While Hegel’s political philosophy has been attacked on the left by republican democrats and on the right by feudalist reactionaries, his apologists see him as a liberal reformer, a moderate who theorized about the development of a free-market society within the bounds of a stabilizing constitutional state. This centrist view has gained ascendancy since the end of the Second World War, enshrining Hegel within the liberal tradition. In this book, Renato Cristi argues that, like the Prussian liberal reformers of his (...) time, Hegel was committed to expand the scope of a free economy and concurrently to ensure that the social practice of subjective freedom did not endanger political stability and order. Aware that a system of mutual advantage failed to integrate the members of civil society and that profound social disharmonies were ineradicable, Hegel adopted the views of the French liberal _doctrinaires_, who sought to realize the principles of the French Revolution by supporting Louis XVIII’s sovereign assertion of the monarchical principle. Not surprisingly, Hegel hailed the French _Charte_ of June 1814 as a beacon of freedom. Endorsement of the monarchical principle was meant to prevent the atomized individuals of civil society from gaining control of the state through appeals to popular sovereignty. This challenges most conventional interpretations of Hegel’s theory of the state and draws it closer to the conservative-authoritarian end of the political spectrum than is usual. (shrink)

This article responds to Nicholas Adams by exploring the affinities between his account and Hegel, with a particular focus on the dialectic of articulation. They seem to agree on the undermining effect of articulation and reflection on implicit commitments. However, Adams diverges from Hegel by questioning the consequence and supposed inevitability of this dialectical process. Whereas Hegel argues for the desirability of conscious articulation in the progress towards modernity, Adams contends that it is actually a destructive and oppressive process, challenging (...) Hegel’s Enlightenment optimism and Eurocentrism. Still, I suggest that Hegel’s concern for rational dialogue as an indispensable condition for modern life and community should be taken seriously. Scriptural reasoning, as discussed by Adams, provides a model how we can have a form of rational dialogue that escapes from the dilemma posed by the Hegelian dialectic, and that it may be possible to combine strong ethical commitments with an openness to pluralistic dialogue. (shrink)

El carácter cognitivista de la ética es introducido por Hegel en el procesoreal y universal del espíritu con las figuras del desengaño trágico y de larelación conflictiva entre estado y sociedad. La referencia a las contradicciones de la conciencia ética confiada en lazos naturales y sociales aparece en Hegel cada vez que él quiere precisar el nexo entre ética y saber en el mundo moderno. Las contradicciones de la conciencia ética indican para él puntos de tránsito a la eticidad fundada (...) en el conocimiento de lo universal. La redefinición de lo ético en el medio del saber conceptual se realiza paraHegel sin embargo sólo mediante la superación e integración de las formaséticas correspondientes a la familia y la sociedad civil en el estado. (shrink)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was one of the philosophic giants of the nineteenth century. Well versed in both ancient and more recent philosophical tracts, he rejected the individualism of Hobbes and Locke, as well as their notion that the state was an agency set up in the first place to protect life and property, and, drawing inspiration from Aristotle, outlined a vision of the state as an agency bound, in the first place, to protect the weak and the powerless. Hegel (...) further rejected Kant’s individualistic ethics and counseled that ethical behavior had to be understood as taking place in a social context, with real duties toward other people. For Hegel, an individual had rights and duties within the context of the family, in the community, and, as a citizen, vis-à-vis the state. He emphasized the network of duties in which each individual finds himself, urging political moderation and concern for the good of the entire community. He has been condemned as a proto-totalitarian, lauded as a democrat of sorts, and described variously as liberal, anti-liberal, authoritarian, conservative-monarchist, and constitutionalist. This essay will argue that Hegel came to champion a constitutional-legal order under an autocratic monarch, with protection for liberal values. The absolute authority of the monarch, thus, was limited to those powers which he needed in order to advance and protect the interests of the citizens of the realm. (shrink)

Problem setting. The structure of the legal life phenomenological model, alongside the social experience and legal values, always contains subjective measurements that reflect legal person’s specific features. In particular, the point is in the legal duties, powers and the capability of legal reasoning. Their consideration provides an opportunity to show the integral phenomenological model of law via restored bonds of all its elements, and also enables us to extend the semantic field of social-philosophical aspect of the research through creating theoretical (...) pre-conditions for studying burning issues and specific manifestations of the modern law. Recent research and publications analysis. In phenomenology the person is traditionally recognized as the essential being, while the process of sense generation ensures, inter alia, contextual opportunities to study law. The contemporary experience of the legal person phenomenological understanding may be complemented by the research into the abilities of the legal person as an element of the legal life phenomenological model. Paper aim. This work aims to study the features of the legal person as a structural element of the legal life phenomenological model. Paper results and discussion. The paper shows that the law lifeworld is deeply rooted in social experience. It confirms that owing to the legal person the law lifeworld is constituted and “extended” with interpretations. Its activity as to the given social experience provides grounds to declare the equality of the following modalities: “be the carrier of legal awareness”, “be a legal agent” and “be a recognized and legally protected value”. These theoretical statements enable us to formulate certain social-philosophical issues of legal standing, and outline the ways of their solving. For instance, there is a problem of the symbolic status of a legal entity, found in its relations with the state and citizens; the issue of possible legal person’s recognition as a value in the conditions of his/her minimalized rights and hypertrophy of the legal duties is considered; the nature of a legal conflict and the mechanism of its solution is studied through recognizing the value of various communicative perspectives; it is stated that the differences between the intentional experiences of a legal person and the person with duties are a precondition to form legal nihilism and ignorance. The legal person is also considered in the context of his or her ability to be engaged in the discourse practices, embedded in the mechanisms of interpersonal constitution of senses inherent in the social being. The purpose of the legal discourse in the modern world is defined as a field to identify problems and “tension zones” in the implementation of liberal values and the rule of law. Following the analysis of the approaches to identifying the legal discourse core, its main strategies were discussed: legal discourse is focused on searching and developing socially important topics and sound arguments, confirming positive suggestions for the solving social problems (after J. Habermas); legal discourse implies the use of the power of language to fight against the arbitrary rule, including that of the legitimate power (М. Foucault); the specifics of the legal discourse are in creating linguistic tools and developing the procedures, owing to which legal enforcement is transferred to the speech space (P. Ricoeur). Conclusion. The study showed that the activity of the person who has his or her own legal opinion is in the fact that their generated texts and individual statements are not limited to the formal logical regulations, but are the means of expressing their social experience, the measure of balancing between the person’s claims and his or her social recognition. (shrink)