Hegel and contemporary liberalism, anarchism, socialism
a defense of the rechtsphilosophie against Marx and his contemporary followers
pp. 224-248
in: Joseph J. O'Malley, K Algozin, Howard P. Kainz, RICE (eds), The legacy of Hegel, Berlin, Springer, 1973Abstract
The modern forms of social freedom — liberalism, anarchism, socialism — have as their common principle the moral or subjective will. The institutional existence of this principle is civil society: concrete persons who seek to realize their particularity in the external realm of natural necessity and arbitrary will, but so that their relation to one another is mediated through universal will.1 This principle and its various forms belong peculiarly to the modern world. The free societies of classical antiquity were founded on a substantial unity where the mediation of conflicting wills did not ultimately fall within the consciousness of their members.2 Between ancient and modern freedom lies abstract right or "the absolutely free will" as immediate self-relation and opposed to the realm of natural or particular interests in which the will is unfree. Abstract right is peculiarly the principle of medieval society, whose tendency and result was to overcome the separation of rational will from natural interests. The subjective will of modern society can only be understood as this result.3 For modern freedom is simply abstract personality that has formed the unity of its two worlds in universal self-consciousness and therefore knows natural interests as only apparently falling outside the identity of individual with universal will.
