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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• §70 and Addition

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

• §§236–241 and Additions

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