EVOLUTION OF THE IDEAS OF LAW AND FREEDOM: FROM THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT TO GERMAN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

The article examines the philosophical and legal ideas of the European Enlightenment and their impact on the development of concepts of law, freedom, and the state, as well as on the subsequent evolution of German classical philosophy. Special attention is given to the views of Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau as key representatives of the Enlightenment, whose ideas of individual liberty, the social contract, and the separation of powers laid the foundation for the later emergence of the rule-of-law state. A particular focus is placed on the philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel, who, as leading figures of German classical philosophy, critically reinterpreted and systematized the intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment.

The object of the study is the body of philosophical and legal doctrines developed by European thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while the subject is their influence on modern understandings of law, legality, and statehood. The aim of the article is to identify the key principles of Enlightenment legal thought and to trace their conceptual transformation within German classical philosophy. The novelty of the research lies in its comprehensive comparative analysis of these two intellectual traditions—the Enlightenment and German classicism—and in demonstrating their joint contribution to the development of the idea of the rule-of-law state.