The State and Public Opinion in Hegel

Abstract

The paper delineates Hegel’s conceptualisation of the State and public opinion as presented mainly in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Hegel thinks the State by relying on the relation of the ethical substance and subject, more specifically, by conceptualizing it as an independent self-conscious place of the universal that, in modernity, essentially proceeds in the realm of knowledge and integrates the right of the subjective particularity. The latter gains its direct political expression in public opinion, which, for Hegel, is consequently a constitutive element of legislative power. But since public opinion is intrinsically particular and arbitrary, the fundamental problem of the actual modern state is, it is argued, how to institute a system of mediation that would, perhaps using the concept of universal work, allow the principle of the civil society to be transcended and public opinion to be transformed into public knowledge.