ABSTRACT
This paper highlights the institutional character of Hegel’s theory of Sittlichkeit, and specifies the understanding of the institutions that it involves; it is therefore inscribed in the framework of institutionalist readings of Hegel. By the way, it challenges Dieter Henrich’s thesis of Hegel’s “strong institutionalism,”’ and suggests a “weak” or flexible conception of institutions, which is reflected in certain legal theories and philosophical contemporary views in social ontology. Such an institutional reading of Hegel’s theory of Sittlichkeit thus resolutely inscribes the theory of Sittlichkeit in what Pettit calls “the broadly tradition of social holism.” In particular, the paper explores how the second nature of Sittlichkeit both produces and is in turn sustained by forms of subjectivity, generally called Gesinnung. Institutions, as essential constituents of the “sociality of reason,” are objective producers of subjectivity, especially of social and political subjectivity and, through the recognition processes already at work in the legal sphere, of intersubjectivity; therefore, institutions are the conditions of the actuality of subjective as well as objective freedom.
