This page is about the wording: which edition the text follows, against what it has been checked, and what has been changed in it. It describes the German text of this edition. The English version is a translation of that text, and the last section says what that means for anyone quoting it.
Textual basis
The text was transcribed from the Suhrkamp Werkausgabe (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Werke vol. 7, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel). That edition descends from the Freundesvereinsausgabe of 1833, prepared by Eduard Gans after Hegel’s death — not from the first edition, and it alters the wording in many places.
The authority here is therefore not that edition but the first printing of 1820. The whole of the paragraph text and the Preface have been checked against it; where the Werkausgabe departs from it for no discernible reason, the reading of the first printing stands. The critical reproduction of the first printing in Gesammelte Werke vol. 14,1 (ed. Klaus Grotsch and Elisabeth Weisser-Lohmann, Felix Meiner Verlag 2009) served as the tool for this. Nothing belonging to that edition itself — its apparatus of variants, its editorial report, its introduction — has been taken over or reproduced.
On the date: the first edition appeared in October 1820, in time for the Michaelmas fair; the title page, however, bears the year 1821, which is why the work is usually cited under that year. Hegel dated his Preface 25 June 1820.
The indented passages are Hegel’s own Remarks, printed with the text in 1820; the superscript figures lead to his own footnotes. Everything else on a paragraph page — Additions, Notes, lecture transcripts, commentary — is not Hegel’s printed text. The Additions are Gans’s, the Notes come from Hegel’s own annotated copy; both are taken from the Werkausgabe and have not yet been checked against their own sources.
What has been checked
The comparison was made word by word, by machine and then inspected at each place. Checked so far: the text and Remarks of all 360 paragraphs, Hegel’s seven own footnotes in §§ 140, 258 and 270, the Preface, and the sentence and paragraph divisions. After correction the agreement with the first printing stands at 96 to 97 per cent at the level of individual words; the remaining difference is almost entirely spelling and inflection, deliberately modernised here.
A second comparison was run against the Werkausgabe itself, to catch transcription errors of our own. It found none.
Interventions in the wording
The wording was altered at 72 places where the Werkausgabe departs from the first printing. Every single one is listed, with its old and new reading, in the register of interventions (in German). The heaviest:
- § 195 read „ungebildetem” for „gebildetem” — the sentence said the opposite of what Hegel wrote.
- § 206 had lost its relative pronoun, and with it the grammar of the sentence.
- § 3 replaced Hegel’s fourfold „etc.” in the Cicero quotation with ellipses, thereby asserting an omission that does not exist.
- The long Haller note stood in the Preface, where it does not belong: in the first printing it stands on pages 245–250, that is, in the Remark to § 258. The Preface now carries the reference Hegel himself gives.
- § 343 restores Hegel’s doubled „sich”; §§ 62 and 317 restore a full stop that had been softened into a semicolon; § 212 a full stop that had gone missing.
Two places where the Werkausgabe had improved Hegel’s grammar have been returned to the first printing: the idiom „gäng und gäbe” and, in the Preface, „jede noch so kahle und partikuläre Objekte und noch so stroherne Materien”. Hegel’s adjective endings there are correct; what does not fit is the singular „jede”, and that has been left as he wrote it.
Silent additions by other hands were removed. Editorial additions that are meant to stay appear in square brackets.
Four decisions
- Inflection modernised. „andern” becomes „anderen”. The older form adds nothing.
- Latin as Hegel wrote it — jure, not iure.
- Names modernised — Plato becomes Platon.
- Abbreviations in citations expanded, never contracted.
Quotations in Latin, Greek or French stand in the original wording in the text; the translation goes in the footnote. This holds in all three language versions.
Spelling, and forms that stay Hegel’s
The German text is given in present-day orthography. The Werkausgabe of 1970 follows the norm of its own time, which is neither Hegel’s nor ours, so some 1 080 places were adjusted — daß to dass, muß to muss and the like. Literal quotations keep the spelling of their source.
At four points the Werkausgabe had not followed the modern norm but altered Hegel’s word-formation, and there his form stands here: Einzelnheit (not Einzelheit), selbstständig, Prätension, Unbedeutenheit. One exception to the rule of modernised inflection is worth naming, because it is audible: in § 214 Hegel writes „von fünf Talern oder aber von vier Taler” — inflecting the first and not the second, in one sentence. After a numeral, German currency and measure words often stay uninflected, and his unevenness has been left standing. Einzelnheit, in turn, matters for readers of the translation: it is Hegel’s term for singularity, the third moment of the concept, and never means “a detail”. He uses the form with n throughout the Science of Logic and all three editions of the Encyclopaedia. The English renders it as singularity, never as detail or particularity.
The page numbers of the first printing
Small grey markers such as |46| run through the text. They show where a new page begins in the first printing of 1820: the Preface in Roman numerals from III to XXIV, the paragraph text in Arabic from 4 to 355. Any passage in this edition can thus be located in the printed book, and the other way round.
The count has been checked against the first edition itself and against Hegel’s own page references: in § 348 he refers to „§ 279 Anm. S. 289″; here § 279 begins on page 285 and § 280 on page 290, so the Remark does run across page 289. His reference „§ 140 S. 144″ checks out likewise.
On precision. In the printed book the break often falls inside a word — page 4 begins with „nunft eines Gegenstandes ist”. The marker is therefore placed after the complete word in which the break falls; words are not split. Where a page opens with a section heading, the marker stands at the head of the following paragraph.
In this English version the markers cannot be word-accurate. The point at which the German page breaks has no counterpart in English word order. They are set at the nearest sentence boundary — which means: the page named begins somewhere in the sentence that follows, within a sentence either way. For a verbatim quotation with a page reference, use the German text.
The Werkausgabe. Its page numbers are not in the text — two series of marks side by side would make it unreadable, and for the paragraphs the number is the more exact reference anyway. A passage cited by Werkausgabe page can be looked up in the concordance of page numbers.
The footnotes
Three different things stand side by side in the footnotes. So that they remain distinguishable, every note not our own carries a statement of origin.
Hegel’s footnote. — the ten footnotes Hegel himself added to the first edition: two in the preface, three to § 140, one to § 258, three to § 270, one to § 317. They belong to the work.
Hegel’s Handexemplar. — the handwritten notes from Hegel’s interleaved own copy. They are Hegel’s, but were not printed.
Everything else, unmarked, is our own annotation: references, dates, quotations traced to their source. The numbering runs through all three together.
Hegel’s own references
Hegel refers constantly to two of his own works, and both references now lead nowhere for a reader. They are resolved in footnotes; in the text itself his own wording stands unchanged.
Encyclopaedia. All his paragraph numbers follow the Heidelberg edition of 1817, which almost no one now has to hand. The renumbering for the third edition of 1830 was drastic and follows no rule; each reference has to be resolved by subject matter. The footnote therefore gives the equivalent as Encyclopaedia, 3rd ed. § …
Science of Logic. Hegel cites volume and page of the first edition (1812/1813 and 1816). The footnote repeats his reference and sets beside it the place in the Gesammelte Werke, which carry the original pagination, together with the heading of the section.
References with no place given. At about a dozen points Hegel says only that something is „presupposed from the Logic”, naming no number. There the footnote gives a short explanation of the matter instead: which logical operation is meant, and where it is set out.
About this English version
This translation was made with the help of artificial intelligence and reviewed editorially. It is an independent rendering: it does not follow Knox, Nisbet or any other published translation, and it was made from the German text of this edition — that is, from the corrected text, not from the Werkausgabe.
It follows the German sentence by sentence. That is a deliberate constraint: it keeps the translation checkable against the original and makes it possible to carry a correction in the German text into the English without retranslating a paragraph. Every one of the 71 interventions listed above was checked here; in practice about half of them had to be carried over, because in the other half the translation had already rendered the sense correctly — which is itself a useful sign that a German reading is corrupt.
What this version is not. It has not itself been collated against anything, because there is nothing to collate it against: it is not a witness to Hegel’s text but a reading of it. The English Preface in particular has not been checked sentence for sentence against the German. Where the two differ, the German is right by definition.
For quotation. Cite this version as a translation, not as Hegel. For a verbatim quotation in scholarly work, take the German text of this edition with the page number of the first printing, or a printed edition. If you find a place where the English says something the German does not bear, that is worth reporting — twice already such a divergence has uncovered a defect in the German.
What has not been checked
This list is here on purpose. An edition that conceals its gaps is not citable.
- The Additions by Gans and the Notes from Hegel’s annotated copy are taken from the Werkausgabe and have not been checked against their own sources. Since that edition is demonstrably faulty in the paragraph text, this is not a formality.
- The emphases have been compared only by sample: 67 places where the first printing letterspaces a word and this edition does not, and 284 the other way round, are still unexamined.
- Divergences affecting several words at once — word order, insertions — have been reviewed only in part.
- Punctuation has been checked at the level of sentences, not within them.
- The English and Spanish Preface have not been collated against the German.
Version and changes
Version 2 — 19 September 2026.
- 19.09.2026 — Preface collated against the first printing for the first time; its spelling brought into line (81 places); the Haller note removed from the Preface, where it does not belong; page numbers of the first printing inserted throughout the Preface and all 360 paragraphs in all three languages; 17 further corrections of wording, carried into the translations; the first printing established as the authority for this edition.
- 18.09.2026 — the paragraph text collated against the first printing on a new basis; 42 corrections of wording; comparison against the Werkausgabe as the transcription source.
- 10.09.2026 — this page created; spelling of the paragraph text brought into line (997 places); the date of the first edition corrected.
This page is kept up to date. What is recorded here as checked has been checked; what is open stands under “What has not been checked”.