6 - Common Welfare and Universal Will in Hegel's Philosophy of Right

Summary

In the history of political ideas concerning the proper end and purpose of the state, philosophers have sought and discovered various ways of legitimating the political power that human beings exercise over each other. But there are essentially two fundamental types of approach. Either the state (qua institution) is interpreted as an administrator of the welfare of its citizens, the preservation and promotion of which is also supposed to guarantee the properly understood and long-term welfare of these citizens, or the state is interpreted as that condition of society where the universal will of the political citizens governs the latter. On this view, the universal will is conceptualized as the only possible source of positive law because it is only through its deliverances (as laws) that the rights of those subjected to it can be upheld. According to this second type of approach (for which Rousseau and Kant are representative), the purpose of the state lies in the actualization of the rule of the universal will, that is, of right. According to the first type of approach (for which Plato and Aristotle are representative), the purpose of the state lies in the realization of “the good life” of its citizens. One can understand the Hegelian conception of the state as an attempt to combine and unify both these ideas of the state that derive from the Enlightenment and from classical antiquity respectively.