Political Thought

John Stuart Mill Liberty. The general outlook of John Stuart Mill’s social philosophy, and especially his ethics, was determined perhaps as much by personal experience as by intellectual considerations. From birth he was destined by his father to carry on the crusade of the Philosophical Radicals, and certainly the elder Mill never envisaged the possibility … Read more

Modernized Liberalism. The greatest legislative success of Philosophical Radicalism was coeval with the beginning of its recession. The high water mark of its influence was reached in 1846 with the repeal of the Corn Laws and the establishment of free trade as British national policy. But even before that date the social effects of unregulated … Read more

Liberalism and Philosophical Radicalism. The reaction against the philosophy of natural rights which began With Rousseau and Burke and received its first systematic statement, from Hegel by no means superseded the tradition of individualism which formed the main strand of political thinking throughout the Seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the contrary this philosophy produced its … Read more

The Later Significance of Hegelianism. Despite the technicalities in which Hegel cloaked his thoughts and the apparent abstraction of his conclusions, few political theories had a more intimate relationship to political realities. It reflected in a very real way the state of affairs in Germany at the close of the Napoleonic Wars, her bitter national … Read more

Hegel’s theory of the state, as was said above, depended upon the peculiar nature of the relationship existing, as he supposed, between the state and civil society. The relation is at once one of contrast and mutual dependence. The state as Hegel conceived it is no utilitarian institution, engaged in the commonplace business of providing … Read more

Hegel Freedom and Authority. Hegel’s critique of individualism was directed against two different conceptions. In the first place he identified individualism with the provincialism and particular-ism which had prevented Germany from achieving modern national statehood. This national trait he attributed largely to the influence of Luther, who had made Christian liberty a mystical independence of … Read more

Individualism and the Theory of the State. The importance of the Philosophy of Right did not depend upon the formal structure of its argument but upon its reference to political realities, a reference which the formalism sometimes made almost surreptitious. It dealt with two subjects of fundamental importance, the relationship between the human individual and … Read more

Dialectic and Historical Necessity.The Philosophy of Right is a book that cannot profitably be summarized. This is true in part because of the technical elaborateness of its logical apparatus but chiefly because, from any empirical point of view, it is fundamentally ill-arranged. This was not due to confusion or carelessness on Hegel’s part but precisely … Read more

The Historical Method of Dialectic & Nationalism. The philosophy of Hegel aimed at nothing less than a complete reconstruction of modern thought. Political issues and ideas were an important but still only a secondary factor in it as compared with religion and metaphysics. In a broad sense Hegel’s problem was on a that had been … Read more

Convention and Tradition: Hume and Burke. The philosophy of Rousseau attacked only one limited segment of the system of natural law, the artificiality of seeing in society merely an agent to secure individual goods and in human nature merely a capacity to calculate advantages. Against this he set a single counter proposition, that the core … Read more