Philosophy of Right

Philosophy of Right (1820) is Hegel's systematic account of freedom and its objective forms. Freedom is not mere arbitrariness or absence of constraint; it achieves reality only by giving itself determinate shape in institutions.

The first section, "Abstract Right," covers property, contract, and wrong. A person becomes free in the world by externalizing the will in an object: property is freedom's basic embodiment. Contract extends this to relations between persons. Wrong, culminating in crime, is the violation of abstract right and demands restoration.

"Morality" follows, treating intention, responsibility, conscience, and the good. This is where Kant's moral philosophy falls: Hegel's critique is that abstract duty, uncoupled from social substance, produces either empty formalism or willful subjectivism. Conscience that answers to no community standard is closer to evil than to virtue.

"Ethical Life" (Sittlichkeit) is the work's core. Freedom is fully realized in three nested institutions: the family (love and natural unity), civil society (the market, courts, and professional associations), and the state (the rational unity of both). The state is not an instrument serving individual ends but the actuality of ethical life, the condition under which genuine freedom is possible at all. Hegel's constitutional monarch unifies the rational structure of the state in a single act of will, but sovereignty is distributed through the whole.

The preface's line, "the actual is rational and the rational is actual," is a claim about ethical life's structure, not an endorsement of whatever exists. Marx read it as an endorsement, inverted it, and built historical materialism on the inversion.