Chapter 10 - Political Ontology and Rational Syllogistic in Hegel’s Objective Spirit

Summary

Hegel’s Groundwork for a Philosophy of Right has become, perhaps, the most widely read of the books he published in his lifetime. Many regard it as a work that stands alongside a handful of others as classics of modern political philosophy. Hegel, of course, did not conceive this work as a stand-alone piece of social and political theorizing, as it was effectively an expansion of the section “Objective Spirit” from the “Philosophy of Spirit”, forming Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. As such, in structure and content, it was meant to be understood as giving further determination to a conceptually articulated edifice presented in Part One of the Encyclopaedia, “The Science of Logic”. But more than this, as the presentation the Encyclopaedia follows a pattern in which subsequent sections reveal the “truth” of earlier ones, the “truth” of the determinations of Objective Spirit should further be illuminated in the later Encyclopaedia sections on “Absolute Spirit”, treating Art, Religion and Philosophy. This chapter attempts to illuminate Hegel’s ideas concerning objective spirit by examining them in this broader context.