Hegel's Dialectics of Politics

Hegel's teachings on the state, law, and society constitute a philosophy of law and were developed by him as the philosophy of the objective spirit. (1) In addition to providing a basis for historically concrete views on political matters, the Hegelian philosophy of law, as an application of dialectics to a specific realm of subject matter in societal, governmental, and political-legal phenomena, contains the logic of that realm of subject matter. The independent meaning of this domain of research transforms logic and gives it politically significant features despite the conscious Hegelian attitude of "logicizing" politics. This is clearly manifested in the political and legal results of Hegel's employment of a conceptual apparatus and theoretical constructs in the dialectical investigation of the objective spirit. Therefore, it is valid to single out two aspects of the political content of Hegel's philosophy of law: (a) the historically concrete political views developed by Hegel in his Philosophy of Right; and (b) the totality of politically meaningful propositions deriving from his application of dialectics to the sphere of politics — which we here call Hegel's dialectics of politics.