Table Of Contentoxford world’s classics
OUTLINES OF THE
PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was born
in Stuttgart and is the exact contemporary of Beethoven and
Wordsworth. In 1788he entered the Theological Seminary (or Stift)
in Tübingen, where he studied both theology and philosophy and
shared a room with the future poet, Friedrich Hölderlin, and future
philosopher, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. After leaving
Tübingen in 1793, he worked as a private tutor in Bern and
Frankfurt before joining Schelling at the University of Jena in 1801.
At Jena Hegel began to develop his philosophical system, lectured
on natural law for the first time, and completed his monumental
Phenomenology of Spirit(1807). After leaving Jena in 1807he worked
for a year in Bamberg as a newspaper editor, and then from 1808to
1816occupied the post of rector of a grammar school in Nuremberg,
during which time he was married and published the three-volume
Science of Logic (1812–16). In 1816 he was made professor at the
University of Heidelberg, and in 1817he published the first edition
of his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. In 1818 he was
called to a professorship in Berlin, where he would remain until his
death in November 1831. During his years in the city Hegel became
one of the most prominent public figures and the centre of a self-
consciously ‘Hegelian’ school of thought. His students included
Ludwig Feuerbach and David Friedrich Strauß. The Philosophy of
Rightwas published in 1820, though it is dated 1821. It is one of the
more widely studied of Hegel’s works, and has influenced gener-
ations of philosophers and political thinkers from Karl Marx to John
Rawls.
Stephen Houlgate is professor of philosophy at the University
of Warwick. He is the author of Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of
Metaphysics (1986), An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and
History (2nd edn. 2005), and The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From
Being to Infinity (2006). He is also the editor of Hegel and the
Philosophy of Nature(1998),The Hegel Reader(1998), and Hegel and
the Arts(2007). He has served as vice-president and president of the
Hegel Society of America and was editor of the Bulletin of the Hegel
Society of Great Britainfrom1998to2007.
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
G. W. F. HEGEL
Outlines of the
Philosophy of Right
Translated by
T. M. KNOX
Revised, edited, and introduced by
STEPHEN HOULGATE
1
3
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770–1831.
[Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. English]
Outlines of the philosophy of right / [G.W.F. Hegel]; translated by T.M. Knox;
revised, edited, and introduced by Stephen Houlgate.
p. cm. — (Oxford world’s classics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Law—Philosophy. 2. Natural law. 3. State, The. 4. Political science.
5. Ethics. I. Houlgate, Stephen. II. Title
K230.H43G7813 2008
340′.11—dc22
2008000395
Typeset by Cepha Imaging Private Ltd., Bangalore, India
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd., St Ives plc
ISBN978–0–19–280610–9
13579108642
CONTENTS
Introduction vii
Excerpts from T. M. Knox’s Foreword xxxiv
Note on the Text and Translation xxxvii
Select Bibliography xxxix
A Chronology of G. W. F. Hegel xliii
OUTLINES OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT
Preface 3
introduction 17
first part: abstract right 53
(1) Property 57
(A) Taking Possession 67
(B) Use of the Thing 71
(C) Alienation of Property 77
(2) Contract 84
(3) Wrong 93
(A) Non-malicious Wrong 94
(B) Fraud 96
(C) Coercion and Crime 96
second part: morality 109
(1) Purpose and Responsibility 115
(2) Intention and Welfare 118
(3) Good and Conscience 126
third part: ethical life 154
(1) The Family 162
(A) Marriage 163
vi Contents
(B) The Family’s Resources 171
(C) The Education of Children and the Dissolution
of the Family 172
(2) Civil Society 180
(A) The System of Needs 186
(a) The Nature of Need and
its Satisfaction 187
(b) The Nature of Work 190
(c) Resources 191
(B) The Administration of Justice 197
(a) Right as Law 198
(b) The Existence [Dasein] of the Law 203
(c) The Court of Law 208
(C) The Police and the Corporation 215
(a) Police [or the public authority] 215
(b) The Corporation 224
(3) The State 228
(A) Right within the State 235
1. The Internal Constitution for itself 256
(a) The Crown 263
(b) The Executive Power 277
(c) The Legislative Power 284
2. External Sovereignty 304
(B) Right between States 311
(C) World History 315
Explanatory Notes 324
Index 364
INTRODUCTION
Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right is one of the greatest
works of moral, social, and political philosophy, comparable in scope
and profundity of insight to Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics,
Rousseau’s Social Contract, and, in the twentieth century, Rawls’s
Theory of Justice. It contains significant ideas on justice, moral
responsibility, family life, economic activity, and the political struc-
ture of the state. In presenting these ideas Hegel draws on Plato,
Rousseau, Montesquieu, Smith, Kant, and Fichte, and on his broad
knowledge of events and conditions in Germany, France, and Britain,
to produce a wide-ranging and penetrating account of modern social
and political life.
Yet Hegel’s political philosophy is not one with which the public,
or even many professional philosophers, are intimately familiar. This
is due partly to the undeniable difficulty of the Philosophy of Right,
which has prevented Hegel’s text from gaining the wider popularity
enjoyed by the works of Marx or Nietzsche. (In addition to the con-
ceptual difficulty of Hegel’s thought, his text is designed to be a
handbook to accompany his lectures, rather than a fully worked-out
presentation of his ideas, and so is at times much more condensed
than one would like.)1The relative obscurity in which Hegel’s polit-
ical philosophy still languishes is also due partly to the ill-informed
but influential prejudice of philosophers such as Karl Popper. In his
widely read book The Open Society and its Enemies, Popper accuses
Hegel of churning out ‘bombastic and mystifying cant’, of maintain-
ing that ‘the state is everything, and the individual nothing’ and of
thereby being ‘the missing link’ between Plato and modern totalitar-
ianism.2 Little wonder that many who hold Popper in high regard
have not felt much inclination to get to know Hegel’s philosophy
better. Popper’s diatribe against Hegel is based, however, on a shock-
ingly superficial and selective reading of Hegel’s work, and leans
heavily on the intemperate grumblings of Hegel’s notoriously hostile
1 See G. W. F. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right[henceforthPR], Preface,
3–4below.
2 Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies,2vols. (1945; London: Routledge,
1966), ii. 28,31.
viii Introduction
contemporary Arthur Schopenhauer, who accused Hegel of being a
paid agent of the Prussian government.3Careful and attentive study
of Hegel’s Philosophy of Rightreveals, by contrast, that Hegel’s text
is in fact one of the most subtle and perceptive accounts of human
freedom that we possess. Far from being a sinister forerunner of
Hitlerian fascism, Hegel emerges from the pages of his book—in the
judgement of the twentieth century’s greatest political philosopher,
John Rawls—as a ‘moderately progressive reform-minded liberal’.4
The aim of this edition of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is to bring
Hegel’s text to a much wider audience than it has enjoyed hitherto,
so that more readers can discover for themselves that Rawls’s judge-
ment on Hegel is considerably nearer the mark than that of Popper.
Hegel’s Life and Political Sympathies
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770, the
same year as Beethoven and Wordsworth. In his youth Hegel read
Rousseau, Lessing, Klopstock, and Wieland, and his diary, which he
wrote (partly in Latin) from 1785 to 1787, indicates that he could
read Greek as well as Latin, and even some Hebrew, and that at the
age of 8he had received a multi-volume translation of Shakespeare’s
plays (some of which he would later read in English).5In1788Hegel
entered the Theological Seminary (or Stift) in Tübingen, where he
studied both theology and philosophy. After 1790he famously shared
a room with the future poet Friedrich Hölderlin, and future philoso-
pher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, though the room was
also occupied by seven other students. Hegel’s ‘hero’ at this time was
Rousseau, whose Émile,Social Contract, and Confessionswere partic-
ular favourites. It is also likely that Hegel shared the general enthusi-
asm at the Seminary for the French Revolution of 1789, though the
often-repeated story that Hegel, Schelling, and other friends planted
a ‘freedom tree’ in a meadow outside Tübingen to commemorate the
storming of the Bastille may well be apocryphal.6
3 Ibid.33.
4 John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2000),330.
5 Johannes Hoffmeister (ed.), Dokumente zu Hegels Entwicklung(1936; Stuttgart–Bad
Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1974),12–13.
6 Walter Jaeschke, Hegel-Handbuch. Leben-Werk-Schule (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler,
2003),6–7.
Introduction ix
After leaving Tübingen in 1793Hegel worked as a private tutor in
Bern and Frankfurt, before joining Schelling at the University of
Jena in 1801. Hegel taught at the university as a Privatdozent (an
unsalaried lecturer paid by his students) until 1806, when he was
finally offered a modest salary after the intervention of Goethe. It was
at Jena that Hegel began to develop his philosophical system and first
lectured on natural law. He also finished his long manuscript on ‘The
German Constitution’, which he had started in Frankfurt, and wrote
his important essay ‘On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural
Law’ (1802–3).7In October 1806Hegel completed his monumental
Phenomenology of Spirit,8and had to send his only copy of large sec-
tions of the manuscript by courier through the French lines outside
Jena. On 13 October 1806—the day before the battle of Jena—the
French occupied the city and Hegel saw the ‘Emperor [Napoleon]—
this world-soul [Weltseele]—riding out of the city on reconnaissance’.9
After leaving Jena in January 1807 Hegel worked for a year in
Bamberg as a newspaper editor, and then from 1808 to 1816 occu-
pied the post of rector of a grammar school in Nuremberg, during
which time he was married and published the three-volume Science
of Logic.10In1816Hegel was appointed to a salaried professorship at
the University of Heidelberg. During his time in Heidelberg he pub-
lished the first edition of his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences
(1817)11 and once again lectured on natural law (1817–18). He also
wrote his manuscript on the ‘Proceedings of the Estates Assembly in
the Kingdom of Württemberg, 1815–1816’ (1817).12
In 1818 Hegel was called to a professorship in Berlin by the new
Prussian Minister for Spiritual, Educational, and Medical Affairs,
Karl Siegmund Franz vom Stein zum Altenstein. He would remain
7 See Laurence Dickey and H. B. Nisbet (eds.), G. W. F. Hegel: Political Writings
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),6–180.
8 Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University
Press,1977).
9 Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington, Ind.:
Indiana University Press, 1984),114.
10 Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999).
See explanatory note to p. 4.
11 G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline[1817] and
Critical Writings, ed. E. Behler (New York: Continuum, 1990). See also first explanatory
note to p. 3.
12 Hegel’s Political Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964),
246–94.
