Politics, Government and the State 59
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
German philosopher. Hegel was the founder of modern idealism and
developed the notion that consciousness and material objects are in fact
unified. In Phenomenology of Spirit ([1807] 1977), he sought to develop a
rational system that would substitute for traditional Christianity by
interpreting the entire process of human history, and indeed the universe
itself, in terms of the progress of absolute Mind towards self-realisation. In
his view, history is, in essence, a march of the human spirit towards a
determinant end-point.
Hegel’s principal political work, Philosophy of Right ([1821] 1942),
advanced an organic theory of the state that portrayed it as the highest
expression of human freedom. He identified three ‘moments’ of social
existence: the family, civil society and the state. Within the family, he
argued, a ‘particular altruism’ operates, encouraging people to set aside their
own interests for the good of their relatives. He viewed civil society as a
sphere of ‘universal egoism’ in which individuals place their own interests
before those of others. However, he held that the state is an ethical
community underpinned by mutual sympathy, and is thus characterised by
‘universal altruism’. This stance was reflected in Hegel’s admiration for the
Prussian state of his day, and helped to convert liberal thinkers to the cause
of state intervention. Hegel’s philosophy also had considerable impact upon
Marx (see p. 371) and other so-called ‘young Hegelians’.
the individual into the community, obliterating any trace of individual
identity, could be achieved only through the ‘politicization’ of every aspect
of social existence, literally the abolition of ‘the private’.
Power and resources
Each of the earlier two conceptions of politics view it as intrinsically
related to a particular set of institutions or social sphere, in the first place
the machinery of government and, second, the arena of public life. By
contrast, the third and most radical definition of politics regards it as a
distinctive form of social activity, but one that pervades every corner of
human existence. As Adrian Leftwich insists in What is Politics? (1984):
‘politics is at the heart of all collective social activity, formal and informal,
public and private, in all human groups, institutions and societies’. In the
view of the German political and legal theorist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985),
politics reflects an immutable reality of human existence: the distinction
between friend and enemy. In most accounts, this notion of ‘the political’ is
linked to the production, distribution and use of resources in the course of