Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 31
What This Distinction Achieves — and What It Does Not
What this extension is good for can be said briefly. First, it makes visible that Hegel’s diagnosis of civil society is not a timeless critique of just any market order, but the diagnosis of a specific historical condition — dissolution. Second, it makes visible that the answer to this dissolution cannot be the Hegelian state in its historical form, but rather an ethical form that comes after the dissolution and takes up its lesson. Third, it makes visible at what point Marx and Hegel converge: both know that modern dissolution is not a stable condition; both know that it does not pass over into reconciliation on its own; both seek — by different paths — a form in which dissolution is carried over into a higher shape of ethical life, that is, in which the theoretical idea is carried over into the practical one.
What this distinction does not achieve should be said with the same clarity: it does not show what conscious ethical life concretely looks like, which institutions sustain it, how it might emerge from the present constitution of civil society. That is not the task of conceptual architecture, but of concrete real philosophy and political practice. The architecture shows that the place is empty and must be occupied. What occupies it is a different question — and it remains open.
VII. External Constitutional Law, World History, Absolute Spirit — Three Sketches to Conclude
The Philosophy of Right does not conclude with the determination of the state. Three thematic fields follow the state, developed very unevenly by Hegel himself: external constitutional law (the relation of states to one another), world history (the movement of forms of life in time), and absolute spirit (religion, art, philosophy as the sphere in which the ultimate purposes that act upon objective spirit are articulated). These three themes are interconnected — they concern the conditions under which what has been developed in the Philosophy of Right is realized or fails to be realized — and they are only sketched here, because their full elaboration would each require its own volume. But as far as the sketches reach, they make visible the place of the Philosophy of Right within a larger structure.