Hegel and the foundation of right

Abstract

For Hegel, right is inextricably tied to free will, which he sees as an expression of spirit. His Philosophy of Right 1 locates the foundation of right exactly in freedom and spirit. Many have viewed this coupling of right and freedom with spirit as problematic. Hegel has for a long time—at least since Isaiah Berlin ’s “Two Concepts of Liberty ”—been interpreted as a representative of positive freedom (being directed by a “true self”) and linked to a totalitarian idea of the state. Recent contributions have to a large extent freed Hegel from such charges, focusing on how the freedom of the individual is not only compatible with participation in society, but also realized through it. The state is not understood as the “march” of some god external to human history. 2 Terry Pinkard ’s recent Hegel’s Naturalism is an example of such a view: “Spirit” is not an independent, supersensible being directing history from the beyond, 3 but is the collective and individual agency of self-interpreting organisms. 4 Axel Honneth goes further in his Das Recht der Freiheit, a reconstruction of Hegel ’s Philosophy of Right in a way suitable for the contemporary mind: Honneth throws the idealist, monist concept of spirit completely overboard. 5 Why was Hegel so concerned with spirit and why are we so concerned with distancing ourselves from it?