“For Hegel, by contrast, liberal society is a reciprocal and equal agreement among citizens to mutually recognize each other”

“Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an "end of history": for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.”

“The effect of education on political attitudes is complicated,for democratic society. The self-professed aim of modern educationis to "liberate" people from prejudices and traditional formsof authority. Educated people are said not to obey authorityblindly, but rather learn to think for themselves. Even if thisdoesn't happen on a mass basis, people can be taught to see theirown self-interest more clearly, and over a longer time horizon.Education also makes people demand more of themselves and forthemselves; in other words, they acquire a certain sense of dignitywhich they want to have respected by their fellow citizens and bythe state. In a traditional peasant society, it is possible for a locallandlord (or, for that matter, a communist commissar) to recruitpeasants to kill other peasants and dispossess them of their land.They do so not because it is in their interest, but because they areused to obeying authority. Urban professionals in developed countries, on the other hand, can be recruited to a lot of nuttycauses like liquid diets and marathon running, but they tend notto volunteer for private armies or death squads simply becausesomeone in a uniform tells them to do so”

“but on Hegel, his "idealist" predecessor who was the first philosopher to answer Kant's challenge of writing a Universal History. For Hegel's understanding of the Mechanism that underlies the historical process is incomparably deeper than that of Marx or of any contemporary social scientist. For Hegel, the primary motor of human history is not modern natural science or the ever expanding horizon of desire that powers it, but rather a totally non-economic drive, the struggle for recognition. Hegel's Universal History complements the Mechanism we have just outlined, but gives us a broader understanding of man—"man as man"— that allows us to understand the discontinuities, the wars and sudden eruptions of irrationality out of the calm of economic development, that have characterized actual human history.”

“For capitalism flourishes best in a mobile and egalitarian society”

“For Hegel, freedom was not just a psychological phenomenon, but the essence of what was distinctively human. In this sense, freedom and nature are diametrically opposed. Freedom does not mean the freedom to live in nature or according to nature; rather, freedom begins only where nature ends. Human freedom emerges only when man is able to transcend his natural, animal existence, and to create a new self for himself. The emblematic starting point for this process of self-creation is the struggle to the death for pure prestige.”

“But it is not necessarily the case that liberal democracy is the political system best suited to resolving social conflicts per se. A democracy's ability to peacefully resolve conflicts is greatest when those conflicts arise between socalled "interest groups" that share a larger, pre-existing consensus on the basic values or rules of the game, and when the conflicts are primarily economic in nature. But there are other kinds of non-economic conflicts that are far more intractable, having to do with issues like inherited social status and nationality, that democracy is not particularly good at resolving.”