Hegel-by-HyperText Resources
Abstract Right is the first chapter of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: the “inherently single will of a subject” confronting an external world. “Hence the imperative of right is: 'Be a person and respect others as persons.'” So having rights is at the very root of being a person; a “thing, as something devoid of will, has no rights against the subjectivity of intelligence and volition”
The most fundamental expression of right, according to Hegel, is the giving of particularity to right in the form of a thing, i.e. in the form of Property and possession.
See Philosophy of Right and Objective Spirit.
See Philosophy of Right and Hegel's Theory of the Modern State by Shlomo Avineri, Lukacs' The Young Hegel or Origins of the Concept of Alienation by Meszaros.
See the Phenomenology
See Philosophy of Right, Objective Spirit and Avineri Chapter 5 and Chapter 7.
See Philosophy of Right.
See Philosophy of Right.
See Philosophy of Right and Objective Spirit.
See Philosophy of Right.
See Philosophy of Right.
See Philosophy of Right.
See Philosophy of Right.
See the Phenomenology.
See the Phenomenology
See Philosophy of Right and the Phenomenology and Avineri.
See Philosophy of Right and Objective Spirit.
See Philosophy of Right.
See Philosophy of Right, Objective Spirit and Avineri.
See Philosophy of Right.
See Philosophy of Right.
See Philosophy of Right and Objective Spirit.
See the Phenomenology
See Philosophy of Right.
See Philosophy of Right and Objective Spirit.
See Philosophy of Right.
See Philosophy of Right and Objective Spirit.
See Philosophy of Right and See Hegel's First system (Marcuse) and Avineri.
See Science of Logic, Hegel's First system (Marcuse) and Speech and Writing according to Hegel (Derrida).
Hegel says: “The principle of rightness becomes the Law when, in its objective existence, it is posited, i.e. when thinking makes it determinate for consciousness and makes it known as what is right”
Law thus appears in Hegel's system in the Administration of Justice (Law as Right — Determinate Law — Courts), the middle term in Civil Society, in which rights, property, contract, etc., are given a determinate, written and universally known and recognised and enforceable form.
See Philosophy of Right.
See Philosophy of Right.
Lordship and Bondage (Master-Slave)
See Subjective Spirit in the Encyclopedia, the Phenomenology or Outline of the Phenomenology.
See Philosophy of Right.
See Philosophy of Right.
See Philosophy of Right and Objective Spirit and the Phenomenology.
See Philosophy of Right and the Phenomenology and Hegel's First system (Marcuse).
See Philosophy of Right.
See Philosophy of Right.
See Objective Spirit from the Encyclopaedia.
See Preface to the Philosophy of Right.
“We take possession of a thing [a] by directly grasping it physically, [b] by forming it, and [c] by merely marking it as ours.”. Hegel explores the limits of what it is possible to take possession of. Through the development of self-consciousness, one takes possession of one's self, but he holds that it is contrary to right that a person can be the property of another.
See Philosophy of Right.
For Hegel, property is about a person putting their will into an external sphere, into a thing (“something not free, not personal, without rights”) and their right to use that thing being recognised by others, so fundamentally it is a relation of mutual recognition between people. The right to property is, for Hegel, the fundamental premise for being truly a person: “The rationale of property is to be found not in the satisfaction of needs but in the supersession of the pure subjectivity of personality. In his property a person exists for the first time as reason”
The moments of Property are Possession (“The will has its embodiment in something positive”), Use (“the will to possess something must express itself”) and Alienation.
See Philosophy of Right, Objective Spirit and Avineri.
See Philosophy of Right and Objective Spirit.
See Philosophy of Right and Objective Spirit.
Right one could define as ‘what one can get away with in a given society’, inasmuch as Right is prior to Property, Morality, Family, Civil Society, Politics, Law and so forth, but is at the base of all these forms.
Hegel says “That a reality is the realisation of the free will, this is what is meant by a right. Right, therefore, is, in general, freedom as Idea”. Thus Abstract Right is reflected or negated in Morality, and the unity of Abstract Right and Morality is Ethics, in which the whole range of social institutions from family to market to state can be understood, not just negatively as limitations on the Will (‘what you can get away with’) but the unfolding of Right from its abstract form.
See Philosophy of Right.
See the Phenomenology.
See Subjective Spirit where Hegel defines the Soul as the immediate form in which the Spirit manifests itself when it emerges from Nature, and describes Soul as the object studied by Anthropology. The Subjective Spirit develops from Soul to Consciousness (the object studied by Phenomenology) to Subjectivity or Reason, which “frees itself for objectivity through its activity”.
The Soul is characterised by “not only reflection into others and reflection into itself but it is also free judgment”. See the first part of the Subjective Spirit for Hegel's exposition of the Soul.
See Philosophy of Right, Objective Spirit, Philosophy of History and Hegel's First system (Marcuse).
See the Phenomenology
See Philosophy of Right and Objective Spirit.
See the Absolute Freedom & Terror in the Phenomenology
See the Phenomenology.
See Philosophy of Right.
The Will is a person's conscious determination to carry out some action. In Hegel's system, Will originates in Subjective Spirit, which develops from Theoretical Spirit to Practrical Spirit, and thereby becomes Objective Spirit.
The Will involves the internal condition of a person (their needs, interests and their knowledge) and objective conditions which provide the stimulus and means and set limits on a person's actions. The problem of whether the Will can be free has long been a central issue in Western philosophy, and Hegel's Philosophy of Right is an elaboration of the dialectic of the Will: “The territory of right is in general the spiritual, and its more definite place and origin is the will, which is free”.
For Hegel, rather than the State being a restraint on the Will of individuals, it is the highest expression of that will, but can become so only by the mediation of conflicting wills and their sublation into a higher determination. Hegel's social and political views and his concept of history, involve understanding how the various institutions and social formations develop, in terms of the dialectics of the Will. However, Will and Concept (knowledge), are inseparable from one another, and mediate one another.
See Philosophy of Right.
For Hegel's view of women, see the Phenomenology, Philosophy of Right on the family and “One sex is mind in its self-diremption; the other is mind in unity as knowledge and volition”.
See Philosophy of Right, Philosophy of History and Hegel's First system (Marcuse).
See Philosophy of Right and See Philosophy of History.
See Philosophy of Right and Objective Spirit.