The state and concrete freedom: is the Philosophy of Right authoritarian or the theory of mediated freedom?

G.W.F. Hegel, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The rational state is the actuality of concrete freedom — not Popper's proto-totalitarian apparatus and not the Romantic-organicist totality.1 It is constitutional monarchy with mediating institutions: civil society with its system of needs, administration of justice, police, and corporation; the legislative body with its estates; the hereditary monarch as the moment of subjective sovereignty; the bureaucracy as the universal estate.2

The state is the realization of freedom because it is the institutional structure within which the will wills itself as objective — the rational mediation of the individual's particular ends with the universal ends of the political community.3 Atomistic social- contract theories, treating the state as a contract among pre-socially-constituted individuals, mistake what is derivative for what is fundamental: individuality is itself a product of the institutions that make it possible.4

The Doppelsatz — what is rational is actual; what is actual is rational — is not the apology for any-status-quo but the claim that rationality is the principle of historical actuality.

Sources

  1. The one and only absolute judge which always asserts its authority over the particular is the spirit which has being in and for itself, and which reveals itself as the universal and as the active genus in world history. A. Constitutional Law The state is the actuality of concrete freedom.
    Elements of the Philosophy of Right, p. 282
  2. The monarchical constitution is therefore the constitution of developed reason: all other constitutions belong to lower stages of the development and realization of reason.1 [Remark] The unification of all concrete state-powers in one existence, as in the patriarchal system or as in a democratic constitution, in the participation of all in all affairs, conflicts for itself with the principle of the division of…
    Philosophy of Mind, pp. 241–242
  3. The state is a) initially its internal structure as self-relating development-internal state-law or the constitution;' it is ř) a particular individual, and thus in relationship with other particular individuals- ex terna/state - law; 2 y) but these particular spirits are only moments in the development of the universal Idea of spirit in its actuality: world history.
    Philosophy of Mind, pp. 236–237
  4. It is the self-awareness of individuals which constitutes the actuality of the state, and its stability consists in the identity of the two aspects in question. It has often been said that the end of the state is the happiness of its citizens.
    Elements of the Philosophy of Right, p. 288

Where the argument is made

  • Philosophy of Right §§142-360 (Sittlichkeit through family, civil society, state)
  • §§257-281 on the state, the constitution, the monarch, the legislature
  • the Preface (the Doppelsatz)
  • Encyclopedia §§483-552

How the argument was received

Popper's 'Prussian apologist' / 'totalitarian' charge is the canonical attack and is now widely held to rest on a caricature. Wood, Neuhouser, and Honneth have developed the 'mediation of freedom' reading: the Philosophy of Right is a theory of the institutional conditions of concrete freedom, closer to constitutional liberalism than to Popper's reading. Charles Taylor's Hegel (1975) framed the modern Anglophone reception.