The philosophy of right
Subtitle: The philosophy of history
By: by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Contributors: Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831
Series: Great books of the Western world -- v. 46
Publisher: Encyclopædia Britannica
Published: 1952
Place of publication: Chicago
Language: eng
Number of pages: 369
Subjects: Law -- Philosophy.; Political science.; Natural law.; Ethics.; History -- Philosophy.
Other titles: Philosophy of history
Work titles: Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts.
Description: This classic offers a comprehensive view of the philosopher's influential system. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel applies his most important concept -- the dialectics -- to law, rights, morality, the family, economics, and the state. The last of Hegel's works to be published in his lifetime, this volume combines moral and political philosophy to form a sociologic view dominated by the idea of the state. Hegel defines universal right as the synthesis between the thesis of an individual acting in accordance with the law and the occasional conflict of an antithetical desire to follow private convictions. The state, he declares, must permit individuals to satisfy both demands, thereby realizing social harmony and prosperity--the perfect synthesis. Further, Hegel renounces his formerly favorable assessment of the French Revolution and rejects the republican form of government, suggesting instead an idealized form of a constitutional monarchy, in which ultimate power rests with the sovereign.

Hegel wrote this classic as an introduction to a series of lectures on the "philosophy of history"--A novel concept in the early nineteenth century. With this work, he created the history of philosophy as a scientific study. He reveals philosophical theory as neither an accident nor an artificial construct, but as an exemplar of its age, fashioned by its antecedents and contemporary circumstances, and serving as a model for the future. The author himself appears to have regarded this book as a popular introduction to his philosophy as a whole, and it remains the most readable and accessible of all his philosophical writings. Eschewing the methods of original history (written during the period in question) and reflective history (written after the period has passed), Hegel embraces philosophic history, which employs a priori philosophical thought to interpret history as a rational process. Reason rules history, he asserts, through its infinite freedom (being self-sufficient, it depends on nothing beyond its own laws and conclusions) and power (through which it forms its own laws). Hegel argues that all of history is caused and guided by a rational process, and God's seemingly unknowable plan is rendered intelligible through philosophy. The notion that reason rules the world, he concludes, is both necessary to the practice of philosophic history and a conclusion drawn from that practice
Notes: Bibliographical footnotes.