Hegel

Sometimes blogging is a really tiresome pastime.  I recently wrote in a recent post that Hegel was a “moderately liberal constitutional monarchist,” which has the virtue of beingmoreorless accurate.  For instance, consider the following:

Hegel stresses the need to recognize that the realities of the modern state necessitate a strong public authority along with a populace that is free and unregimented [bold mine-DL]. The principle of government in the modern world is constitutional monarchy [bold mine-DL], the potentialities of which can be seen in Austria and Prussia.

There are all sorts of responses to Hegel’s position, and it might be interesting to pick up our copies of Philosophy of Right and sort through his arguments.  Denying that he held such a position, when it is the beginning of most discussions of Hegel’s political philosophy, seems to me to be an unsatisfactory response.  Repeating some caricature of Hegel’s position that you could have picked up in The Open Society And Its Enemies and pretending that this is the appropriate understanding of Hegel’s politics are not the methods likely to persuade anyone of Hegel’s terrible totalitarianism.