ABSTRACT
Social philosophy must primarily concern itself with those phenomena that can be interpreted only in the context of the social existence of humans, such as the state, law, economy, religion: in short, with all of the material and spiritual culture of humanity as such. Social philosophy, thus understood, became in the history of classical German Idealism the decisive philosophical task. Its most brilliant achievements are in turn the most powerful aspects of Hegel's system. All of the projects of contemporary social philosophy seem to provide individual human beings with access into a supra-personal sphere that is more invested with being, more meaningful, more substantial than their own existence. Social philosophy appears to be part of the philosophical and religious efforts to plant the hopeless individual existence back into the womb, or to put it, in Sombart's term, in the "golden ground" of meaningful totalities.
