To what extent, if at all, might hegel be described as a communitarian - Essay Example

Undoubtedly, he is one of the greatest photospheres the world has ever seen and he has been credited with many achievements of which the most prominent one is the addition of a historical perspective to philosophy. He also was the first philosopher to understand the importance of ‘the other’ in relation to fully understanding the self. However, it is his writings on civil society, individualism and government which have to be discussed in order to understand if he was a communitarian and if he was, to what extent he agreed with the idea of being a communitarian.

Of course to understand Hegel as a communitarian we must first discuss what being a communitarian is about and what communitarianism entails. Fundamentally, communitarianism is a set of connected philosophical ideas which started to take form as a system in the modernist era as an opposing force to the ideals of radical individualism (Chong, 2006). It advocates the idea of having a civil society which works as a unit where the community takes precedence over the individual (Wikipedia, 2006). Communitarianism is not directly opposed to the concepts of social liberalism or social democracy since the focus of the philosophy remains on the priority in decision making which is given to the community rather than the individual (Franco, 1997).

However, as described by Franco (1997) it remains very difficult to place Hegel as a communitarian if we only use labels and not understand what Hegel was trying to get across to us. Franco further suggests that: “Hegel provides us with a ‘middle ground’ between deontological liberalism and contemporary communitarianism. Like the modern communitarians, he is critical of the individualistic and historical conceptions of rights underlying the liberal polity, but like many liberals in both his day and ours, he is skeptical of any attempt to return to some form of democratic participatory gemeinschaft based upon immediate face-to-face relations (Franco, 1997,