Kotzebue murder come the Carlsbad Decrees (1819) - censorship, surveillance of the universities, prohibition of the Burschenschaften. The reaction uses the terror as a pretext for repression. Sand wanted freedom - he brought oppression. This is the dialectical irony of terrorism: it achieves the opposite of what it wants.

The RAF - Hegel’s Warning Realized (1970-1977)

The Red Army Faction (RAF, founded in 1970 by Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof) structurally repeats what Sand did 150 years earlier - with the same fatal consequences.[7]

The legitimation: the RAF invokes Fanon (“violence as self-liberation”), Mao (“power comes from the barrel of a gun”), Che Guevara (“foco theory”). They understand themselves as a guerrilla within - the anti-imperialist struggle of the Third World is carried into Germany. The German state is not democratic, but crypto-fascist - a continuity with the Nazi state, only more subtle. Violence against this state is self-defense.[8]

The practice: bank robberies (fundraising), bomb attacks (US headquarters, the Springer skyscraper), kidnappings (Schleyer, 1977), murders (Buback, Ponto, Schleyer). The RAF kills not only “representatives of the system,” but also random victims - chauffeurs, police officers, passersby. The line between political violence and terror blurs.[9]

The “German Autumn” (1977): the culminating point. The kidnapping of Schleyer, the hijacking of an airplane to Mogadishu, the rescue by GSG9, the suicide of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe in Stammheim, the murder of Schleyer. The terror ends - but the damage is immense. The left is discredited, society is traumatized, the constitutional state has shown its harshness (but also its stability - democracy holds).[10]

Hegel’s critique - updated: First: arbitrariness instead of right. The RAF elevates itself to judge, jury, and executioner. It decides who is a “representative of the system” and must be executed. But this decision is subjective - it follows no procedure, no public scrutiny, no revision. Schleyer is sentenced to death by a people’s tribunal of three people - that is arbitrariness, not right.

Second: abstraction instead of concretion. The RAF fights for an abstract idea - “socialism,” “liberation,” the “anti-imperialist struggle.” But these ideas have no concrete shape. What exactly is supposed to come after the overthrow? How is the new society supposed to be organized? The RAF has no answers - only negation. That is abstract negativism (Hegel) - destruction without construction.

Third: substitutionism. The RAF believes it is fighting for the working class. But the workers do not want the RAF - they vote SPD or CDU, not RAF. The RAF substitutes itself for the class it claims to represent. This is vanguardism as self-empowerment - a minority speaks for a majority that rejects it. Hegel would say: that is not freedom (self-determination of the many), but despotism (rule of the few).[11]

Fourth: performative contradiction. The RAF fights against “fascism,” but uses fascist methods - violence against uninvolved people, vigilante justice, death sentences without trial. It wants liberation, but produces terror - systematic fear. It wants to weaken the state, but strengthens it (through emergency laws, surveillance, repression). This is the dialectical irony - the means contradicts the end.

Brigate Rosse (Italy), Weather Underground (USA), Japanese Red Army

The terrorism of 1968 is not German, but international. In Italy the Brigate Rosse kidnap the prime minister Aldo Moro (1978), murdering him after 55 days. In the USA the Weather Underground bombs government buildings (but deliberately avoids fatalities). In Japan the Japanese Red Army hijacks a plane to North Korea (1970).[12]

The commonalities:

  • all come out of the student movement
  • all invoke Third World liberation struggles (Fanon, Che, Mao)
  • all fail - they do not achieve their goals, they discredit the left, they strengthen the state

The differences:

  • the Weather Underground avoids fatalities (bombs at night, when buildings are empty) - less terroristic than the RAF
  • the Brigate Rosse are larger, more organized, more brutal than the RAF - they kill more than 80 people
  • the Japanese Red Army is the most internationalized - it cooperates with the PLO, operates worldwide

Hegel’s Warning - Why Terrorism Must Fail

The systematic lesson: terrorism is not only morally reprehensible, but also systematically hopeless. For three reasons:

First: no social base. Revolutions need mass movements - workers, farmers, the middle class. Terrorism is minority action - self-appointed vanguards who are isolated. Without a base among the people, revolution is impossible. The RAF never had more than 50-70 members (in its hard core) - ridiculously few for a “civil war.”[13]

Second: the state is stronger. Modern states have police, intelligence services, the military. Terrorists can inflict pinpricks, but cannot topple the state. The RAF killed 34 people in 20 years - tragic, but no attack on the substance of the state. The state responded with repression (manhunts, surveillance, emergency laws) - and prevailed. Terrorism systematically underestimates the stability of modern institutions.[14]

Third: performative contradiction. Terrorism wants freedom, but produces unfreedom (fear, surveillance, repression). It wants to weaken the state, but strengthens it (providing legitimation for harshness). It wants to mobilize the masses, but isolates itself (through violence). This is self-contradictory - the means contradicts the end. Hegel would have said: this is not dialectic (which makes contradictions productive), but bad infinity - senseless repetition that achieves nothing.

The Moral Dimension - Guilt and Responsibility

But terrorism also raises a moral question that cannot be answered systematically: are the terrorists guilty?

The perpetrators say: we are soldiers in a war. The state is crypto-fascist, capitalism kills millions (through hunger, war, oppression). Whoever fights against this system is not a criminal, but a freedom fighter. Our victims are regrettable, but necessary. (Ulrike Meinhof: “Of course we say the cops are pigs, we say the guy in uniform is a pig, he is not a human being…”)[15]

The victims say: we are not representatives of a system, but human beings. Schleyer’s chauffeur had no political power. Buback was Attorney General, but also a father, a husband, a human being. You do not kill “the system,” but concrete people with names, faces, families. That is murder, not politics.

Hegel would say: both sides are partially right - but both are one-sided. The state is repressive (emergency laws, occupational bans, surveillance). Capitalism produces suffering (exploitation, poverty, war). The critique is justified. But: the answer to it is not individual violence, but collective transformation - through organizing, enlightenment, institutional reform. Whoever bypasses mediation (institutions, the public sphere, law) and resorts directly to violence ends up at arbitrariness - not at freedom.

  1. On the Kotzebue murder see Lionel Gossman: “Unwriting History: August von Kotzebue” in: The Journal of Modern History 61 (1989). ↩︎

  2. Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Preface, Werke 7, pp. 17–28. ↩︎

  3. Hegel, op. cit., §140 (conscience and arbitrariness). ↩︎

  4. Hegel, op. cit., preface on “ethics of conviction.” ↩︎

  5. On Hegel’s critique of romanticism see Terry Pinkard: Hegel: A Biography (2000), pp. 461–467. ↩︎

  6. On Fries and Hegel see Klaus Vieweg: Hegel. Der Philosoph der Freiheit (2019), pp. 387–395. ↩︎

  7. On the RAF see Stefan Aust: The Baader-Meinhof Complex (1985); Butz Peters: Tödlicher Irrtum (2004). ↩︎

  8. RAF: “Das Konzept Stadtguerilla” (1971), printed in: RAF-Texte (1977). ↩︎

  9. On the chronology see Butz Peters: RAF. Terrorismus in Deutschland (1991). ↩︎

  10. On the German Autumn see Richard Huffman: The Guns of Autumn: The German Autumn of 1977 (2008). ↩︎

  11. On the logic of substitution see Wolfgang Kraushaar: “Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus” in: id. (ed.): Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus (2006). ↩︎

  12. On the Brigate Rosse see Robert Meade: Red Brigades: The Story of Italian Terrorism (1990); on Weather Underground see Dan Berger: Outlaws of America (2006). ↩︎

  13. On RAF membership numbers see Butz Peters, op. cit., pp. 678–684. ↩︎

  14. On the concept of the state see Herfried Münkler: “Terrorismus als Kommunikationsstrategie” in: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B 3-4/2002. ↩︎

  15. Ulrike Meinhof: “Kolumne” in: konkret (1968), quoted in: Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof (2007). ↩︎