In brief: Hegel expressly claims: real. Dialectic is not the procedure of someone thinking but the movement of the matter itself, at which thinking merely looks on. That is the strongest and the most assailable thesis of his philosophy — and for the philosophy of right it stands in § 31.
The sentence
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. Subjective thinking, as such, merely looks on at this development of the Idea as the proper activity of its reason, without adding any ingredient of its own.
Groundlines, § 31 Remark
And the preceding sentence draws the consequence for the whole method: „To consider something rationally does not mean to bring a reason to the object from the outside and thus to work upon it, but rather the object is rational for itself.“
In the Encyclopaedia the same is put still more widely: the dialectical is „the principle of all movement, all life and all activity in actuality“ (§ 81 Addition). Not a way of speaking about things — a way in which things are.
What Hegel marks off by it
Expressly against dialectic as a trick. In § 31 Remark he resists an understanding that is „concerned only with deriving its opposite — a negative mode such as frequently appears even in Plato“. Ancient scepticism too, and „a modern half-measure“ that settles for an approximation to the truth, are rejected. The higher dialectic is the one that brings forth the positive content out of the determination.
Just as expressly not meant is a schema. The formula thesis – antithesis – synthesis does not come from Hegel and does not fit his procedure (see Has Hegel simply misunderstood the copula?).
What is strong about the thesis
It explains why Hegel has nothing to „apply“. If the movement belongs to the object, then the presentation is not an order imposed on the material but the tracing of what happens in it. § 31 says so in the main text: the progression happens „not through the assurance that various relations exist, nor through the application of the universal to such material taken up from elsewhere“.
It is moreover most nearly redeemable in the social domain. That civil society generates poverty out of itself and cannot remedy it out of itself (§ 243–§ 245) is not a figure of thought but a claim about an order, which may hold or fail to hold.
What is weak about it
It cannot be tested without already being assumed. Whoever says the movement belongs to the matter, and whoever says it belongs to the presentation, see the same text and reach different verdicts. There is no procedure by which the dispute could be settled — and Hegel offers none; the justification is to follow, as the Preface to the Phenomenology puts it, „only through the exposition of the system itself“.
To this comes: where the philosophy of nature makes the thesis testable, it does not hold up (see Is Hegel’s philosophy of nature the Achilles heel of the system?). That does not tell against the thesis in the domain of spirit, but it feeds the suspicion that a form of thought has been generalized here.
The usable middle position
One can read the philosophy of right without sharing the strong thesis. It then remains a procedure of reconstruction: it is shown that one institution cannot do without the next. That is weaker than Hegel means it, and strong enough to work with. Whoever shares the strong thesis has more to defend — and more to gain.
Sources. Groundlines § 31 and Remark, § 2 Remark, § 243–§ 245. – Encyclopaedia (1830) §§ 79–82, especially § 81 with Addition. – Science of Logic I, Introduction; Logic II, „The absolute Idea“ (the method). – Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface. – Literature. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegels Dialektik, Tübingen 1971; Michael Theunissen, Sein und Schein. Die kritische Funktion der Hegelschen Logik, Frankfurt a. M. 1978; Kevin Thompson, Hegel’s Theory of Normativity, Evanston 2019. – In the glossary: dialectic, the speculative, determinate negation.