Hegel's theory of the state is a cornerstone of his larger philosophical system, known as Hegelianism. According to Hegel, the state is the ultimate realization of human freedom. It is the highest form of human organization, representing the unity and reconciliation of individual wills within a larger, universal whole.
Hegel's view of the state is rooted in his concept of Spirit, which he sees as the driving force behind history. Spirit, for Hegel, is the source of all meaning, purpose, and identity. It is through the state that Spirit is able to manifest itself in the world and achieve self-consciousness.
The state, for Hegel, is not simply a political organization or a system of laws and regulations. Rather, it is a living, dynamic entity that embodies the collective will of its citizens. It is the highest form of human community, in which individuals are able to fulfill their potential and contribute to the greater good.
Hegel's view of the state was influenced by the Enlightenment, which emphasized reason, individual rights, and the rule of law. However, Hegel went beyond this Enlightenment perspective by seeing the state as the ultimate expression of human freedom. He believed that the state was not just a means of ensuring social order, but a way for individuals to realize their full potential and achieve self-consciousness.
For Hegel, the state was not just a political entity, but a spiritual one. It was the expression of the collective will of its citizens, and it was through the state that individuals were able to find meaning and purpose in their lives.
Hegel's theory of the state has had a lasting impact on political philosophy and has been influential in the development of various political ideologies, including conservatism, liberalism, and socialism. It continues to be a subject of study and debate among scholars and political thinkers today.
Hegel view on State and civil society
A more substantive guide awaits reflecting about ourselves acting in relation to others concretely in Ethical Life. EL the Addition to §95. EL Remark to §81. Thus, in our consciousness of God, we somehow serve to realize his own self-consciousness, and, thereby, his own perfection. It is in his Berlin Phenomenology—only now he is able to expound at greater length and with greater clarity upon what he had covered earlier in such a condensed fashion. This opposition begins in the clash between the substantial intuition of an aristocracy and the principle of free personality in democratic form.
German has two words for "history," Historie and Geschichte. Translated by Taubeneck, Steven A. Because the thought of pure Being is undetermined and so is a pure abstraction, however, it is really no different from the assertion of pure negation or the absolutely negative EL §87. Two further journeys into the history of philosophy will help to show why Hegel chose dialectics as his method of argument. This perspective, however, overlooks over sixty years of French writing on Hegel, according to which Hegelianism was identified with the "system" presented in the Encyclopedia. The principles of the national minds are wholly restricted on account of their particularity, for it is in this particularity that, as existent individuals, they have their objective actuality and their self-consciousness.
Not only do nations issue forth invigorated from their wars, but those nations torn by internal strife, win peace at home as a result of war abroad. According to Hegel, the notion that persons in their original state were equal and free appeared to be absurd and foolish. Several states may form an alliance to be a sort of court with jurisdiction over others, there may be confederations of states, like the Holy Alliance for example, but these are always relative only and restricted, like perpetual peace. Hegel, art, religion and philosophy: The final stages of total spiritual process correspond to those of Art, Religion and Philosophy: the movement of the Spirit acquires a transparency of greater and greater. Hegel: the attraction of philosophers to high-sounding jargon and gibberish almost for its own sake, followed by the gullibility of a credulous public.
Whether or not Hegel is a historicist simply depends upon how one defines the term. Industrial progress was quite unsatisfactory such could never be the true state of a national state. This article was reprinted, with some changes, in two different editions of Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, listed below. Addition: Immature minds delight in argumentation and fault-finding, because it is easy enough to find fault, though hard to see the good and its inner necessity. Inwood, however, clarifies: derived from the Latin absolutus, it means "not dependent on, conditional on, relative to or restricted by anything else; self-contained, perfect, complete.
Maybee 2009: 73, 100, 112, 156, 193, 214, 221, 235, 458. Freedom Views of Hegel: Hegel thinks that, freedom is an indispensable and it is the spirit of man, and its denial to a man equivalent to denial of his personality and humanity, he said that freedom is positive marvel rather than negative concept of freedom. This assumption, however, is mistaken. In short, taking the logic as a category theory opens up two general lines of interpretation: should the categories be understood as primarily ontological categories, as found in Aristotle, or as primarily categories revealing the necessary structure of thought, as in Kant? Free, universal, or rational choice cannot show its full power until I come to recognize my subjective interests and myself as integrally connected to an objective, rational, form that permeates or pervades them, the family and the state being such forms. And so it makes manifest the philosophical truth of religion, which now is known.
The unreflected existence of the State rests on custom, and its reflected on the self-consciousness of the individual, in return, has his substantial freedom in the State, as the essence, purpose, and product of his activity. Now if religious feeling wished to assert itself in the state in the same way as it is wont to do in its own field, it would overturn the organisation of the state, because the different organs of the state have latitude to pursue their several distinct paths, while in religion everything is always referred back to the whole. Certainly, extreme German nationalists, such as von Treitschke and some of the theorists of Italian fascism were influenced by Hegel; nonetheless, the charge is generally unfair. What is required is a transition bringing together the universality of Abstract Right enveloping us all and providing a foundation in mutual recognition with the particularity of Morality where we both outwardly and inwardly grasp the development of right. HEGEL THEORY OF STATE Hegel regarded the state as a representation of the universal mind, or giest, in its whole.
Hegel’s Social and Political Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The principle of subjectivity and self-conscious freedom is there too shown to be the principle of the Germanic people, but the book goes no further than the decline of natural states, and consequently the principle is only brought to the point where it appears either as a restless mobility, as human caprice and corruption, or in its particular form as emotion, and where it has not yet developed to the objectivity of the self-conscious substantiality or to an organised legal system. The individual on the other hand cannot be conceived apart from the community. According to Hegel, true freedom does not consist alone in the development of individual interests and rights recognised by the state, but also in the transformation of individual interests and rights into universal goals. This dependence shows how anthropological determinations do not simply disappear with the development of more psychological ones—they are preserved as well as negated as in the pattern of what is aufgehoben. But those in Greek antiquity, where psychological determinations were closer to anthropological ones, had lived with a comfortable felt unity between spirit and body and between the individual and society. Thus, "The modern State, proving the reality of political community, when comprehended philosophically, could therefore be seen as the highest articulation of Spirit, or God in the contemporary world. PN: §273 While Mechanics clearly reflects the more space-filling conception of matter dominant in British thought, Physics is consistent with the more dynamic continental European conception of matter originating in Leibniz with his idea of living forces.
Now the third is the state, the nervous system as a whole, something inwardly organised; but this lives only in so far as both moments in this case family and civil society are developed within it. As should be clear, Morality can only make so much progress in individual abstraction. The one-sidedness of Finite Purpose requires the dialectical process to continue through a series of syllogisms that determines Finite Purpose in relation to the ignored content. Without any governing global authority, states can come into conflict with each other. With the decline of the Greek world and the rise of the Roman one, movements such as Stoicism and Christianity would come to give expression to an individual point of view, but under the social conditions of Rome or the Middle Ages such a subjective point of view could only be an alienated one attracted to what, in contrast to Greek concreteness, would be seen as abstractions. The pantheistic legacy inherited by Hegel meant that he had no problem in considering an objective outer world beyond any particular subjective mind.
