Hegel and industrial capitalism: poverty and the plebs as remnants of the modern state

Abstract

This article has as purpose the approach about the most important "fissure" of the "Principles of the philosophy of law": the huge increase of poverty within the modern industrial societies. From his gray philosophy, deprived of solutions, Hegel contributes a political philosophy whose logical structure and coherence doesn’t escape respect the negativity’s beat that all historical events contains, describing the reality contradictions just as it is. In this sense, poverty will no longer be seen as mere collateral damage of abundance or as an external intrusion inside civil society and confronted with the State, but as the foundation of the social order. The study of Hegel will lead to getting closer about the reality "fissures" and, especially, the limits of modern rationality, whose abstraction level and remoteness from the reality seems to generate an irrepressible accumulation of residues, impossible to assume by the herself.