Research: A Critique of Modern Political Concepts. A Reworking of the Hegelian VerfassungThe Hegelian Philosophy of Right gives us a broad concept of „right“ (Recht) that is not limited to the sphere of the legal and the political, but also includes the social dimension. Such a rich conception of right shows the inadequacy of the modern political categories which presuppose the distinction between the public side of the legal-political institutions and the private side of the civil society. The operation developed by Hegel in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right can thus be interpreted as a systematic exposition of the modern political science born with the natural law theory and, at the same time, its immanent and radical critique, aimed at overcoming its abstract and intellectualistic elements. The comparison with Hegel‘s reflection gives us the paradigm for a critical theory of the modern political concepts that distances itself as much from those elaborations based exclusively on the social sciences as from those that presuppose an autonomy of the legal-political disciplines. The former, in fact, often fail to show the political nature of the specialisations of the modern societies. The latter, on the other hand, tend to relegate society to the dimension of the private, separated from the public sphere, thought in terms of empty formalism and proceduralism, or in terms of a theological-political and 'quasi-metaphysical' construction.
keywords
Critical Theory of Society; Critique of Politics; Hegel; History of Concepts; Philosophy of Right; Dialectics