Hegel's Political Philosophy

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7/27/2019 Hegel's Political Philosophy http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/hegels-political-philosophy 1/24 Copyrighted Material I  H egel’sPhilosophyofRightasa  T heoryof   J ustice  Although many contemporary philosophers have embraced Hegelian philosophy to a surprising degree—which may even help to bridge the gul between the Analytic and Continental traditions—Hegel’s  Elements of the Philosophy of Right has so ar ailed to exert the slightest inuence on the current debates in political philosophy. Rather, in recent years—ater the abrupt end o the Marxist phase and its reduction o modern right to a mere superstructure—philosophers returned on a broad ront to the rationalist paradigm o the Kantian tradition, which es- sentially dominates the debate rom Rawls to Habermas; and however hard these two authors in particular try to embed their Kantian concepts o justice in a realistic, almost social-scientifc approach, the theoretical model o Hegel’s  Philosophy of Right plays no decisive part in their thought. Nor has the situation changed much in response to the countermovement in political philosophy that came into being through the somewhat arti- fcial grouping o theoreticians as diverse as Charles Taylor,  Michael Walzer, or Alasdair MacIntyre under the heading o “communitarianism.” Despite a strong tendency to award a privileged position to ethics as opposed to a ormalistic prin- ciple o morality, or to communal values as opposed to arbi- trary individual reedom, no real attempt has been made in these circles to render Hegel’s  Philosophy of Right ruitul or the discourse o political philosophy. Indeed, the act that authors

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I H egel’sPhilosophyofRightasa

 T heoryof  J ustice

 Althoughmany contemporary philosophers have embracedHegelian philosophy to a surprising degree—which may evenhelp to bridge the gul between the Analytic and Continentaltraditions—Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right has so ar

ailed to exert the slightest inuence on the current debates inpolitical philosophy. Rather, in recent years—ater the abrupt end o the Marxist phase and its reduction o modern right to amere superstructure—philosophers returned on a broad ront to the rationalist paradigm o the Kantian tradition, which es-sentially dominates the debate rom Rawls to Habermas; andhowever hard these two authors in particular try to embed theirKantian concepts o justice in a realistic, almost social-scientifcapproach, the theoretical model o Hegel’s  Philosophy of Right 

plays no decisive part in their thought. Nor has the situationchanged much in response to the countermovement in politicalphilosophy that came into being through the somewhat arti-fcial grouping o theoreticians as diverse as Charles Taylor,

 Michael Walzer, or Alasdair MacIntyre under the heading o “communitarianism.” Despite a strong tendency to award aprivileged position to ethics as opposed to a ormalistic prin-ciple o morality, or to communal values as opposed to arbi-

trary individual reedom, no real attempt has been made inthese circles to render Hegel’s Philosophy of Right ruitul or thediscourse o political philosophy. Indeed, the act that authors

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such as Michael Walzer, Alasdair MacIntyre, or Joseph Raz aretrying to keep the greatest possible distance rom the political

philosophy o Hegel has acquired an almost symptomatic sig-nifcance by now.

 At frst sight, this general isolation o Hegel’s  Philosophy of  Right is difcult to understand since the work has a number o theoretical eatures that could make it appear particularly suit-able or our debates today. Given the widespread awareness o the need or the social contextualisation o ormally establishedprinciples o justice, Hegel’s attempt at setting the abstract 

principles o modern right and morality within an institutionalramework should look extremely attractive; urther, in view o the increasing uncertainty about the place ormal right shouldoccupy in our practical everyday morals, his eorts to developan ethical metatheory o right ought to appear uncommonly seductive; and fnally, in view o the problems o political phi-losophy today, there could be a particular appeal in the closeconnection between the development o his theory o right and

his diagnosis o the age, which centers on the alleged threat o individualism. But it appears that all these advantages have beenunable so ar to regain a legitimate place or Hegel’s Philosophy

One exception, o course, is Charles Taylor, who not only wrote a majormonograph on Hegel ( Hegel [Frankurt, 1978]) but who, in a summary o that book, also produced a concise interpretation o Hegel’s political philosophy ( Hegel and Modern Society [Cambridge, 1979]); however, even that impressivestudy can in no way be understood as a resumption o the specifc intentions o the Philosophy of Right , but rather as an actualization o Hegel’s philosophicalthought as a whole. The Philosophy of Right converges with Walzer’s theory o 

 justice in the idea that the separation o certain normative spheres must con-stitute an essential principle o a modern concept o justice (Michael Walzer,Sphären der Gerechtigkeit [Frankurt, 1983]; Spheres of Justice [New York,1983]);it touches on the ethics o MacIntyre in the idea that a certain internal connec-tion must be established between a diagnosis o the age and a normative theory (Alasdair MacIntyre, Verlust der Tugend [Frankurt, 1987];  After Virtue [Lon-don, 1981]); and it agrees in certain points with the approach o Joseph Raz inclaiming that the starting point o a liberal theory o justice must be a complexethical concept o individual autonomy (Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom[Oxord, 1986]). Currently the only exception, i.e., a genuine reactualization o Hegel’s Philosophy of Right , seems to be Michael O. Hardimon’s study, Hegel’s Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation (Cambridge, 1994).

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of Right in today’s philosophy. Rather, even in the debates withRawls or Habermas, where a theoretical recourse to his work 

 would seem most obvious, any attempt at a systematic reactu-alization is patently avoided. Thus we are acing a paradoxicalsituation in which, on the one hand, the reviving interest inHegel is beginning to produce a growing amount o academicresearch into his  Philosophy of Right  while, on the other hand,its systematic content still seems to have no signifcance or thepolitico-philosophical sel-understanding o our time. Hegel’s

 Philosophy of Right —which once divided the most talented minds

o a whole generation and which made the distinction betweenHegelians on the Right and Hegelians on the Let possible un-til the middle o the previous century—has obviously lost itspolarizing orce. In contrast to Kant’s theory o right or JohnStuart Mills’s treatise on liberty, which have recently returnedinto the limelight, Hegel’s book plays the unortunate part o aclassic that is widely read but no longer heard.

I we try to discover the reasons why Hegel’s  Philosophy of 

 Right  has so conspicuously lost its appeal to the present, weare immediately struck by two reservations about the treatisethat have in the course o time become commonplace in thediscourse o political philosophy; these two stereotypes, addedtogether, explain to a certain extent why doubts about Hegel’spolitical philosophy are so dominant today that they eveneclipse its obvious attractions. The frst prejudice, whether de-liberately or involuntarily, amounts to saying that the Philosophyof Right has antidemocratic consequences because it subordi-

nates the reedom o the individual to the ethical authority o the state. It is true that certain details or trains o thought inthe book could support such an objection, but in each case thecenter is held by Hegel’s unmistakable reusal to interpret, asKant does, the autonomy o all the citizens as the principle o 

Exceptions to this rule are Clio 10, no. 4(1981): 407–; Andrew Buchwal-ter, “Hegel’s Concept o Virtue,”  Political Theory 0(199): 548–83; Andrew Buchwalter, “Structure or Sentiment? Habermas, Hegel, and the Conditionso Solidarity,” Philosophy Today 41(suppl.): 49–53; Sibyl Schwarzenbach, “Zügeder Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie in der Theorie Rawls,”  Hegel-Studien 7(199): 77–110.

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the sovereignty o the people; and as this undemocratic ea-ture o the work is oregrounded, it becomes obvious that it 

cannot productively be understood as a kind o metatheory o the democratic constitutional state.  The second reservationthat bars the road to any attempt at actualizing the Philosophy of 

 Right today is o a mainly methodological kind and reers to thestructure o the argument in the text as a whole. It is said that the steps in Hegel’s reasoning can be correctly ollowed and

 judged only in relation to the appropriate parts o his Logic , but the Logic has become totally incomprehensible to us owing to

its ontological conception o spirit. Thereore, it seems advis-able to treat the text as a quarry or brilliant individual ideasrather than making a utile attempt to reconstruct the theory asan integral whole.

It was probably these two reservations, one political and theother methodological, that made the most signifcant contribu-tion to the decline in importance o the Philosophy of Right in thelast ew decades. All the arguments, epistemological as well as

normative, that Hegel is able to marshal in support o his ownconception o “ethical lie” remain hidden behind the contestedelements o his methodology and his concept o the state. I thiscrude characterization bears any resemblance to the receptiono the work over the years, then any attempt at reactualiza-tion is aced right at the outset with the choice between twoalternatives: we must either criticize the two objections directly and show them up as mere misunderstandings through a new interpretation o the  Philosophy of Right , or we must criticize

them indirectly by demonstrating their irrelevance to any re-ally productive reappropriation o the treatise. Thus, while thefrst, “direct” strategy would aim to actualize the  Philosophy of 

 Right  according to its own methodological standards and at 

One o the most even-handed discussions o this problem is still that inShlomo Avineri,  Hegels Theorie des modernen Staates  (Frankurt, 1976), pub-lished in English as Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (London, 197).

 The dependence o the entire argument o the Philosophy of Right on the as-sumed concept o spirit is most convincingly and clearly demonstrated by Rol-Peter Horstmann, “Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,” Routledge Encyclopedia of 

 Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig, :59–80, esp. 73.

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called that part o his philosophy which dealt with the norma-tive principles o a just social order in modern conditions, he

intended to ollow a line o reasoning that was very dierent rom the deductions o rational right in Kant or Fichte. First,he argued, since subjects were connected rom the start by in-tersubjective relations, a justifcation o general principles o 

 justice could not arise rom the atomistic idea that the reedomo the individual essentially consisted in the arbitrary exerciseo a subject’s own will, undisturbed and uninuenced by others.

 This led, second, to his equally unchanged objective o devising

general principles o justice that would legitimize those socialconditions under which each subject is able to perceive the lib-erty o the other as the prerequisite o his own sel-realization.

 Third, he had not discarded the quasi-Aristotelian idea o his youth that the normative principles o communicative reedomin modern society must not be anchored in rules o externalbehavior or mere coercive laws but needed to be internalizedby practical training in habitualized patterns o action and cus-

tom i they were to lose the last remnants o heteronomy. Andourth, he remained equally, or even more frmly, convincedthat in such a culture o communicative reedom, called “ethi-cal lie,” a signifcant space must be provided or that socialsphere o action in which all the subjects in their turn couldpursue their selfsh interests according to the conditions o thecapitalist market.  When Hegel was planning the publicationo the Philosophy of Right in Berlin, he did not wish to part withany one o these our premises, all o which hailed back to the

creative initial phase o his time in Jena, but his philosophicalsystem had meanwhile developed in such an independent way that it was not easy to see how his original intuitions could beshown to their best advantage and without any damage in thenew ramework. The solution Hegel ound or this task in histreatise not only clarifes the central intention o his practicalphilosophy; it explains both the extent o the underlying con-

For these our premises o the practical philosophy o the young Hegel,c. Axel Honneth,  Kampf um Anerkennung (Frankurt, 1994); The Struggle for  Recognition (Cambridge, MA, 1996), chap. 1, sect. .

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cept o right and the structure o the text as a whole, whichseems conusing at frst sight.

Since his arewell to Jena, the development o Hegel’s systemhad been accompanied by the idea that the discipline devotedto morality and right must all into that part o his philosophy that was to contain the explanation o the “objective spirit”; thismeant, roughly, that portion o his philosophical undertakingthat was to reconstruct the process o sel-reection undergoneby reason during the stage in which it maniests itsel in theexternal phenomena o social institutions and practices.  The

distance between this ormulation and the tasks we usually as-sociate with disciplines such as ethics or moral philosophy issignifcantly reduced i we take into account a urther defni-tion Hegel provides or the sphere o the “objective spirit”; but in so doing we must ignore the difculty that arises rom thisadditional characterization, which introduces into the systeman element that has evolved historically and yet is intended torepresent the sel-reection o reason. In act, Hegel holds that 

reason realizes itsel as a specifc orm o spirit in the objective world o social institutions; under modern conditions objectivespirit takes the orm o a “will that is generally ree”; thus hisphilosophy o “objective spirit,” in its most general defnition,has to reconstruct systematically those steps that are necessary or the ree will o every human being to realize itsel in thepresent. Now it is no longer difcult to see that it is precisely this part o Hegel’s system that contains the oundations o thephilosophical discipline usually described as the “philosophy o 

right” or “ethics,” and i we remove the theory rom the systemas a whole, we can even interpret it in such a way as to make it 

For a more precise defnition o the place o the Philosophy of Right  withinHegel’s system, c. Horstmann, “Hegel,” 74.

 To elucidate the general intention o Hegel’s Philosophy of Right , c. Kenneth Westphal, “The Basic Context and Structure o Hegel’s Philosophy of Right ,” inThe Cambridge Companion to Hegel , ed. Frederick C. Beiser, (Cambridge, 1994),34–69; Siep, “Vernuntrecht und Rechtsgeschichte”; Karl-Heinz Ilting, “DieStruktur der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie,” in  Materialien zur Hegelschen

 Rechtsphilosophie, ed. Manred Riedel (Frankurt, 1974), :5–78.

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comparable not only to the philosophies o morality and right in Hegel’s time but also to concepts o justice in our own.

Hegel, then, sees the idea o the “ree general will” as the ba-sic principle o his Philosophy of Right . Like Rousseau, Kant, andFichte, he sets out rom the premise that under the conditionso modern enlightenment any defnition o morality or right canbe considered as justifed only to the extent that it expresses theindividual autonomy or sel-determination o the human be-ing. However, the comparison becomes more difcult as soonas Hegel tries to integrate this discussion into his system by 

describing the perspective rom which that “ree will” is to be viewed in the Philosophy of Right . In the amous wording o § 9o the Introduction we are told that the task o the treatise is torepresent the “existence o the ree will,” which will at the sametime defne the sphere o “right” as a whole. In comparison

 with the approaches mentioned beore, everything about thischaracterization is unclear. Our understanding o the concept o “existence” is assisted to some extent by the suggestion that 

in accordance with the defnition o “objective spirit” we must be dealing with the social conditions or the realization o ree will, but even the simple question o how ar this can provideany kind o normative justifcation is let unanswered. Thus theonly way to obtain any urther clarifcation is through a closerexamination o Hegel’s use o the term free will ; or right at thebeginning he builds into this key category o his  Philosophy of 

 Right a set o intuitions he has preserved rom his early phase, which distance him rom Kant or Fichte.

In his elucidation o the term  free will , which takes up thelargest part o his Introduction to the Philosophy of Right , Hegelreects on the modern idea o individual autonomy or sel-determination. In his view, only two, equally incomplete ideashave so ar had an eect on the philosophical treatment o thisnormative ideal: on the one hand, individual sel-determinationhas been understood as the ability o human beings to distance

 An excellent survey o the development o the modern idea o autonomy is now provided by J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge,1998); however, the historical reconstruction o the theory ends with Kant.

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themselves, by a decision o the will, rom all those “needs,desires, and drives” that might be experienced as a restriction

o the independence o the sel; Hegel is convinced that thisdefnition has captured an elementary component o individualreedom, as is shown, or example, by the human capacity orsuicide, but in eect it leads to total inactivity because actiono any kind is tied to the positing o restrictive purposes (§ 5).On the other hand, merely as the counterpart o the frst, solely negative version o ree will, Hegel sees a defnition that oersthe possibility o understanding individual sel-determination

as the ability to make an inormed choice between “given con-tents”; as § 6o the Philosophy of Right indicates, this category contains, among other things, the approaches to the moral phi-losophy o Kant and Fichte, who can think o reedom o the

 will only in terms o a moral deliberation about impulses orinclinations over which the individual has no control. Hegel’sobjections to what we might call an “optional” model o “ree

 will” leads to his own characterization o the autonomy o the

individual, which to a certain extent provides the pivotal point o the entire construction o the Philosophy of Right ; or what it means to explain a just or “good” social order by a “representa-tion” o the “existence o ree will” is measured above all else by the way the concept o “ree will” is understood in detail.0

Basically, Hegel is able to sum up his objections to the optionalmodel o sel-determination in the single ormula that here thematerial o a reective decision o the will must continue to beregarded as contingent and in that sense as “heteronomous”: as

he puts it in his own terminology, “the content o this sel-determination” thereore remains something essentially “fnite”(§ 15). Thus, while the limitation o the negativistic model o “ree will,” in Hegel’s view, consisted in its ability to describesel-determination only as the exclusion o all specifc inclina-tions or purposes, the shortcoming o the optional model was

0 An outstanding interpretation, albeit one that deviates rom the reectionsthat ollow, is oered by Robert B. Pippin, “Hegel, Freedom, the Will: ThePhilosophy o Right (§ 1–33),” in Siep, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts,31–54.

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the compulsion to represent the act o sel-determination asa reective choice between inclinations or impulses that are

themselves beyond the subject’s control—and, as Hegel nevertires o repeating, a consequence o such an incomplete defni-tion o reedom is the Kantian dualism o duty and inclination,o ideal moral law and mere instinct-driven nature. In contrast,not surprisingly, the author o the  Philosophy of Right aims at a more complex model o “ree will” in which even the mate-rial o individual sel-determination loses every trace o heter-onomy because it can in its turn be imagined as a product o 

reedom. Such a demanding concept is supposed to be possiblei the will is imagined as an internally reective relationship, whereby it is able to have an eect on itsel as will.

 At this difcult point Harry Frankurt’s amous suggestionto distinguish between “frst” and “second-order volitions” ismuch less helpul than it might appear at frst sight. The dis-tinction may explain what Hegel means by talking about the

 will that “has itsel as its object” (§ 10); in accordance with

Frankurt’s suggestion, this must reer to the idea that we canunderstand our impulses or inclinations as expressions o the will (“volitions”) o the frst order, which we are able to assessrom the perspective o a second order. Based on such a model,it makes sense to regard the human will as a relationship on twoor more levels, in which we are able to will or not to will ourelementary, subordinate volitions again. But all this proves lessthan helpul as soon as we turn to Hegel’s more comprehensiveormulation that the “ree” will must will itsel “as ree,” that 

is, as able in its turn to transorm into the stu o reedom thematerial composed o its impulses and inclinations; or, giventhis defnition, the obvious question will be how to represent impulses in such a way that they can be imagined as “ree” andnonfnite.

Here we are oered two alternative interpretations, distin-guished by the degree to which they understand Hegel as in-

 volved in the project o radically sublating contingency in the

Harry G. Frankurt, “Freedom o the Will and the Concept o a Person,”The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge, 1988), 11–5.

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system o human motivation. On the one hand, Hegel can beinterpreted as essentially adopting the Kantian idea o sel-

determination, but adding the premise that every subject must possess the appropriate inclinations in order to be able to con-

 vert the reely chosen decisions into motives. On the otherhand, this rather conventional interpretation is countered by the claim that Hegel wanted to draw the idea o individual sel-determination so deeply into the structure o human motiva-tion that every subject, and correspondingly every social com-munity, as it were, “naturally” and “spontaneously” sets itsel 

the task o developing and cultivating within itsel inclinationsand impulses that were consistent with, and in act an integralpart o, true human reedom. In this second case the idea o ree

 will includes the ar-reaching demand or a deliberate “workingthrough” o the whole system o human impulses. The key orthe choice between the two alternatives, in my view, is suppliedby an apparently insignifcant passage in the Addition to § 7, in

 which riendship is described as the paradigmatic pattern or

experiencing such a reedom:But we already possess this reedom in the orm o eeling, or

example in riendship and love. Here, we are not one-sidedly 

 within ourselves, but willingly limit ourselves with reerence

to an other, even while knowing ourselves in this limitation as

ourselves. In this determinacy, the human being should not eel;

on the contrary, he attains his sel-awareness only by regarding

the other as other. Thus, reedom lies neither in indeterminacy 

nor in determinacy, but is both at once . . . the will is not tiedto something limited; on the contrary, it must proceed urther,

or the nature o the will is not this one-sidedness and restric-

tion. Freedom is to will something determinate, yes to be with

onesel in this determinacy and to return once more to the

universal.

 At this point we are suddenly aced once more by the frst o the our motives Hegel tries to salvage rom his early, pre-

systematic period in his complete system despite all the new 

See, e.g., Allan Patten, Hegel’s Idea of Freedom (Oxord, 1999), 53.

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constructional constraints; or the passage I have just quotedamounts precisely to the concept o reedom that he had previ-

ously advanced against the atomism o the various theories o natural right. Here, in contrast to the two deective defnitions,Hegel answers the question how “ree will” is really to be un-derstood by, roughly, this train o thought: in order to be ableto will itsel as ree, the will must restrict itsel to those “needs,desires, and drives,” in short its “frst-order volitions,” the re-alization o which can again be experienced as an expression,or confrmation, o its own reedom. But that is possible only 

i the object o the desire or inclination itsel has the quality o being ree, because only such an “other” can really enablethe will to experience reedom. It is easy to see why Hegel canpresent this construction as a synthesis o the two models that 

 were earlier described as deective: rom the second, “optional”model he adopts the idea that individual sel-determinationmust consist in a reective restriction to a specifc aim, androm the frst the notion that autonomy must always have the

orm o an unrestricted experience o sel, so that, adding thetwo together, “ree will” can be described as “being with one-sel in the other.” Naturally, this proposed solution containsa number o unclarities, which are resolved in later passages o the Philosophy of Right ; or example, the concept o “education”in the Introduction provides only a vague indication o how the reective restriction to a specifc aim can be presented asanything other than a “choice” or an “arbitrary act.” But, onthe other hand, this model o a “ree will,” which clearly reveals

the contours o a communicative model o individual reedom,allows us to describe somewhat more precisely the program o the Philosophy of Right as intended by Hegel.

 As we have already seen, Hegel would like to develop theprinciples o a just social order by representing the “existenceo ree will”; as we have also seen, “existence” is supposed to

On the concept o “communicative reedom,” see Michael Theunissen,Sein und Schein (Frankurt, 1978), chap. 1, sect. 1, ; Dieter Henrich, “Hegelund Hölderlin,” Hegel im Kontext (Frankurt, 1971), 9–40; Hinrich Fink-Eitel,Dialektik und Sozialethik (Meisenheim am Glan, 1978), sect. D, E.

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mean the totality o external, social, or institutional conditionsthe “ree will” needs in order to realize itsel. By clariying

more accurately what Hegel means by the principle o “ree will,” this provisional defnition o the task can be expanded by an essential ingredient: as the quintessence o a just social orderhe regards those social or institutional conditions that allow each individual subject to enter into communicative relation-ships that can be experienced as expressions o their own ree-dom; or it is only insoar as they can participate in such socialrelationships that subjects are able without compulsion to real-

ize their reedom in the external world. To put this intentiono Hegel in somewhat more general terms, one might perhapssay that he regards communicative relationships as the “basicgood” in which all human beings must take an interest or thesake o realizing their reedom; however, we must hasten to addthat Hegel, unlike Rawls, does not believe that this basic goodcan be distributed airly according to some principles; what heis driving at is rather the idea that the “justice” o modern soci-

eties depends on their ability to make it possible or all subjectsequally to participate in such communicative relationships.

 This supposition receives urther support i we add the last defnition given by Hegel in connection with the basic or-mula o his Philosophy of Right ; in § 9he had written that any “existence” that is the “existence o ree will” should be called“right.” An explanation o this rather unclear ormulation,

 which is supposed to determine the range o the concept o right, is ound in the subsequent paragraph, which can be re-

garded as a urther key passage o the entire Introduction; hereit becomes clear that the term right has the double meaning o a “necessary condition” and a “justifable claim”: “Each stage inthe development o the Idea o reedom has its distinctive right,because it is the existence o reedom in one o its own determi-nations. When we speak o the opposition between morality or

Suggestions in this direction can be ound in Charles Taylor, “The Natureand Scope o Distributive Justice,” Philosophy and the Human Sciences ( Philosophi-cal Papers ) (Cambridge, 1983), 89–317; see also Charles Taylor, “Irreducibly Social Goods,” Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 17–45.

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ethics and right , the right in question is merely the initial andormal right o abstract personality. Morality, ethics, and the

interest o the state—each o these is a distinct variety o right,because each o them gives determinate shape and existence to

 freedom” (§ 30). I we disregard the use o terms such as ethics and interest of the state, the meaning o which is not explainedmore accurately till later in the text, this passage shows unmis-takably that Hegel means something ar more comprehensiveby “right” than other philosophers o his time: unlike Kant orFichte, to whom “right” meant human coexistence regulated

by the laws o the state and who relied most o all on the coer-cive power o the state, he understands that term to cover allthose social conditions that can be proved to be necessary orthe realization o the “ree will” o every subject. But, in his

 view, what must be given in “existence,” or social reality, toenable the individual “ree will” to develop and realize itsel, isnot completely absorbed by the single institution o legal right;rather, as we have already seen, the prerequisites o such a real-

ization must include some essentially communicative relationsthat will enable the individual subject to be “with onesel in theother.” At frst sight, Hegel’s use o the title Philosophy of Right ,

 which meant something else then just as it does today, seemsmistaken or misleading; while the term is generally understoodto mean an attempt to provide a normative justifcation o thesocial role o legal rights, Hegel’s intention appears to be tosupply a kind o ethical representation o the social conditionsor individual sel-realization; and because in these conditions

the legal right, as suggested by the sense o the above quota-tion, orms a separate, albeit only “ormal” element, one couldat best talk about an ethical theory o legal right rather than a

 Philosophy of Right . However, such a manner o speaking wouldignore the reason Hegel himsel gives in the passage I quoted

For this comprehensive concept o Hegel’s notion o right, see Siep, “Ver-nuntrecht und Rechtsgeschichte”; see also Siep, “Philosophische Begründungdes Rechts bei Fichte und Hegel,” in Praktische Philosophie im deutschen Idealis-mus (Frankurt, 199), 65–80; Allen W. Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought (Cam-bridge, 1990), 71.

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to justiy his specifc, comprehensive use o the title  Philoso- phy of Right : all orms o social existence, insoar as they can be

proved to be necessary conditions or the realization o “ree will,” may be called “rights” because they are allocated a spe-cifc “right” in each case.

Hegel owes this conceptual proposition to a transerence o the modern concept o “right”—the normative idea that subjectshave some claims that are generally justifed and sanctioned by the state—rom the sphere o the individual to social conditionsor structures as a whole. In his usage o the concept o right in

the Philosophy of Right , universal rights initially are not attrib-uted to individuals but to those orms o social existence that can be proved to be social “basic goods” serving the realizationo “ree will.” This usage o the term becomes even clearer when

 we try to answer the urther question about what the justifableclaims o the various spheres might be; what Hegel means isapparently that such spheres, in proportion to the degree o their irreplaceability in making individual sel-determination

socially possible, have the right to occupy a legitimate place inthe institutional order o modern societies. Thus the bearers o the “rights” that the Philosophy of Right is concerned with in thefrst instance are those social spheres and practices that havea justifable claim to be maintained and carried on by society as a whole; and the purported guarantors o such “rights” o spheres, institutions, or systems o practices must be all themembers o those societies who are characterized by the nor-mative principle o individual sel-determination.

It is this extremely idiosyncratic usage o the concept that led Hegel to entitle his own attempted theory o social justice

 Philosophy of Right ; in so doing he did not merely want to un-derline, through the choice o a name, the challenge that hisown enterprise was bound to represent to Kant’s or Fichte’s ap-proach to the philosophy o right in spite o the many eaturesthey all had in common; rather, through the choice o that title,he consciously gave his theory a turn toward the normative, be-

cause his usage o the category o right required him to supply rational reasons or the legitimacy or validity o the “existentialclaims” made by the dierent social spheres. It should be clear

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by now that these reasons were to be justifed by a “presenta-tion” o the necessary conditions o individual sel-realization;

and it should also be clear that the yardstick or such a “descrip-tive” justifcation is provided by the principle o irreplaceability in the social enabling o sel-determination.  To that extent Hegel’s Philosophy of Right represents a normative theory o so-cial justice that, by reconstructing the necessary conditions o individual autonomy, tries to determine what social spheres asociety must comprise or make available in order to give allits members a chance to realize their sel-determination. In

this program it is also easy to recognize the second intentionthat Hegel has kept alive since his youthul phase in Jena andrevived in the mature shape o his practical philosophy: i weadd what we have so ar discovered about the basic good o communicative relations, the central intention o the Philosophyof Right  is seen to be the development o universal principleso justice in terms o a justifcation o those social conditionsunder which each subject is able to perceive the liberty o the

other as the prerequisite o his own sel-realization. With thisinterim result in mind, it no longer seems too difcult to assessthe basic structure and organization o the text in detail.

“Right”inthePhilosophyofRight :Necessary

SpheresofSelf-Realization

 The title and intention o Hegel’s Philosophy of Right must havestruck its original readers as surprising and bizarre, but itsstructure and division into chapters and sections will also have

 An interesting discussion o how ar Hegel’s Philosophy of Right should beunderstood as a normative theory is ound in Vittorio Hösle,  Hegels System(Hamburg, 1987), :417–3. My own suggestion diers rom Hösle’s proposedinterpretation, in that I regard the concept o “objective spirit” or “rationalreality” as such as normative insoar as we can speak here o rationality only 

 with regard to the moral principle o “ree will”: what can be called “rational”in relation to social reality is measured by the ulfllment o not only cognitivebut moral demands.

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seemed unamiliar. The clarifcation o the intention behind theprogrammatic ormulations o the Introduction may have cre-

ated the reasonable expectation that the subsequent implemen-tation o the theory would essentially consist in the straight-orward reconstruction o the communicative conditions o individual sel-realization; but i we assumed that such a simplepattern o argument really represented the structural principleo the text we would be underestimating not only the pressureexerted by the system on the Philosophy of Right but also Hegel’sar more complex intentions. In developing his theory o jus-

tice, Hegel’s aim was not only to reconstruct precisely thosespheres o intersubjective action that are indispensable or therealization o “ree will,” given the communicative structure o reedom; rather, he also wanted to allocate a legitimate place inthe institutional order o modern societies to those conceptionso reedom that are necessary, but not sufcient—and there-ore incomplete—conditions or individual sel-realization.

 Thus the binary division Hegel introduces into his theory o 

 justice arises frst rom the distinction between incomplete andcomplete conditions or the realization o “ree will”: while heis convinced that only communicative relationships based onthe pattern o riendship actually allow the individual subject to realize his reedom, he nevertheless concedes that other, in-complete concepts o reedom are a necessary prerequisite orthe emergence o such a practical reedom. In the idiosyncraticterminology o the Philosophy of Right , Hegel’s concern must beto clariy the hierarchy o the “rights” associated with all the

dierent understandings or spheres o reedom and show how they must come together to enable the complete realization o “ree will”; and, to continue the argument, the aim o such asystematic lineup would be to allocate to the dierent condi-tions o reedom the precise place in the structure o modernsocieties that they must occupy in the process o enabling indi-

 vidual sel-realization.However, this reection represents only a preliminary stage

in the attempt to understand adequately the conusing structureo the Philosophy of Right . I Hegel had been guided only by thedivision into necessary and sufcient conditions o reedom, the

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most obvious thing would have been or him to break down histreatise into two parts; however, the  Philosophy of Right com-

prises three substantial sections which deal, in this order, with“Abstract Right,” “Morality,” and “Ethical Lie.” It is truethat this tripartition can be seen to reect again the two types o conditions o reedom, because only the third section, entitled“Ethical Lie,” with its chapters about “the Family,” “CivilSociety,” and “the State,” seems to deal really with commu-nicative spheres o action, while the frst two sections are con-cerned only with individualistic conceptions o reedom, so that 

the contrast between incomplete and complete conditions in thebackground obviously plays a certain part in determining thestructure. But as ar as the explicit division is concerned, the act remains that Hegel is trying to reconstruct the necessary condi-tions o individual sel-realization in three separate steps: theopening section about “Abstract Right” is joined by the sectionabout “Morality,” which is ollowed by the undamental closingsection about “Ethical Lie” as a synthesis. I we want to avoid

a superfcial explanation o this tripartition by resorting toHegel’s  Logic , which oers a wealth o arguments in avor o such a three-stage procedure, we may fnd the key in remem-bering the discussion o the three conditions o “ree will,”

 which take up substantial parts o the Introduction. An attempt at explaining the tripartite structure o the Phi-

losophy of Right  with the help o the distinctions I made there would take roughly this shape: frst, Hegel is convinced that by distinguishing the three concepts o “ree will” he has

opened up the entire spectrum o possible models o reedomin the modern world; second, he assumes that all three mod-els o reedom contain essential and indispensable aspects o the social attitudes and practices and that these aspects must be brought into an explicit theoretically articulated relation toeach other i we are to explain the communicative conditionso individual sel-determination; third, he believes that all these

For some interesting suggestions on how to interpret this tripartite divisionsee, among others, Ilting, “Die Struktur der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie,”and Westphal, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Right .”

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models o reedom have not remained mere abstract ideas ortheoretical concepts but have in their turn already gained so

much inuence on social processes in the modern world that they must be treated as “maniestations” o the objective spirit and appraised as to their “rights.” I it is indeed these threepremises that underlay Hegel’s structural intentions, regard-less o any considerations o his system, the tripartition o thetext reveals a systematic and quite comprehensible meaning.Beore it becomes possible to determine the nature o thoseconditions that are necessary and sufcient or individual sel-

realization, that is, beore the institutional conditions o com-municative reedom can be sketched under the title “ethicallie,” it is necessary to determine the restricted role that must be played by the two other, incomplete models o reedom inmodern society, because they contain some constitutive pre-requisites or individual participation in that communicativesphere. In that sense the two sections that precede the real coreo the Philosophy of Right represent Hegel’s systematic attempt 

to clariy the legitimate claim to existence o two defnitions o individual reedom, both o which, in his view, independently o each other, have gained a substantial inuence on society’spractical sel-understanding, even though they are able only toencompass some partial aspects o sel-determination. Underthe heading “Abstract Right” he wants to fx the social locationo the modern conception o reedom, according to which theindividual subject exercises his reedom in the orm o subjec-tive rights, while under the heading “Morality” he tries to out-

line the legitimate location o the modern conception o ree-dom according to which the reedom o the individual subject is characterized by his capacity or moral sel-determination.

 This tripartite structure o the Philosophy of Right , which hasits own inherent rationale and is not dependent on the ormalstructure or requirements o Hegel’s system, does not merely presuppose a certain symmetry between his characterizations

 The idea that or Hegel “abstract right” and “morality” are inuential andpowerul concepts o reedom in the modern world is well developed in Allan

 Wood, “Hegel’s Ethics,” in Cambridge Companion to Hegel , ed. Beiser, 11–33.

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o the incomplete conception o “ree will” and his defnitionso “abstract right” and “morality”; it also implies that he was

actually engaged in an ingenious quest to represent both re-stricted models o reedom as socially inuential complexes o ideas which, in their correct location, would prove to be amongthe necessary institutional prerequisites o communicativereedom. I am convinced that Hegel sets out to supply proo or both premises in the frst two sections o his  Philosophy of 

 Right . In so doing he must have ound it much easier to elabo-rate the frst thesis than processing the proo demanded by the

second. With respect to the frst thesis, he can restrict himsel to uncovering in both models o reedom—“abstract right” and“morality”—the characteristic eatures that turn them into theexpression o a merely “negativistic” defnition in the case o the ormer and into the expression o an “optional” defnitiono “ree will” in the case o the latter. The demonstration o the frst thesis is connected to the more ar-reaching suppo-sition that, given a reduction o individual reedom to moral

autonomy, the subject continues to depend on contingent im-pulses or drives. It must, however, have been much more dif-cult or Hegel to document the second thesis, which I have only touched on so ar, and which asserts that i those two restrictedmodels o reedom are correctly placed, their constitutive sig-nifcance or all the communicative orms o reedom can beproved. Here the question that immediately arises is what wemay mean when we speak o an adequate place, or an appropri-ate “right” o the attitudes connected with such ideas o ree-

dom in the institutional abric o our intersubjective reedoms. The multilayered argumentation with which Hegel tries to

answer this question in the frst two sections o his text repre-sents one o the greatest challenges o his practical philosophy to this day; that is one o the reasons why, in an examinationo the  Philosophy of Right , it is pointless to concentrate exclu-sively on the section about “Ethical Lie,” taking it to someextent or the sum o the whole. Hegel conducts his argument 

negatively in the sense that he tries to circumscribe the appro-priate “place,” or the specifc “right,” o the two incompletemodels o reedom by demonstrating the social damage their

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comprehensive use would lead to. The decisive argument runsas ollows: i either o the two ideas o individual reedom is

treated as an absolute, be it in the orm o a legal demand orequated with moral autonomy, the social reality itsel will un-dergo some pathological dislocations that are a certain, almost “empirical” indication that the limits o legitimacy have beentransgressed. Thus, by illustrating the negative consequencesthat are bound to occur i incomplete, or inadequate, concep-tions o reedom are allowed to establish themselves in society in complete independence, it is possible step by step to athom

the proper place in our communicative practice to which theirstructure entitles them. Two background convictions allow Hegel to use such an in-

direct method o justifcation in his diagnosis o the age. First,he is empirically certain that in his own time those two modelso reedom have not only become powerul inuences in thesocial world but also that as a result o being treated as abso-lutes they have caused the frst dislocations in the practical re-

lations o the subjects with themselves. This enables him, at several points o the text, to scatter reerences to pathologicalconditions and phenomena that can be regarded as indicatorso a violation o the legitimate borders o “abstract right” and“morality”; and the terms with which he tries to characterizesuch social pathologies are words used in diagnoses o the agesuch as solitude (§ 136), vacuity (§ 141), or burden (§ 149), all o 

 which can be reduced to the common denominator o “suer-ing rom indeterminacy.” But in order to help his diagnosis o 

the age acquire a systematic signifcance or the  Philosophy of  Right , Hegel must resort to a second assumption, which is armore theoretically relevant: to maintain a necessary connection

In this methodological respect, but in none other, Hegel’s approach re-sembles that o Alasdair McIntyre in After Virtue: the plea or a dierent, moreextensive, understanding o reedom is developed in the light o a diagnosiso the social damage or pathology that the alse or incomplete understandingo reedom under criticism leaves behind in the individual’s relation to him-sel; a structurally comparable argumentation is ound in Michael Theunissen,Selbstverwirklichung und Allgemeinheit:Zur Kritik des gegenwärtigen Bewuβ tseins (Berlin, 198).

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between those pathological states and the treatment o two in-complete models o reedom as absolutes, he must be able to

demonstrate that social reality is not indierent to the use o those alse or incomplete defnitions o human existence. Herethe central part is played by his conviction that social reality isalways permeated by rational reasons to such an extent that apractical inringement o them is bound to create dislocations insocial lie. It is these two ideas that Hegel asserts in the frst twosections o his  Philosophy of Right in an extremely provocativeorm; together they allow him to combine his drat o a theory 

o justice with a diagnosis o the age intended to convince hiscontemporaries that in their “burdened” state o mind they canfnd good reasons to let themselves be persuaded by his plea oran ethical relationship o communicative reedom.