engleski

In Search of a Virtue - Hegel's Early Republicanism

This article problematizes the republican character of Hegel’s early political theory. Hegel's republicanism is inspired by antiquity and opposed to Christianity which is in his opinion the main source of spiritual and political backwardness of his time. Although Hegel does not repudiate the moral essence of Christianity, he considers a number of reasons that led to its distortion, from the original form in which it was presented by Jesus himself to it becoming an official state religion. At the same time, he develops a program of folk religion, which aims at establishing the unity of reason and sensibility, promoting political freedom of the individual and self-activity of people. An historical example of the political order that corresponds to those demands Hegel sees in the antique ethico-political communities. However, Hegel's depiction of antiquity shows the true meaning of his criticism of Christianity and inner limitations of his republican position. What exalts ancient polis in Hegel’s eyes is absence of distinction between morality and politics and complete identification of the individual with the political community. Although he generally recognizes the modern distinction between legality and morality, he does not want to separate those spheres, but searches for their unmediated unity in accordance with the antique ideal. Christianity is thus ultimately contentious as state religion not because it as a religion addresses morality, but because of the private content of its moral teaching. In the same vein, the particularly modern phenomena (individualism, private property, social differentiation) are seen as the result of disintegration of ethical life in antiquity. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the non-modern character of Hegel’s early republicanism and the fact that he does not yet see the inner tension between the opposites he is trying to reconcile (reason and sensibility, morality and politics), the program of the early writings contains ideas that will remain decisive for Hegel’s later political philosophy: conception of man as an integral being, understanding of the freedom from the perspective of intersubjective relations and the notion of the state as ethical totality which represents the actualization of the individual freedom.

Hegel ; Republicanism ; Early Writings

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