That someone, Hegel declared, is the State. Its development as an autonomous actor in history is in fact the next and final stage of freedom beyond commercial society. It smooths out all the problems of capitalism, with its “atomistic principle which insists upon the sway of individual wills” but ends up making men feel powerless.14 What Rousseau and Romantic nationalists had seen in the idea of the Nation, a community shaped by laws, customs, and traditions into “one single being,” or General Will, they can now achieve concretely through the actions of the State. Under its aegis, teams of
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