Hegel’s State

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 8 reconstructs Hegel’s theory of the state. Of crucial importance to the structure of Hegel’s state is understanding the way that its pattern is essentially that of the estates—and thus the way Hegel’s institutional design of the state is a self-conscious attempt to bridge the gap between state and society. Because the very notion of the estates sounds as archaic and idiosyncratic to us now as does Kant’s thing-like right to persons, the first section of this chapter goes into some detail regarding the context and function of Hegel’s theory of the estates. That chapter argues that for Hegel, the estates are social preconditions for legal and political practices, forms of political participation in their own right, and conditions of possibility of moderate government (three functions also attributed to the estates by Montesquieu).