Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 36
The Place of the Philosophy of Right in the Whole
With the three sketches — external state law, world history, absolute spirit — the philosophy of right is set into the framework in which it has its function. It is not an end in itself; it is the systematic presentation of the idea of living-together, in which the material of human action is shaped by higher purposes, and it stands between the philosophy of nature and economics on one side and absolute spirit on the other.
What it can accomplish on its own is the exposure of the structural architecture within which historical movement orders itself. No more than this can be demanded of it, but no less either. It is the conceptual precondition for a world history that does not disintegrate into mere empirical fact-gathering, and it is the conceptual ground for a practice that does not disintegrate into arbitrariness. What it cannot accomplish is the historical movement itself — that must be accomplished by other inquiries, and in the end by the subjects themselves who act within that movement.
The connection attempted in this conception between Hegelian architecture and Marxian concretion is not a synthesis that would sublate their differences. It is the recognition that both are necessary, each in its own way: Hegelian architecture, because without it the material disintegrates into mere empirical fact-gathering; Marxian concretion, because without it the architecture remains empty. What Marxists in the twentieth century often regarded as specifically Marxist — the structural analysis of inversions, the critique of formal equality underlain by substantive asymmetries, the diagnosis of the historical specificity of modern conditions — is in fact already laid out in Hegelian form, insofar as that form is carried through consistently. Marx worked out what Hegel could not work out; but he did so methodically in a form that is Hegelian. This insight is not a reconciliation of opposites but a proposal for reading, one that attempts to do justice to both authors and that sustains the architecture developed here.
VIII. Conclusion
The path traced by the Philosophy of Right through the logic of the concept can be summarized in retrospect as follows: the free will must actualize itself in the world, or else it is not free. It does so by setting itself ends and using means to realize them — the teleological structure of the logic of the concept becomes, in objective spirit, the real philosophy of conscious human action. In abstract right, the will actualizes itself in the thing (property), in exchange (contract), and in defense against wrong. In morality, it turns back into itself and becomes conscience. Right and morality are each, taken separately, one-sided; their truth is ethical life, in which family, civil society, and the state are articulated.
The decisive point for reading Hegel today is the place where civil society and the state meet. Hegel sees the contradiction — the rabble [Pöbel] — and identifies it with conceptual precision. He had already developed, within logic itself, the teleological reversal in which the means turns against the end; he knows that mere life — including social life — cannot by itself distinguish between successful and parasitic self-preservation. What he cannot accomplish with his own means is the economic analysis of its necessity. Marx carries out this analysis, methodologically in a Hegelian manner — not as an objection to the architecture, but as its concretization at a point that Hegel himself had left open. Pistor shows today, at the level of legal form, what this economic structure means juridically, and reopens a question of substance that in Marx had seemed closed by the labor theory of value. Todd shows that the familial preconditions of political form are not arbitrary. Neither of these is a refutation of Hegel; both are empirical concretizations without which his architecture would today remain empty.
The methodological lesson is the one with which we began. Hegel’s logic is not empirical derivation, but neither is it a mere heuristic scheme; it is an ordering form of conceptual necessity, showing which determinations must emerge from one another when freedom actualizes itself institutionally. Teleology and the idea of cognition and volition are not, in this respect, arbitrary stations of the logic, but a framework within which conscious human action becomes conceptually graspable: as the positing of ends, the use of means, the realization of ends — and as the ever-present threat of reversal, in which the means turns against the end. Whoever reads the Philosophy of Right without this framework loses its inner necessity; whoever reads it without the Marxian concretization loses its edge against reality; whoever reads Marx without the Hegelian framework loses the methodological substance of his analysis. The three readings are, together, the whole reading. It must nonetheless be recalled that the teleological framework does not explain everything in this material that stands in need of explanation: it makes the structure of reversal visible, but it does not by itself supply the specific economic form-determination of capital. That comes from the analysis of the value-form, of wage labor, of competition, and of accumulation — an analysis that lies beyond the architecture of the Philosophy of Right and must be pursued in a separate volume.
So that the line developed through this text is not read as too smooth a synthesis, its real points of rupture must finally be marked.
First, regarding Hegel: if the thesis is that Hegel remains, in his philosophy of the state, too conciliatory, what is meant by this must be differentiated. Three layers must be distinguished. The logical and methodological core of Hegel’s position — the state as the site where the universal becomes conscious; ethical life as the sphere in which the rational is meant to become practical; the task of a mediating instance that brings together what has fallen apart in civil society — is load-bearing and is not refuted by the critique. Even the reception of Hegel in the Eastern Bloc’s Marxism had largely taken over this core and believed it could see its own state as the true realization of what Hegel had conceptually demanded. Hegel’s linguistic expression, on the other hand, is in places too far-reaching — he formulates matters as though the reconciliation had already been accomplished, where the matter in fact designates a task. This layer of diction is Hegel’s own contribution to the difficulty in which he has placed his reception, and it does not disappear on a careful reading. Finally, there is the time-bound assumption that in the state of Hegel’s own time (the Prussia of the reform era and its restoration) the unity of cognition and volition was already actualized — an assumption that was not historically borne out and that Hegel himself asserts more strongly than the matter can support. Whoever distinguishes these three layers recognizes that Marx’s critique strikes above all the second and third layers, while the logical core can be set apart as what it is: a demand that coincides neither with Hegel’s own diction nor with the state of his own time.
Second, regarding Marx: Marx criticizes not only Hegel’s language but also real political constructions — the estates, the crown, the law of inheritance in the sense of Hegel’s own account, the bureaucracy as an accomplished reconciliation. These real critiques are not dissolved by a sympathetic reading of Hegel; they remain as a genuine difference. What chiefly distinguishes Marx from Hegel and Gans is the detailed economic analysis of the circumstances that produce the rabble — an analysis that neither Hegel nor Gans carried out, and which is the condition for the Hegelian demand (that the circumstances must disappear) to be made concretely operational.
Third, regarding Gans: Gans is a bridge, but not yet Marx. He thinks in a Hegelian spirit — cognition of reality, cognition of circumstances, right action arising from this cognition — and applies this consistently to the rabble, where Hegel himself still hesitated. His demand amounts, in substance, to this: not the poor, but the circumstances that produce the rabble, must disappear. What Gans does not accomplish is the detailed economic analysis of these circumstances; he holds fast to the Hegelian concept of property and seeks the solution in the free corporation. He makes visible the step that lies between Hegel and Marx, without yet taking it himself.
Fourth, regarding Pistor: Pistor supplements Marx at the level of legal form, but does not replace him. What Pistor shows — the coding of capital through private legal modules — is a concretization of the Marxian analysis, not an alternative to it; the question of substance that Marx tried to close through the labor theory of value remains open, but the economic form-determination that he developed is not replaced by Pistor, but carried forward onto another level.
Fifth, regarding teleology: the teleological framework explains the structure of reversal — the immanent possibility that the means turns against the end — but it does not by itself explain why, under capitalist relations, this reversal becomes system-sustaining. Only the analysis of the specific economic forms, to be pursued in a separate volume, can explain that.
Whoever keeps these five points of rupture in view loses nothing of the line developed here; one sees it only more clearly, because one knows the places where it does not grow together smoothly, but where the concretizations must do their own work.
A philosophy of right that seeks to write today can go back neither behind Hegel nor behind Marx. It must retrace the path of the logic of the concept while carrying along the economic concretization — as two sides of the same matter. It must leave open the questions that are open: what conscious ethical life looks like, whether and how the state can redeem what Hegel assigns to it, in what relation economic coding and political form stand to one another. And it must acknowledge that the answer to these questions is not to be found in theory, but on the terrain of political practice — a terrain that the subjects must win for themselves, because no authority will hand it to them.
This is the task this attempt serves: not to assert a new synthesis, but to clear the ground so that the question itself can be posed anew. Reconciliation in the Hegelian sense does not mean that the irrational is accepted as rational, but that the rational is made practical.
Bibliography
Hegel’s Texts
Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), TWA 7. The Additions derive from Gans’ second edition (1833) and go back to lecture transcripts.
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), §§ 483–552, TWA 10.
Lectures on the Philosophy of Right 1818–1831, ed. by Karl-Heinz Ilting, 4 vols., Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1973–1974.
The Philosophy of Right. Lecture of 1819/20, ed. by Dieter Henrich, Frankfurt 1983.
On Its Genesis and Reception
Eduard Gans, Naturrecht und Universalrechtsgeschichte, ed. by Manfred Riedel, Stuttgart 1981.
Manfred Riedel (ed.), Materialien zu Hegels Rechtsphilosophie, 2 vols., Frankfurt 1975.
Karl-Heinz Ilting, “Die Struktur der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie,” in: Riedel, vol. 2.
Own Preliminary Studies
On the logic, which is presupposed throughout, Hegels Logik; on the subjective spirit, whose result §§ 4–28 repeat, Hegels subjektiver Geist; on Marx’s critique Hegel und Marx.