As with Plato, Hegel taught that the key to human happiness was belonging to an entity larger than ourselves. For Hegel and the Hegelian, the desire of each person to lead his or her life as he or she pleases—the Lockean individual of the Enlightenment—was as morally absurd as it was physically impossible. We are all inevitably parts of larger and larger wholes, Hegel explained, both organically (the individual and his family belong to a village or town; that local community is part of the nation; and so on) and over time, as all things become integrated into the ultimate reality of the
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