O devir-putrefato do Estado: Hegel e a crítica à democracia

In this work, we investigate the antinomies present in the Hegelian concept of the State and, on that ground, we elaborate an immanent critique of the Philosophy of Law, drawing on Frank Ruda's work on the rabble. We argue that the Hegelian State is characterized by a sui generis organicism in which any element capable of calling into question the process of totalization is assimilated to the inorganic. This is the case of the people in democratic systems, which is viewed as an inorganic force that dissolves the movement of the whole into a multitude of isolated atoms. This is precisely the presupposition of the Hegelian argument in favour of excluding (direct) democracy as a viable alternative to the representative system advocated in his book.