Hegel's Philosophy of Mind · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Essay V. Ethics And Politics.
It would be a long and complicated task to sift, in these ill-digested but profound suggestions, the real meaning from the formal statement. They are, like Utopia, beyond the range of practical politics. The modern reader, whose political conceptions are limited by contemporary circumstance, may find them archaic, medieval, quixotic. But for those who behind the words and forms can see the substance and the idea, they will perhaps come nearer the conception of ideal commonwealth than many reforming programmes. Compared with the maturer statements of the _Philosophy of Law_, they have the faults of the Romantic age to which their inception belongs. Yet even in that later exposition there is upheld the doctrine of the supremacy of the eternal State against everything particular, class-like, and temporary; a doctrine which has made Hegel—as it made Fichte—a voice in that “professorial socialism” which is at least as old as Plato.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
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