Bruno Ferreira da Rosa

The general subject of this thesis is the analysis of the Hegelian concepts of public representation and public opinion, such as they are appear in Hegel's works between the writing of his German Constitution, in which the philosopher promotes the necessity of a modern system of political representation in contrast with the feudal model based in the "Vertretung", and the Philosophy of Right of 1821. As we aim to show in our thesis, the necessity introduced by Hegel in the German Constitution requires a model of mediation between the social and the political, which the methodological ideas with which Hegel worked in the years immediately prior to the writing of this text couldn't provide. It is only after 1806, with his transition to a philosophy of consciousness, that Hegel can begin to move towards the repatriation of these concepts of political representation and public opinion into his systematic writings, since this transition is accompanied by a change in the Hegelian conceptualization of "corporation spirit" which doesn't clash with the "political state of mind". Concomitantly to this, Hegel advances against the model of liberated political representation from the French Revolution; as he shows us in the chapter "The absolute freedom and the terror" of the Phenomenology of Spirit, the inchoate model of political representation the philosopher has in mind will be an alternative for saving the principles of the Revolution without adopting the model of political representation associated with the representation of the "abstract will of the individuals". The model of political representation that Hegel will develop in his courses on the philosophy of right between 1817 and the appearance of his Philosophy of Right in 1821, when he joins the political debate of the time on the functions of the estates, is born under the umbrella of a conception of estate assemblies as "organs of mediation" between the people and the government, in which a representation of socially organized interests can take place.