ABSTRACT
By the late eighteenth century, Thomas Hobbes's problem—the problem of rescuing man from the self-destructive implications of acting on his own unmediated natural right—had been resolved. Friedrich Hegel's should not be taken to mean that he, himself, did not heartily endorse the French Revolution and welcome its importation into Germany. The French Revolution was, first and foremost, a bourgeois revolution against the feudal system of rights and privileges, many obnoxious residues of which persisted into the eighteenth century throughout all Europe. The dilemma created by making absolute freedom the political objective of a community is that it cannot be realized without resulting in what Hegel called a self-negating "fury of destruction". Ethical existence, the completed unity of rights and welfare in the rational state, must already be present conceptually at the outset and guiding "the dialectic of the concept" if the transition is to be possible.
