Abstract

The dissertation is a reading of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, which seeks to interpret that work against the background of contemporary liberal political theory. I argue that Hegel is a fundamentally political thinker whose idea of rational reconciliation provides an alternative to prevalent liberal notions of legitimacy. Specifically, Hegel does not believe, after the fashion of contemporary liberal philosophers, that the scope of legitimate state action may be delimited by means of some set of extra- or pre-political decision procedures. Further, rational reconciliation of citizens to their social order depends not on normative criteria constructed according to some hypothetical decision procedure, but rather on the degree to which such citizens find the rational content of their wills actualized in the concrete institutions of their social order. Such concrete institutions must have certain features--for example, respect for what Hegel calls "the right of subjectivity"--if the rational demands of modern citizens are to be met, but these features are not absolute constraints on public authority. Some tentative suggestions are made regarding the usefulness of the Philosophy of Right as a source book for a reinvigorated notion of federalism