Hegel in Wien: Eine Ringvorlesung zu Hegels Rechtsphilosophie am Wiener Juridicum, Edited by Linda Lilith Obermayr and Alexander Somek (Verlag Österreich, Vienna, 2023) gathers twelve essays drawn from a winter-semester lecture cycle held at the Vienna Faculty of Law in 2021/22, augmented by contributions from a concluding January workshop and one essay on the state added thereafter. Its central question is whether Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts can still be read as the immanent self-development of a single concept—the Idea of right as the existence of the free will—rather than as a sequence of doctrines about property, morality, family, civil society, and state. The governing ambition is hermeneutic: to retrace the movement by which each category, taken in its abstractness, generates from itself the next, so that the work’s articulations become recognizable as moments of a single thought rather than as detachable theses. Its distinctive value as an object of study lies in the way an introductory pedagogical aim—offering students of law and philosophy a guide to the Grundlinien—is fused with a sustained interpretive thesis about the inseparability of legal form, willing, and ethical institutions.
The book opens with an editorial overture by Obermayr and Somek that does not so much announce its program as enact it. Under the title Vom Belcanto zur Rechtsphilosophie, the editors stage Hegel’s two-week stay in Vienna in the autumn of 1824, his epistolary effusions about Italian opera, his enthusiasm for Rossini, and the cultural context of the so-called Hegelfieber at the Juridicum, in order to extract from this seemingly biographical episode a properly philosophical claim. Hegel, they argue, finds in bel canto a model of the immanent unfolding of a content—the singer is herself a Compositeur, generating expression and coloratura from within the act of singing—and this same logic of immanente Entwicklung der Sache selbst governs the Grundlinien as a philosophical text. The introductory chapter thereby fixes a methodological wager that returns throughout the volume: that the proper labor of interpretation is to follow how a content develops itself, refusing to bring external standards or Räsonieren to bear on the matter. The Verstand, Hegel’s term for the merely classifying and externally predicating understanding, is identified as the perennial enemy of such immanence; the editors locate its modern symptom in the journalistic practice of dressing musical or philosophical objects with content drawn from outside them, of decorating Rossini with hidden ideological messages, or of reading the Grundlinien through political prejudices supplied in advance.
This first move establishes a tone of deflationary exegesis. The editors make explicit that the philosophical reception of Hegel has been distorted by two notoriously isolated formulations from the preface—the equation of the rational with the actual and the figure of Minerva’s owl flying only at dusk—and they show, by appeal to the second edition of the Enzyklopädie, how these formulations are mistaken when read as endorsements of the existing order. Wirklichkeit in Hegel’s technical sense is not whatever happens to exist, but only what has been comprehended as necessary, a content in which thinking finds itself; and the philosophical retrospect symbolized by the owl is a logical, not a temporal, claim about the relation of the concept to the Sollen. The editors press the point that what philosophy is forbidden to do is precisely what its critics, from Popper to Tugendhat, accuse Hegel of: namely, to instruct the world how it ought to be from a standpoint outside it. Philosophy comes too late not from defect but because the ought, conceived as severed from being, is by its very concept not yet; were it already, it would not need to be ought-to-be. The hermeneutic stake of this opening is therefore that all subsequent contributions must read the Grundlinien as a comprehension of the rational in the actual, not as a normative recipe imposed on it.
The editors then turn to the introductory paragraphs of the Grundlinien themselves and articulate, in what may be read as the volume’s spinal claim, the dialectical structure of the free will. The will, Hegel insists, is not the opposite of thinking but a particular mode of thinking, namely thinking translating itself into existence, the drive to give itself Dasein. The will’s freedom proves to be incompatible with sheer indeterminacy: a will that wills nothing determinate is at first taken to be the freest, since every determination would seem a constraint, but this empty I is only the negation of all content and therefore not anything first. It is itself a result, the negation of every particular willing, and so it is itself determined—determined precisely to abstract from determination. When this determinacy is mistaken for true freedom, the disastrous consequence is the Freiheit der Leere—the freedom of pure emptiness—which acquires reality only by destroying every existing order; the editors invoke Hegel’s own analyses of Indian ascetic withdrawal and the political fanaticism of the French Terror as actualizations of this empty universality. From the inadequacy of the indeterminate will and from the equally one-sided will of mere particular content there emerges the concrete free will, the will that wills its own freedom in every determinate willing, the will that wills the free will. The editors thereby fix from the outset the hermeneutic key that will govern every later contribution: each major figure of objective spirit—abstract right, morality, ethical life—is one historically and conceptually possible form of the universality through which the will lays hold of its own freedom.
Already in this introductory analysis a tension is registered that the rest of the book labors to articulate. The free will requires both Allgemeinheit and Bestimmtheit, both universality and a determinate content, but these two moments seem to drag the will in opposite directions: the more determinate the willing, the less it remains bei sich, with itself, and the more it threatens to become passive, possessed by the determinacy it has acquired; the more universal the willing, the more it threatens to vanish into the indifference of empty self-relation. The whole of the Grundlinien, on the reading the editors set in motion, is the working-out of this tension across three forms of social universality: abstract right, in which the will appears as person and willkürlich chooses without reference to grounds; morality, in which the will reflects upon the goodness of grounds and submits its choices to a universalizing principle; and ethical life, the lived world of institutions in which the universal is encountered as an actual, substantial Sein that confers on the subject a concrete content. These three are at once a logical sequence of moments and a typology of historical and social formations.
This staging is crucial because each of the subsequent chapters can be read as taking up one of these forms and showing both its inner integrity and its inner pressure toward the next. The volume is therefore not a sequence of self-standing studies of distinct topics; it is a layered re-articulation of a single argument, where each later contribution retroactively determines the meaning of the earlier ones. What in the editors’ introduction appears as the mere structural typology of three forms of universality is by the end of the volume—after the chapters on civil society, the state, the act of resolution, international law, and world history—shown to be a graduated stratification of liberty itself, in which the negative freedom of the person, the reflective freedom of the moral subject, and the social freedom of the ethical participant each receive a determinate institutional habitat.
The editors close their introduction with a remarkable methodological reflection on hermeneutics that frames the entire volume’s tone. To interpret Hegel, they insist, is to expose oneself to a movement of Dehnung—a stretching of one’s own horizon—rather than to discover the right doctrine. The hermeneutic encounter is necessarily ironic, because the suspension of the claim to truth is what permits the alien horizon to do its work on the interpreter; what the volume affirms in Hegel is therefore also the volume’s own work, and the editors do not pretend otherwise. Was wir an Hegel bewundern, ist also immer auch unser eigenes Werk. This avowal of interpretive contingency frames the volume’s entire stance: the contributors do not claim to have unlocked the historical Hegel, but to have made Hegel’s text again productive in the act of reading it.
The first substantive contribution, by Tatjana Sheplyakova, advances the volume’s central interpretive thesis at the highest level of conceptual generality. Her question is what it means that Hegel speaks of the Idea of right. The phrase is taken to be a calculated terminological choice that demarcates Hegel’s project from two other long-dominant ways of thinking right, namely classical natural law and modern Vernunftrecht. Sheplyakova reconstructs both polemics with a fine grain. The classical natural-law tradition—Plato, Aristotle—treats law as an order pre-given to the individual by nature, secured by paideia and bringing in the apparatus of courts and written law only when education fails. Hegel’s polemic against this position, already articulated in the early Naturrechtsaufsatz, is that political freedom predicated on a presupposed natural order is structurally complicit with slavery, since the very ground that authorizes freedom for some authorizes unfreedom for others; the abolition of antique slavery required, according to Hegel, the supersession of antique freedom itself.
The modern Vernunftrecht of Kant and Fichte, by contrast, takes its starting point in the freedom of the individual subject, conceived as a property-bearing pre-political being whose external relations to other such beings must be coordinated through the universal form of law. Sheplyakova foregrounds Hegel’s diagnosis that this rational-law construction silently presupposes a particular social model—that of juxtaposed private individuals whose relations are exhaustively regulated by stable legal fixations—and is therefore unable to think the social as a productive medium in which new forms of life arise. Citing Böckenförde, she shows how Kant’s rational law guarantees a state of affairs that is presupposed rather than instituted by law itself; the law on this view secures the social, but does not constitute it. Hegel’s reproach to Kant’s formalism in the Naturrechtsaufsatz is that it reduces the social to abstract reciprocal limitation and thereby produces, paradoxically, a more atomistic image of the polity than the openly individualist antisocialistic doctrines it claims to surpass.
Against both natural law and rational law, Idea in Hegel’s sense names a process: the law that does not stand external to the subject because it has itself become subjective, that is, has become reflexive. Sheplyakova locates the philosophical root of this usage in Hegel’s Logik, where the Idea is no longer a Kantian regulative concept of reason but the vernünftige itself, the logical-real process of reason’s self-determination, in which form and content, ontology and method, are one. To say that right has the form of the Idea is to say that right is unconditioned in the technical sense, that nothing alien stands over against it, that its objectivity is not an external given but a moment of its own self-positing subjectivity. Sheplyakova develops this provocative claim by reading the Logik‘s chapter on the Idea as articulating a complex theory of relation between subjectivity and objectivity, articulated through the figures of Life, Cognition, and the Good, where the absolute Idea emerges only as the unity of theoretical and practical relations to the world.
Here Sheplyakova introduces what is arguably the most original move of her chapter: the claim that the Logik itself leaves an unresolved problem at this very point. The transitions from Cognition to absolute Idea, from the merely theoretical and merely practical relations to their unity, are formally indicated but not concretely thinkable; two false relations are not, of themselves, sufficient to generate a true one. The crucial insight she draws from this is that what the Logik leaves unresolved at the level of pure thought is precisely what the Grundlinien attempts to resolve in its own register: the question of how a content—right—can be thought as having both the form of objective being and the form of self-relating subjectivity. The Idea of right is, on this reading, the Realphilosophie of a problem that is properly logical, and the entire enterprise of the Grundlinien can be understood as the construction of an institutional habitat in which the unity of theoretical and practical, of attitude-independent objectivity and attitude-dependent subjectivity, becomes operationally real.
The diagnostic force of this thesis becomes evident when Sheplyakova turns to the Realphilosophie counterpart of the same problem in the Grundlinien itself. There the difficulty reappears as the problem of the supersession of Moralität in Sittlichkeit and as the crisis of liberal legal consciousness. The dichotomy of enforceable right and non-enforceable morality leaves the order of right looking imperfect from the standpoint of moral demand and morality looking impotent before the order of right. Quoting Lübbe-Wolff, Sheplyakova shows how the bifurcation produces, on the one hand, a real but ethically deficient order of law and, on the other, an empty Sollen without anchorage in actuality. This Verfallsgeschichte—using Theunissen’s term—is the modern self-canceling form of moral consciousness, in which self-legislating moral subjectivity becomes the narcissistic self of the ironic Romantic, oscillating between Selbstschöpfung und Selbstvernichtung, or modulates into the malicious self-stylization of grievance: the Moral als Bosheit of which Somek’s recent book is invoked as the contemporary diagnosis. Hegel’s own marginal note that morality is die Krankheit dieser Zeit, the illness of this time, is presented as the early formulation of a diagnostic that runs from Hegel through Marx to Böckenförde and Christoph Menke.
What Sheplyakova adds to this familiar genealogy is a reading of how the Idea of right is supposed to answer the diagnosis. Her argument proceeds, characteristically, by historical detour. She reconstructs, through Walter Jaeschke and through Max Weber’s analyses of the anschaulicher Formalismus of older legal forms, the path of right from outside to inside, from ritual to procedure. In archaic Roman law, the legis actiones, the strict formulae of the Twelve Tables, the gestural meum esse aio by which property was transferred—all these are forms in which right exists as ritualized externality, as a formula whose proper performance is the legal act. Modern law, by contrast, rests on abstract propositions: norms with the content that under such-and-such condition such-and-such is legally the case. The transition from one to the other is not merely technological but conceptual: it is the becoming-internal of a content that was previously only externally enacted, and the philosophical re-description of this becoming-internal is precisely what Hegel’s category of the Idea names. Sheplyakova thereby ties Hegel’s most abstract logical category to the most concrete historical developments of legal practice, and the Grundlinien emerges from her chapter as the philosophical reconstruction of the way modern law has come to know itself.
The chapter further develops the institutional consequences by attending to Hegel’s treatment of Rechtspflege and the court within civil society. Sheplyakova shows that the modern court, with its publicity, its codification, its rule-bound procedure, and its rejection of merely machinenmäßige application of statutes, is for Hegel the institutional locus where law’s Sich-Wissen—its self-cognition—becomes effective. The judge’s role in adjudicating among colliding rules is not the mere subsumption of cases under norms; it is the moment in which the law makes itself manifest as law, in which the universality of the legal rule reveals its dependence on the situated decision that brings it to actuality. Through this concrete institutional reading, Sheplyakova allows the volume’s overarching claim—that right is the Dasein of the free will—to acquire pedagogical sharpness: the freedom of the will is not given somewhere outside law, to be then secured by law; it is enacted in the procedural self-reflection of legal practice itself.
The chapter by Kristin Y. Albrecht and Folko Zander opens the Grundlinien‘s first major moment, abstract right, and accordingly furnishes the volume with its most basic technical apparatus: an account of Hegel’s dialectical method in just enough detail that subsequent chapters can presuppose it. Albrecht and Zander insist that this apparatus must be presented through the relevant texts themselves rather than through the textbook caricature of the triad thesis–antithesis–synthesis. They locate the structural form of dialectical argument in Hegel’s distinction between the verständig, the dialectical, and the speculative sides of the logical, where abstraction generates apparent purity, but the abstractive exclusion itself reveals the abstraction’s negativity, since what has been excluded must be re-thought as that without which the abstraction has no determinate content. Out of the mutual negation of the abstract concept and its excluded content there emerges the speculative Aufhebung: the concept is preserved (conservare) and lifted (elevare) into a higher, more determinate concept, in whose light the original concept retroactively appears in a new register. This logical schema is then declared to govern the entire architecture of the Grundlinien, from the abstract right through morality to the institutions of ethical life.
The substantive analysis of abstract right that follows is keyed to Hegel’s claim that the Idea of right is freedom, that right is the Dasein of the free will, and that this Dasein must be reconstructed in its abstract first form before its more concrete forms can be intelligible. Albrecht and Zander insist on the technical sense of abstract: not the opposite of form and content, but rather exclusionary, one-sided, considered in isolation from its mediations. The free will, when first considered, appears as the empty I that has negated all its drives and inclinations; this negation, considered in itself, yields a merely abstract universality that, lacking particularization, is in truth not yet universal at all. The dialectical recovery of the will from this empty self-identity proceeds through the recognition that particularity is the necessary instantiation of universality—as fruit as such exists only in apples, oranges, and bananas, not as some additional something alongside them—and through the further recognition that singularity is the unity in which universality and particularity are jointly realized. The person, the protagonist of abstract right, is the will conceived precisely in this abstract self-identity; she is Selbstbewusstsein, but formal, since she abstracts from every determinate content. The very etymology of persona as mask is invoked to make this abstractness conceptually palpable: every person is, in abstract right, indistinguishably a person, mask-like, defined exclusively by the formal attribution of capacities of choice.
From this first determination Albrecht and Zander develop, with considerable economy, the canonical themes of property and contract. Property is the Dasein of the person: the will gives itself external existence by appropriating things and thereby gives its own internal abstraction the form of an external objectivity. The contract is the meeting of two such property-bearing wills who agree to alienate or exchange. Crucially, however, the meeting of two particular wills produces only a Gemeinsamkeit, a contingent commonality, never the genuine Allgemeinheit of right; the contract therefore cannot, on Hegel’s account, ground the state, since whether the joint particular will accords with the will an sich is contingent. This is the central point at which Albrecht and Zander show how the abstract right of contract already contains the seeds of its own supersession: marriage and the state, both of which Hegel explicitly removes from the contractual sphere, are introduced not as exceptions but as illustrations of what contract structurally cannot do. Marriage rests on love, an inwardly subjective ground that no contract can capture; the state rests on the universal free will, from which individual wills are conceptually derived rather than the reverse. Kant’s notorious definition of marriage as a contract for the reciprocal use of sexual organs, ridiculed by Hegel and later by countless commentators, becomes intelligible from within the limits of Kant’s own legal philosophy: having sundered legality from morality and admitted only external, property-mediated relations into legal theory, Kant had no other way of conceptualizing the legal institution of marriage. The pair show how Hegel’s location of marriage in Sittlichkeit and not in abstract right is therefore not a pious traditionalism but a structural consequence of the dialectical method.
The chapter’s most rigorous moment is its treatment of Unrecht—wrong—as the necessary self-exposure of abstract right. Wrong is the negation of right, and its three forms—non-malicious wrong, where the right as such is acknowledged but its concrete subsumption is contested; fraud, where the right as such is acknowledged but the particular right of the other is curtailed; and crime, where the right as such is itself negated—articulate a graduated dialectic in which the abstract right of the person reveals itself as essentially incomplete. Crime in particular shows that the will of the criminal, who negates the right of another and thereby attacks personality as such, attacks his own personality, since the personality of the other is the same universal personality of which his own personality is a moment. The will that negates the will of another is therefore in itself contradictory and null. Strafe—punishment—is the demonstration of this nullity. Albrecht and Zander show how Hegel’s absolute theory of punishment differs both from the archaic jus talionis and from relative theories that justify punishment by its preventive or rehabilitative effects: punishment, on Hegel’s analysis, is not an additional evil added to the original evil but the dialectical exhibition of the criminal act’s own self-cancelation, the zweiter Zwang in which the criminal’s own status as free, rational subject is publicly acknowledged. To punish a person is to take her seriously as one who has acted from purpose—precisely the recognition that the deontological dignity of the criminal demands.
The transition from abstract right to morality is now conceptually warranted. The criminal acted from purpose, and purpose is the central category of morality. With this transition Albrecht and Zander hand the conceptual baton to Linda Lilith Obermayr, whose chapter on the Begriff der Moralität bei Hegel unfolds under the heading Die Krankheit dieser Zeit. Obermayr begins with Hegel’s own marginal note where morality is described as the principal standpoint and the illness of this time, and she takes this diagnostic formula as the lens through which the entire moral chapter of the Grundlinien must be read. Morality, in Hegel’s strict sense, is not the same as the moral life of antiquity or any of the ethical formations to which the term moral is applied colloquially. It names the very specific historical and conceptual configuration in which the subjective will, withdrawn into its own inwardness, claims to derive the standards of action from itself, treating any external ethical content as merely contingent unless validated by its own conscience. The thesis that this configuration is an illness is therefore not a mere polemic; it is a structural diagnosis that morality, understood in this specific way, generates pathologies that morality alone cannot heal.
Obermayr develops the diagnosis with care. She first sets the moral standpoint in relation to abstract right by showing that whereas abstract right takes the will only on the side of its universality—any person under any other—morality takes the will on the side of its particularity, that is, in its capacity to find itself in its action. The action, Hegel’s central category in the moral chapter, is the Äußerung of the subjective will; in acting, the subject externalizes itself and becomes accountable for what it has externalized. Obermayr traces through Vorsatz und Schuld, Absicht und das Wohl, and Das Gute und das Gewissen the progressive determination of this accountability. The right of the subjective will to recognize as its own only what it has consciously intended is the right of knowing; yet the action’s consequences belong to the action, and the moral agent must therefore know not only the singular gesture but the general nature of the action it embeds. To strike the match against a piece of wood is to start the fire that may consume the building; to fire a bullet into a heart is to take the life that the heart sustains. The moral agent must know the universal in the particular she enacts; without such knowledge she lacks responsibility, as is the case with children or those impaired by intoxication or psychiatric illness, in whose cases Hegel speaks of Zurechnungsunfähigkeit.
Obermayr then turns to the Wohl, the welfare or happiness in the satisfaction of which the moral agent has a legitimate right. She shows how Hegel, against Kant’s strict severance of moral worth from inclination, insists that moral interest is interwoven with the concrete needs, drives, and passions of the living subject. The right of the subject to find satisfaction in her action is identified as the modern subjective right—rights to opinion, religion, privacy—and the one-sided fixation of right on this particularity is shown to produce the ideological appearance that the particular stands against the universal. Citing Pippin, Obermayr highlights the radical existentialist undertow of Hegel’s claim that the subject is the series of her actions, with the methodological consequence that the meaning of an intention is determined retrospectively, in light of what the action turned out to be. There is no inner eigentlich sphere of moral truth to which the agent can appeal against her objectified deeds; the Tat is the visible hieroglyph in which intention becomes legible.
The peak of the chapter’s diagnosis is reached in the section on Das Gute und das Gewissen, where Obermayr shows how morality undoes itself. The good, conceived as the substantial universality of the moral standpoint, can only be the duty whose ground is itself; but every concrete duty must determine itself, and the principle of self-determination is the conscience. Conscience claims to know what is right and to be the organ in which the universal becomes effective for the singular subject. Yet, as Hegel argues, conscience is precisely as necessary as it is self-canceling: as the only concrete locus of moral judgment, it is indispensable; but as merely the felt certainty of the subject, it cannot guarantee that what it claims to know really is what is right. The pure inwardness of conscience generates from itself the Zweideutigkeit of conscience—the simultaneous demand that what is right is right because I claim to know it, and that my claim to know it is justified only if what I assert is right. Without an objective principle to fix the content, conscience must look inward for its content, and the self-empowering inwardness of conscience tips, by its own logic, into the self-glorification of the singular will. Hegel’s identification of this configuration with the root of evil, with hypocrisy, and with romantic irony is the rhetorical climax of the moral chapter, and Obermayr renders it with the requisite philosophical sobriety: a morality that ultimately invokes nothing but conscience, whose only ground is felt individual conviction, is malicious—not because the moralist intends evil but because, in the absence of objective grounds, the moralist’s claim to universal validity is itself an act of arbitrary self-empowerment.
The chapter therefore prepares the way for Alexander Somek’s contribution, which takes up the question that Obermayr’s diagnosis leaves urgently open: how is the transition from morality to ethical life to be conceived, given that the very inwardness of conscience generates evil and that no return to mere convention is philosophically respectable? Somek frames his chapter explicitly as a confrontation with what he calls the Rätsel—the riddle—of Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie. The riddle is precisely the move from morality to Sittlichkeit. Following Theunissen, Somek concedes that one might also locate the core of the Grundlinien in the relation of civil society to the state, and that any reading of Hegel must reckon with the centrality of that relation; but the transition from morality to ethical life encompasses the question of the state, since the state in Hegel is the highest form of ethical life, and the transition is therefore the systematic key. Somek’s reading has the virtue of being unpitying about the difficulty of this transition. He acknowledges that critics from Tugendhat to Popper have read Hegel’s claim that the existing laws have absolute authority and the individual’s conscience must vanish into trust as evidence of conservative apologetic; he does not dismiss the worry but works through it.
The riddle, in Somek’s formulation, is this: the moral consciousness, having self-destructed in the dialectic of conscience and the good, is supposed to find rest in the substantial ethical world, which is described by Hegel as having a power and authority firmer than the being of nature itself. Why should the failure of postconventional morality to produce a determinate moral principle warrant the rehabilitation of conventions? Conventions are notoriously in conflict with one another—the convention that permits self-spending on pleasure conflicts with the convention that demands self-spending on the welfare of the distant poor—and a postconventional principle was needed precisely to resolve such conflicts. If the postconventional level is unattainable, conventions remain in a state of suspended validity, valid as if not, which is hardly the firm authority that Hegel ascribes to ethical substance. Somek presses the point that eine eilfertige Unterwerfung unter das Bestehende—a hasty submission to what exists—does not solve the problem the moral consciousness raised; it merely installs the unsolved problem at a higher institutional level.
The solution Somek constructs from the materials of the Grundlinien hinges on what he identifies as the unspoken theme of the morality-to-ethical-life transition: the form of the relation between subjective recognition and the objective claim to be recognized. Quoting the formulation that the right to acknowledge nothing that one does not see as rational is the highest right of the subject, but through its subjective determination at the same time formal, and against it the right of the rational as the objective stands firm, Somek elucidates the structural feature that subjective insight and objective rationality stand to each other in a relation of mutual Anerkennungsanspruch. The subject claims the right to acknowledge only what she sees as rational; reason claims the right to be acknowledged by subjects, but to be reason it must hold an sich, independently of any particular subject’s acknowledgment. The subject must therefore relate to reason as to something it has not posited but found, to a Sein that is what it is by virtue of its own being. The ethical, accordingly, is the subjective disposition of the an-sich-seienden Recht, a recognition whose content is precisely the content that has not been merely posited by the recognizer.
Somek then performs the volume’s most sustained piece of conceptual labor by working out two interlocking analyses: the first of the objective side, where the substantial good must be articulated as a content that is not arbitrarily constructed; the second of the subjective side, where the subject must participate in the substantial good as its living moment rather than as its passive recipient. He shows, by recourse to Hegel’s own elliptical paragraph on the unity of subjective and objective good, that the bestimmungslose Gute, the indeterminate good, must contain in itself its opposite—the determination by the subject; and equally that the determining subjectivity must contain in itself its opposite—the an-sich-seiende rationality. Each, taken one-sidedly, aufhebt itself and is reduced to a moment of the Begriff, which now appears as their unity. The unity is not constructed by appending one moment to the other but consists in the recognition that each moment, considered for itself, is intelligible only through the other.
To make this logical claim concretely accessible, Somek invokes the communitarian tradition, particularly Charles Taylor’s analysis of strong evaluations. Taylor’s contention that we orient ourselves in our lives by evaluative contrasts—calling some pursuits nobler than others—and that such evaluations require a horizon of values not invented by us but historically inherited, is presented as a contemporary translation of Hegel’s claim that ethical life is the lived medium without which moral judgment is impossible. The ethical horizon is not a sum of rules but a complex tissue of practices, roles, vocabularies, and contrasts, in which alone determinate evaluative meanings can occur. The chapter emphasizes that this horizon does not foreclose criticism or innovation; novel evaluative claims must reach back into the existing horizon for their intelligibility, and even Nietzsche’s Umwertung aller Werte presupposes the values to be revalued.
Somek’s reading then advances a thesis stronger than Taylor’s. Hegel’s claim, he argues, is not merely that evaluative meanings depend on a cultural horizon but that the very form of validity—the form in which a content can show up as claiming validity—requires that the content not be gesetzt, not merely posited, by the recognizing subject. The conscience tries to make itself depend on something that is not its own product; for that something to count as obligating, it must simply be there. The substantial good of ethical life is, on this analysis, the institutional realization of the form of validity itself, the public existence of contents that we encounter as given. In this reading, the “majestic indifference” that Hegel ascribes to ethical substance—ob das Individuum sei, gilt der objektiven Sittlichkeit gleich—is not a totalitarian gesture but the structural feature without which ethical content could not be experienced as binding. The institutional anchoring of normative content in the existing social world is therefore the very condition of moral seriousness.
The chapter culminates in an analysis of how the contents of ethical life must, despite this objectivity, be such that their recognition by the subject does not amount to alienation. The institutions of ethical life must be Wirklichkeit der Freiheit; they must inwardly have the structure of freedom, so that to recognize them is to recognize one’s own freedom in them. Somek redescribes the structure of the free will articulated in the introduction—the will that wills its own free will in every determinate willing—and shows how each of the spheres of ethical life realizes this structure differently. In abstract right, freedom is realized as non-interference; in morality, as the integrity of the role-bearer who refuses to sacrifice the orientation of action to particular advantage; in ethical life proper, as social freedom, the participation in structures of mutual Füreinander-tätig-Sein whose ends interlock with our own. The institutions of marriage, civil society, and the state are the differentiated habitats in which this social freedom takes determinate shape. The chapter ends with a reflection on the figure of the We as Geist—the impersonal collective subject that issues the validity claims to which we, as singular subjects, respond—and on how the transmission of this We through habit, education, and quotidian feedback constitutes the medium of ethical formation. The implication, registered carefully and without polemic, is that postconventional morality survives in ethical life not as an external principle to be applied to institutions but as a critical principle internal to the very institutions that fail to realize the Wirklichkeit der Freiheit.
The chapter on civil society by Alfred J. Noll, titled with a quotation that Hegel might have endorsed—Schlechtes Wetter ist immer noch besser als gar kein Wetter—takes up the next moment in the architectural sequence. Noll opens by distancing his contribution from the academic norm of detachment: he writes as both a philosopher and a practising lawyer, and his reading of Hegel’s bürgerliche Gesellschaft draws unapologetically on the materials of Hegel’s 1819/20 lectures, in the Henrich edition, for their plain-spoken concreteness. The civil society of the Grundlinien is, in his rendering, the sphere in which the subjective will of the individual attains its Selbständigkeit—where each pursues her particular ends through the system of needs—and where this very pursuit, by virtue of universal interdependence, generates a paradoxical universality that is at once its own ground and its own structural deformation.
Noll lingers on the threefold structure of civil society: the system of needs, the administration of justice, and the police-and-corporation. The system of needs is the level at which Hegel makes the most striking diagnostic statements about modernity. Need, in its initial natural form, belongs to the singular individual, but in becoming socially mediated it acquires the form of universality. The subject is not constrained by natural necessity; she relates to a self-made necessity, and in this relation lies ein Fortgang zur Befreiung. Yet this freedom is, as Hegel insists, only formal, since particularity remains the underlying content. Out of this formal freedom Hegel develops one of his most powerful theses: that the indefinite proliferation of needs, means, and gratifications, joined to the differentiation between natural and cultivated need, is structurally tied to a parallel differentiation in productive labor. Noll allows the Grundlinien and the lecture transcripts to make Hegel’s diagnosis of incipient capitalism speak in their own voice: the increase of wealth and the increase of poverty advance in step; the dependence and constraint of those bound to particular labor produce a class structurally incapable of the higher freedoms and spiritual goods of bourgeois society. The famous formulation—the civil society is on the one hand too poor to maintain its poor; this means, on the other side, that the civil society is too rich—is Hegel’s diagnostic of a chronic overproduction crisis whose escape is at once colonial expansion and the consolidation of Pöbel on both ends of the social ladder.
Noll’s most striking exegetical move is his reading of Hegel’s discussion of poverty and its inner Empörung. The poor person stands not before mere natural necessity but before the will of others; her exclusion is the result of Willkür, of human contingency, and her dispossession is therefore experienced as a violation of recognition. The internal indignation that follows is, in Hegel’s analysis, the necessary conceptual precondition for the formation of the Pöbel—a state of consciousness in which freedom no longer has Dasein and the recognition of universal freedom collapses. Noll registers, with critical care, that Hegel extends this Pöbelhaftigkeit not only downward to those impoverished but upward to those whom wealth has rendered shameless and contemptuous. The civil society is the social formation in which two species of Pöbel form symmetrically.
The chapter continues with the administration of justice and the police-corporation as Hegel’s structural responses to the deficits of the system of needs. In Rechtspflege, the universal that has so far operated only as the indifferent mediation of needs becomes determinate as positive law and as the procedural recognition of right. Noll quotes Hegel’s calls for codification—the praise of the Code Napoléon for enshrining property freedom and abolishing feudal residues—and his insistence that the procedure of right be bestimmt, public, knowable. The publicity of the administration of justice is for Hegel a constitutive structural feature of the modern legal order: not because law is administered better when public, but because the right of self-consciousness, the right of the citizen’s own insight, demands that justice be visible, that the citizen know the law and the trial as her own. Yet the administration of justice still leaves the Wohl of the singular subject as something external to right; the welfare of the person is, from the standpoint of right alone, a matter of indifference. Hence the necessity of the Polizei und Korporation: the police, in Hegel’s broad sense of öffentliche Wohlfahrtspflege, takes the welfare of the singular as itself a juridical concern, and the corporation gathers individuals into substantive solidarities whose ethical density compensates for the abstract universality of the legal order. Noll concludes by registering the immense originality of Hegel’s claim that the corporation is the zweite sittliche Wurzel des Staates alongside the family—a claim that prefigures the modern social-democratic intuition that the legitimate state cannot be founded merely on private right but must rest on intermediate associations of social labor.
The shift from civil society to a closer examination of the institutional arrangements of modernity is performed by Andreas Gelhard’s chapter, Staat, Examen. Über die Bürokratisierung der Bildung in Hegels Rechtsphilosophie. Gelhard’s contribution introduces a strikingly contemporary register into the volume by reading Hegel’s analyses of education, examination, and bureaucratic recruitment as the philosophical articulation of a problem that has only intensified in the present day. The chapter begins by reconstructing Hegel’s concept of Bildung through its development from the Phänomenologie des Geistes to the Grundlinien. In the master-slave dialectic, Bildung first appears as the formative labor of the slave on the natural object, the Bilden des Dinges, which only acquires its bildungsphilosophical sense through the recognition that in shaping the thing the laboring subject shapes itself. The discipline of service joined to productive forming converts blind obedience into conscious self-appropriation; Bildung is therefore intelligible only as a particular synthesis of objective work and subjective formation.
Gelhard then turns to the Grundlinien, where the relation of Bildung and labor is explicitly programmatic. Hegel speaks there of an Arbeit der Bildung, an act of liberation, by which the subject works against the immediacy of desire, against the subjectively contingent vanity of feeling, and against the arbitrariness of preference. Citing Christoph Menke, Gelhard shows that this Bildung-as-liberation is the dynamizing of Kant’s concept of autonomy into a process of Autonomisierung: freedom is not given as a property of the subject; it must be acquired through laborious self-formation. In its civil-societal habitat, the Arbeit der Bildung is the labor by which the bourgeois individual rises from her particular subjective motives to the universality of social life. The mechanism of this rise is, structurally, the Entäußerung—the externalization through which the laboring self comes to behold itself in its product and the acting self comes to be seen by other selves in its actions. Entäußerung names the form of appearance in which freedom, which is not an empirical property among others, can show up at all.
The chapter deepens this analysis through a careful reading of the Bildung section of the Phänomenologie and its description of the Welt der Bildung as the world of inversion. The Verkehrung, the inversion of every received certainty, is the negativity through which Bildung unsettles the self-evident standards of everyday life. Following Heidemann and Emundts, Gelhard distinguishes this dialectical Verkehrung from the speculative Umkehrung of consciousness in which a higher standard takes hold; Bildung is the negativistic moment, not yet the speculative resolution. The structural insight Gelhard derives is that Bildungsprozesse are Bewährungsproben—ordeals of testing—in which the subject’s standards of judgment are themselves put on trial. The standards are not mental rules carried in the head and applied to objects; they are complex systems internal to forms of practice, and they change when the practice itself is exposed as inadequate.
Against this conceptual background Gelhard turns to the Grundlinien‘s treatment of the Examen, the institutional examination through which entry into state service is regulated. The state, as Hegel develops it in the third part of ethical life, recruits its officials by Befähigung—qualification—rather than by birth, hereditary right, or contract. Yet Hegel is fully aware that the demand for ascertainable qualification opens the door to a bureaucratization of Bildung, in which the formative labor of self-development is reified into measurable competencies, examined performances, and the reproductions of credentials. Gelhard reads Hegel’s careful insistence that the official’s Pflichterfüllung must be supported by sufficient remuneration and freedom from external dependence as a structural acknowledgment of the danger of the bureaucratized examination: when Bildung is reduced to its examinable surface, the formation of the rational state risks producing officials who are, paradoxically, less gebildet than the program of the modern state demands.
The chapter situates this analysis within Hegel’s broader conception of the state as the institutional realization of Bildung. The state, Gelhard argues, is on Hegel’s account not external to Bildung but internal to it; it is the medium in which formative practices, including the practice of self-presentation under the examining gaze of others, become socially objective. Yet the very institutionalization of Bildung introduces the risk that the formative process degenerates into ritualized performance. Gelhard’s chapter ends by suggesting that the ambivalence Hegel registers between Bildung as liberation and Bildung as bureaucratized examination is not a flaw in his analysis but the philosophical articulation of a permanent tension within modern institutions: the demand that subjects be formed for citizenship and rational service generates institutional procedures that, by their very formality, threaten to substitute the appearance of Bildung for its substance. The chapter thus contributes to the volume’s running tension-sensitivity an analysis of the way the rational state, in seeking to secure its own intelligence, produces examination as both its instrument and its danger.
The two chapters on the state, by Christoph Bezemek and by Thomas Meyer, articulate the architecture of Hegel’s Staatsphilosophie in complementary registers. Bezemek’s Hegels Staat. Ein Umriss offers a sober survey of the state’s threefold structure—fürstliche Gewalt, Regierungsgewalt, and gesetzgebende Gewalt—with attention to how each power articulates the universal, the particular, and the singular moments of the Begriff. Bezemek frames the state as a self-relating organism whose unity is not the aggregation of its parts but the immanent self-production of the whole. The state, as Hegel insists, is the Wirklichkeit der sittlichen Idee, the substantial will that thinks itself, knows itself, and executes what it knows; the state is therefore vernünftige sittliche Substanz in the strict sense developed in Somek’s chapter, the institutional realization of the form of validity. Bezemek’s exposition emphasizes the organic metaphor that pervades Hegel’s account: the state’s powers are not parts but Glieder, members; each member sustains the others by fulfilling its own sphere; the Selbsterhaltung of each is at once the substantive end of the others. Citizens’ patriotism is, on this analysis, not a sentiment to be cultivated by appeal to particular emotion but the Reflexwirkung of institutional functionality. The patriotism of the schweigende Mehrheit—the silent majority—is sustained not by rhetorical appeals but by the daily experience of institutions that work.
Bezemek’s most piercing analyses concern the figure of the monarch and the political constitution. The monarch, in Hegel’s treatment, is the punctual moment of Selbstbestimmung in which the state acquires the singular will that unifies its powers. The monarch herrscht aber nicht regiert; he reigns but does not rule; he merely sets the dot on the I, says yes to the matters that the apparatus of state has prepared. He is, in Bezemek’s apt formulation, ein Monarch ohne Eigenschaften—a monarch without qualities—whose role is precisely to be the formal decider, the necessary contingency through which the state actualizes itself as a singular will. The conceptual function of this formelle Entscheidung parallels Kelsen’s Grundnorm in that both fulfill the role of an unconditioned originating moment that grounds further legal validity without itself being grounded. Bezemek’s restraint in registering this parallel preserves the integrity of Hegel’s argument while signaling its philosophical reach. The chapter thereby places Hegel’s monarch not in the register of ancien-régime apologetics but in the register of constitutional theory, where the question of how political unity is to be institutionally fixed is a perennial problem.
Bezemek further analyzes the Regierungsgewalt—the executive—as the moment of subsumption, the carrying-through of decisions, the maintenance of laws and institutions, including the police and the judiciary. He notes Hegel’s striking inclusion of adjudication within the executive function, a feature that diverges sharply from the contemporary tripartite separation of powers and that prompts a careful reconstruction of why Hegel insists that adjudication is die Geltendmachung of the universal interest in the particular sphere of civil society. The Stände—the bicameral legislative assembly—are introduced as the mediating organ between the executive and the people, with the upper chamber drawn from landed property and the lower from the bewegliche Seite of civil society, especially the Stand des Gewerbes. Bezemek emphasizes that the legislative function is, on Hegel’s account, embedded in the constitution rather than the constitution’s source: the constitution is das schlechthin an und für sich Seiende, that which is to be regarded as the divine and enduring; legislation operates within the constitution and modifies it slowly through ongoing constitutional change. Hegel’s anti-contractualism is here exhibited at its most consequent: the state cannot rest on a contract, the constitution cannot be made, and the political order must be understood as having grown rather than been instituted.
Thomas Meyer’s chapter, Hegels Theorie der Staatsorganisation, supplements Bezemek’s overview by furnishing a closer reconstruction of the explicit arguments by which Hegel justifies his particular constitutional commitments, especially his preference for hereditary monarchy. Meyer formalizes Hegel’s argument for the monarch as the moment of state sovereignty: if a state is sovereign, then it exists as the self-certain subjectivity in which the ultimate decision lies; subjectivity in its truth is only as a subject; therefore state sovereignty exists as a single individual subject, the monarch. Meyer concedes that one could attempt to liberate this argument from its high-Hegelian theoretical scaffolding and ask whether Hegel’s analysis can illuminate modern conceptions of popular sovereignty, in which all state power emanates from the people but is exercised through differentiated organs. The German Basic Law (Grundgesetz) is invoked as a contemporary analogue: even there the federal president is the locus of certain symbolic acts of unity—the signing of treaties, the commitment to devote his strength to the welfare of the German people—that fulfill, in attenuated form, the function Hegel ascribed to the monarch. Meyer’s analysis culminates in a careful distinction between Hegel’s rejection of Volkssouveränität understood as opposition to monarchical sovereignty and Hegel’s acceptance of Volkssouveränität understood as the wholeness of the state itself, which includes the monarch as its differentiated apex. The chapter concludes that Hegel’s defense of hereditary monarchy is grounded not in dynastic apologetics but in the conceptual demand that the moment of singular decision be unentleitbar, immediate, beyond the reach of contractual rationality—a demand that any modern constitutional order must, in its own way, satisfy.
Frank Ruda’s chapter, Sich entschließen, takes up at the highest pitch of philosophical intensity the very category of decision that Bezemek and Meyer have analyzed in its constitutional embodiment. Ruda’s reading is the volume’s most adventurous and its most concentrated. He begins from the Grundlinien‘s introduction and argues that the will, in Hegel’s account, comes into being only through the act of resolving itself—sich entschließen—an act in which the will exits its empty universality and gives itself Dasein by determining itself. Ruda glosses Hegel’s Beimirsein im anderen—the being-with-oneself in the other—as the conceptual signature of the free will: I am a singular will when I am with myself in what is outside me, when I have resolved myself toward and into the Außen, having settled on something that excludes alternatives.
Simon Gros 
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