 The influence of Rousseau and Hegel is clearly evident here (Sweet 1991). Bosanquet saw in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right a plausible account of the modern state as an “organism” or whole united around a shared understanding of the good. Moreover, like Hegel, he argued that the state, like all other social “institutions”, was best understood as an ethical idea and as existing at the level of consciousness rather than just material reality. Within nation states, Bosanquet held that the authority of the state is absolute, because social life requires a consistent co-ordination of the activities of individuals and institutions.