Not what is ordinarily called a concept: a general representation under which one sorts cases. In Hegel the concept is the inner structure of a thing, that in it which drives its development — unfolded in the Logic as the unity of universality, particularity and individuality. For the philosophy of right this has a hard consequence: right is nothing made, but the unfolding of the concept of freedom itself. And because the concept does not stand beside its actualization but gives itself that actualization, it is also here that it is decided what „actual“ means at all.

Philosophy has to do with ideas and therefore not with what are usually called mere concepts; on the contrary, it points out their one-sidedness and untruth, as well as the fact that the concept (not what is often heard called such, which is merely an abstract determination of the understanding) alone is what has actuality, and indeed in such a way that it gives this actuality to itself.

§ 1, Remark

In the edition: § 1 · § 2 · § 33 — see also The Idea, Actuality and Rationality, The Concrete Universal

The Idea is the concept together with its actualization — not the plan and not the thing carried out, but both in one. The philosophy of right treats throughout the Idea of freedom; hence it is not enough for it to clarify concepts, nor to describe conditions. It must show how the concept gives itself existence.

Hegel used an image for this which hits the matter better than any definition:

The concept and its existence are two sides, distinct and united, like soul and body. […] The unity of existence and concept, of body and soul, is the Idea. It is not merely harmony, but complete interpenetration. Nothing lives that is not in some way Idea. The Idea of right is freedom […]

Addition to § 1 (compiled by Eduard Gans from lecture transcripts)

In the edition: § 1 · § 29 · § 142 — see also The Concept, Freedom, Ethical Life

The word with which the philosophy of right opens, and the reason why it may not stop at the clarification of concepts. Actualization in Hegel does not mean applying a finished thought to material found lying about. The concept gives itself its own existence; only therein is it what it is. This is why the history of institutions is not an appendix to the theory of right but its content.

The first sentence of the book names both sides in one breath:

The philosophical science of right has as its object the Idea of right, the concept of right and its actualization.

§ 1

In the edition: § 1 · § 29 · § 141 — see also The Concept, The Idea, Actuality and Rationality

The cornerstone of Hegel’s practical philosophy — and the most frequently misunderstood of his terms. Freedom is not arbitrariness, not the ability to choose between A and B; whoever merely chooses still depends on that from which he chooses. Freedom in the full sense is being with oneself in an other: I am free when that in which I live — family, occupation, right, state — does not restrict me but first makes me the person I am. The will is therefore free only insofar as it wills what is rational.

From this follows the proposition on which the whole philosophy of right turns: the system of right is not the limit of freedom but its realm.

Only in this freedom is the will unqualifiedly with itself, because it relates itself to nothing but itself, so that every relation of dependence on something other thereby falls away.

§ 23

The ground of right is the realm of spirit in general; its more precise location and point of departure is the will, which is free, so that freedom constitutes its substance and determination, and the system of right is the realm of actualized freedom […] as a second nature.

§ 4

In the edition: § 4 to § 7 · § 15 · § 23 · § 149 — see also The Will, Arbitrariness, Subjective Freedom, Ethical Life

The will is the ground on which right stands. It is not a faculty alongside thinking, but thinking itself insofar as it resolves upon something and passes over into actuality. The philosophy of right begins with the will in its most abstract shape — as the bare capacity for self-determination — and fills it with content stage by stage, until in the state it has the content that corresponds to it.

Hegel states the goal towards which the whole runs in a formula that looks like a tautology and is none:

[…] the abstract concept of the Idea of the will is, in general, the free will which wills the free will.

§ 27

In the edition: § 4 to § 28 · § 21 · § 27 — see also Freedom, Arbitrariness, The Person

The commonest error about freedom. Arbitrariness is freedom taken as the capacity to choose — I can do this or that. Hegel does not deny that this is freedom; he denies that it is the whole of it. For that from which one chooses comes from elsewhere: from drives, inclinations, circumstances. The one who chooses is free in form and dependent in content.

He therefore calls it contingency as it exists in the form of the will:

According to this determination, the freedom of the will is arbitrariness [Willkür] — in which both of these are contained: the free reflection, abstracting from everything, and the dependence upon a content and material given internally or externally. […] arbitrariness is contingency as it exists in the form of the will.

§ 15

In the edition: § 14 to § 20 — see also Freedom, The Will, Contingency

The key term of the dialectic — and the site of a widespread inaccuracy. In almost every account one reads that aufheben has three meanings in Hegel: to negate, to preserve, and to raise to a higher level. Hegel himself, at both of the authoritative places — in the Science of Logic and in the Encyclopaedia — expressly names two.

To sublate, and the sublated (the ideal), is one of the most important concepts of philosophy […]. What sublates itself does not thereby become nothing. […] Aufheben has in the language the twofold sense that it means to preserve, to maintain, and at the same time to cause to cease, to put an end to. […] The two determinations of sublating here given can be listed lexically as two meanings of this word.

Science of Logic I, Remark „The Expression: To Sublate“

The raising up does occur in the same Remark — but as precisely what the Latin tollere does not achieve: „The double meaning of the Latin tollere […] does not go so far; its affirmative determination reaches only as far as raising up.“ In Hegel it is thus the poorer determination, against which he shows the superiority of the German word. To make it a third meaning of that very word turns his thought upside down.

How the sublated continues to exist Hegel says immediately afterwards — and he says it without any „higher“:

Something is sublated only insofar as it has entered into unity with its opposite; in this more precise determination, as something reflected, it may fittingly be called a moment.

Science of Logic I, ibid.

That something richer and also higher emerges from this Hegel does not deny; he says so expressly elsewhere — only there he says it of the result of the negation and not of the word aufheben:

Since what results, the negation, is a determinate negation, it has a content. It is a new concept, but the higher, richer concept than the preceding one; for it has become richer by the negation or the opposite of that concept, and thus contains it, but contains more than it, and is the unity of itself and its opposite.

Science of Logic I, Introduction

The gain in height is therefore a consequence of the matter and not a meaning of the word. In the philosophy of right the movement can be followed throughout: wrong is sublated in punishment, abstract right in morality, and both in ethical life. Each time the earlier stage is neither gone nor unchanged.

In the edition: § 32 · § 99 · § 141 — see also Dialectic, Determinate Negation, Contradiction, Ideality and Reality

The first stage at which the free will acquires existence. „Abstract“ here does not mean unreal, but: with everything left out of account that makes the individual this particular human being. He is recognized only as a person, that is, as someone who can have rights. The three moments are property, contract and wrong — taking possession of a thing, the mutual recognition of two wills with regard to it, and the violation that leads to punishment.

The whole domain stands under a single command, and Hegel puts it as briefly as it can be put:

Personality contains in general the capacity for rights, and constitutes the concept and itself the abstract basis of abstract, and therefore formal, right. The command of right is therefore: be a person and respect others as persons.

§ 36

In the edition: § 34 to § 104 — see also The Person, Property, Contract, Wrong and Punishment

The bearer of abstract right. A person is the individual insofar as he relates himself to his bare freedom — without regard to origin, ability or need. Precisely this emptiness is the point: because everything particular is left aside, every human being can be a person. It lies in personality that I, as a wholly determinate and finite individual, at the same time know myself as infinite and universal.

The universality of this will that is free for itself is formal universality – the self-conscious, otherwise contentless, simple relation to itself in its individuality; the subject is, to this extent, a person. It lies in personality that I, as this person, am, in every respect […] determinate and finite, yet am, absolutely, a purely self-related being, and thus know myself, in my finitude, as the infinite, universal, and free.

§ 35

In the edition: § 35 · § 36 · § 66 — see also Abstract Right, Alienation, Subjective Freedom

In Hegel not primarily a means of satisfying needs, but the first form in which freedom has existence. In order to be actual at all, the will requires an external sphere in which it holds good; this arises when the person places its will into a thing — by taking possession, working on it, using it. This is why property stands at the beginning of the system and not at its end, and why it stands in need of justification not as acquisition but as a relation of freedom.

The person must give itself an external sphere of its freedom in order to be as Idea.

§ 41

In the edition: § 41 to § 71 · § 44 · § 46 — see also The Person, Alienation, Contract

The act by which the will places something of itself into the external world and thereby first acquires existence at all. In property this is the taking of possession; in contract, the transfer. I can alienate what is by its nature external — and precisely for that reason not everything.

This limit is one of the sharpest propositions in the philosophy of right. It separates what can be alienated from what I am:

I can alienate my property, since it is mine only insofar as I place my will in it […] — but only insofar as the thing is, by its nature, an external thing.

§ 65

Inalienable, therefore, are those goods, or rather substantial determinations, and the right to them likewise imprescriptible, which constitute my own most personal being and the universal essence of my self-consciousness — such as my personality as such, my universal freedom of will, ethical life, and religion.

§ 66

In the edition: § 65 to § 70 — see also Property, Contract, The Person

Right is not a condition that anyone could have on his own. My will is posited as right only when another free will lets it hold good. Hegel first developed this in the Phenomenology, in the struggle for recognition and in lordship and bondage; in the philosophy of right it comes out expressly for the first time in contract and thereafter underlies all the ethical institutions.

The sentence with which he grounds the transition from property to contract is at the same time the most compact statement of the thought:

This relation of will to will is the peculiar and true ground on which freedom has determinate being.

§ 71

In the scholarship of recent decades this term has had a career that goes beyond Hegel. In him, recognition is a member of the system — it appears in contract, in the honour of the member of a corporation, in the relation between states. In recent scholarship it has become the normative foundation of an entire social theory. The philosophy of right is then read as a ladder of spheres of recognition — love, right, social esteem — the violation of which can be described as disrespect. What is disputed is whether this translation still carries Hegel’s logical claim or replaces it with social psychology.

Sources: Ludwig Siep, Anerkennung als Prinzip der praktischen Philosophie, 1979 · Axel Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung, 1992 · Robert R. Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition, 1997

In the edition: § 71 · § 72 · § 253 · § 260 — see also Lordship and Bondage, Contract, Intersubjectivity

In contract one freedom enters into relation with another. Two persons recognize each other as owners and make their will regarding a particular thing a common one. With this, recognition takes an expressly legal form for the first time.

Hegel describes this not as agreement but as a contradiction that mediates itself — and that is the reason why for him the state precisely cannot be a contract:

Property […] comes about through contract – as the process in which the contradiction presents and mediates itself: that I am and remain an owner existing for myself and excluding the other will, insofar as, in a will identical with the other, I cease to be an owner.

§ 72

In the edition: § 72 to § 81 · § 75 · § 258 — see also Recognition, Property, The State

Wrong is the negation of right: a particular will sets itself against the universal, recognized right. Punishment is the negation of this negation — restoration of right, not revenge and not deterrence. Hegel’s best-known thesis here, and the one with the greatest consequences for lawyers, is that punishment is the criminal’s own right: he is taken as a rational being who through his deed has himself set up a law under which he may now be subsumed. Whoever merely deters or reforms the offender does not treat him as a person.

The thought stands in a single dense sentence:

The violation that befalls the criminal is not only just in itself […] but it is also a right done to the criminal himself […]. For in his action, as that of a rational being, lies the fact that it is something universal, that through it a law is established which he has recognized for himself in it, under which he may therefore be subsumed as under his right.

§ 100

In the edition: § 82 to § 104 · § 94 · § 99 · § 100 — see also Abstract Right, Sublation, The Administration of Justice

The second sphere, arising from the contradiction that wrong tears open in abstract right. The will turns from the external thing inward; what is now at issue is purpose, intention, welfare and conscience — what I knew, what I willed, and what I stand answerable for. This inwardness is an infinite right of the modern subject and at the same time insufficient, because it can come to rest in the mere ought.

Why the stage is nevertheless unavoidable Hegel says in one sentence:

Only in the will as subjective can freedom, or the will existing in itself, be actual.

§ 106

In the edition: § 105 to § 141 — see also Conscience, Evil, Subjective Freedom, Ethical Life

The form of thought proper to morality — and, for Hegel, its limit. Where the good appears only as a demand, it stands over against actuality instead of being in it; the will remains with an infinite claim that the world never satisfies. Hegel does not deny that there are duties; he denies that a philosophy may end with the ought. This is why morality passes over into ethical life, where the good is no longer demanded but present in institutions.

Because, in this its first emergence in the individual will, it is not yet posited as identical with the concept of the will, the moral standpoint is the standpoint of relation and of an ought, or of a demand.

§ 108

In the edition: § 108 · § 135 · § 141 — see also Morality, The Good, Ethical Life, The Owl of Minerva

The principle of the modern world: the right of the individual to see for himself what is to hold good. The French Revolution put it into the world, and Hegel’s system does not seek to take it back but to give it its actuality in the state. Where this right is lacking, even the best condition is only a condition one endures.

The proposition is one of those that concern lawyers directly — it is the philosophical formulation of what today is called the right to be heard and the duty to give reasons:

The right of the subjective will is that what it is to recognize as valid should be seen by it as good, and that an action, as the purpose entering into external objectivity, should be imputed to it […] according to its knowledge of the value that the action has in this objectivity.

§ 132

In the edition: § 124 · § 132 · § 228 · § 260 — see also Morality, Conscience, Trial by Jury

The unity of the concept of the will with the particular will — that in which abstract right and subjective welfare are both sublated. Hegel thereby gives the good a position that neither Kant nor utilitarianism gives it: it is neither a command nor a benefit, but actualized freedom itself. At the same time it remains abstract at the stage of morality — it does not yet say what is to be done. Only ethical life fills that gap.

The good is the Idea, as the unity of the concept of the will and the particular will, in which abstract right, as well as welfare and the subjectivity of knowing and the contingency of external existence, are sublated as self-subsistent for themselves, yet at the same time, according to their essence, are contained and preserved within it — freedom realized, the absolute final purpose of the world.

§ 129

In the edition: § 129 to § 141 — see also Morality, Conscience, Evil, Ethical Life

The summit of morality: the subject’s knowledge within itself of what is right and duty. Hegel recognizes in this an infinite right of the modern world — and the very same movement that can lead into evil. For a conscience that withdraws upon its bare certainty has no criterion left outside itself; it can pass off its own particularity as the good. In Hegel the two do not lie far apart but immediately side by side.

For the sake of the abstract character of the good, the other moment of the Idea — particularity in general — falls into subjectivity, which, in its universality reflected into itself, is the absolute certainty of itself within itself, the positing of particularity, the determining and deciding element — conscience.

§ 136

In the edition: § 129 · § 136 to § 141 — see also Evil, Morality, Subjective Freedom

Neither a defect nor an external power, but a possibility that arises only with modern subjectivity. In Hegel evil is the same force as conscience — the capacity of self-consciousness to put everything valid in question — except that it resolves to put its own particularity in the place of the universal. This is why it stands in his account not at the beginning but at the height of morality.

Self-consciousness, in the vanity of every otherwise valid determination and in the pure inwardness of the will, is just as much the possibility of making the universal in and for itself its principle, as it is the possibility of making arbitrariness — its own particularity — its principle above the universal, and of realizing this through action — of being evil.

§ 139

In the edition: § 139 to § 140 — see also Conscience, Morality, Arbitrariness

The third and highest sphere, in which abstract right and morality find their truth. Ethical life is neither disposition nor prescription, but freedom as it exists in actual institutions: family, civil society, state. In them the good is no longer something merely demanded but something present, in which the individual finds his own essence again — not as an alien order to which he submits, but as the shape in which he can first be himself at all.

Ethical life is the Idea of freedom in that on the one hand it is the good become alive — the good endowed in self-consciousness with knowing and willing and actualised by self-conscious action — while on the other hand self-consciousness has in the ethical realm its absolute foundation. Thus ethical life is the concept of freedom developed into the existing world and the nature of self-consciousness.

§ 142

In the edition: § 142 · § 151 · § 157 — see also The Family, Civil Society, The State, Ethical Substance

The first shape of ethical life, its immediate one. Its principle is love — not as one feeling among others, but as the way of being with oneself in an other. In the family the individual is not a person with rights against the others but a member; abstract right is here sublated, and the resources are held in common. Hegel’s determinations concerning the position of women (§ 166) are the point at which feminist criticism takes hold, and at which the question arises whether this is a judgement of his time or something systematically necessary.

The family, as the immediate substantiality of spirit, has, as its determination, spirit’s own feeling of its unity, love, so that the disposition [involved] is to have the self-consciousness of one’s individuality within this unity, as of an essentiality that is in and for itself, in such a way as to be within it not as a person for oneself, but as a member.

§ 158

In the edition: § 158 to § 181 · § 166 · § 170 — see also Ethical Life, Civil Society

The sphere between family and state, in which each pursues his own ends as a private person. Hegel’s discovery is that this does not issue in chaos but in a system: in seeking his own, each becomes a means for every other, and there arises a universal reciprocal dependence that no one intended. For a while he calls this the external state — a state resting on need and on the understanding instead of on ethical life.

The self-seeking purpose, in its actualization, so conditioned by universality, grounds a system of all-round dependence, such that the subsistence and welfare of the individual, and his rightful existence, are interwoven with the subsistence, welfare, and right of all […]. — This system can, at first, be regarded as the external state — the state based on need and on the understanding.

§ 183

In the edition: § 182 to § 256 · § 185 · § 187 — see also The System of Needs, Poverty, The Rabble, The State

The modern concept through which Hegel’s bürgerliche Gesellschaft is read anew. Once it is separated from pure economics, what in him stands alongside it anyway comes into view: the corporations, the public sphere, the administration of justice. On this reading, civil society is the space of free associations and the necessary mediation between the individual and the state — not the realm of selfishness which only the state sets in order.

The translation is not self-evident: Hegel’s expression is the German rendering of societas civilis, which traditionally included the state. That state and society come apart in him is itself already a result.

Sources: Manfred Riedel, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft und Staat bei Hegel, 1970 · Jean L. Cohen / Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory, 1992

In the edition: § 182 · § 250 · § 288 — see also Civil Society

One of the strongest and least known concepts of the philosophy of right. For Hegel, Bildung is neither the possession of knowledge nor a refinement of manners, but labour: the labour by which the subject sheds its bare immediacy — drive, caprice, crudity of willing — and gains the form of universality. He thereby sets himself expressly against the notion of the innocence of the state of nature, and equally against the notion that cultivation is a mere means to enjoyment.

The sentence in which he sums this up is among the hardest and at the same time most liberating in the book:

Cultivation is therefore, in its absolute determination, liberation and the labour of higher liberation […]. In the subject, this liberation is the hard labour against the mere subjectivity of conduct, against the immediacy of desire, as well as against the subjective vanity of feeling and the arbitrariness of caprice. That it is this hard labour accounts for part of the disfavour that falls upon it.

§ 187, Remark

In the edition: § 187 · § 197 · § 209 · § 270 — see also The State of Nature, The System of Needs, Lordship and Bondage

The first part of civil society: the market in the widest sense. Through labour and the division of labour individuals satisfy their needs and in doing so produce something universal that no one intended. Hegel did not invent this — in the Remark he refers expressly to Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say and David Ricardo, and is thereby among the few philosophers of his time who had read political economy.

What interests him in it is not prosperity but that reason appears here in a sphere that knows nothing of reason — as understanding:

Since its purpose is the satisfaction of subjective particularity, but universality asserts itself in its relation to the needs and the free arbitrary will of others, this shining of rationality into this sphere of finitude is the understanding […]

§ 189

In the edition: § 189 to § 208 · § 198 · § 200 — see also Civil Society, The Estates, Contingency

Philosophy has to do with the necessary; contingent is what could also be otherwise. In civil society contingency is systematic: whether someone comes to possess resources depends on capital, skill and circumstances that cannot be brought into any order. Hegel draws no consolation from this but a task — police and corporation are for him the institutions that are to mediate this contingency and catch its hardships.

The sobriety with which he describes inequality as a necessary consequence and not as an accident is remarkable:

The possibility of participating in the universal resource […] is, however, conditioned, in part by an immediate basis of one’s own (capital), and, in part, by skill, which is, for its part, again conditioned, in turn, by that basis, but also by contingent circumstances […] — a difference which, together with the rest of contingency and arbitrary will, has as its necessary consequence the inequality of resources and skills among individuals.

§ 200

In the edition: § 189 · § 200 · § 241 — see also Civil Society, Poverty, Police and Corporation

In Hegel civil society does not fall apart into a mass of individuals but articulates itself into estates: the substantial estate (agriculture), the estate of trade (crafts, industry, commerce) and the universal estate (the civil servants). These are not castes — Hegel insists that the individual chooses his estate — but the ethical articulations within which anyone is anyone at all. The term returns later in a quite different sense, as part of the legislative power; the two are to be kept apart.

The agricultural estate has, in the substantiality of its family and natural life, immediately within itself, its concrete universal, in which it lives; the universal estate has, in its determination, the universal for itself, as the purpose of its activity and as its ground. The mean between the two, the estate of trade, is essentially directed toward the particular […]

§ 250

In the edition: § 201 to § 207 · § 250 — see also The Estates (legislative power), Police and Corporation

In civil society the right that in abstract right was mere demand must become actual: as posited law that everyone can know, and through courts that apply it. Hegel’s ground for this is remarkable: it is not order or security that makes the administration of justice necessary, but that right must be known and willed in order to hold good. A right that those affected cannot know is, for them, no right at all.

But it is this sphere of the relative, as culture, itself, which gives to right its existence: to be universally recognized, known, and willed, and, mediated through this being-known and being-willed, to have validity and objective actuality.

§ 209

In the edition: § 209 to § 229 · § 211 · § 215 — see also Positive Right, Trial by Jury, Wrong and Punishment

Right insofar as it is posited in a state. For it to hold good it must become law: codified, published, accessible to everyone. Its legitimacy it has from its rational content; its form, however, is bound to the history and circumstances of a particular people. At this point Hegel is in dispute with the historical school of law — he refers expressly to Savigny’s tract against codification — and insists that a people has a right to a code of laws.

What is right in itself is, in its objective existence, posited — that is, determined for consciousness through thought, and made known as that which is right and valid: the law; and right, through this determination, is positive right in general.

§ 211

In the edition: § 211 to § 218 · § 3 — see also The Administration of Justice, Natural Right

Hegel grounds the publicity of proceedings and the participation of laymen not in utility but in the right of self-consciousness: whoever is judged must be able to take part in the proceedings not merely bodily but with his own knowledge. A right accessible only to an estate closed off by its own terminology turns everyone else into a minor — and remains for them an external fate.

The passage is among the sharpest a philosopher has ever written about the legal profession:

If the knowledge of right […] is the property of an estate which makes itself exclusive, even through a terminology that is a foreign language for those whose right is at stake, then the members of civil society […] are held alien to what is not only most personal and most their own, but also the substantial and rational element in it, right, and are placed under tutelage — indeed into a kind of bondage toward that estate. If they do have the right to be present in court bodily, with their feet (in iudicio stare), this is little if they are not to be present spiritually, with their own knowledge […]

§ 228, Remark

In the edition: § 224 to § 229 · § 227 — see also The Administration of Justice, Subjective Freedom

„Police“ in Hegel does not mean a force of order but universal provision: everything the public power does to catch the contingencies of the market. The corporation is the association by trade and estate. It is Hegel’s real answer to the isolation produced by civil society — it gives the individual a whole to which he belongs again, and with it honour.

He expressly calls it a second family:

The corporation has […] to bear, for those belonging to it, care against particular contingencies, as well as for the culture needed for the capacity to be admitted into it — in general, to step in for them as a second family […]

§ 252

It is likewise recognized that he belongs to a whole that is itself a member of the universal society, and that he has interest and exertions for the less self-interested purpose of this whole; he thus has, in his estate, his honour.

§ 253

In the edition: § 230 to § 256 · § 241 · § 252 · § 253 — see also Poverty, The Estates, Civil Society (the modern term)

One of the central aporias of civil society. The market produces wealth and poverty by one and the same movement. In Hegel, however, poverty is not merely a lack of goods but exclusion: the poor are left with the needs of society while the means of meeting them by their own labour have been taken from them — and with those means, access to the administration of justice, to health care, to education, often even to the comfort of religion.

But, just as much as arbitrary will, contingent, physical circumstances, and circumstances lying in external relations, can bring individuals down into poverty — a condition that leaves them the needs of civil society, and […] thereby also deprives them, more or less, of all the advantages of society — the ability to acquire skills and culture in general, as well as the administration of justice, the care of health, and, often, even the comfort of religion, and so on.

§ 241

In the edition: § 241 to § 245 · § 200 — see also The Rabble, Civil Society, Police and Corporation

The consequence of poverty, but not to be equated with the poor. Rabble is a disposition: the inner indignation that arises when someone can no longer be a member of the whole and loses the feeling of subsisting by his own labour. This is why in Hegel there is also a rich rabble.

The sinking of a great mass [of people] below the level of a certain mode of subsistence […] — and with it, the loss of the feeling of right, of rectitude, and of the honour of subsisting by one’s own activity and labour — brings forth the production of the rabble, which, in turn, brings with it, at the same time, the greater ease of concentrating disproportionate wealth in a few hands.

§ 244

What is remarkable is what Hegel does next: he does not solve the problem. He runs through the possible remedies — burdens on the wealthier, public endowments, the provision of work — and shows that each either violates the principle of society or enlarges the evil. Then comes the sentence at which the system remains open:

It comes to light here that, with an excess of wealth, civil society is not wealthy enough, that is, it does not possess enough in its own distinctive resources to steer the excess of poverty and the production of the rabble.

§ 245

In the edition: § 243 to § 245 — see also Poverty, Alienation (Entfremdung)

A term Marx took over from Hegel and recast. In the philosophy of right, civil society is the sphere in which the individual becomes a means for everyone and is not with himself in his labour. The great question in dispute is: does Hegel sublate this alienation in the state and in philosophical consciousness merely in thought, while it persists economically? Or does his chapter on the rabble show precisely that he recognized the insolubility of the problem within civil society and let it stand?

Sources: Karl Marx, Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte, 1844 · Georg Lukács, Der junge Hegel, 1948 · Frank Ruda, Hegels Pöbel, 2011

In the edition: § 243 to § 245 — see also The Rabble, Lordship and Bondage

The highest stage of ethical life. Not a contract, as in Rousseau, and not a mere protector of property, as in liberalism: the state is the unity in which family and civil society have their subsistence. Hegel’s formula for it — that the state is the actuality of the ethical Idea — has earned him more hostility than any other sentence.

What really matters, however, is not that determination but the one concerning concrete freedom: the modern state does not require the individual to give up his particularity. It requires both at once.

The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea — ethical spirit as the revealed, self-transparent, substantial will, which thinks and knows itself and accomplishes what it knows, and insofar as it knows it.

§ 257

The state is the actuality of concrete freedom; but concrete freedom consists in this, that personal individuality and its particular interests not only achieve their complete development and gain recognition of their right for themselves […] but also […] knowingly and willingly recognize this universal interest even as their own substantial spirit […]. The principle of modern states has this enormous strength and depth, that it allows the principle of subjectivity to complete itself into the self-subsistent extreme of personal particularity and at the same time leads it back into substantial unity […]

§ 260

In the edition: § 257 to § 329 · § 258 · § 260 — see also Ethical Life, The Constitution, Ethical Substance, The Concrete Universal

For Hegel not a document that one drafts, but the articulation of the state itself — the shape its reason has taken. From this follows his best-known and most reviled thesis on constitution-making: a constitution cannot be given to a people; it is always already the expression of what that people is. The proposition sounds conservative and is so, but it has a second side: it says equally that no people keeps for long a constitution that no longer fits it.

To wish to give a people a constitution a priori — even one more or less rational in its content — is a fancy that overlooks precisely the moment through which a constitution becomes more than a mere thing of thought. Every people therefore has the constitution appropriate and proper to it.

§ 274, Remark

In the edition: § 260 to § 286 · § 271 · § 274 — see also The Division of Powers, The State

Hegel distinguishes the powers, but he does not separate them on Montesquieu’s model of mutually checking forces — for him that leads only to paralysis. The state is one sovereignty which articulates itself into three moments: the power of the crown (the final decision), governmental power (application to the particular), legislative power (determination of the universal). Decisive is the condition he attaches: each power must contain the others within itself, or the state falls apart into parties.

The constitution is rational in so far as the state differentiates and determines its activity within itself according to the nature of the concept, and indeed in such a way that each of these powers is itself, within itself, the totality, in that it has the other moments effectively present and contained within it […]

§ 272

In the edition: § 272 to § 274 — see also The Constitution, The Power of the Crown, Governmental Power, Legislative Power

The apex of the constitution and the moment of final decision. Hegel’s monarch does not rule: the laws are prepared by the government and deliberated in the estates. But the state must be able to act as an individual, it must be able to say „I will“ — and this final subjectivity cannot, on Hegel’s view, be derived from grounds, because it is precisely the point at which deriving stops. For that reason, and only for that reason, birth.

This is at the same time the place where one sees most clearly that Hegel pursues constitutional law out of the Logic:

But subjectivity, in its truth, exists only as subject, and personality only as person […]. This absolutely decisive moment of the whole is therefore not individuality in general, but one individual, the monarch.

§ 279

In the edition: § 275 to § 286 · § 279 · § 280 · § 282 — see also The Right of Pardon

The court judges according to the law; the punishment must follow. But the state as sovereign spirit must have the power to break through this necessity. Hegel grounds pardon not in mercy but in a determination of the power of spirit — and formulates it in a sentence that reaches far beyond constitutional law.

From the sovereignty of the monarch flows the right of pardon for criminals, for to it alone belongs the actualization of the power of spirit to make undone what has been done, and to annihilate the crime through forgiving and forgetting.

§ 282

In the edition: § 282 — see also The Power of the Crown, Wrong and Punishment

The civil service, in Hegel the universal estate. Its business is subsumption: it carries out what has been decided and applies the laws to cases. Its legitimacy comes not from election but from expertise and cultivation — and its task is to make the universal interest effective precisely where civil society pursues its particular ends.

Distinct from decision is the execution and application of the decisions of the crown, and in general the carrying-on and maintenance of what has already been decided — the existing laws, institutions, arrangements for common ends, and the like. This business of subsumption in general is comprised within governmental power […]

§ 287

In the edition: § 287 to § 297 · § 291 · § 294 — see also The Estates (articulation of society), Police and Corporation

It concerns the laws as such and the universal internal affairs. Hegel notes something here that still occupies constitutional lawyers: the legislative power is itself a part of the constitution which is presupposed by it — it cannot therefore dispose of its own foundation, but only develop it further from within.

This power is itself a part of the constitution, which is presupposed by it and, to that extent, lies in and for itself outside its direct determination, but receives its further development in the progressive formation of the laws and in the progressive character of the universal affairs of government.

§ 298

In the edition: § 298 to § 320 — see also The Estates (legislative power), The Constitution

The second sense of the word: the assembly of estates as part of the legislative power. Its task is that the universal concern should not merely subsist in itself but be there for public consciousness as well. Hegel expressly does not want representation of individuals by general election, but representation of the already articulated circles — the corporations and estates. The individual is to appear in the state not as an atom but as a member of his ethical context.

The estates element has the determination that the universal concern should come to existence not only in itself but also for itself — that is, that the moment of subjective formal freedom, public consciousness as the empirical universality of the views and thoughts of the many, should attain existence in it.

§ 301

In the edition: § 298 to § 315 · § 301 · § 308 — see also Legislative Power, The Estates (articulation of society), Police and Corporation

The form in which citizens judge about universal affairs. Hegel treats it as an existing contradiction: it contains the true needs and the ethical foundations of a people — and at the same time all the contingency, ignorance and perversity of mere opining. He draws from this no convenience but a twofold demand.

Public opinion therefore deserves to be as much esteemed as despised — despised with regard to its concrete consciousness and expression, esteemed with regard to its essential foundation […]. Since public opinion does not itself possess the standard of discrimination, nor the capacity to raise its substantial aspect to determinate knowledge, independence from it is the first formal condition for achieving anything great and rational […]

§ 318

In the edition: § 316 to § 320 — see also Freedom of the Press, The Estates (legislative power)

Hegel treats the press soberly to the point of brusqueness. He secures its freedom not by an abstract right to say everything, but by something else: by the rationality of the constitution, the firmness of the government and above all by the publicity of the assemblies of the estates — where matters are debated publicly and competently, there is little left for mere opining to gain. For him the best protection against bad journalism is good politics, not censorship.

The freedom of public communication […] and the satisfaction of that prickling urge to state one’s opinion and to have stated it, have their direct safeguard in the police and legal statutes and ordinances which partly prevent and partly punish their excesses, but their indirect safeguard in the harmlessness which is grounded chiefly in the rationality of the constitution and the firmness of the government, and also in the publicity of the Estates’ assemblies […]

§ 319

In the edition: § 319 · § 320 — see also Public Opinion

Outwardly the state is one individual among others; its sovereignty consists in being recognized by them as independent. Hegel rates this independence very high — higher than a reader today is likely to find comfortable:

Individuality, as exclusive being-for-itself, appears as a relation to other states, each of which is independent in relation to the others. Since it is in this independence that the being-for-itself of actual spirit has its existence, independence is the first freedom and the highest honour of a people.

§ 322

In the edition: § 321 to § 340 — see also War

The hardest passage in the philosophy of right. Because there is no judge above sovereign states — a league of nations would for Hegel be only a contract, not a state — war remains the final means. But Hegel goes further and ascribes an ethical significance to it: in war what is otherwise only edifying talk becomes serious, namely the transience of finite goods. He supports this with an image from his own Jena writings.

Whoever reads the passage should read with it the qualification Hegel himself adds: this is „only a philosophical idea“, and actual wars require a different justification.

[…] it has the higher significance that through it, as I have expressed it elsewhere, „the ethical health of nations is preserved in their indifference towards the fixing of finite determinacies, just as the movement of the winds preserves the sea from that foulness which a lasting calm would produce in it, as a lasting or indeed an everlasting peace would produce in nations“.

§ 324, Remark

Above all, however, the passage is not to be read without § 338. There Hegel draws the limit beyond which, for him, there is no longer any war at all. Because states recognize one another as states even in war, a bond remains between them, and from this bond follows a hard restriction:

In the fact that states mutually recognize one another as such, there remains, even in war — that condition of rightlessness, violence, and contingency — a bond whereby they count for one another as beings in and for themselves, so that even in war itself, war is determined as something that ought to pass away. It thus contains the determination, in accordance with international law, that the possibility of peace be preserved within it — so that, for example, envoys are respected — and, in general, that it not be waged against internal institutions and peaceful family and private life, nor against private persons.

§ 338

In the lectures Hegel becomes more explicit. According to Griesheim’s transcript, whatever sustains common life is to remain untouched — „against the administration of justice, churches, poor-houses, hospitals, all this is left to go its way, and likewise private life, the trades“; in the disarmed enemy „the human being is always recognized“. And in the lecture course of 1822/23 it says unmistakably: „Only fanaticism can wage a war of extermination.“

With this a standard is set by which what is today called war can be measured. A war that takes the civilian population, the hospitals and the supply of necessities as its target is by this standard no war in Hegel’s sense, but what he ascribes to fanaticism. Whoever invokes Hegel to justify such a war invokes a text that excludes it.

One remark on the securing of this limit, easily overlooked: Hegel knows that it is not a law. „There is no law about it, for a law requires a power that actualizes it“ (lecture course 1822/23). What limits war are the customs of nations (§ 339) — neither morality nor contract, but what has grown, and in which a people recognizes itself. That is why the limit cannot be enforced at law, only lost.

In the edition: § 324 · § 333 · § 338 · § 339 — see also External Sovereignty, Ethical Life

The highest sphere of objective spirit and at the same time its transition to the absolute. In the conflicts of states the world spirit develops; history is the progress in the consciousness of freedom. The sentence in which Hegel puts this is borrowed from Schiller’s Resignation and is in him not a threat but a rule of cognition: there is no other court of judgement than the course of events itself.

[…] out of which the universal spirit, the spirit of the world, brings itself forth as unlimited, and it is this spirit which exercises its right — and its right is the highest of all — upon them in world history, as the court of judgement of the world.

§ 340

World history, furthermore, is not the mere court of judgement of power — that is, the abstract and non-rational necessity of a blind fate — but […] the development, necessary solely out of the concept of its freedom, of the moments of reason and hence of its self-consciousness and its freedom […]

§ 342

In the edition: § 341 to § 360 · § 340 · § 347 — see also The World Spirit, The Cunning of Reason

The mechanism by which something other comes out of history than what the agents willed. Reason does not intervene; it lets interests and passions work upon one another and thereby attains its purpose. The world-historical individuals — Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon — pursue their own ends and are at the same time, without knowing it, instruments of the next step.

The expression does not occur in the philosophy of right but in the Logic, in the section on teleology:

That the subjective purpose, as the power over these processes in which the objective wears itself away against itself and sublates itself, keeps itself outside them and yet is what maintains itself in them — this is the cunning of reason. […] Reason is as cunning as it is mighty.

Encyclopaedia § 209 with Addition

In the edition: § 344 · § 348 — see also World History, The World Spirit

The subject of world history: the one spirit that unfolds itself in the spirits of nations. Hegel divides its course into four world-historical realms and describes the movement as an increase in the consciousness of freedom — from the freedom of one in the Orient, through the freedom of some in the Greek and Roman world, to the freedom of all in the Germanic-Christian world. It is precisely this schema that is the point of attack for postcolonial criticism.

The concrete Ideas, the spirits of nations, have their truth and destination in the concrete Idea as absolute universality — the world spirit, around whose throne they stand as the accomplishers of its actualization and as witnesses and ornaments of its splendour.

§ 352

In the edition: § 341 · § 344 · § 347 · § 352 — see also World History

Hegel’s work of 1807, subtitled „Science of the Experience of Consciousness“. It is the ladder on which ordinary consciousness climbs from sense-certainty to absolute knowing — not by being instructed, but by making at every stage the experience that its own standard does not hold. For the philosophy of right two chapters above all matter: self-consciousness, where recognition is developed, and spirit, where ethical substance appears.

The best-known sentence of the work stands in the Preface and is at the same time its instruction for reading:

The true is the whole. But the whole is only the essence completing itself through its development.

Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface

See also Self-Consciousness, Lordship and Bondage, Spirit, Absolute Knowing

The stage at which the I relates itself no longer to objects but to itself. Hegel’s decisive step is that it cannot remain with itself: self-certainty that has only itself is empty. It becomes true only when another self-consciousness lets it hold good. Recognition is thus not a moral postulate but a structural condition — and the root of all right.

Self-consciousness is in and for itself in and through the fact that it is in and for itself for an other; that is, it is only as something recognized.

Phenomenology of Spirit, Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness

See also Recognition, Desire, Lordship and Bondage

The first, immediate way in which self-consciousness seeks to prove its independence: it negates the other by consuming it. This necessarily fails, for what has been consumed can confirm nothing any more. Desire therefore produces its own restlessness: it needs its object again and again and is never satisfied by it. Only an object that is itself self-consciousness can give what is at stake.

But this opposition of its appearance and its truth has for its essence only the truth, namely the unity of self-consciousness with itself; this unity must become essential to it, that is, it is desire in general.

Phenomenology of Spirit, The Truth of Self-Certainty

See also Self-Consciousness, Lordship and Bondage

Hegel’s most famous passage and the most frequently cited in all nineteenth-century philosophy. Out of the struggle for recognition there arises an unequal relation: the one fears death and serves, the other is recognized. But the lord is recognized only by someone whom he himself does not let count as free — a recognition that is worth nothing. The bondsman, by contrast, comes to himself through two things: through the fear that dissolves in him everything that had become fixed, and through labour.

The sentence about labour is the heart of the matter and was Marx’s point of departure:

Labour, by contrast, is desire held in check, a vanishing staved off; or, it forms and cultivates.

Phenomenology of Spirit, Lordship and Bondage

That in the end both sides can be free only in mutual and equal recognition is the insight underlying the philosophy of right — and the reason why Hegel can call slavery „wrong in and for itself“ without skipping over the history of unfreedom.

See also Recognition, Self-Consciousness, Alienation (Entfremdung)

A word that does not occur in Hegel and is nevertheless suited to naming one of his insights: that the I does not have itself but is first formed in relation to a you. This is developed in the Phenomenology, in the struggle for recognition. Whoever reads objective spirit from here understands right not as an order that meets ready-made subjects, but as the medium in which they become subjects at all.

Sources: Jürgen Habermas, „Arbeit und Interaktion“, 1968 · Ludwig Siep, Anerkennung als Prinzip der praktischen Philosophie, 1979 · Michael Theunissen, Der Andere, 1965

See also Recognition, Self-Consciousness, Objective Spirit

Neither the intellect of the individual nor anything ghostly: in Hegel, spirit is the actuality of a We consisting of nothing but I’s, without any of them disappearing. It lives in language, custom, law, institution. The philosophy of right is the scientific presentation of precisely this spirit in its objective forms.

The formula for it is as short as it is famous:

[…] the I that is We, and the We that is I.

Phenomenology of Spirit, The Truth of Self-Certainty

See also Objective Spirit, Absolute Spirit, Ethical Substance

Hegel’s principal work (1812–1816), the presentation of the pure determinations of thought. It is not logic in the present-day sense — no doctrine of correct inference — but the development of the categories out of one another: being, essence, concept. For the philosophy of right it is not an accessory but a presupposition: the course from abstract right through morality to ethical life is the same course as that from being through essence to the concept. Whoever reads the one without the other takes Hegel’s transitions for assertions.

Hegel knows how this science strikes its readers, and says so himself:

The system of logic is the realm of shadows, the world of simple essentialities, freed from all sensuous concretion. The study of this science, the sojourn and the labour in this realm of shadows, is the absolute cultivation and discipline of consciousness.

Science of Logic I, Introduction

See also Being, Essence, The Concept, Dialectic

The first category of the Logic and the poorest thought there is: being without any further determination is indistinguishable from nothing — out of which becoming arises, and with it the Logic is under way. In the philosophy of right, abstract right corresponds to this place: property is simply there, the person is a person, nothing more has yet been said.

Being, pure being — without any further determination.

Science of Logic I, First Chapter

On this site: Sein – Nichts – Werden (in German) — see also Essence, The Concept, Abstract Right

The second sphere of the Logic. Being has shown itself to be merely immediate; thought looks behind it. Here the categories of separation prevail — identity and difference, ground and consequent, appearance and thing in itself. In the philosophy of right, morality corresponds to this: the will is no longer in the external thing but reflected into itself, and the world falls apart into ought and is, good intention and deed.

Hegel derives the name from language, as he does with sublation:

The truth of being is essence. […] Language has preserved essence in the past tense of the verb to be — gewesen [been]; for essence is past, but timelessly past, being.

Science of Logic II, The Doctrine of Essence

See also Being, The Concept, Morality

Denotes what something is according to its concept, without yet knowing or having actualized it. The child’s will is in itself free; the slave is in himself free. That is no palliation but the very reason why wrong is done to him. In Hegel the whole of world history is the process in which spirit becomes what it already is in itself.

Hegel warns expressly against stopping there:

The understanding stops at mere being-in-itself and thus calls freedom, according to this being-in-itself, a capacity [faculty], since in this way it is indeed only a possibility.

§ 10, Remark

In the edition: § 10 — see also For itself, In and for itself

The condition in which something has distinguished itself from other things and related itself to itself — independence and self-consciousness. The person in abstract right is the will’s first being-for-itself. Hegel sets the two expressions against each other in a sentence that contains the method of the entire book:

Thus the will is free only in itself, or for us, or it is the will in general in its concept. Only when the will has itself as its object is it for itself what it is in itself.

§ 10

In the edition: § 10 — see also In itself, In and for itself

The condition of completed actualization: what was there in possibility is now also known and actual. This is the structure of the Idea. The ethical state is freedom in and for itself — not a mere inner capacity and not mere subjective pleasure, but actualized in institutions and known and willed by the citizens as their own freedom. In Hegel the phrase is no filler; where it stands, it stands at the point where the development of a concept is complete.

In the edition: § 21 · § 33 · § 258 — see also In itself, For itself, The Idea

Nothing is merely given. What appears immediate — sense-certainty, pure being, the custom one grows up into — has always already passed through something else. And conversely: what is mediated is in the end immediately there too. For the philosophy of right this means that the state, which confronts the citizen as a power he finds already there, is in truth the result of all the preceding stages — and that custom, which seems self-evident, is the most mediated thing in the world.

[…] that there is nothing, nothing in heaven or in nature or in spirit or anywhere else, which does not contain immediacy just as much as mediation, so that these two determinations show themselves to be unseparated and inseparable, and that opposition between them shows itself to be a nullity.

Science of Logic I, Introduction

In the edition: § 151 · § 257 — see also Being, Ethical Substance

A pair of terms describing what happens in a sublation. A moment is real so long as it appears as an independent existence; it is ideal as soon as it has lost its independence and occurs only as a moment within a unity — without having disappeared on that account. Family and civil society, taken for themselves, are real spheres with a life of their own; in the state they are ideal moments: the state is that in which they have their subsistence and their sense.

Out of this Hegel makes a proposition of great reach — it defines what idealism means at all:

The proposition that the finite is ideal constitutes idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in refusing to recognize the finite as a true being.

Science of Logic I, Remark 2

See also Sublation, Absolute Idealism, The State

The force that keeps everything in Hegel in motion. Negativity is not destruction and not scepticism, but the power not to let something existing stand — and therein lies the freedom of thought. In the philosophy of right it appears everywhere: as wrong, which negates right; as punishment, which negates wrong; as evil, as death, as war. Whoever takes Hegel for a thinker of harmony has not read this side of him.

The passage from the Preface to the Phenomenology is the most famous on the subject:

[…] that the accidental as such, separated from its compass, that which is bound and actual only in its connection with something else, should gain an existence of its own and a separate freedom — this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure I.

Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface

In the edition: § 82 · § 99 · § 139 · § 324 — see also Determinate Negation, Contradiction, Sublation, Dialectic, Slavoj Žižek (in German)

The concept on which it depends whether Hegel’s procedure is more than scepticism. A negation can be one of two things. It can content itself with the empty nothing — then one is rid of what was disputed and has nothing in its place, and must wait until something new comes from outside. Or it is the negation of this determinate thing: then the result still carries within it the thing from which it proceeds, and the movement continues out of itself. Only in the second case is there a progression that no one has to push from outside.

[…] scepticism, which always sees in the result only pure nothing and abstracts from the fact that this nothing is determinately the nothing of that from which it results. […] When, by contrast, the result is grasped as it is in truth, as determinate negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen […]

Phenomenology of Spirit, Introduction

In the Logic Hegel draws the methodological consequence, in a sentence he himself calls a tautology:

[…] that such a negation is not all negation but the negation of the determinate thing which dissolves itself, and is therefore determinate negation; that consequently the result essentially contains that from which it results — which, properly speaking, is a tautology, for otherwise it would be something immediate and not a result. Since what results, the negation, is determinate negation, it has a content.

Science of Logic I, Introduction

This also puts a test in one’s hands. Where a concept dissolves an opposition and nothing of either side is afterwards to be found, there is no determinate negation but the abstract one — and the result can be filled with anything at all. The same test lies in sublation: what is sublated is something preserved.

In the edition: § 82 · § 99 · § 31 — see also Negativity, Sublation, Dialectic, Contradiction, Hegel und die deutsche Rechtswissenschaft (in German)

For the understanding an error; for Hegel the condition of everything that moves. He is not claiming that one may assert nonsense at will; he is claiming that every finite determination turns into its opposite at its own limit and brings forth something new out of that. In the philosophy of right this can be seen throughout: wrong is the contradiction of right, which drives on to punishment and further to morality; contract is expressly determined by Hegel as a contradiction.

The sentence in which he gives contradiction precedence over identity is among the boldest in the Logic:

[…] if there were any question of ranking the two determinations and they had to be kept separate, then contradiction would have to be taken as the deeper and more essential. For as against it, identity is merely the determination of the simple immediate, of dead being; but contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality; only in so far as something has a contradiction within it does it move, does it have drive and activity.

Science of Logic II, Contradiction

In the edition: § 72 · § 82 — see also Dialectic, Sublation, The Speculative

Not a term of abuse but a definite stage of thought: the understanding holds differences fast and lets every determination count for itself. Without it there is no determinacy, either in science or in action — Hegel says expressly that a person of character is a person of understanding. Its defect is that it stops at what is separated. In the philosophy of right the understanding is therefore at work wherever freedom and law, individual and state, appear as opposites that would have to be weighed against each other.

Thought as understanding stops at fixed determinacy and at its distinctness from other determinacies; such a limited abstraction counts for it as subsisting and being on its own account.

Encyclopaedia § 80

In the edition: § 183 · § 189 — see also The Speculative, Dialectic, Concrete Universality

Not the art of refuting propositions, and least of all the schema thesis–antithesis–synthesis, which occurs nowhere in Hegel. Dialectic is the movement in which a determination founders at its own limit and brings forth from that a determinate, positive content. What is decisive is that it is not the thinker who does this: the object does it itself; thinking looks on.

Hegel defined this in the philosophy of right itself, more clearly than in some passages of the Logic:

The moving principle of the Concept, as not only dissolving but also producing the particularizations of the universal, I call Dialectic […]. The higher dialectic of the Concept consists in not merely producing and grasping the determination as a limit and opposite, but in producing and grasping the positive content and result out of it; for through this alone is it development and immanent progression. This dialectic, then, is not the external doing of a subjective thinking, but the own soul of the content, which organically puts forth its branches and fruits.

§ 31, Remark

In the edition: § 31 · § 32 — see also Sublation, Contradiction, The Speculative

The third moment of thought. Hegel divides it in the Encyclopaedia thus: the abstract or understanding side, the dialectical or negatively rational, the speculative or positively rational. The speculative grasps the unity of opposites — not as a compromise but as the insight that the two sides live off each other. An example from the philosophy of right: the understanding separates subjective freedom and objective law and must then ask how much freedom is to be sacrificed to the law. Grasped speculatively, the state is the shape in which subjective freedom first has its actuality.

The logical has, in respect of form, three sides: α) the abstract or understanding side, β) the dialectical or negatively rational, γ) the speculative or positively rational. These three sides do not make up three parts of logic, but are moments of everything logically real, that is, of every concept or of everything true in general.

Encyclopaedia § 79

See also Dialectic, Contradiction, Concrete Universality

In the Logic, the form of reason itself: the unity of universality, particularity and singularity. Hegel does not mean the syllogism of the textbooks but the structure in which a whole closes together with itself through its members. Hence he can say that the entire system is a single syllogism — and hence it is no play on words when he describes the state as a syllogism in which the universal mediates itself through the particular with the singular.

[…] the definition of the absolute is now that it is the syllogism, or, expressed as a proposition, this determination reads: „Everything is a syllogism.“

Encyclopaedia § 181

In the edition: § 198 · § 272 · § 302 — see also Concrete Universality, The Science of Logic

The logical key to Hegel’s concept of the state. For the understanding, the universal is what many things have in common — what one obtains by disregarding their differences. The concrete universal is the opposite: the whole that actualizes itself into its differences and in doing so does not lose them but first brings them forth. The state is not the sum of its citizens, nor what they have in common, but the context in which they can first develop their particularity at all.

It is the universality that is concrete within itself and thus is for itself, which is the substance, the immanent genus or immanent Idea of self-consciousness – the concept of the free will as the universal that encompasses its object, that runs through its own determination, and that in this determination is identical with itself.

§ 24, Remark

In the edition: § 24 · § 258 · § 260 — see also The Concept, The State, The Speculative

An expression that is almost universally misunderstood. Hegel’s idealism does not claim that things are only in our heads (that would be subjective idealism), nor does it place an unknowable thing in itself behind appearances (that was Kant). It claims that nothing finite can subsist on its own — that every singular thing has its truth only in the context that sustains it.

The proposition that the finite is ideal constitutes idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in refusing to recognize the finite as a true being. Every philosophy is essentially idealism, or at least has idealism for its principle […]

Science of Logic I, Remark 2

On this site: Was ist – im philosophischen Sinne – Idealismus? (in German) — see also Ideality and Reality, The Science of Logic, Die metaphysische Lesart (in German)

The most famous and most abused sentence of the philosophy of right. It stands in the Preface and runs:

What is rational is actual;
and what is actual is rational.

Preface to the Philosophy of Right

It is no licence for what exists. In Hegel, actual does not mean: present at hand. What is actual is what corresponds to its concept; everything else is, as the Remark to § 1 puts it, „transient existence, external contingency, opinion, inessential appearance“. A despotic government exists, but it is not actual — and for that reason it perishes. Conversely the sentence also says: whoever holds the present to be merely null and knows better has, as Hegel writes, his better world only in his own opining.

On this site: Preface — In the edition: § 1 — see also The Concept, The Idea, Reconciliation, The Owl of Minerva

The title of the section in Hegel’s Encyclopaedia which the philosophy of right works out in detail. Between subjective spirit (the individual consciousness) and absolute spirit (art, religion, philosophy) stands the spirit that gives itself shape in the world: in right, morality and institutions. Its stages are abstract right, morality, ethical life.

The division that carries the whole book stands in the philosophy of right itself:

According to the sequence of stages in the development of the Idea of the will that is free in and for itself, the will is A. immediate […] – the sphere of abstract or formal right; B. the will reflected out of its external determinate being into itself […] – the sphere of morality; C. the unity and truth of these two abstract moments […] – ethical life.

§ 33

In the edition: § 33 — see also Spirit, Absolute Spirit, Ethical Life

Substance is what underlies, what remains. In the philosophy of right the state is the ethical substance: the whole body of custom, law and culture in which someone grows up and which he has not made himself. Hegel’s point is that freedom does not consist in setting oneself against it, but in finding oneself again in it as in one’s own essence.

The state therefore has for him two modes of existence — an immediate one in custom and a mediated one in the knowledge of the individual:

It has its immediate existence in custom, and its mediated existence in the self-consciousness of the individual, in the latter’s knowledge and activity; while self-consciousness, in turn, has its substantial freedom in the disposition it holds toward the state as its essence, purpose, and the product of its activity.

§ 257

In the edition: § 257 · § 146 · § 151 — see also The State, Ethical Life, Spirit

Hegel’s reckoning with the tradition, conducted as early as 1802/03 in the essay „On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law“. There he criticizes two forms: empirical natural law, which starts from the state of nature and takes the state as a means of self-preservation, and formal natural law, which starts from the abstract autonomy of the individual and turns the state into a contract. For him both miss the same thing: that right springs neither from facts nor from a mere ought, but from the ethical spirit of a people. In the philosophy of right this returns as the dispute over the concept of positive law.

On this site: On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right — In the edition: § 3 · § 258 — see also Positive Law, Absolute Ethical Life

For Hegel not an explanation but an error of thought. The contract theories posit a condition before society in which man is said to have been free, with simple needs; from this they derive what right has to accomplish. Hegel disputes the premise: a condition of unbroken naturalness would not be freedom but its opposite, because freedom begins only in the distinction of the spiritual from the natural. At the same time he lets the expression stand in one place — in the relation of states to one another, where there really is no superior power.

The representation that the human being, in a so-called state of nature, in which he had only so-called simple natural needs […] lived, with respect to needs, in freedom, is […] an untrue opinion; for natural need as such, and its immediate satisfaction, would be nothing but the condition of a spirituality submerged in nature, and hence of crudeness and unfreedom, whereas freedom lies solely in the reflection of the spiritual within itself […]

§ 194, Remark

In the edition: § 194 · § 200 · § 333 — see also Natural Law, Culture and Cultivation, External Sovereignty

Hegel’s counter-concept to formal natural law, from the Jena period: the undivided, living unity of the spirit of a people, thought on the model of the Greek polis, in which right, custom, religion and morality had not yet fallen apart into separate spheres. In the Berlin philosophy of right this concept is no longer the goal but what has been lost: there Hegel knows that the modern world has brought forth the principle of subjectivity and can no longer go back behind it. What in Jena was one unity now unfolds into family, civil society and state.

On this site: The Natural Right essay — In the edition: § 142 · § 260 — see also Natural Law, Ethical Life, The Jena Philosophy of Spirit

Hegel’s lectures from about 1803 to 1806, in which he works out the system of nature and spirit for the first time. They matter for the philosophy of right because spirit is developed here out of a context of language, labour, tool and struggle for recognition — more concretely and more materially than the later presentation does. Civil society too, then still under the title „system of needs“, already appears here as a sphere of alienation. The texts are not part of this edition; but they explain much that in the Berlin paragraphs stands there only as a result.

See also Absolute Ethical Life, Recognition, The System of Needs

The third and highest sphere of the philosophy of spirit, after the subjective and the objective. Here spirit no longer knows something else — nature, the state — but itself. This happens in three forms which have the same content in different shapes: art (intuition), religion (representation), philosophy (concept). For the philosophy of right this is the limit: the state is the highest shape of objective spirit, but not the highest thing of all. Whoever takes Hegel for a deifier of the state overlooks that in him three further stages come above the state.

See also Art, Religion, Philosophy, Objective Spirit

The first stage of absolute spirit: truth as it appears to the senses. Here spirit grasps itself not in pure thought but in stone, colour, sound, word. Hegel’s definition of it has become famous and is hard to surpass for brevity:

The beautiful is thereby determined as the sensuous shining of the Idea.

Lectures on Aesthetics I, Introduction

See also Absolute Spirit, The End of Art, Representation

This too is a catchword that sounds sharper than Hegel’s thesis. He does not claim that there will be no more art, but that art is no longer the highest way in which a reflective world makes its truth present to itself. For the Greeks it was; for us philosophy has taken that place.

In all these respects art is and remains for us, on the side of its highest determination, something past.

Lectures on Aesthetics I, Introduction

See also Art, Absolute Spirit

The second stage of absolute spirit. Its content is the same as that of philosophy — spirit knowing itself — but its form is representation: a personal counterpart, historical narratives, cult and congregation. Hegel does not disparage this; the form of representation is the one in which truth is there for everyone, not only for the few who philosophize. For the state, religion is therefore that in which its ethical consciousness has historically come to be — which does not, however, found the state on dogmas.

See also Absolute Spirit, State and Religion, Representation, Philosophy

The concept with which Hegel marks off religion from philosophy — and at the same time ordinary thinking from comprehending thought. Representation is thinking in images, narratives and juxtapositions: God as father, creation as an event, the beyond as another place. The content may be perfectly true; it is only the form that holds it apart. Philosophy translates representation into the concept without adding anything to it or taking anything away. In the philosophy of right, too, the expression often stands as a warning: where Hegel says that something first occurs to representational thinking, a correction almost always follows.

In the edition: § 21 · § 24 · § 274 — see also Religion, The Concept, Philosophy

A point on which Hegel is readily misunderstood. He treats religion in the chapter on the state expressly only in passing — on the ground that here it is the principle of the state that is carried through in its own sphere, and not that of religion. For him the state rests on reason, not on articles of faith; historically, however, he holds fast to the view that the modern form of the state would be unthinkable without the consciousness of freedom brought by the Reformation.

Religion, like cognition and science, has, as its principle, a distinctive form of its own, different from that of the state; they therefore enter into the state partly in the relation of means of culture and disposition, and partly, in so far as they are essentially ends in themselves, on the side of their having an external existence.

§ 270, Remark

In the edition: § 270 — see also Religion, The State

The third and highest stage: the same content as in art and religion, but in the form alone adequate to it — in the concept. Hegel’s determination of it is a return: at the end of the system stands the same logical element with which it began, but now as a result and proved in concrete content.

This concept of philosophy is the self-thinking Idea, the knowing truth […], the logical with the meaning that it is the universality proved in concrete content as in its actuality.

Encyclopaedia § 574

See also Absolute Spirit, The History of Philosophy, The Science of Logic, Absolute Knowing

For Hegel not a collection of opinions but the unfolding of philosophy itself. Every system is a necessary step; the later philosophy has not refuted the earlier ones but sublated them. Whoever reads the philosophy of right therefore always reads its prehistory along with it — Plato, Aristotle, natural law, Kant, Fichte, Rousseau.

But the master craftsman of this labour of millennia is the one living spirit, whose thinking nature it is to bring what it is to its own consciousness, and, once this has thus become an object, to be at the same time already raised above it and to be a higher stage within itself.

Encyclopaedia § 13

On this site: Enzyklopädie, Einleitung (in German) — see also Philosophy, Sublation

The end of the Phenomenology and the standpoint from which the system is written. It does not mean omniscience. It means that nothing stands over against spirit as absolutely alien — that what appeared to it as another world has turned out to be its own determination. Only from here can logic be pursued, and only from here can it be said that right is the actualization of freedom and not merely an institution one might wish otherwise.

See also The Phenomenology of Spirit, Philosophy, Absolute Spirit

The closing image of the Preface and Hegel’s determination of what philosophy can and cannot accomplish. It comes too late to instruct the world how it ought to be; it comprehends a shape of life only once that shape is complete. This is no topos of modesty but the consequence of his concept of actuality: what is not yet actual cannot be known either.

When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then a form of life has grown old, and with gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the falling of dusk.

Preface to the Philosophy of Right

On this site: Preface — see also Actuality and Rationality, Reconciliation

The goal of philosophical cognition: to see that the world — nature, history, the state — is not alien and senseless, but the unfolding of the same reason that thinks in the one who knows. For the philosophy of right this means that the individual recognizes the laws not as external constraint but as the shape of his own freedom.

Against this Hegel sets the image of the cross and the rose — an allusion he does not resolve, and the hardest sentence of the Preface:

To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present and thereby to delight in it — this rational insight is the reconciliation with actuality, which philosophy grants to those upon whom the inner demand has once been made to comprehend […]

Preface to the Philosophy of Right

On this site: Preface — see also Actuality and Rationality, The Owl of Minerva

An expression that does not occur in Hegel in this form. It comes from the reception — from Alexandre Kojève, later from Francis Fukuyama — and there means something Hegel did not assert: that nothing further happens. What is to be found in Hegel is something else: world history is the progress in the consciousness of freedom, and with the principle of the modern state — that all are free — this consciousness has reached its concept. With that a principle has been found, not a condition completed. The actualization of this principle remains a task, and Hegel left no doubt how unfinished it was in his own time.

In the edition: § 341 to § 360 — see also World History, The World Spirit