The Hegelian Right came before the Hegelian Left.
The movement was very much a royalist movement formed in reaction to the American and French revolution.
King George I, King George II, and King George III were jointly kings of Hanover and of England. Frederick the Great was an ally of England ruling over the kingdom of Prussia.
The Founders of the United States had a classical education. They fought for liberty. They saw liberty as self-rule. "Kingdom" meant rule by a king. "Freedom" meant free people who ruled themselves. The US Founders might be called "classical liberal."
The goal of Hegel was to frame the monarchy (the state) as the source of progress and to discredit the classical liberals.
In the Art of War one learns that the way to destroy an enemy is to define the position of the enemy.
To discredit the classical liberals, Hegel undertook an intense study of the master/slave relation and the paradoxes of freedom. The result of this was a new paradoxical understanding of freedom. The paradoxes of freedom were immediately relevant in the newly formed US because the United States had inherited slavery and couldn't figure out how to get rid of it.
Closer to Germany, the French Revolution was an ugly affair in which the revolutionaries sought to impose social change. It broke down into factions with a distinct left and right. It included genocide followed by the rise of Emperor Napoleon.
Hegel adored Napoleon.
Living in a world of conflict, Hegel applied oppositional dialectics to create a philosophy of history in which the world spirit evolved through conflicts on the world stage.
The Hegelian Left came a generation later when Feuerbach showed how to radical anti-religion to consolidate power. Marx followed with a philosophy centered on class conflict. The Hegelian left took Hegel's paradoxical definition of "liberalism" and ran with.
The Modern Liberal seeks freedom in slavery. The left holds that freedom reaches its highest level when the state is absolute. The enemy of the Hegelian Left is the Hegelian Right.
The tell tale sings of the Hegelian Conservative is that the philosophy is based on a paradoxical definition of liberalism.
When you watch Fox News and the Main Stream Media, you will notice that the reporters present news as conflict. They push a paradoxical view of "liberalism" and often spend more time defining the position of their opposition than their own position.
I contend that this new think (oppositional dialectics) is the cause for our systematic loss of liberty.
Conservatives who are dependent on the perverted definition of "liberal" are as much to blame for the lost of our liberty as the Hegelian left which runs with the perverted definition of liberal.
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