The Roman conception reduces man to a single figure, to a unit and an atom. Man on this definition regards all others as a problem and a challenge. He assumes that he has to free himself from them. He can never finish this work, for it puts him against the whole world, gives him nothing in common with anyone else, undermines all attempts at comradeship. Kant is the idol and the god of the man who wants to be modern and so represents the modern way of being human. Hegel saw that this was what Kant had done, and that it made the problem acute. The individual could not accept any external restraint on himself, and so was at war with the whole world. The individual could not concede that the public world could offer him anything or demand anything from him. The individual could concede anything to our common life. For the individual, there could be no common well-being. Hegel’s response was to decide that the state is the same thing as the commonwealth. The state is the single thing that stands beyond the reach of the individual. The state is the whole form of our social life. It is the Collective, the Whole. Kant has dissolved the whole world of human intercourse into the individual. Hegel has dissolved the whole world of human intercourse into the state. The state is the only true individual. Between them, they have turned the state into an idol and a god. On this basis we have no defence against the unhappy people who want to draw all power into their own hands. Their only achievement is to turn our common life into a totalitarian state. They want to reduce all our freedom to the libertinism of sexual permissiveness. Our liberty is the liberty to swap partners and make every relationship interchangeable. The state does not want us to form any permanent attachments, and alternative focuses for our loyalty, except with itself. On this basis, the state is the one true individual, and we are all merely fragments of it.
Modernity is idolatry dear friends
