Philosophy of Right

Overview

The Elements of the Philosophy of Right is four hundred pages, published in 1820 with 1821 on the title page, and it was written as a textbook: numbered paragraphs for students to follow the Berlin lectures, with remarks appended by Hegel and, in most editions, additions taken from students’ notes of what he said aloud. The additions are much easier reading than the paragraphs and are not, strictly, his text.

It is the most accessible of his major works, which is a low bar but a real one. The structure is explicit, the paragraphs are short, and the subject matter is concrete: property, contract, punishment, marriage, work, markets, courts, taxation, war.

The method is dialectical in the specific sense that the book moves through forms of freedom, each of which turns out to be incomplete by its own standard and to require the next. Abstract right cannot handle intention; morality cannot supply content; ethical life supplies both and is where the argument lands.

Its political reputation has been contested since it appeared. Hegel was a salaried professor in Prussia writing about the modern constitutional state, and the book was read by some contemporaries as an apology for the regime that employed him. Later readers, including the whole Hegelian left, took it as a critical instrument. The text supports argument in both directions, which is why the fight has lasted.

The argument

The preface. Short, pugnacious, and the source of two famous sentences. The first is that what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational, which sounds like a blessing on the status quo. Hegel’s defenders point out that actuality is a technical term for him, distinct from mere existence: a great deal that exists is not actual, because it does not embody its own concept, and a bad state is no more actual than a bad tree is a tree. Whether that rescue works is a genuine question.

The second is the closing image: the owl of Minerva takes flight only as dusk falls. Philosophy cannot tell the world how it should be, because it comes on the scene too late for that, and can only paint its grey on grey when a form of life has already grown old.

Abstract Right. The first and thinnest level. Here a person is simply a bearer of a free will, and the only question is what it takes for such a will to have any external reality. The answer is property: the will must put itself into a thing to be anything at all. From property follows contract, the mutual recognition of two owners, and from the possibility of breaking a contract follows wrong, and from wrong, punishment.

Hegel’s account of punishment is one of the best-known parts of the book. He rejects both deterrence and reform as justifications, on the ground that both treat the criminal as an animal to be trained rather than as a rational being. Punishment is the annulment of the crime, and the criminal has a right to it: by acting, he has laid down a universal law in his own deed, and in punishing him we honour him as rational by applying his own principle to him.

Morality. The standpoint of the inner will, and Hegel’s engagement with Kant. Here intention, purpose, welfare and conscience come into view, and the level is a genuine advance because it lets us ask what an agent meant.

Its defect is emptiness. A conscience that consults only itself has no criterion, and Hegel argues that Kant’s test of universalisability cannot generate any actual duty without smuggling in content from somewhere else. Left alone, the moral standpoint slides into what he calls the beautiful soul, a conscience so concerned with its own purity that it will not act, and finally into evil dressed as principle.

Ethical Life. The resolution, and three quarters of the book. Ethical life is freedom that has become an actual world: institutions, practices and roles that people inhabit, that shape their wants, and in which they recognise themselves.

The family is the first form, held together by love rather than contract, dissolving as children grow into independent persons. Hegel’s remarks on women belong here and are the most dated thing in the book; he assigns them to the family and argues they are unsuited to the state or science, and presents this as a conclusion rather than an assumption.

Civil society is the great innovation. It is the sphere in which independent persons pursue their own interests through work and exchange, connected by a system of needs, governed by an administration of justice, and supported by what he calls the police, meaning public authority broadly, and by corporations, the trade and professional associations that give members a standing and a collective identity.

And it is here that Hegel sees the problem. A flourishing market produces both concentrated wealth and a class driven below the standard of living that society itself regards as decent, and that class loses not just resources but the disposition to work, to self-respect, to honour. He calls the result a rabble. He canvasses the remedies, charity, public works, emigration, and rejects each, and concludes that despite its excess of wealth civil society is not wealthy enough to prevent the excess of poverty. He does not solve it, and the honesty of leaving it unsolved is why Marx read him closely.

The state is the culmination and the most misread section. Hegel’s state is not the government apparatus but the ethical order as a whole, in which family and civil society are preserved rather than abolished, and in which a person’s particular aims and the universal interest coincide. Institutionally he proposes a constitutional monarchy with a hereditary head who mostly signs, an executive of trained professional civil servants, and a legislature of estates giving representation to the agricultural class and to the corporations of civil society. Not a democracy, and not an autocracy either.

The final section treats international relations, where he denies any effective authority above states and treats war as a reality rather than an aberration, and ends with world history as the court in which states are judged.

How to read it

Read the preface and the introduction, then paragraphs 4 to 33 on the will, then the whole of Ethical Life from paragraph 142. Abstract Right and Morality can be read quickly.

Read the paragraphs and the remarks; treat the additions as helpful commentary rather than as Hegel’s text.

Take the argument about civil society and poverty seriously and on its own. Paragraphs 241 to 248 are perhaps four pages and they are among the sharpest things written about market society by anyone in the nineteenth century, including by people who thought they were answering him.

Watch what he means by freedom. The whole book depends on the claim that doing whatever you happen to want is not freedom, and if you do not grant that, nothing that follows will look like anything but an argument for submission.

Read Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right afterwards, or at least its famous introduction. Marx inverts the relation between state and civil society, arguing that Hegel made the state the truth of civil society when in fact the state is its product.

And decide what you think about the preface. Whether Hegel is reconciling us to what exists or supplying a standard by which most of what exists fails is the question the whole book hangs on.

Questions it raises

• Is a will that can choose anything free, or empty? Everything in the book follows from Hegel’s answer.
• What is rational is actual. Does the technical sense of actuality save the sentence, or is the rescue too convenient?
• Punishment is said to honour the criminal as rational. Is that a justification or a consolation?
• Hegel identifies the poverty a market produces and rejects every remedy he considers. What follows from a philosopher stating a problem he cannot solve?
• The state is called the actuality of freedom. How would you tell such a state from one that has simply persuaded its members to want what it wants?
• He wrote this as a Prussian professor about a constitutional monarchy. How much does that fact bear on the argument?