ABSTRACT
The goal of the philosopher's dialectic is to bring out, make explicit, the objective dialectic or dynamics of the structure being studied. Since philosophers' ideas and everyone else's too, come out of their own culture and its past, they necessarily think in terms that are relevant to their own time and its problems. Form is the rational, the structural relations of the 1820 state, as described in the philosopher's dialectic; content is the actual, how those institutions work in practice. The principle of maximizing satisfaction of desire assumes that desires are good; other philosophers have argued that natural desires are evil and have urged different principles. Consequently the state is the beginning point of the philosopher's empirical investigations. For Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel the Federalist "reason" was simply a philosophical expression of bourgeois individualism. One could go a step beyond Hegel by observing that an actual, effective political state would require an approximate balance between individuality and community.
