Notes from Ritter on Hegel and the French Revolution

Ritter argues that in Philosophy of Right Hegel deals with civil society as such for the first time. Hegel is inspired by reading English political economy for which he had enormous respect: he believed that writers like Adam Smith inductively demonstrated the philosophical and generalized principles that regulate the "mass of accidents" that constitute society. In effect, for Hegel, Smith is to civil society what Kepler was to astronomy. (70) And the way in which political economy can aid philosophy becomes especially apparent in Hegel's remarks on globalisation and the sea (paras 243-246 of Philosophy of Right; in the footnote Ritter also refers admiringly to Carl Schmitt's Der Nomos der Erde (1950)).
More generally, according to Ritter, 77ff , Hegel argues that the civil society which produces the modern opposition between enlightenment (objectivity) and romanticism (subjectivity) also produces the pre-conditions for man as such to emerge out of a system designed to satisfy mere needs, ie. out of civil considerations of individual and communal welfare. Out of the history of civil society, "abstract" man appears: a being who is not merely a Jew, Catholic, German, Italian etc. And this abstract man does not belong to history: he has been emancipated from it. But this abstract man is merely abstract, he exists in a certain sense nowhere.
Which is why Hegel cannot think of the division between romanticism and enlightened rationality as surpassable. Ritter 78, “Existing reason reveals itself in the present not in the inner preservation of subjectivity in its antithetical relation to social and political revolution, but in the dichotomy making it possible.” This means that there is also a ‘continuance of the substantial order of tradition within the realm of the modern world.” (78) In my own words: it seems to be the case that the human liberation which evolves mechanically from out of civil society/political economy, requires an appeal to, as well as the continuation of, the history of philosophy and of the religious passions (i.e. longing for transcendence) to be recognised as liberation.
But, more practically, philosophy also “has the methodological task of validating the historical substance of modern society, and of grasping in their concept those determinations which cannot be won from their abstract natural and emancipatory principle, without connection to the historical substance.” (80-1). Philosophy in other words judges what is emergent and what is residual
Furthermore a revolutionary materialism comes into existence in modernity that refuses to recognise the importance of the history of tradition to liberation. It is dangerous both in its social power and in its blindness to the fact that human liberation sublates rather than overcomes the dichotomy between the tradition of the (religious) spirit and welfarism (or the dynamics of needful man in civil society.)