Hegel contrasted Athens’ plastic individuality with Sparta’s rigid abstract virtue

Evidence

In all these instances ‘plastic’ clearly stands for that which ‘has the character of mobility’. In comparing Athens to Sparta, Hegel describes the former as the cradle of ‘plastic individuality’, the exemplary home of ‘great industry, excitation and stimulus, intense development of individuality within the sphere of a moral spirit (eine große Betriebsamkeit, Regsamkeit, Ausbildung der Individualität innerhalb des Kreises eines sittlichen Geistes)’. But in Sparta, ‘we see on the other hand a rigid, abstract virtue (die starre abstrakte Tugend), a life devoted to the State. But in which the mobility and freedom of individuality are repressed (aber so, daß die Regsamkeit, die Freiheit der Individualität zurückgesetzt ist)’, (p. 262, translation modified; Suhrkamp 12, p. 319). — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1305