Modernity is a very complex term, which needs great precision in the definition of its meaning. My point is that Hegel plays a major role in the transformation of modernity in post-Enlightment, but he IS also working with very traditional concepts like Stände, Polizei and so on. This represents an objective limit of his science of government, which cannot be intended as a persistent model for the democratic State-building in the 19th and 20th cen-tury. From a philosophical point of view however his idea of sovereignity and representation could be useful for us today in order to imagine a new idea of political obligation. For doing so, we need an extreme effort to elaborate and achieve a new standard of modernity, perhaps no longer based on the liberal items of individualism, representation and formal constitution. We need to discover a new measure for men and women which can coexist with the growing reality of globalization and human interchange. We can of course call it federalism, as a combination of different measures in private and public life, not only as a rule of law but with the sociological implications put forward for instance by Emile Durkheim and Léon Duguit. An answer could possibly come from a reinterpretation of a political structure that also Hegel had known very well: administration, toward an administrative federalism
