Between philosophy and state: Hegel’s dialectic of the institutionalization of freedom

Abstract

Hegel considers, in his system of philosophy, different specifications of freedom; he distin­guishes between subjective, objective and absolute freedom. I am interested, in this paper, primarily in the dialectics of objective freedom, which Hegel introduces in his Philosophy of Law, in order to point out the problematics of the historicity of objective freedom, and to argue that the concept of freedom gains the quality of true historicity only at the level of the absolute spirit. This will allow me to open the space, within my argument, for presenting the thesis about the dialectical gap which is present in Hegel’s understanding of the perfection of freedom at two different levels of his system: in the state as attaining the concreteness of freedom in the domain of the objectivity of the spirit, as well as in the apparently apoliti­cal notion of freedom in the sphere of the absolute spirit, that is, in the sphere of concrete thinking, the sphere of philosophy itself. [Project of the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, Grant no. 179049]

Keywords

• Hegel
• freedom
• state
• history
• absolute spirit