Review article
REPUBLICANISM AND LIBERALISM IN THE LIGHT OF HEGEL’S SCIENCE OF THE STATE
Domagoj Vujeva
; Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The first part of the text presents the republican position of young Hegel.
This position is developed primarily through a divergence from Christianity,
which is, in Hegel’s judgment, the spiritual pillar of political despotism and
the main cause of German spiritual, social and political backwardness. According
to Hegel, the main reason for the fatal influence of Christianity is its
private character, the fact that it teaches man to despise this earthly life, tells
him that he is unable to achieve moral perfection through his own efforts and
turns him into an object of a transcendental power. In opposition to Christianity,
Hegel puts forward the Greek popular religions, i.e. the antique republican
orders as the only orders adequate to man’s freedom, pointing them out also
as models for his own time. The second part of the text shows how Hegel’s
giving up on his youthful republican-democratic ideals and his adherence to
hereditary monarchy is a consequence of the appearance of the liberal moment
in his political philosophy. Through acceptance of subjectivity as the supreme
principle of the new age, Hegel realizes that a return to the substantial
ethical unity of the Greek polis is impossible. At the same time, he sees in the
constitutional monarchy of the hereditary type the only order adequate to modern
conditions. Namely it preserves the autonomy of non-political spheres in
the state, while simultaneously – in the monarch who is not dependent on the
will of those subject to his power – the state unity is guaranteed as opposed to
civil society as a space of interest plurality and socio-economic differences.
Finally, the author strives to demonstrate how, in spite of Hegel’s obvious
opting for hereditary monarchy and rejection of the republic, his mature political
philosophy also encompasses a republican dimension. This has to do
with a contradiction between the republican form and the monarchic contents
of the political state. Namely the latter is not (only) a machinery of power
which serves as a counterbalance to civil society, but is defined as the sphere
of true political community. It is however not shaped through the activity of
individuals; their political subjectivity is embodied in the hereditary monarch.
This contradiction, i.e. the republican essence of the political state, leads to
the conclusion that political emancipation can be conceived as a natural and
necessary consequence of civil emancipation also in the conceptual field of
The Philosophy of Right.
Keywords
republicanism; liberalism; Hegel
Hrčak ID:
97875
URI
Publication date:
14.2.2013.
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