Republikanizam i liberalizam u svjetlu Hegelove znanosti o državi
Republicanism and liberalism in the light of Hegel’s science of the state

Summary/Abstract: The first part of the text presents the republican position of young Hegel. This position is developed primarily through a divergence from Christianity, which is, in Hegel’s judgment, the spiritual pillar of political despotism and the main cause of German spiritual, social and political backwardness. According to Hegel, the main reason for the fatal influence of Christianity is its private character, the fact that it teaches man to despise this earthly life, tells him that he is unable to achieve moral perfection through his own efforts and turns him into an object of a transcendental power. In opposition to Christianity, Hegel puts forward the Greek popular religions, i.e. the antique republican orders as the only orders adequate to man’s freedom, pointing them out also as models for his own time. The second part of the text shows how Hegel’s giving up on his youthful republican-democratic ideals and his adherence to hereditary monarchy is a consequence of the appearance of the liberal moment in his political philosophy. Through acceptance of subjectivity as the supreme principle of the new age, Hegel realizes that a return to the substantial ethical unity of the Greek polis is impossible. At the same time, he sees in the constitutional monarchy of the hereditary type the only order adequate to modern conditions. Namely it preserves the autonomy of non-political spheres in the state, while simultaneously – in the monarch who is not dependent on the will of those subject to his power – the state unity is guaranteed as opposed to civil society as a space of interest plurality and socio-economic differences. Finally, the author strives to demonstrate how, in spite of Hegel’s obvious opting for hereditary monarchy and rejection of the republic, his mature political philosophy also encompasses a republican dimension. This has to do with a contradiction between the republican form and the monarchic contents of the political state. Namely the latter is not (only) a machinery of power which serves as a counterbalance to civil society, but is defined as the sphere of true political community. It is however not shaped through the activity of individuals; their political subjectivity is embodied in the hereditary monarch. This contradiction, i.e. the republican essence of the political state, leads to the conclusion that political emancipation can be conceived as a natural and necessary consequence of civil emancipation also in the conceptual field of The Philosophy of Right.

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