Philosophy of Right

Summary

Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts) was written as a textbook for his Berlin lectures on law, ethics and the state. Its preface is dated June 1820, and the book appeared in Berlin late that year with 1821 on the title page. The library text is S. W. Dyde's English translation of 1896, made at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. It includes Dyde's preface, Hegel's preface, all 360 numbered sections with Hegel's notes, and the Additions that Eduard Gans compiled from students' lecture notes for the edition of 1833. Dyde renders Hegel's Sittlichkeit as the ethical system or ethical observance and bürgerliche Gesellschaft as the civic community. In the Preface Hegel attacks philosophers, Jakob Fries above all, who would found law on feeling and conviction, and declares that philosophy must comprehend what is, not teach the world what it ought to be. Here he writes that what is rational is real and what is real is rational, and closes with the image of the owl of Minerva, which flies only at dusk. The Introduction defines right as the existence of the free will and traces the will from bare choice to a freedom that wills itself. Part One, Abstract Right, treats the person as the bearer of rights, under the command to be a person and to respect others as persons. Freedom first takes outward shape in property; owners recognize each other through contract; and wrong, from innocent mistake to fraud and crime, is answered by punishment, which Hegel calls the criminal's own right as a rational being. Part Two, Morality, turns inward to purpose and responsibility, intention and welfare, and the good and conscience. Hegel honours the modern right of subjective freedom but argues that conscience left to itself can become pure self-assertion, and he criticizes irony and the ethics of mere conviction. Part Three, the Ethical System, joins outward right and inward morality in living institutions. The family rests on love and marriage, owns its property in common and raises children to independence. The civic community is the world of needs, labour and exchange, where Hegel discusses political economy, the classes or estates, courts of law, the police (public authority over markets, streets and welfare) and the corporations. He notes that wealth and poverty grow together and that a rabble may form. The state is the realized ethical idea, a constitutional monarchy with a crown, an executive of trained civil servants and a legislature of estates. Hegel then treats sovereignty toward other states, war and international law. The book closes with world history as the world's court of judgment, passing through the Oriental, Greek, Roman and Germanic realms. The book has been read in sharply different ways. Some nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics saw it as a defence of the Prussian state, while many later scholars read it as a reforming theory of modern freedom.

Plot or Argument

• Preface: the rational and the real

  Hegel says the book is a compendium for his lectures and defends a scientific treatment of right against those who would build the state on the heart, enthusiasm and conviction; he names Jakob Fries and quotes his speech on a celebrated public festive occasion, the Wartburg festival of 1817. Philosophy does not instruct the world how it ought to be but grasps the reason present in what is. He declares that what is rational is real and what is real is rational, calls reason the rose in the cross of the present, and ends with the owl of Minerva, philosophy arriving only when a form of life has grown old.

• Introduction (§§1–33): right as the existence of free will

  The subject of the philosophy of right is the idea of right, its conception and its realization. Right belongs to spirit, and its starting point is the will, which is free. Hegel traces the will from the abstract ability to withdraw from every content, through arbitrary choice among impulses, to the free will that wills its own freedom. The system of right is the realm of freedom made actual, and the book's three parts follow the stages of that realization.

• Part One, Abstract Right (§§34–104): person, property, contract, wrong

  The person is the bare bearer of rights, and right's command is to be a person and respect others as persons. The person gives his freedom outward existence in property, through taking possession, use and alienation; one's own body and life are possessed by the spirit, so a man has no right to take his own life. Contract joins two wills in a common will about property. Wrong ranges from unintended wrong through fraud to crime, and punishment cancels crime and honours the criminal as a rational being, as against mere revenge.

• Part Two, Morality (§§105–141): purpose, intention and conscience

  The will now becomes a subject that recognizes as its own only what it has knowingly intended. Hegel treats responsibility for consequences, the right of intention and welfare, the right of necessity, and finally the good and conscience. True conscience wills what is absolutely good, but conscience taken as mere private certainty can turn into evil, and Hegel analyses the plea of good intentions, probabilism and romantic irony as conscience cut loose from objective content.

• Part Three, the Family (§§158–181)

  Ethical life begins in the family, a unity of feeling and love. Marriage is a free ethical bond, not merely a contract or a passion, and Hegel defends monogamy. The family holds property in common, raises children toward independent personality, and is dissolved by the children's coming of age and by death, which raises questions of inheritance. Antigone's piety appears as the law of the family.

• Part Three, the Civic Community (§§182–256)

  In civil society each pursues his own ends but depends on all. Hegel describes the system of needs and labour, naming Smith, Say and Ricardo; the division into agricultural, business and universal (civil-service) classes; the administration of justice through public, written law and courts; and the police and corporations, which regulate markets, provide for public works, health and education, and care for the poor. He observes that growing wealth brings a poor class and the danger of a rabble, which drives societies toward trade and settlement abroad.

• Part Three, the State: internal constitution (§§257–320)

  The state is the realized ethical idea, where individual freedom and the universal good are reconciled. Hegel discusses the relation of state and church, then the rational constitution as a constitutional monarchy: the crown, whose occupant gives the final decision and dots the i; the executive of educated civil servants; and the legislature with its estates and public debate. He also treats public opinion and freedom of the press.

• Part Three, the State: external relations and world history (§§321–360)

  States are individuals toward one another and recognize no judge above them; Hegel discusses sovereignty, war and international law and rejects Kant's proposal for perpetual peace through a league of states. World history is the court of judgment of nations, in which spirit advances through the Oriental, Greek, Roman and Germanic realms, ending with the reconciliation of church and state in the modern world.

Characters

• Jakob Friedrich Fries, opponent

  Heidelberg philosopher attacked in the Preface for wishing to build the state on feeling and enthusiasm rather than on law and thought.

• Karl Ludwig von Haller, opponent

  Swiss author of the Restoration of Political Science, criticized in the long note to §258 for grounding the state in the rule of the stronger.

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, authority and foil

  Credited with making the will the principle of the state, but faulted for reducing the general will to a contract of individual wills.

• Immanuel Kant, authority and foil

  Kant's moral philosophy and his idea of perpetual peace through a league of states are discussed and criticized at several points.

• Plato, authority

  Plato's Republic is treated in the Preface and elsewhere as the grasp of Greek ethical life, which lacked the principle of subjective freedom.

• Antigone, literary exemplar

  Sophocles' heroine is cited in the sections on ethical life and the family as the voice of the unwritten law and of family piety.

• Eduard Gans, editor

  Hegel's student and colleague, who edited the 1833 edition and added the Additions from lecture notes; his remarks open Dyde's preface.

Lessons

• Freedom needs institutions to become real

  Hegel's whole book argues that freedom is not just the absence of restraint. The bare ability to choose is only the beginning; freedom becomes actual in property, contract, moral responsibility, and finally in family, civil society and the state. A person is free, on this view, when he finds in the institutions of his common life a rational order he can recognize as his own.

  • Why does Hegel say in the Introduction that arbitrary choice is not yet true freedom?
  • How does each of the three parts add something the previous part lacked?
  • Can a person be fully free alone, outside family and community, on Hegel's account?

• Conscience is sacred, but not self-sufficient

  In Part Two Hegel honours the modern right of conscience: no one should be held responsible for what he did not knowingly intend. He also warns that conscience treated as pure inner certainty, answerable to no objective good, can justify anything. He looks for a conscience formed by and answerable to an ethical order.

  • What does Hegel mean by calling conscience the deepest internal solitude?
  • How does he distinguish true conscience from formal conscience?
  • Where would a Christian account of conscience agree or disagree with Hegel's?

• The family and the market each need the other and need more

  The family is held together by love and the civic community by mutual need. Hegel describes both with sympathy, but shows that each has limits: the family dissolves as children grow, and the market produces great wealth alongside poverty. Courts, public authority and corporations, and finally the state, are meant to hold these spheres together.

  • What does Hegel say marriage is, and what does he deny it is?
  • Why does he think the corporation gives a person honour in his trade?
  • What dangers in the civic community does he name, and what remedies does he propose?

• Philosophy comes after the fact

  The Preface closes with the owl of Minerva: philosophy understands a form of life only when it has matured. Hegel thinks the philosopher's task is to comprehend the reason already present in the world, not to draw up utopias. Readers have argued ever since about whether this is wise realism or too ready an acceptance of what exists.

  • How does the owl of Minerva image fit Hegel's claim that every person is a son of his time?
  • What does he mean by finding the rose in the cross of the present?
  • Is there still room, on Hegel's view, for criticizing and reforming institutions?

Context

Hegel wrote in Prussia in the years after the Napoleonic Wars, when the reforms of Stein and Hardenberg had abolished serfdom, opened careers to talent and reorganized the civil service, but a promised written constitution had not been granted. In 1819 the student Karl Sand murdered the playwright August von Kotzebue, and the Carlsbad Decrees imposed censorship on universities and the press. Hegel's book enters debates among restorationists such as Haller, followers of Rousseau and the French Revolution, Kantian moralists and romantic nationalists. It draws on Aristotle and Plato, Roman law, the new British political economy and Hegel's own system of logic and spirit.

Composition

Hegel had lectured on natural right at Heidelberg and Berlin before publishing this compendium of numbered sections with remarks, meant to be expanded orally in lectures. The preface is dated 25 June 1820 and the book was published by Nicolai in Berlin late in 1820, dated 1821. Eduard Gans's edition of 1833, in Hegel's collected works, added the Additions (Zusätze) drawn from students' lecture notes. S. W. Dyde translated this enlarged text for Bell's Philosophical Library in 1896. The library text is an OCR transcription of that edition; the index is omitted and some OCR errors remain.

Reception

After Hegel's death his followers divided into Right and Left (or Young) Hegelians. The young Karl Marx wrote a critique of the book's theory of the state in 1843. Rudolf Haym (1857) portrayed Hegel as the philosopher of the Prussian restoration, and Karl Popper revived that charge in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). Scholars such as T. M. Knox, Shlomo Avineri and Allen Wood have read the book instead as a liberal-reformist account of the modern state, pointing out that Hegel's constitutional monarchy was more limited than Prussia's government at the time. British idealists including T. H. Green and Bernard Bosanquet, and later communitarian thinkers, drew on its account of ethical life.

Comparisons

• the-republic

  Hegel's Preface treats Plato's Republic as the grasp of Greek ethical life, admiring its unity of individual and city but faulting it for excluding the principle of subjective freedom, the right of individual choice of calling and conscience.

• politics

  Aristotle's progression from household to village to city, and his claim that the city exists for living well, stands behind Hegel's movement from family through civic community to the state.

• the-social-contract

  Hegel credits Rousseau with making will the principle of the state but argues in §258 that Rousseau reduced the general will to the common element in individual wills, so that the state became a contract.

• kant-perpetual-peace

  In the note to §333 Hegel answers Kant's proposal that a league of states could secure lasting peace, arguing that sovereign states recognize no judge above them.

• second-treatise-of-government

  Locke grounds government in a contract to protect property; Hegel treats property and contract as only the first stage of right and denies in §75 and §258 that the state is a contract.

• the-communist-manifesto

  Marx began as a critic of this book; Hegel's account of wealth and poverty growing together in the civic community is often set beside the Manifesto's account of class conflict, though the two reach opposite conclusions about the state.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The Preface's maxim that what is rational is real, and its closing image of the owl of Minerva.
• The three-part movement from Abstract Right to Morality to the Ethical System, and what each stage lacks.
• §36's command to be a person and respect others as persons, and how property and contract follow from it.
• The turn in Part Two from conscience as inward certainty to the dangers of conscience without objective content.
• The triad of family, civic community and state in Part Three, and Hegel's warning about wealth, poverty and the rabble.

Key terms and names

Right (Recht)

For Hegel, not only law but every way in which free will takes outward, recognized existence, from property to the state.

Abstract right

Part One's sphere of persons, property, contract and wrong, in which people are considered only as bearers of rights.

Morality (Moralität)

Part Two's sphere of the inward subject: purpose, intention, welfare, the good and conscience.

Ethical system (Sittlichkeit)

Dyde's rendering of the ethical life of family, civic community and state, where right and morality are joined in shared customs and institutions.

Civic community

Dyde's term for civil society: the sphere of needs, labour, exchange, courts, police and corporations, between family and state.

Corporation

An association of a trade or profession, recognized by the state, that gives its members standing, honour and mutual support.

Owl of Minerva

Hegel's image for philosophy, which, like the bird of the goddess of wisdom, takes flight only at dusk, after a form of life has matured.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What are the three main parts of the Philosophy of Right, and what does each one treat?
2. Comprehension Whom does Hegel attack in the Preface, and what does he say is wrong with founding the state on feeling?
3. Comprehension According to the section on the family, what holds a family together, and how does a family come to an end?
4. Interpretation What does Hegel mean by saying that what is rational is real and what is real is rational? Does the claim defend every existing institution?
5. Interpretation Why does Hegel think conscience, taken as mere inward certainty, can turn into evil?
6. Interpretation How do the courts, the police and the corporations answer the problems Hegel sees in the civic community?
7. Big Question Is a person most free when choosing without limits, or when living within institutions he understands and affirms?
8. Big Question Can the state rightly be called the realized ethical idea, or does that ask more of a political community than it can bear?

Faith Connections

• Genesis 2:24 (Scripture)

  A man leaves father and mother and the two become one flesh. Hegel's sections on marriage (§§161–163) describe a free consent to become one person, a bond deeper than contract or passion, in terms close to this verse.

• Matthew 22:21 (Scripture)

  Render to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's. The long note to §270 on church and state works through how a modern state should protect religious communities while keeping its own sphere.

• Augustine, City of God XIX (Great Conversation)

  Augustine finds in every earthly city only a partial peace and reserves true justice for the city of God; Hegel's state as the realized ethical idea makes a far larger claim for political community, and the two can be weighed side by side.

• Luther, On Secular Authority (1523) (Great Conversation)

  Luther distinguished the spiritual and temporal governments; Hegel, a Lutheran, sees the Reformation's freedom of conscience as the source of the modern state's principle of subjective freedom.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Freedom is the essence of will; freedom becomes actual only in an objective order that the will can recognize as its own; property and contract, and inward morality, each realize freedom only partially; therefore freedom is fully realized in ethical life, in family, civic community and state.

Rhetorical device: chiasmus. The Preface's maxim, quoted in the record, reverses its terms (rational, real; real, rational) so that neither side can be read without the other.

Debate: Resolved: that philosophy should seek to understand existing institutions rather than to design ideal ones.

Memory Work

Be a person and respect others as persons.

When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Trace one idea, such as freedom or property, through all three parts of the Philosophy of Right, showing how Hegel's treatment changes at each stage.

Comparison with The Republic: Hegel says Plato's Republic captured Greek ethical life but left out subjective freedom. Compare the place of the individual in Plato's city and in Hegel's state, using Hegel's Preface and his sections on the civic community.

Medical Lens

The Philosophy of Right touches medicine only at the edges, but three places may interest a psychiatrist or historian of medicine. In Abstract Right (§§47–48) Hegel argues that I possess my body only as the spirit takes possession of it, so that the living body is the existence of freedom and may not be treated as a beast of burden; this is a philosophical rather than physiological account of the mind-body relation. In §70 and its Addition he denies that a person has a right to take his own life, since life is not an external thing standing below the person, while allowing that Hercules on his pyre and Brutus on his sword acted in a heroic way; the passage belongs to the long philosophical and theological discussion of suicide rather than to medical thought. In the sections on the police and corporations (§§230–245) the public authority oversees street lighting, markets and health, and Hegel discusses public provision for the sick and poor, a window on early nineteenth-century ideas of what would later be called public health.

• §§47–48 and notes

  The body as the outward existence of the free person, which others may not treat as a mere thing or beast of burden.

  Mind Body
• §70 and Addition

  Hegel denies a right to suicide and discusses the cases of Hercules and Brutus.

  Suicide
• §§236–241 and Additions

  Public authority's care for streets, markets, health and the poor in the civic community.

  Public Health Sanitation

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation in a Berlin lecture room in 1821 between a student who admires the Wartburg festival and Hegel, who has just read aloud the Preface's attack on founding the state on feeling.

• Classroom

  Draw Hegel's map of freedom as a building: abstract right on the ground floor, morality above it, and family, civic community and state on top. Label each room with one section number and one sentence on what it adds.

• Essay

  Hegel says in §36 that the command of right is to be a person and respect others as persons. Explain what he means by person, and why he thinks this command is necessary but not sufficient for a good society.

• Essay

  Take one institution Hegel describes in the civic community (the courts, the police, the corporation) and compare his account with an institution you know.

Further Reading

• Elements of the Philosophy of Right (trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Allen W. Wood), G. W. F. Hegel

  The Cambridge translation of 1991, with full notes.

• Hegel's Theory of the Modern State, Shlomo Avineri

  An influential reading of Hegel as a theorist of the modern constitutional state.

• Hegel's Ethical Thought, Allen W. Wood

• Hegel: A Biography, Terry Pinkard

• Hegel and Modern Society, Charles Taylor

  A short introduction to Hegel's social and political thought.