Introduction

'What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.' This sentence from the Preface to the Philosophy of Right has provoked two centuries of debate. 'Right' here means not only law but all the forms in which freedom is realised in the world. The book has three parts: 'Abstract Right', on property, contract and wrong; 'Morality', on purpose, intention and conscience; and 'Ethical Life', the highest realisation of freedom, with its three moments of the family, civil society and the state. Hegel was one of the first philosophers to analyse civil society in depth, seeing in the market economy the contradiction of growing wealth alongside poverty. The Preface ends: 'The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.' Philosophy always comes to understand an age only after it has reached maturity.