Hegel's philosophy of history is conventionally regarded as a part of his mature “system of science.” And so it is. What is less frequently understood, however, is that this philosophy grew out of or can at least be understood as an attempt to come to terms with a crisis in the tradition of modern natural right.

Perhaps the most basic and enduring theme in political philosophy is that which concerns the inherent tension between individual values and social values. Indeed, the task of reconciling, in thought, the individual and social is virtually a definition of political philosophy. Of course, in much secondary work, and some primary work as well, this basic task often gets lost in a maze of more particular considerations, including the analysis of moral principles and the elaboration of special institutional arrangements or particular causal patterns. Nonetheless, major theorists, virtually without exception, have recognized that the basic individual values (e.g., freedom, privacy, personal morality) may well be politically undesirable and, similarly, that the requirements of political life (e.g., order, obedience, ethical behavior) may significantly compromise individual goals.

Hegel's Philosophy of Right is the first work to make a doctrine of progress in history conceived as an organized whole into an integral, even culminating, part of a systematic, philosophic political teaching. Certainly Kant and Rousseau, at the least, preceded Hegel in giving history an emphasis soon to be seen as characteristically modern; yet Hegel nevertheless transformed and deepened their rather tentative approaches into something more solid and comprehensive, perhaps also more grandiose, speculative and questionable. In establishing the view that history could be made theoretically intelligible, and an essential element of political philosophy, he produced a concept of historical progress which is free of utopian idealism, distinguishable from theologically inspired precursors, compatible with freedom (indeed, history becomes the story of the realization of freedom), and an alternative to a quite different form of historicism which thought insight into history would justify anti-rationalist realism or subjectivism.

Moses Hess is customarily described as Karl Marx's erstwhile mentor, later colleague and eventual protagonist in the socialist movement, who in his later years surprised most of his friends in publishing in 1862 a proto-Zionist treatise, Rome and Jerusalem. In this book Hess advocated the establishment of a socialist Jewish commonwealth in Palestine as the only way to the solution of the Jewish problem. As both a colleague of Marx and a precursor of Zionism, Hess is in the unique position of being claimed, in various ways, by both the Socialist and Zionist movements.

Jimmy Carter's farewell address deplored the pernicious influence of “single-interest” groups in America. These are said to harm the two-party system, which is already in trouble in any case. Such groups are not interest groups in the classical liberal sense, but are more like unusually narrow mass movements.