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Hegel's Philosophy of Right
Hegel's Philosophy of Right presents a collection of new essays by leading international philosophers and Hegel scholars that analyze and explore Hegel's key contributions in the areas of ethics, politics, and the law.
- GenresPhilosophy
224 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 10, 2018
This is a very nice collection of essays that covers the mainlines of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. It is not possibly to briefly summarize the book but a number of highlights can be noted. Moyar's essay helpfully places Hegelian ethics in the context of the debate between consequentialism and utilitarianism, with Hegel falling somewhere in the middle but closer in some ways to the former rather than the latter. While insightful, the inclusion of an Aristotelian perspective would have helped to clarify these issues. Brooks's paper (Ch 4) on punishment is quite good but his discussion of what he terms, 'Hegel's natural law internalism,' (in Ch 8) suffers from a fairly uncharitable reading of the tradition of natural law jurisprudence, leading the author to exaggerate the differences between Hegel and more traditional approaches to natural law. Freyenhagen and Stern discuss the issue of Hegel's critique of Kantian formalism. Both essays are insightful. The former compares Hegel's critique of Kant with more recent responses of contemporary Kantians. The latter offers a somewhat novel reading of Kant, arguing that he and Hegel largely agree both in seeing morality as resting on a principle of reason and in seeing the most important moral factors as being contextual.
All of the other papers are insightful as well. This collection would be useful for anyone trying to disentangle the varied strands of argument in the Philosophy of Right and to locate Hegel's argument in terms of the wider field of debate.
All of the other papers are insightful as well. This collection would be useful for anyone trying to disentangle the varied strands of argument in the Philosophy of Right and to locate Hegel's argument in terms of the wider field of debate.
May 10, 2025
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1821) is no easy read—obscure, dense, and mangled by Marxists and fascists who’ve twisted it into something it’s not. Skimming it, I see a moderate conservative, not a radical ideologue. He’s all about Western Christianity and Enlightenment values, but grounded in history, not floating in utopia. His ideal state—a constitutional monarchy with a hereditary upper house of peers and a lower chamber of bourgeois corporations—looks fairly liberal for early 19th-century Prussia. It’s a riposte to von Haller’s private-law feudalism, not a rejection of freedom, but Hegel’s no fan of Anglo bourgeois liberalism or Jacobin mob rule either. He wants a rational state that guards private liberty under public law, a middle path that’s easy to miss amid his tangled prose.
Hegel picks up where Kant leaves off, rooting everything in the will’s autonomy. Kant’s “pure practical reason” made ethics a transcendental law humans can live out, even if it’s unprovable in the noumenal deep end. Hegel rejects the gap—reality is spirit. “What is real is rational, and what is rational is real” isn’t just wordplay; it’s the will in action, the conceptual made flesh. You don’t need to buy all of German idealism to see the point: it’s a positive stitch-up of Christian morals and Enlightenment reason. The book unfolds in three acts—abstract property rights, morality via religion and philosophy, ethical life in civil society—all crowned by the state. Aristotle’s ghost looms here: the state’s the highest good, a natural whole bigger than its parts, not some Enlightenment contract gimmick.
His setup gets specific: a hereditary monarch as sovereign, not a Whig-style figurehead, flanked by a bicameral legislature—corporations below, estates above. It’s a liberalized Prussian monarchy, half-realized post-1848 after his death. The monarch’s no busybody executive; he signs off his name in a well formedcommonwwaltg, embodying subjective will and nature’s quirks (heredity) against abstract rights or raw demos power. Hegel’s dodging both Jacobin populism and Haller’s reaction, baking freedom and law into a constitutional shell that shields family, faith, and economy. He calls it “the divine idea as it exists on earth” (§258)—not as scary as it sounds; less a god-state and more God’s will playing out in history, a Christian nod to spirit’s earthly gig. On the world stage, these rational states are history’s endpoints—sovereign, self-contained—but war’s always lurking. States ought to respect norms like treaties, but not bow to Kant’s dreamy league; it’s closer to a 20th-century “rules-based order”—shaky, thumos-charged, hut no global cop.
It’s got Hobbesian echoes—the state as ultimate good—but Hegel flips the script. Hobbes saw fear of death as the universal shove into civil society, trading liberty for a sovereign’s leash. Hegel casts that fear as the slave’s chain; the master’s glory—unfazed by death—wins freedom and recognition. History’s this push-pull, fear versus glory, grinding toward universal freedom in a Christian-German state. I read it as Hobbes’s dynamism matured into ordered liberty, sidestepping Locke and Kant’s republican coolness.
Fukuyama’s Kojevian take—that liberal democracy nails Hegel’s “end of history”—half-fits. It’s a rational-legal Weberian machine, not Haller’s personal-patrimony vision, but it’s closer than Marx’s stateless communism. Kojève’s left-Hegelian spin ditches humanism; the reactionary right’s since cooked up its own brew—anarcho-capitalism and neocameralism, government as a corporate contract, not a sovereign-subject gig. Hegel’s metaphysical grounding—spirit over naturalism or consent—gets flak from both. Herbert Spencer, in Hegel’s own century, bet on the state fading via evolution, not dialectics. Hegel’s stuck in the middle—bourgeois yet conservative, too stodgy for mass movements like libertarianism or communism.
There’s another angle I’ve mulled: French positivism, like Charles Maurras’s integral nationalism, hits similar beats without the idealist baggage. Think Montesquieu, de Maistre, Comte—social and psychological facts as political bedrock, no higher principle needed. Monarchy and religion stand where history plants them, not as dogmas but as tools. Hegel’s rational synthesis of will’s discord feels fussy next to that pragmatism. Still, his state—glory-tamed, freedom-ordered—sticks with me. It’s not my world, but it’s not dead either.
Hegel picks up where Kant leaves off, rooting everything in the will’s autonomy. Kant’s “pure practical reason” made ethics a transcendental law humans can live out, even if it’s unprovable in the noumenal deep end. Hegel rejects the gap—reality is spirit. “What is real is rational, and what is rational is real” isn’t just wordplay; it’s the will in action, the conceptual made flesh. You don’t need to buy all of German idealism to see the point: it’s a positive stitch-up of Christian morals and Enlightenment reason. The book unfolds in three acts—abstract property rights, morality via religion and philosophy, ethical life in civil society—all crowned by the state. Aristotle’s ghost looms here: the state’s the highest good, a natural whole bigger than its parts, not some Enlightenment contract gimmick.
His setup gets specific: a hereditary monarch as sovereign, not a Whig-style figurehead, flanked by a bicameral legislature—corporations below, estates above. It’s a liberalized Prussian monarchy, half-realized post-1848 after his death. The monarch’s no busybody executive; he signs off his name in a well formedcommonwwaltg, embodying subjective will and nature’s quirks (heredity) against abstract rights or raw demos power. Hegel’s dodging both Jacobin populism and Haller’s reaction, baking freedom and law into a constitutional shell that shields family, faith, and economy. He calls it “the divine idea as it exists on earth” (§258)—not as scary as it sounds; less a god-state and more God’s will playing out in history, a Christian nod to spirit’s earthly gig. On the world stage, these rational states are history’s endpoints—sovereign, self-contained—but war’s always lurking. States ought to respect norms like treaties, but not bow to Kant’s dreamy league; it’s closer to a 20th-century “rules-based order”—shaky, thumos-charged, hut no global cop.
It’s got Hobbesian echoes—the state as ultimate good—but Hegel flips the script. Hobbes saw fear of death as the universal shove into civil society, trading liberty for a sovereign’s leash. Hegel casts that fear as the slave’s chain; the master’s glory—unfazed by death—wins freedom and recognition. History’s this push-pull, fear versus glory, grinding toward universal freedom in a Christian-German state. I read it as Hobbes’s dynamism matured into ordered liberty, sidestepping Locke and Kant’s republican coolness.
Fukuyama’s Kojevian take—that liberal democracy nails Hegel’s “end of history”—half-fits. It’s a rational-legal Weberian machine, not Haller’s personal-patrimony vision, but it’s closer than Marx’s stateless communism. Kojève’s left-Hegelian spin ditches humanism; the reactionary right’s since cooked up its own brew—anarcho-capitalism and neocameralism, government as a corporate contract, not a sovereign-subject gig. Hegel’s metaphysical grounding—spirit over naturalism or consent—gets flak from both. Herbert Spencer, in Hegel’s own century, bet on the state fading via evolution, not dialectics. Hegel’s stuck in the middle—bourgeois yet conservative, too stodgy for mass movements like libertarianism or communism.
There’s another angle I’ve mulled: French positivism, like Charles Maurras’s integral nationalism, hits similar beats without the idealist baggage. Think Montesquieu, de Maistre, Comte—social and psychological facts as political bedrock, no higher principle needed. Monarchy and religion stand where history plants them, not as dogmas but as tools. Hegel’s rational synthesis of will’s discord feels fussy next to that pragmatism. Still, his state—glory-tamed, freedom-ordered—sticks with me. It’s not my world, but it’s not dead either.
November 21, 2022
Pissing Hegel
June 22, 2017
I found this book very difficult to read so I got the audible audiobook that I enjoyed very much. Robert stern has an excellent article on kant versus hegel. He has a Pythagorean interpretation of Kant's fundamental universal law and formula for humanity. He says kant wasn't trying to ground a supreme moral principle, which hegel would strongly object to, but rather just help provide a bulwark and rational thought processes for "good" behavior. He thus doesn't really conflict with hegels intuitionism. The Pythagorean view of kants means mostly that we know what we should do but are corruptible by bad philosophy and reasoning once the initial revelation comes to an end. So we need kant not as a supreme moral principle but rather as a support against our fashioning our morality to fit our inclinations. We already know what to do by revelation. We don't need supreme moral principles to figure out what to do. Also discusses whether property, giving to the poor, dying for one's country, and monogamy are based on any morality.
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May 17, 2013340.1 H462 2012
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews