The Hegel Theory of the Civil Society: The first contemporary critic of the liberal conception of the society, from the reading of the “Principles of the Philosophy of the Right”

Abstract

The “Principles of the Philosophy of the Right”, published in 1821, is a work about Right and the State. It is a contemporary text about the State and, specifically, about the social constitutionalism that was arising in Europe a year later. With a lot of documentation, our author exposes the development of the spirit through the moments of the Abstract Right, the Morality, and, finally, of the Ethics. In the section dedicated to latter, Hegel analyzes the concept of civil society –bürgerliche Gessellschaft-, clearing its constituent elements. This notion of civil society, was already popular in the classic politic economy, starting from the essay by Adam Ferguson “An Essay of the History of Civil Society”. Between the paragraphs 182 and 256, Hegel studies a social form that he considers divided from the State, that separates the social existence of the individuals in themselves and in their mutual relations, of all their substantial, personal and ethic link and put as only general social principle, the selfish principle, that says, each person is the end for himself and everything else is nothing. With this “true” abstraction of an alienated person, the satisfaction in every directions of his necessities, of the contingent will, drive to the show of the misery and the lechery with the physic and ethic corruption that is common to both (par. 185). However, the essential characteristic of this analysis is to show the logical and politics necessity of the intervention of the State, understood as field of the Ethics, in the organization of its dimensions differentiated. It is reiterated opinion by Hegel, that only in the State the society is organized according to the reason. No forget: “only with the knowledge that the idea of the liberty can only be true as State, is assured that the objective spirit, the content of the right, not be newly reduced to it subjective concept” (par. 57).