Hegel has been accused of conservatism or worse. The most common basis for this charge is Hegel's claim that what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational. This claim has been taken as a blanket endorsement of the status quo, but in the paragraph headed by this statement, Hegel distinguished between phenomena that embody a rational structure and those that do not. The mere fact that a state exists, in Hegel's view, does not entail that it is either rational or, in Hegel's technical sense, "actual." Hegel's distinction between existence and actuality is tied to his metaphysics, according to which the universe's rational structure progressively actualizes itself. In the political sphere, this means that social institutions aspire and tend to achieve a fundamentally rational form. 

Hegel has also been taken as a conservative because he espouses an organic conception of individuals and society. Most organic theories at the time, such as Burke's, were conservative. Organicism opposes atomistic individualism by holding that people do not enter society fully formed in order to satisfy their pre- or non-social aims and interests. According to organic views, individuals are formed, together with their needs, aims, and ways of thinking, within the social group to which they belong. An organic view becomes specifically conservative if it additionally holds that individuals have no conception of themselves apart from their group, that individuals cannot escape their group because it has formed their identities and needs, that individuals thus are incapable of evaluating society by pre- or non-social standards, and that because individuals are formed by their society's cultural traditions and social and political institutions, their society also suits them.

However, it is crucial to understand how he recast the issue. Typically it is supposed that there are two positions on this issue. Either individuals are more fundamental than or are in principle independent of society, or vice versa: society is more basic than or "prior to" human individuals. Hegel realized that these two options form a false dichotomy. Briefly, Hegel held that individuals are fundamentally social practitioners. Everything one does, says, or thinks is formed in the context of social practices that provide material and conceptual resources, objects of desire, skills, procedures, and the like. No one acts on the general, merely biological needs for food, safety, companionship, or sex; and no one seeks food, safety, companionship, or sex in general. Rather, one acts on much more specific needs for much more specific kinds of objects that fulfill those needs, and one acts to achieve one's aims in quite specific ways; one's society conditions one's ends because it provides specific objects that meet those ends, and it specifies procedures for obtaining them. 


Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-philosophy-channel--4573240/support.

"Dare to use your own reason" - Immanuel Kant