Thursday, July 25, 2019

World Unity 47

Hegel, the German philosopher, looked beyond the political realities of his time to America. He suggested that the full burden of history’s march towards humanity’s freedom could not be born by Europe alone. “America is therefore the land of the future,” he wrote in The Philosophy Of History, “where in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the world’s history will reveal itself.” American political experience agrees completely with Hegel’s notion that only the state can be the form where freedom can and should be exercised. But American experience also proves that the freedom of all individuals can not be exercised fully in a state that possesses full national sovereignty. A fully sovereign state always puts full power and full freedom in the hands of a minority of its citizens. Such power can be reduced and spread around throughout a population to free all citizens only if the political power of a state is not absolute. A state can be “the moral whole” and “that form of reality in which the individual has and enjoys his freedom” without being a fully sovereign state if it can become a member state of a just union of states with a central government  with the legal power clearly stated in a Constitution to force states to support freedom for all their citizens. The American Federal Government has already lightened history’s burden by assuming some of the sovereign power of 50 states but it has not lessened their sovereign power to govern themselves democratically and provide for their citizens a moral whole where they can live freely.
Daniel McNeill 
Read: The United States of the World by Daniel McNeill amazon.com/author/graceisall

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