Over time, however, the concept of the ethical state has taken on a different composition and has come to assume a totalitarian dimension in which good and evil are the result of imposition independent of what should be the contract of basis between state and citizen. Thomas Hobbes is considered the father of modern political philosophy with his distancing from classical world thinking on sociality and human politics; Hobbes inaugurates the contractualist method where men will find common rules by sacrificing part of their freedom in exchange for the protection and respect of the established rules and will refer to a single great institutional representative whom he defines as the Leviathan; in this sense, Hobbes is defined as the main theorist of the absolute state or absolutism in which the sovereign is considered to be above universal law.

After Hobbes, Hegel (illustration), the idealist philosopher, defines the State as an ethical substance conscious of itself; the state is the highest expression of ethics, a theory that contrasts sharply with the natural law and contractualism of modern political philosophy. The state, asserts Hegel, is the source of freedom and of the ethical norm for the individual, it is the supreme end and the absolute arbiter of good and evil.

However, the Hegelian state is not a true absolutist and totalitarian state, but a living organic unity which must adapt to the natural changing circumstances of human society. For Hegel, the ethical state is the last moment of the subjective and objective mind, Hegel affirms that freedom is and remains at all times the historical condition of philosophy since ancient Greece. For Hegel, a combination of the common good and the personal good must be found in the state within the limits due to the interaction of individuals. Hegel's position was later countered by the critique of Karl Popper, who defined the ethical state as a closed society, as opposed to the rule of law proper to an open society.

The ethical state theory was then taken up in the XNUMXth century to explain fascist and communist states, which were in fact totalitarian states in which individual liberties were repressed according to the higher rules of Hobbes' "Leviathan".

The successive democratic constitutions which have governed the rule of law until the last century base their existence on a fragile balance between rights and freedom, between the general interest and the protection of minorities which opposes the single thought.

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