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The Philosophy of Right (as it is usually called) begins with a discussion of the concept of the free will and demonstrates that the free will can only realize itself in the complicated social context of property rights and relations, contracts, moral commitments, family life, the economy, the legal system, and the polity. A person is not truly free, in other words, unless he or she (and for Hegel, this person is most likely male) is a participant in all of these different aspects of the life of the state.

Hegel also demonstrates that the state itself is subsumed under the higher totality of world history, in which individual states arise, conflict with each other, and eventually fall. The course of history is apparently toward the ever-increasing actualization of freedom; each successive historical epoch corrects certain failures of the earlier ones, but Hegel does not seem to have figured out--and he admits as much--how the modern state can solve the problems of povertyPoverty describes a wide range of circumstances associated with need, hardship and lack of resources, as well as the decision by some—e. ascetics, monks, and nuns—to live simply. For some, poverty is a subjective and comparative term; for others, it is mo and classA social class is, at its most basic, a group of people that have similar social status. The relative importance and definition of membership in a particular class differs greatly over time and between societies, particularly in societies having a legal d division. At the end of his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel leaves open the possibility that history has yet to accomplish certain tasks related to the inner organization of the state. Thus, the thesis of the " end of history," proclaimed by Francis FukuyamaFrancis Fukuyama (born October 27, 1952 in Chicago) is an American political economist of Japanese ancestry. A professor of political economy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, he is best known as the author of the c and his followers, cannot with justification be called Hegelian.