ABSTRACT
This chapter considers what Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel means by the “necessity” of constitutional monarchy. Hegel uses “necessity” in two distinct but integrally related ways. One refers to the “objective” processes of the natural and human worlds which would make many things happen even if people had never chosen deliberately to shape events, i.e. “external necessity”. ‘Historical necessity’ is taken more accurately to express the ‘human” necessity which was implicitly present in the “human laws” discussed in the above passage. The chapter argues that Hegel’s “inner necessity” can be construed as another name for ‘philosophical necessity’. It sought also to elucidate the necessity of the “contrarieties” which together are Reason’s life. The conception of the inner necessity of Reason secures the theoretical condition for our “liberation”. While Hegel does not always explicitly use the two distinguishing adjectives, external and inner, the contexts usually make the two meanings clear.
