Hegel and the Modern World

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom

10.22034/jpiut.2025.21085

Abstract

In this essay I examine Hegel’s critique of England and France in his own day, and I argue that this critique sheds light on what he would say about constitutional states in the twenty-first century. Hegel’s critique is based on the normative “idea” of freedom he sets out in his Philosophy of Right (1820). This idea, which in Hegel’s view determines what rights and institutions are necessary for true freedom, gives a central role to what he calls “corporations” — business or trade associations, but also local communities and towns — in the free, rational state. The purpose of these corporations is twofold: first, to render economic activity cooperative and “ethical”, and so to prevent the emergence of systematic poverty, and second, to send delegates to the legislature who represent legitimate interests in civil society, rather than just numbers of people. Hegel argues, however, that corporations disappeared or were abolished in England and France and that this led to extreme poverty in England and to the “liberal” idea in France that political authority should derive from the individual will (an idea that in turn sets the “people” permanently against government). I argue that poverty and individualistic “liberalism” remain problems in the twenty-first century, and that a Hegelian solution to these problems would be to reintroduce corporations (or their equivalent) something that Hegel himself advocated in the 1820s. Hegel’s alternative to unrestrained capitalism and liberalism  both of which he thinks undermine true freedom and right  is thus not, as Marx recommends, to abolish the system of free production and exchange altogether, but to imbue citizens with an ethical concern for one another in their economic and political life  an ethical concern that is grounded in corporations, associations and other communities.

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References

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Journal of Philosophical Investigations
Volume 19, Issue 53 - Serial Number 53
Articles
Issue 53, Winter 2026
December 2025
Pages 25-42

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