ABSTRACT
In Hegel’s later work, the Philosophy of Right (1821), the process of embedding liberal legal forms in the ethical continued, but in a developed, significantly different way. The work, which is in three parts, begins with self-consciousness (‘Abstract Right’) and proceeds to moral consciousness (‘Morality’) before ending with the idea of an ‘Ethical Life’ in which self-and moral consciousness are englobed in modern forms and institutions that are at once ideal and actual. Throughout, the process of ideal rational development is concretely linked to legal and social forms associated with modern civil society. The forms of Abstract Right are developed as a dialectic of selfconsciousness in its links with property, contract and civil and criminal wrongdoing. These then find a universal ethical setting in the categories of modern civil society, as Hegel sees them: a ‘system of needs’, the administration of justice, institutions of police and corporations, the state itself. Ethical Life is then further assured by systems of international law and ‘world history’.
