ABSTRACT

This chapter analyses the general evaluative character of the whole of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophical system within which the model constitution is seen to have its place and from which its political prescriptions can be developed. With regard to the question of a monarch’s role before a rational constitution becomes established, Hegel said that the independent intervention of the monarch is sometimes “required and justified” in order to remove an obstacle to the administration of justice which might be caused by a “clique of officials”. Hegel took “Friedrich II’s “overruling of the lawyers’ arguments in the “Arnold Case” to be an example of such an intervention. Prior is the search for a rational model which may serve as the general prescriptive goal. This model is certainly the primary concern of this work and may have been Hegel’s also.