The Role of Civil Society in Hegel's Political Philosophy

Abstract

The seemingly endless debate over the proper interpretation of Hegel's political philosophy with respect to its supposedly progressive or reactionary implications and to its supposedly liberal or conservative presuppositions naturally regards Hegel's theory of civil society as a decisive issue in this respect. For, on the one hand, Hegel's development of the concept of civil society, more than any other theoretical element offered in his richly elaborated system of objective spirit, would seem capable of providing the principal burden of proof that all talk of Hegel as the philosopher of the Prussian state, as the dutiful apostle of authority, as the very metaphysician of the state, should simply be consigned to the realm of tendentious legend. And his concept of civil society would seem to suggest that Hegel, on the contrary, should be regarded and interpreted as a theorist of a typically modern form of society, one who can apparently propose the principle of the freedom of the individual as the legitimating foundation of its constitutional structure and social mechanisms. But on the other hand, the “progressive” character of Hegel's theory of civil society, especially when considered in relation to his theory of the state, also would seem to provide grounds for the strong suspicion, voiced repeatedly since the time of Rudolf Haym, that Hegel's “apparent recognition” of the progressive characteristics of modern political reality merely provided him with the best means of “blunting or defusing” the “free attitude and outlook that belongs to those characteristics.”