ABSTRACT
In the countries of Eastern Europe, the history of the revolutions of 1989 are being reinterpreted through what are essentially "whiggish" lenses which present the intellectuals as the major dramatis personae who gradually mobilized society against a totalitarian State under the rather abstract banner of "civil society." In Hegel's writings it becomes clear that the individual need for recognition is attained through the recognition of property. Indeed, for Hegel property in the realm of civil society takes the place of love in the realm of the family. Indeed in the writings of Adam Smith himself the public nature of individual validation gives way to a much more private locus of virtue and ethical realization. The development of early Christianity saw, after all, the construction of a new "moral community" of believers differentiated from the societies in which they lived and united by bonds of exclusive communal fellowship.
