 Contemporary Left Hegelians treat Hegel’s doctrine that reason is active in history as the claim that free thought, through the thinking of individuals, is history’s internal cause. Conservatives, in contrast, attacked Hegel’s conception of evolving reason, for undermining the political order (Moggach 2013). But for Skorupski, Hegel holds that free thought or natural reason must be mediated by entrenched institutions of intellectual and spiritual authority: for Aquinas, the Church, for Hegel, a tradition of communal ethical life. Hegel affirms that “the right of the subjective will”, the freedom of the moral subject, is inherent in modern ethical life, thus grounding reason in free thought, but only in the context of a conservative holism (Skorupski 2015). The key concept here is Sittlichkeit (“the ethical” or “ethical life”). 