The charge is as old as it is famous, and it has a precise origin: Rudolf Haym’s book Hegel und seine Zeit of 1857. Haym read the sentence about the rational and the actual as a justification of the Prussian Restoration, and Hegel as its appointed thinker. The formula has held; it drove Hegel out of German legal scholarship for half a century.
What speaks against it – in the text itself
Whoever reads the Groundlines as the programme of the Prussian state of 1820 has to explain why it demands institution after institution that Prussia at that time precisely did not have:
Trial by jury and public proceedings (§ 228), grounded not on utility but on the right of self-consciousness – whoever is judged must be able to take part in the proceedings with his own knowledge. The opposite, Hegel says, places people in „a kind of serfdom toward such a profession“.
A code of laws, publicly promulgated (§ 215). „To hang the laws up so high, as Dionysius the Tyrant did, that no citizen could read them“ is, he writes, the same injustice as burying them in learned apparatus. Prussia did not get its code.
Civil rights for Jews (§ 270, note) – and with a grounding that places the state under obligation, not those affected.
An assembly of estates deliberating in public (§ 314 f.), so that public consciousness may have any knowledge of universal affairs at all.
Above all, though: in the note to § 258 Hegel attacks the leading theorist of the Restoration, Carl Ludwig von Haller, by name and over several pages, with a sharpness that occurs nowhere else in the book. Haller’s principle that it is „the eternal, unalterable order of God, that the more powerful rules“ Hegel calls the expression of „a complete lack of thought“; hatred of law he calls „the shibboleth by which fanaticism, feeble-mindedness, and the hypocrisy of good intentions reveal themselves“.
What speaks for the other side
One makes it too easy for oneself by exculpating only. Hegel was a Prussian official, the book appeared under censorship after the Carlsbad Decrees, and the preface attacks Jakob Friedrich Fries, who had just been suspended – a man who was down. That is unlovely, however one explains it.
In 1973 Karl-Heinz Ilting made this into the thesis that between the transcript of 1819/20 and the printed book there lies an accommodation to the censorship: Hegel dissembled. In 1983 Dieter Henrich replied with the edition of precisely that transcript – the fundamental positions are the same throughout, and the sharpening is Hegel’s own. The dispute is open. On this website you can conduct it yourself: the transcripts stand beneath the paragraphs.
The verdict
The Groundlines are the book of the Prussian era of reform, not of the Restoration – in detail they pursue the aims that were being defeated after 1819. Whoever declares Hegel the state philosopher must further explain why Haller, the actual philosopher of the Restoration, is treated in the book as an opponent.
A true kernel remains, but a different one from the one asserted: Hegel holds the rational state to be knowable and wants to comprehend it, not to design it. Whoever turns that into a readiness to take whichever state happens to exist for the rational one has performed the short circuit on which the German reception of Hegel did in fact later break – only it was not Hegel who performed it.
Sources. Rudolf Haym, Hegel und seine Zeit, 1857 · Franz Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat, 1920 · Joachim Ritter, Hegel und die Französische Revolution, 1957 · T. M. Knox and Shlomo Avineri in Jon Stewart (ed.), The Hegel Myths and Legends, 1996 · Karl-Heinz Ilting (ed.), Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie, 1973/74, against Dieter Henrich (ed.), Die Vorlesung von 1819/20, 1983 · Klaus Vieweg, Das Denken der Freiheit, 2012. – In detail on this website: Hegel and German legal scholarship.