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WorkGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Elements of the Philosophy of Right

Hegel's account of freedom made real in property, family, market and state — delayed by censorship, and remembered for its combative preface.

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel514 passages held

  • German, the original language
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Original title
Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts
First published
(aged 51)
Original language
German

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Overview

In March 1819 a theology student stabbed the playwright August von Kotzebue to death in Mannheim, and by September the German states had answered with the Carlsbad Decrees: censorship of the press, a ban on the student associations, and dismissal for professors who seemed dangerous. Hegel, in his second year at Berlin, had a handbook for his lectures on law and the state nearly ready, and he held it back. It appeared late in 1820, with 1821 on the title page. The book argues that freedom is not being left alone but something a person has only inside institutions — property and contract, conscience, the family, the market economy Hegel called civil society, and a constitutional state — each a stage at which freedom becomes real. It is candid about where that fails: amid great wealth, Hegel wrote, civil society is not rich enough to keep part of its people from sinking into a destitute underclass. Most of the fire fell on the preface, dated June 1820, in which Hegel claimed that what is rational and what is actual coincide, and that philosophy always arrives too late to instruct the world, flying only at dusk, like the owl of Minerva, goddess of wisdom. He also struck at Jakob Friedrich Fries, a philosopher already dismissed from Jena for his part in the student movement, and a reviewer at Halle called it ignoble to hit a man who was down. The charge that the book served the Prussian state ran from Rudolf Haym's Hegel und seine Zeit in 1857 to Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies in 1945. The young Karl Marx went through its account of the state paragraph by paragraph in 1843, in a manuscript not printed until 1927.

Key concepts

What does 'right' mean in this book's title?

Right, the German Recht, means far more than law. It is every way in which a free will gains real existence in the world. Property is right in its simplest form, a contract joins two wills, and morality, the family, civil society and the state are richer stages of the same thing. So a book about right is a book about how freedom becomes real, step by step.

What is civil society in Hegel's sense?

Civil society is the world of the market and of private interest, standing between the family and the state. Each person pursues their own ends, yet can reach them only through everyone else, so a web of mutual dependence grows. Hegel shows how needs multiply without limit once they are refined, a spiral he calls luxury, and how dependence and hardship multiply along with them.

What does Hegel mean by the rabble?

The rabble, in German Pöbel, is what forms when a large mass of people sinks below the standard of living a society treats as necessary. Poverty alone does not make it. What makes it is the loss that follows: the feeling of right, of honour, and of supporting oneself by one's own work. And the same process, Hegel adds, makes it easier to concentrate disproportionate wealth in a few hands.

What does 'what is rational is actual' mean?

It means reason is already at work in the world as it is, so philosophy's job is to comprehend the present, not to design an ideal elsewhere. Actual, for Hegel, is stronger than merely existing. A theory that builds a world as it ought to be, he writes, exists only in its author's opinion, a soft element into which anything at all can be imagined.

What is a corporation in this book?

A corporation is Hegel's term for an association of people in the same trade or profession, like a guild. It sits inside civil society but looks beyond private gain: it trains its members, vouches for their skill and cares for them in hardship. Membership gives a person standing and honour that do not depend on showing off wealth, and so it is one of civil society's defences against the rabble.

Why is the state not a contract, for Hegel?

A contract comes from the choice of individuals and can be made or withdrawn as they please; the state does not. Hegel's example is Beccaria, who denied the state the right to execute because no one could be presumed to have consented to being killed. Hegel replies that the state is no contract at all, and that protecting each person's life and property is not its whole essence.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Freedom given a shape in the world

Is a person free when nobody interferes, or only when their will has found a shape in the world? The answer runs from property to conscience.

Hegel starts from the free will and follows it outward. A person first gives freedom an outward existence in property, which others must respect; contract joins two wills; crime negates right, and punishment negates the crime, honouring the criminal as a rational being. Morality then turns inward, to intention and conscience, which Hegel defends as the right of subjective freedom yet sees hardening into hypocrisy once it answers only to itself. Freedom as doing whatever one likes he calls caprice, the commonest idea of it.

  • freedom
  • free will
  • will
  • personhood
  • property
  • contract
  • punishment
  • justice
  • law
  • moral responsibility
  • conscience
  • morality
  • subjectivity
  • individuality

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Family, market and state

Where does freedom become a way of life? In three institutions, each with its own bond: love in the family, need in the market, shared purpose in the state.

The family rests on love, and marriage on free consent, not a contract. Civil society, Hegel's name for the modern market world, lets everyone pursue private ends while making each dependent on all; its divided labour grows ever more mechanical. He is candid about its failure: amid excessive wealth it is not rich enough to prevent a destitute rabble. The state, the actuality of the ethical idea, is to hold these together as a constitutional monarchy, with corporations, estates and a public opinion that deserves respect and contempt alike.

  • ethical life
  • family
  • marriage
  • civil society
  • state
  • political authority
  • monarchy
  • political representation
  • political philosophy
  • education
  • religion
  • rationality

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Philosophy arrives at dusk

Can philosophy tell the world what it ought to be? The preface says no: it can only grasp its own time in thought, and always comes too late to give instructions.

The preface, dated June 1820, holds the book's most quoted lines. What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational; philosophy's task is to comprehend what is, not to build a world as it ought to be. No philosophy leaps beyond its time, any more than a person can jump over Rhodes. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk. Against Fries, who wanted the state to flow from heart and enthusiasm, Hegel defends law and thought.

  • reason
  • rationality
  • philosophical method
  • philosophy of law
  • self-consciousness
  • political philosophy
  • state

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Within this work

passages held
514
distinct concepts
666
by passages held, corpus-wide
#144

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “ethical life” and “freedom”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 27 pairings. 82 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
ethical lifefreedom19
ethical lifestate15
freedomstate12
lawstate10
civil societyethical life9
civil societyfamily8
ethical lifefamily8
ethical lifelaw8
familyproperty8
civil societyproperty7
ethical lifesubjectivity7
civil societystate6
familystate6
lawsubjectivity6
familyfreedom5
freedomproperty5
propertystate5
civil societyfreedom4
freedomlaw3
freedomsubjectivity3
civil societylaw2
ethical lifeproperty2
statesubjectivity2
civil societysubjectivity1
familylaw1
lawproperty1
propertysubjectivity1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1801 The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy (Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie)

    The book that opened Hegel's Jena years and first put his name before the public — as Schelling's ally, a role his essays for their Critical Journal continued.

     DE
  2. 1802 Faith and Knowledge (Glauben und Wissen)

    Written at the height of the alliance with Schelling: the longest of Hegel's pieces for their journal, and his fullest early reckoning with Kant.

     DE
  3. 1802 How the Ordinary Human Understanding Takes Philosophy (Wie der gemeine Menschenverstand die Philosophie nehme)

    Of Hegel's reviews for the Critical Journal, the most openly mocking: the journal's programme of severity turned on a single named Kantian.

     DE
  4. 1802 On the Essence of Philosophical Criticism (Über das Wesen der philosophischen Kritik überhaupt)

    Unsigned, and claimed for both editors ever since: the programme at the head of the journal Hegel and Schelling ran in 1802–03, which Hegel's reviews in its later issues put into practice.

     DE
  5. 1802 On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law (Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts)

    Spread across the Critical Journal's last two issues: Hegel's longest published early writing on law and the state, composed while he was still an unsalaried lecturer at Jena.

     DE
  6. 1802 Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy (Verhältnis des Skeptizismus zur Philosophie)

    Between the Krug review and Faith and Knowledge in the Critical Journal's run, the essay in which Hegel first says what doubt does for philosophy.

     DE
  7. 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (Die Phänomenologie des Geistes)

    Written as Napoleon's army entered Jena and published in 1807, the book Hegel meant as the doorway into his system — and the one many readers still enter him through.

     DE
  8. 1812 Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik)

    The larger of Hegel's two versions of the Logic, written away from any university while he ran a Nuremberg school; the metaphysical core the rest of the system rests on.

     DE
  9. 1817 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline (Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse)

    The frame for Hegel's other books: its first part condenses the Science of Logic, and the Philosophy of Right expands one section of its third part. Hegel taught from it and rewrote it twice.

     DEEN
  10. 1821 Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts) you are here DE
  11. 1831 On the English Reform Bill (Über die englische Reformbill)

    Some three decades after his first, unpublished pamphlets on Württemberg and on the German constitution, Hegel's last venture into the politics of the day.

     DE
  12. 1833 Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie)

    Among the posthumous lecture books, the course Hegel carried through nearly his whole teaching life, and the one that closes on his thanks to the students who had followed it.

     DE
  13. 1835 The Philosophy of Fine Art (Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik)

    Not a book Hegel wrote but Berlin lectures assembled by a student after his death — the most influential philosophy of art of the nineteenth century, and a contested reconstruction of it.

     EN
  14. 1835 Who Thinks Abstractly? (Wer denkt abstrakt?)

    Hegel in the manner of a magazine essayist: short, comic and aimed at the general reader, though he never published it himself.

     DE
  15. 1837 Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte)

    For decades the most widely read of Hegel's works, and now the most contested — lectures on world history, published after his death, reading it as the growth of human freedom.

     DE
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