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The State As A Community Of Persons In Hegel; A Critique
CHAPTER ONE -- [Total Page(s) 4]
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CHAPTER ONE
1.1 BACKGROUND OF HEGEL’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
1.1.1. HISTORICAL SURVEY
Every individual is a child of his time. It is not easy for one to escape the influence of his epoch or contemporary world. Hegel himself is not innocent of this. His historical judgments and moral evaluations were in fact as much conditioned by time, place and personality, as those of other philosophers.
However, in virtue of the nature and scope of our topic, this portion will rather concentrate more on the de facto German political condition which presented itself glaringly before Hegel and to which his political thought was nothing but a reaction.
Hegel made a comprehensive and scholarly case study of his native German state and discovered the multiple ills that overwhelmed it. He lamented that people considered private property and interest to be indeed common to all society so as to justify their selfish ends[1].
He also saw the pseudo-democratic spirit that shrouded the state which he thought would engender more threat to freedom than ever. In effect, he wished to eradicate all these. He wanted to substitute them with a magnificent theory of power vested upon the state and the monarch.
From his experiences of the French Revolution, Hegel deplored the consequences of the Revolution. He even tagged it a ‘glorious dawn,’ but he also meant that at the inception of the revolutionary wars, Germany was not free from the revolutionary armies’ invasion. The invasion came up when Hegel was twenty-one.
On another note, Germany was infested with a myriad of petty despotisms that were loosely linked together as the Holy Roman Empire under the leadership of Francis I of Austria. Marcus enumerating this noted that:
The Reich[2] consisted of Austria and Prussia, the prince Electors, 94 ecclesiastical and secular princes, 103 barons, 40 prelates, and 51 Reich towns, in sum it consisted of nearly 300 territories.
Under this heteronomy of despotisms, Germany found it extremely hard to subsume their personal whims under a united national spirit. There was rather an evidence of porosity, individualism and weakness. In view of this Hegel as one of the contributors to the development of the German state made this elegant remark;
Without law and justice, without protection from arbitrary taxation, uncertain of the lives of our sons and our freedom and our rights, the existence of the despotic power, our existence lacking unity and a national spirit… This is the status quo of our nation.[4]
Therefore, this was a period when people believed strongly in the divine right of kings even though they could not reach out for laws and justice. This means that rationality was conspicuously lacking and this manifested itself in the introduction of arbitrary taxations and insecurity. However, everyone yearned for the German reunification, which has for long eluded her even after the revolutionary wars during which Austria and Prussia were vanquished.
CHAPTER ONE -- [Total Page(s) 4]
Page 1 of 4
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