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In the Preface to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel writes that ‘what is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational’. This so-called Doppelsatz has been much discussed, with commentators offering both conservative and progressive readings of Hegel's meaning. This chapter takes a different approach, arguing that the Doppelsatz should be understood in a normatively neutral way, claiming instead that it is a defense of Hegel's philosophical rationalism, and his belief that the political world is amenable to the sort of rational investigation he offers in the Philosophy of Right.

In addition to setting out the problem of free will as a problem generated by our commitment to the explicability of the world or the principle of sufficient reason, this chapter accomplishes two tasks. First, it explains why extant interpretations of Hegel's theory of agency that do not engage the causal structure of agency or the modern problem of free will necessarily fall short of articulating Hegel's view as a full theory of self-determination. Most importantly, it argues that for Hegel, the problem of expression is fundamentally a problem concerning the balance between self- and other-determination in productive activity, a problem Hegel terms of the problem of reflection. Second, the chapter briefly traces Hegel's basic theory of free will in the Introduction to his Philosophy of Right.

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. This book has argued for a systematic reading of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. This reading is both consistent with Hegel's own self-understanding of his project and offers a more robust interpretation of the Philosophy of Right, providing a clear advance on existing studies of this text. A principal target throughout has been Allen Wood's influential non-systematic reading of the Philosophy of Right in his Hegel's Ethical Thought. Throughout, a philosophical defence of Hegel's positions has been avoided. Instead, the focus has been to make explicit a more robust understanding of Hegel's positions on important topics in his political and legal philosophy.

This chapter presents a very general picture of Hegel's system and its logic. The aim is to provide a view that is acceptable both to commentators who believe that Hegel presents a strong metaphysical account and to those who believe that he does not. The chapter argues that, whichever side we find ourselves on, we can agree upon certain basic features of Hegel's system and the Philosophy of Right's place within it. These features include an understanding of (a) the dialectical structure of Hegel's arguments; and (b) the technical vocabulary Hegel employs in his arguments. The chapter is organized as follows. It offers a general background explanation of Hegel's system and its logic, with the primary aim of making clear the relationship between Hegel's system and his Philosophy of Right. The chapter begins with an analysis of Hegel's logic that underpins his wider system. This is followed by an explanation of how the logic relates to his wider system, and then, by how this system relates to the Philosophy of Right.

Explores and partially defends Hegel's claim that freedom is most fully realized through membership in the modern state. It contrasts Hegel's ‘civic humanist’ understanding of this claim with the social contract theory's view of the relationship between freedom and the state. The chapter also argues against those commentators (e.g. Isaiah Berlin and Allen Wood) who see something sinister in the Hegelian association of freedom with the state. In developing its interpretation, the chapter considers Hegel's distinction between state and civil society and it offers an overview of the basic structure of Hegel's main work of political philosophy—the Philosophy of Right.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the reception of G. W. F. Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right. It then provides the systematic reading of Hegel's work, and addresses the question of why the non-systematic approach is often a non-metaphysical one. Finally, the chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to provide a modest systematic reading of the Philosophy of Right (which we might call a weak systematic reading) that demonstrates the necessity of the systematic account.

This chapter examines Hegel’s notion of actuality, which I analyze as the retrospective logic of positing-presupposing implicit in philosophies of reflection. This retrospective logic is central to actualization—a process of externalization and recollection distinctive of Hegelian mediation. It also draws implications of the reading of actuality offered for understanding the structure of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

This chapter begins by explaining how the section ‘Subjective Spirit’ is related to the Philosophy of Right. Central to this explanation is the development of the free will from one section to the other. This view helps us make best sense of the primary problem of the Philosophy of Right, namely, how the free will can will freely, and not arbitrarily. The chapter explains why Hegel's views on property ownership in abstract right are primarily illustrative of the initial development of the free will, rather than a complete theory of property, as many have maintained. If this position is correct, then we cannot present a picture of Hegel's theory of property that exclusively considers abstract right, nor can we understand abstract right as a realm of private law. This position is best arrived at after grasping the relation of the abstract right within the Philosophy of Right and Hegel's larger philosophical system.

Amongst contemporary theorists, the most widespread interpretation of Hegel's theory of punishment is that it is a retributivist theory of annulment, where punishments cancel the performance of crimes. The theory is retributivist because it holds both that (a) criminals can be punished only if punishment is deserved; and (b) the value of punishment must be proportional to the nature of its corresponding crime, rather than to any consequentialist considerations. This chapter begins with an examination of ‘abstract right’ and the role of punishment in this section of the Philosophy of Right, and then considers how the role of punishment changes later in the Philosophy of Right. It argues that Hegel's later treatment of punishment may endorse different punishments whose function may not always be retributivist, and explores how this view coheres with Hegel's earlier treatment. Thus, the chapter rejects the view both that Hegel's most substantive treatment of punishment is contained in ‘abstract right’ and that his full treatment has only a retributivist function and is not open to additional functions, such as deterrence and rehabilitation.

Perhaps one of the most controversial aspects of G. W. F. Hegel's Philosophy of Right for contemporary interpreters is its discussion of the constitutional monarch. This chapter first argues that Hegel's justification of the constitutional monarch is established with the use of his logic, and then considers the question of whether or not it matters who serves as the monarch. It examines the domestic and foreign powers of the monarch, and argues against the virtual consensus of recent interpreters that Hegel's monarch is far more powerful than has been previously understood. In part, Hegel's monarch is perhaps even more powerful than Hegel himself may have realised, and certain inconsistencies with some of his claims are demonstrated. The present interpretation is a distinctive break from the virtual consensus on Hegel's monarch, without endorsing the view that Hegel was a totalitarian.

This chapter adopts the following approach to interpreting Hegel's views: When we judge the arguments of the Philosophy of Right we are not speaking of Hegel, the person, as a judge we should avoid on an Equal Rights Tribunal. We are in the business of attending carefully to his arguments. It shares the view with most, if not all, contemporary philosophers that the ideal family is not a heterosexual, monogamous, married couple with children, where the wife's roles are limited to homemaker and mother; there is no such thing as ‘an ideal family’. The chapter attempts to merely set straight Hegel's arguments in favour of the family and the particular form this family takes, arguing that the substance of Hegel's arguments only make sense if we take seriously the rationalist dialectical structure which informs the whole of the Philosophy of Right. The view of the family we find may be familiar, but the author's account is able to best make sense of Hegel's arguments, and provides a more robust understanding of Hegel's views on the family that improves upon and corrects previous accounts.

This chapter provides an explanation of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, a founding text for the social theory of law. It examines the contrast between Hegel's recognition of subjective freedom as the great accomplishment of modern society and his critique of subjectivism as its foremost pathology. It is proposed that the historical relation between subjective freedom and subjectivism lies at the heart of Hegel's analysis of modern forms of ‘right’. Hegel discovers personality as the determinate social form of the individual in modern capitalist society. His argument is that the absence of distinction between ‘morality’ and ‘ethical life’ — an absence he found in Kant's political philosophy — is a problem in terms of understanding the modern age. Moreover, in his observations on the association between subjective freedom and ethical life, Hegel shows the significance of civil society. Discussion on social theory and the Philosophy of Right is offered as well.

This chapter discusses the life and works of Hegel. Hegel was born in 1770 in the city of Stuttgart, capital of Württemberg, a Protestant enclave in generally Catholic southern Germany. He went to school at the local, classically oriented Gymnasium and not the more socially elevated, almost business school-like Karlsschule, in accordance with his father's intention that he should become a Protestant clergyman. In 1816, at the age of forty-six, Hegel finally secured a chair, at Heidelberg. A year later he brought out the summary of his whole system, his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and in 1818 achieved his ideal job, a chair at the University of Berlin, founded by Alexander von Humboldt in 1809 to be a centre of Bildung and for the spiritual reconstruction of Germany after its catastrophic disruption by Napoleon. Two years later Hegel published his Philosophy of Right, which is probably the most widely read of his works today.

This chapter examines the relevance of the “absolute method” developed in Hegel’s Science of Logic for his practical philosophy or philosophy of objective spirit. It argues, first, that the fruitfulness and vitality of Hegel’s practical philosophy as a whole depends in a fundamental way on two conditions, namely, (i) on its being conceived as part of a system of philosophy, and (ii) on its being based on the logic as the first part of the system. It argues, second, that the “absolute method” with which Hegel concludes the Logic presents the structure of a “logic of action.” It follows that since the Science of Logic itself is developed on the basis of the method, the logic is the foundational part of Hegel’s practical philosophy. Ultimately, the chapter contends that this is Hegel’s transformation and radicalization of Kant’s claim of the primacy of practical reason.

This chapter spells out the conceptual stakes of the reformist literary mode by turning to British state theory’s ‘Hegelian moment’. Hegel’s state theory converges on an understanding of the state as an aspect of social life (Sittlichkeit), making it possible to think about the state’s institutional structures as a moment in the actualization of social life rather than as a Foucauldian assemblage of administrative means external to social life. Britain’s Hegelian moment makes visible a reformist idiom in which the state appears as an aspirational figure that makes it possible to imagine the transition from capitalist society (Hegel’s bürgerliche Gesellschaft) towards a more egalitarian socio-political order. This transformation is imagined through close engagement with existing social forms rather than through a complete revolutionary overhaul of existing social arrangements. The chapter ends by asking why Britain’s Hegelian moment ended around 1914 and what were its more immediate afterlives.

This chapter examines systematicity as a form of normative justification. Thompson’s contention is that the Hegelian commitment to fundamental presuppositionlessness and hence to methodological immanence, from which his distinctive conception of systematicity flows, is at the core of the unique form of normative justification that he employs in his political philosophy and that this is the only form of such justification that can successfully meet the skeptic’s challenge. Central to Thompson’s account is the distinction between systematicity and representation and the way in which this frames Hegel’s relationship to the traditional forms of justification and the creation of his own distinctive kind of normative argumentation.