The Interpretation of the Government of Terror by the Phenomenology of the Spirit and Its Position in Hegel’s Political Philosophy

The French Revolution is recognized as the first concrete presence of the modern individual in history, where he stands for the realization of right and liberty against the absolute power of the king and wants absolute freedom. But Hegel, despite much praise for the revolution, deals with Pathology and critiques the meaning of will, freedom, and individuality in them. At the end of the Spirit chapter of Phenomenology, Hegel deals with the French Revolution, especially the era of terror and, in his dialectical space, rises to the battle by imagining the revolution from the absolute self-consciousness, absolute freedom, partial will, and general will, and proves Robespierre’ and the French nation’s abstract and hollow understanding of these terms. Hegel, after this criticism, also implicitly deals with Rousseau's critique as the foregrounding of the French conception of the meaning of these terms. After examining the outcome of absolute freedom and all its determinations to the end, Hegel redefines the fundamental terms in the Terror section and illustrates how public freedom and will are realized in his political thought system whereby penetrating into the absolute power and will, not only does the particular return to the individual again, but also realizes the whole inside him through outer mediators, and in this way, coming up with a very precise definition of the whole exclusive in individual and returning the external reality to the individual in a complex way.