Hegel - Outlines of the Philosophy of Right

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

OUTLINES OF THE
PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL (17701831) was born in Stuttgart and is the exact contemporary of Beethoven and Wordsworth. In 1788 he entered the Theological Seminary (or Stift) in Tbingen, where he studied both theology and philosophy and shared a room with the future poet, Friedrich Hlderlin, and future philosopher, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. After leaving Tingen 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 1807 he worked for a year in Bamberg as a newspaper editor, and then from 1808 to 1816 occupied the post of rector of a grammar school in Nuremberg, during which time he was married and published the three-volume Science of Logic (181216). In 1816 he was made professor at the University of Heidelberg, and in 1817 he 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 Strau. The Philosophy of Right was published in 1820, though it is dated 1821. It is one of the more widely studied of Hegels works, and has influenced generations of philosophers and political thinkers from Karl Marx to John Rawls.

STEPHEN OULGATE 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 Hegels 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 Britain from 1998 to 2007.

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Translated by
T. M. KNOX

Revised, edited, and introduced by
STEPHEN HOULGATE

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Translation Oxford University Press 1952, 2008
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First published as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 2008

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 17701831.
[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 worlds classics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. LawPhilosophy. 2. Natural law. 3. State, The. 4. Political science.
5. Ethics. I. Houlgate, Stephen. II. Title
K230.H43G7813 2008
340.11dc22

2008000395

Typeset by Cepha Imaging Private Ltd., Bangalore, India
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd., St Ives plc

ISBN 9780192806109

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

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 Platos Republic, Aristotles Politics, Rousseaus Social Contract, and, in the twentieth century, Rawlss Theory of Justice. It contains significant ideas on justice, moral responsibility, family life, economic activity, and the political structure 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 Hegels 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 Hegels text from gaining the wider popularity enjoyed by the works of Marx or Nietzsche. (In addition to the conceptual difficulty of Hegels 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.) The aim of this edition of Hegels