"It will be seen that Hegel claims for the State much the same position that Saint Augustine and his Catholic successors claimed for the Church. There are, however, two respects in which the Catholic claim is more reasonable than Hegel's. In the first place, the Church is not a chance geographical association, but a body united by a common creed, believed by its members to be of supreme importance; it is thus in its very essence the embodiment of what Hegel calls the "Idea." In the second place, there is only one Catholic Church, whereas there are many States. When each State, in relation to its subjects, is made as absolute as Hegel makes it, there is difficulty in finding any philosophical principle by which to regulate the relations between different States. In fact, at this point Hegel abandons his philosophical talk, falling back on the state of nature and Hobbes's war of all against all."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
p. 740.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A_History_of_Western_Philosophy
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
A History of Western Philosophy
359 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by A History of Western Philosophy →
Related Quotes
"Heraclitus himself, for all his belief in change, allowed something everlasting. The conception of eternity (as oppos…"
"Passing from that small to the large, astronomy no longer allows us to regard the heavenly bodies as everlasting."
"A dose of disaster is likely to bring men's hopes back to their older super-terrestrial forms: if life on earth is di…"
"He [Anaxagoras] rejected necessity and chance as giving the origins of things; nevertheless there was no "Providence"…"
"Science, like philosophy, has sought to escape from the doctrine of perpetual flux by finding some permanent substrat…"
"Nothing daunted, the physicists invented new and smaller units, called electrons and protons, out of which atoms were…"
"The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of instincts leading men to philosophy. It is derived, no do…"
"The cheerfulness of the nineteenth century turned men against these static conceptions, and modern liberal theology b…"
"Philosophically inclined mystics, unable to deny that whatever is in time is transitory, have invented a conception o…"
"The doctrine of perpetual flux, as taught by Heraclitus, is painful, and science, as we have seen, can do nothing to …"