O idealismo prático e o terror : a revolução francesa aos olhos de G. W. F. Hegel

Abstract

The work shows the Hegelian interpretation on French Revolution according to Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of History, even with no exhaustive approach. The Hegel’ analysis on French Revolution is exposed according to the logic and historic subject in each book, it is, the conscience and the peoples, respectively. The concepts of abstraction and terror both which delimitate the practical reach of French Revolution are taken in Hegel’s account as consequences of an atomist notion of freedom. While the instability of French constitution and republic illustrates the abstraction (pure negativity), the banality of death illustrates the terror. The conscience absolutely free is able to make nothing but laws and mere state acts. In Philosophy of History the abstraction, with better historical limits, culminates considering the liberalism as a principle which oversize particular interests. There is over the end of Philosophy of History the spectrum of an uncertain future marked by the progress of Catholicism and liberalism. Since Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of History the Philosophy of Right delineates the categories which complete the concept of accomplished freedom in both senses individual and political. Thus, the book postulates a unification of individual as much as of civil society into the State. Such postulation implies an integration in a same individual the bourgeois and citoyen. It implies as well the control of the civil society’s excesses. So become clear the fundamental difference between the Hegelian concept of political freedom and the French Revolution’s one (democracy and elective republic). In concluding the work points out possible problems of the Hegelian interpretation of the French Revolution, mainly about the integrity of Hegelian analysis.