Prilog genealogiji Hegelova poimanja građanskog društva
Contribution to the Genealogy of Hegel's Conception of Civil Society

Summary/Abstract: The starting point in this article is Hegel’s mature understanding of civil society as the birthplace of the modern meaning of the concept. Since this understanding is primarily the consequence of Hegel’s coming to terms with political economy, the author problematizes Hegel’s first attempt at incorporating modern economic topics into ethical totality in the 1802 Article on Natural Law. It is shown how the fundamental paradox of the first variety of Hegel’s science of the state is his effort to renew the classical natural law framework in circumstances of modern economic and political life. It is for this reason that Hegel fails to see the full extent of the emancipatory potential and the specifically modern character of the system of economic and private-legal interdependence of individuals, thus, on the one hand, interpreting these as the consequence of the disintegration of antique ethical life while, on the other hand, in the construction of ethical totality, placing its members in the estate of the unfree. It is precisely due to this historical point of origin of these systems and the ways they incorporate into ethical totality that the article on natural law, concludes the author, cannot be seen as the place where Hegel finally formulated his theory of civil society.

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