March 14, 2006
A review of a book of critical essays on Hegel's conception of ethical life ---as the ongoing living practices of an actual ethical community--in The Philosophy of Right. Ethical life is crucial in Hegel's political philosophy, as this category mediates between between civil society 's particular interests and the state 's universality. It is the category of ethical life that makes sense of the initial steps amongst those on the left of ALP taking the first steps beyond life lived within the market economy to link to concerns about mutuality, community, or social solidarity.
Hegel's distinction between civil society and the state evokes, and reworks, the civic republican themes of the primacy of the political, the primacy of the public to the private and the primacy of the citizen to the bourgeois; a reworking based on the human freedom. and the shift from the subjective freedom in civil society to the substantive freedom of the state. It is a distinction displaced by liberalism, it remains content with the subjective freedom within the boundaries of civil society.
Liberalism makes the freedom of the individual in civil society paramount; hence it is higher than the bonding or community in the family or the state. The family and the state are seen to constrain individual freedom in the name of the good of the family as a unit, or the common good of citizens in the state.
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