Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.56550/d.3.2.1
The “Protective State”: Dialectics of a category in Eduard Gans
Andreas Arndt
; Humboldt University Berlin
*
* Corresponding author.
Abstract
In 1832, Eduard Gans, a student of Hegel, criticised the Prussian state as a “protective state” that kept its citizens in a state of immaturity. However, there were no longer any reasonable grounds for this guardianship, so that citizens had to free themselves from it. Today, when citizens in Western democracies still largely enjoy rights of freedom, this demand is being reversed: Freedom is increasingly understood as private property without social ties, so that the state is required to take action against everyone and everything that could interfere with this private property. As a consequence, this is a call for an authoritarian state and thus the path to a new immaturity.
Keywords
Eduard Gans; protective state; state; citizen
Hrčak ID:
330692
URI
Publication date:
30.4.2025.
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