Dialectics and Democracy in Hegel's "Elements of the Philosophy of Right": Toward an Analysis of Political Logics in American Politics

Book excerpt: The greater part of this dissertation provides a textual analysis of Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right in terms of two dialectics of institutional phenomenology of freedom in the modern constitutional nation-state. These two dialectics together structure politics as the intermediary action that holds together the distinct institutions of state and civil society through a process of education in individual self-consciousness that is necessary for the informed action that unifies modern ethics altogether as political spirit. In this sense Hegel's text served as an argument for modern political institutions in post-Napoleonic Germany, but in another sense the text reveals Hegel's awareness of the dangers of modern political institutions as they contain the possibility of democratic revolution, and, as Hegel thought political and religious fanaticism - dangers which he simultaneously tried to deny for the sake of instituting a modern constitution altogether. Following the analysis of Hegel, Marx is interpreted in his "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" to be pointing out the inevitable democratic politics that would result not only from the Hegelian idea of the modern state as a whole, but from the particular institutional politics that are involved with organizing the constitutional nation-state at each intermediary level of political action. In the last chapter Tocqueville's Democracy in America and The Federalist Papers are interpreted as being concerned with the same dialectic analysis and problems as Hegel and Marx, which sets up the conclusion of this dissertation, wherein, it is argued that the problematics of institutionalized democratic political spirit can be seen as animating American political development at key moments of institutional and cultural change (the Progressive era and the Sixties). This argument is advanced by a deeper methodological analysis about the dialectics of political democracy, based on Hegel and Marx, which theoretically organizes different sorts of institutional and political action into 6 different 'logics' - which, it is argued, have acted and interacted in such a way to bring about those changes in American political history.