The full title runs: Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse. In this edition: Groundlines of the Philosophy of Right, or Natural Right and the Science of the State in Outline. Every part of it says something, and the subtitle more than the title.
„Grundlinien“ — and why this edition says „Groundlines“
English editions have handled the first word in three ways. Dyde, Knox and White simply drop it, so that the book appears as The Philosophy of Right. Nisbet and Wood render it Elements, which catches the sense of foundational building blocks but can suggest separable parts rather than a continuous line of reasoning. Houlgate, revising Knox, uses Outlines, which is close in register but makes the book sound provisional.
This edition says Groundlines. „Groundline“ is an established English word for a foundation or basis, and its technical use points at what Hegel seems to mean: in descriptive geometry — developed shortly before he wrote — the groundline is the axis along which a three-dimensional form is projected onto a plane. A reference line, not a finished picture. The paragraphs are the guiding lines along which Hegel traces the concept of right into its actual institutional forms. The full reasoning, with the alternatives weighed, is set out in the translator’s note: A Note on the Translation: Why „Groundlines“?
„Im Grundrisse“ — in outline
The book is not a work but a guide. Hegel says so in the first sentence of the Preface: the immediate reason for publishing it is „the need to provide my students with a guide for the lectures that I deliver, in accordance with my office, on the Philosophy of Right“. The paragraphs are propositions to be noted down; the working out happened in the lecture room. That explains the terseness, which sometimes borders on discourtesy — and it explains why the transcripts are not an appendage but the missing half.
Here too the translation had to choose. Grundriss is the architect’s ground plan, the two-dimensional map of a completed whole — so, to stay with the architectural metaphor, Ground Plan would be the consistent rendering. This edition keeps the conventional „outline“ all the same, so as not to overburden the text with terminological changes; the choice is stated openly in the first footnote to the Preface. The reader should simply know that „outline“ here does not mean „sketchy“.
„Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft“
These are the two academic subjects into which the material then fell apart, and Hegel names them in order to force them together. Naturrecht was the doctrine of rational right, Staatswissenschaft the doctrine of the actual arrangement of the commonwealth. The book insists that the two cannot be separated: what is rational and does not become actual is not rational, and an arrangement that is not rational is not worth a science.
At the same time the subtitle distances itself from the natural right of the tradition — from Hobbes, who starts from the state of nature, and from Kant and Fichte, who start from the autonomous individual. Hegel had taken this apart as early as 1802/03 in his essay on natural right.
„Philosophie des Rechts“
Recht in Hegel is wider than the lawyer’s „law“, and wider than the English „right“. It means every existence of freedom (§ 29), and that is why morality, the family, the economy, the state and world history belong to it. Whoever expects a textbook of positive law finds a book about the conditions under which there can be right at all.
On the translation. A Note on the Translation: Why „Groundlines“? · Preface, footnote 1 (on „Grundriss“ / „outline“) · Glossary, where the other contested terms are listed. – Literature. Gesammelte Werke, vols. 14,1–14,3, Hamburg 2009–2011, with the editorial report on the genesis, the title and the subtitle; Karl-Heinz Ilting (ed.), Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie 1818–1831, vol. 1, Stuttgart 1973, on the prehistory of the book in the lecture course.