What Might Hegel Think Is Crucially Missing From Our Conception of the Goals of Liberalism?

Abstract On all sides we hear and feel that our liberal constitutional democracies confront an ideological or educational challenge: a need to elaborate better the normative grounds and arguments for the superior choice-worthiness of liberal democratic constitutionalism. I suggest how Hegel can provoke us to begin some otherwise missing, imaginative rethinking—helping us to get out of the grooves into which our normative thinking tends to run, and to stultify. My intended audience is not the circle of Hegel scholars, but the whole range of political science students and teachers. I focus on two problematics addressed by Hegel in his late lectures: the less-than-rational political power of majorities voting as “atomized” individuals, and the paradoxical combination of irrationality and weakness characterizing the religious consciousness discernibly emerging within the historically most advanced populations. My subordinate aim is to alert the political science community to an ongoing renaissance in more appreciative study of Hegel's political thought, exemplified by scholars such as Richard Bourke and Elias Buchetmann—due in some measure to (1) the recent publication of the first truly critical edition collating all the records of the lectures on the philosophy of right, of history, and of religion that Hegel delivered in his final years, and (2) the first English translation of the classic work of Franz Rosenzweig, Hegel and the State.