Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 15
What Right Means
With the concept of purpose and the free will, the ground is laid for determining what right means. Hegel uses the concept in a broad sense that does not primarily mean statute book or judiciary. Right is every mode in which the free will is recognized as actual.
This becomes concrete across four stages, which the main part of this book develops. In abstract right, the will recognizes itself in the thing: by making a piece of the world my property, I give myself an external actuality. In contract, two wills recognize each other reciprocally: by exchanging, we treat one another as persons with equally entitled will. In morality, the will relates to itself: by acting conscientiously, I make my own inwardness the authority governing my action. In ethical life, the will finds itself again in institutions that are at the same time its own self-determination: family, civil society, state are not external constraints but the forms in which the will can exist as actual free will.
In each of these modes, one can also point out the means-end structure developed in II.2 — without thereby claiming that this structure exhausts their content. The free will (subjective purpose) gives itself a determinate being in a means (thing, contract, welfare, institution); the result is the accomplished purpose — an actuality in which the will rediscovers itself. Right is the sphere in which this self-donation is organized.
This also sets the measure by which the following analyses assess right. Where right becomes a means turned against the free will — where property is inverted from a means of realizing personality into a machine of appropriation, where contract plays formal equality off against substantive control, where ethical life turns into paternalism, where right itself becomes a coding that determines to whom which sphere of existence accrues — this is not a rupture of right but a teleological inversion within right. Recognizing it and seeking its sublation is not the task of some higher authority outside right, but a matter for practical reason, which gives itself its own right.
With these premises — purpose, free will, right — the ground is laid. Abstract right, with which the following analysis begins, is the first concrete shape in which these premises become effective.