Sorry: I didn't notice that the "this" was a link. I don't know what you find problematic about the German concept of the nation of the time. I don't know exactly what you mean by that, but I skimmed through the Fichte text, and didn't find anything especially offensive. (Maybe I missed something.) As I'm sure you know, "Germany" at the time consisted of many states, most of them small, and as the intro to that text says, Fichte wrote that piece in response to the French occupation. Intellectuals of the time were trying to develop a nationalist consciousness, and in the revolutions of 1948 that was combined with a yearning for democracy. I am not going to defend Fichte in general, however: I believe that Hegel criticized him for advocating a police state.

It is a relief to me that you do not say anything unreasonable about Hegel. (Thus, my fear that you were infuenced by Popper and/or Hayek in this regard was evidently mistaken.) Now, to understand the passages you quoted, you have to realize that Hegel had a social, as opposed to individualistic, concept of freedom. That means that it contains the liberal concept of freedom (absence of coersion by state or church etc.) but adds on further requirements. This is where reason comes in. (Liberalism is unable to articulate the notion of freedom I discussed in my original post by the way, no better than Islam can, because it rejects the concept of reason, starting with Hume. Remember his "Reason is and always must be the slave of the passions"?) To be free, I must know that the institutions of the society I live in are rational. This is an extremely powerful idea. For one thing, if you find the institutions aren't rational, then they must be made rational. (After Hegel's death, there was a split into the Left and the Right Hegelians; the Left Hegelians, of whom Marx was one, picked up this thought. The Right Hegelians simply assumed society was rational, so that the problem was simply to demonstrate this. Critical theory (of the Frankfurt School type) derives from this idea, too.) The purpose of The Philosophy of Right is to show that the state is rational.

Notice by the way that by Hegel's notion of freedom, Americans are not free: and it is not just because we have an unelected president. It is because the American state is not rational. It is not rational because the Constitution is designed in such a way that states with small populations are disproportionately represented in the Senate and Electoral College. Since sparsely populated states are more rural, and rural areas are more conservative, that means that a conservative minority is able to block legislation desired by a progressive majority. Thus, the will of the American people is constantly and repeatedly blocked: a people that lives under such conditions is not free. But by the liberal notion of freedom, they are. Thus, Hegel's notion of freedom turns out to be more left-wing than the liberal one.

I think you know by now what I will say in response to Hegel's being in favor of monarchy and against democracy. In the Preface, Hegel states that any philosophy reflects its time. The state of the early 19th century is an absolutist state; the state of the 20th century is a democratic state. (Since the British, unlike the Continental Europeans, did not go through a period of absolutism, it appears that the English-speaking world wants to have its experience with absolutism in the 21st century.) I don't know if Hegel really privately was against democracy, but if he advocated it in print, he would have gotten into trouble (or the book wouldn't have passed the censors). When it came to disputes between reformers and proponents of the status quo in Prussia, Hegel was always on the side of the reformers.

A bomb, H bomb, Minuteman / The names get more attractive / The decisions are made by NATO / The press call it British opinion -- The Three Johns