Elements of the Philosophy of Right

The last major book Hegel published, written as a textbook for his Berlin lectures and set out in numbered paragraphs with remarks. Its subject is right in a broad sense: the forms in which free will makes itself real in the world. The Preface claims that what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational, and that philosophy, like the owl of Minerva, arrives only at dusk, when a form of life has grown old. The book then moves through three parts. Abstract Right covers property, contract and wrong, including crime and punishment. Morality treats purpose, intention, responsibility, the good and conscience, and criticises Kant's ethics as an empty formalism. Ethical Life (Sittlichkeit) describes the family; civil society, with its system of needs, courts, police and corporations; and finally the state, presented as a constitutional monarchy. Critics have read it as an apology for the Prussian state; defenders see a theory of modern freedom.

It is one of the most ambitious accounts of how individual freedom depends on social institutions, and it lies behind later debates about civil society, recognition, markets and the state, including Marx's.