In brief: In part – and then in a way that is probably not wanted. Hegel supplies the strongest arguments against constructivism in politics. He supplies at the same time the sharpest sentences written in the nineteenth century against appeals to tradition, the spirit of a people and the wisdom of ancestors.
What speaks for it
First: constitutions are not made. § 273 note treats the question who should make the constitution as senseless – either there is none yet, in which case the concept has to do with a mere „atomistic heap of individuals“, or there is one, in which case „making“ means only changing it, and that only by constitutional means.
In general, however, it is absolutely essential that the constitution, although it has emerged in time, should not be regarded as something made.
Groundlines, § 273 note
Second: institutions carry more than dispositions. Hegel’s whole ethical life is a refusal of the notion that good common life rests on good intentions. And third: the warning in § 258 note against beginning „entirely afresh, from thought alone“ has often been quoted from the conservative side, with some justice.
What speaks against it
Hegel’s best-known sentence against historical justification stands in § 3 note and strikes the conservative figure of argument at its centre:
a legal determination can be shown to be perfectly grounded and consistent based on circumstances and existing legal institutions, and yet be inherently wrongful and irrational.
Groundlines, § 3 note
And he turns the argument round: whoever justifies an institution by the use it once had has shown that today – the circumstances being gone – it „has thereby rather lost its meaning and its right“. His example is the monasteries.
The footnote to § 258 is plainer still. It concerns Carl Ludwig von Haller, the leading thinker of the Restoration, whom Hegel credits with „a complete lack of thought“ and whose enmity towards codes of law he disposes of in a sentence worth knowing by heart:
Hatred of law, of right determined legally, is the shibboleth by which fanaticism, feeble-mindedness, and the hypocrisy of good intentions reveal themselves.
Groundlines, § 258 note, footnote
And then there is the substance itself: Hegel’s state has a written constitution, a division of powers, public court proceedings, juries, freedom of trade, free choice of occupation, freedom of the press and the legal equality of Jews (§ 270 note). In 1820 that was not a conservative programme but a reforming one.
The real gain
Hegel is interesting for conservatives because he has the conservative insight without the conservative comfort. That institutions are older and wiser than the intentions of those who carry them – yes. That it follows one should leave them alone – no. The proving of an order lies for him not in its age but in its bearing the freedom of its members. What does not do that has lost its right, however long it has stood.
Sources. Groundlines § 3 and note, § 211 note, § 258 note with footnote (against Carl Ludwig von Haller), § 270 note, § 273 note (the constitution not as something made), § 298–§ 320. – Preface to the Groundlines. – See also Was Hegel the Prussian state philosopher? – Literature. Joachim Ritter, Hegel und die Französische Revolution, Cologne 1957; Henning Ottmann, Individuum und Gemeinschaft bei Hegel, Berlin 1977; Franz Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat, Munich 1920.