Because of the adjective Hegel attaches to it, abstract law is generally considered to be secondary within the economy of objective spirit, just as (although for different reasons) morality is. If Sittlichkeit is the concrete milieu in which “freedom, as the substance, exists no less as actuality and necessity than as subjective will,”1 law and morality are abstract, which in the Hegelian context means at the very least that they are not fully intelligible by themselves. For many commentators, antilegalism is a characteristic trait of Hegelianism, which thus finds itself far from the dominant opinion within postrevolutionary political philosophy, which saw rights as the inalienable condition of political freedom. Against this common interpretation, I would like to establish here that because of its very abstraction, abstract law is judged positively by Hegel to the extent that it is indispensable for adequately thinking the concept of law in a way that accounts for social and political modernity and history as the history of the actualization and concretization of law. This is what I show, at a general level, in the first chapter, which seeks to explain the expansion that the concepts of law and right undergo in Hegel’s treatment. The second chapter shows that this expansion makes it possible to overcome the difficulties of modern theories of natural law by thinking of law as “between nature and history.” The third chapter studies Hegel’s discussion of the concept of contract: far from being a necessary tool for understanding the nature of the political relationship, as in the dominant current of modern thought (culminating with Fichte), the contract is what makes it possible to connect abstract law and modern civil, “bourgeois” society, which actualizes its principles by making it possible to think the juridical conditions of the social.
1. RPh, § 33, GW 14.1, p. 48 (Elements, 62; see Outlines, 50).