ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Hegel's treatment of political sentiment in the versions of his Rechtsphilosophie, and then in light of that review of the Philosophy of Right. “Political sentiment" is essentially knowledge, a complex social-political consciousness and self-consciousness, which animates the state as organism and effects its universal end. That Hegel conceived of political sentiment as essentially knowledge seems to have gone largely unnoticed by commentators. Hegel's transition from the social to the explicitely political plane is evidenced, where the institutional correlate of the individuals' political sentiment is identified not as the whole of the constitution, civil and political institutions together, but as the “strictly political" institutions in their own organic interrelationship. The political sentiment of selfconscious individuals is, then, an indispensable co-principle of the state-as-organism. As knowledge, the activity of spirit, it would seem to be the animating principle of the state organism.
