Was George Hegel a Liberal Authoritarian

Is it fair to call Hegel an ‘authoritarian liberal'?

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is one of the most influential and most difficult political theorists in the history of western thought. This is one of the first points that is realised when researching his works and readings. His name is invoked by many philosophers that followed him yet not often truly understood. This can often be put down to the different way his political theory was perceived by the reader. Even the supporters of Hegels thought were directly split using his thoughts and ideas to argue for both sides of the political spectrum. In the following piece of research I intend to look into whether it is possible to tag Georg Hegel and his readings with a label or whether the complications often spoken about make this impossible to be the case.

A key component of liberal ideas are that of freedom and liberty itself and Hegel wrote on freedom in length. Hegel understood freedom as a variant of what Isiaah Berlin spoke of as ‘positive freedom'. This was the idea that freedom could not exist in the ‘absence of obstacles and impediments' but it existed in the ‘presence of a certain kind of relationship or connection between the agent and his activity' Hegel called this ‘self-determining'. Hegel spoke of freedom as ‘being with oneself in another, I cannot become free by avoiding otherness, by refusing to commit myself to any activity or relationship with others. But even if I do engage with otherness in some way, it does not follow that I am necessarily free. I must be ‘with myself' in the action or relationship in which I engage: it must be an expression of my self-determination'. Hegel talks here that it must be the person; one's self at all times making the decision to do something with others or by oneself for the person to be in a position of freedom. Though a rather complicated way of putting the point across Hegel here shows his liberal tendencies, classic liberalism broadly speaking emphasises