ABSTRACT
Liberalism, the movement that appeared triumphant at the end of the wars of the French Revolution, had its counterpoint in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a thinker whose influence beyond his lifetime was incalculable. Hegel, however, viewed the state as the entity that overcame the conflicts of civil society by synthesizing objective social reality with the individual. Hegel's political thought must also be viewed as part of the early nineteenth-century European—and particularly German—revulsion against Napoleon's imperialism and as favoring national liberty—two concepts that, ironically, coexisted uneasily within French revolutionary thought. For Hegel, England was an example of a country in which collective life remained strictly limited within the sphere of civil society. In Hegel's political thought, the habits of a people constitute its ethic, which in turn becomes part of a body of public law requiring duties; these duties are thus rooted in the consciousness of a people.
